Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): The US won WW2 and then immediately plunged into the Cold War. The US won the Cold War and then immediately set to work destroying the Middle East. The US destroyed the Middle East and then immediately started another cold war in preparation for another world war. The US
Actually it was Russia that won the war on the Eastern Front at Stalingrad, the greatest land battle ever fought. Russia took 27 million casualties in the war far outnumbering all Allied casualties. WW ll saw 87 million people die.
Even while the Nuremberg Tribunals were in session, the Dulles brothers and others were plotting the new Cold War.
David Talbot's, The Devil's Chessboard is essential reading for what was happening then and understanding what is happening now.
The wars being fought now are steeped in history and in too many ways a sequel to WW ll.
The US did provide a considerable amount of weaponry and supplies to Russia. Without which, one wonders if they could have fought off the massive German onslaught.
But that being said - yes, the manpower of Russia on the Eastern front, dwarfed anything put together by the Allied powers in the West, including the D-Day landings.
Those Nazis are still here and continue to be funded. The Bush family has deep ties to that very funding of Hitler and brought many Nazis into the CIA and many other organisations where they remain today. That's the real reason this bunch of warmongering whores have no problem supporting Nazis in Ukraine.
The fact that G. Bush became head of the CIA really says it all. The CIA rejects anyone for security clearance for minor infractions or "unpatriotic beliefs" and yet his father directly supported the Nazis. Then he becomes president and nary a word mentioned about it in the press. It's beyond disgusting.
Nazism, Leninism, Progressivism, all of the same Scientific Management movement of liberal legalism. They are all centered on that other people should be managed, mangled, and destroyed in service of some emotional state projected on some long-dead idiot by some soi-disant seer guild.
Everyone should read Ehrenreich's essay on the professional-managerial class to understand their role in the order and how they are in no way the friends of human emancipation, in fact quite the opposite. It's all emotive theater.
Being or supporting Nazis is not unpatriotic. It's not against the law to fly swastika or promote Nazism in the US. The US consistently voted against the UN resolution to condemn it, along with Ukraine. Last year a bunch of its puppets - Germany included - joined.
Just goes to show how disgusting these people are. No wonder we get nothing but canned pre-scripted responses from our representatives since we did not have a say in this decision they obviously made it for us and don't need to tell us anything.
That's the thing too when I hear people on Robert Reich's substack page who I asked this question of they say they see no evidence of the Nazis still being here! I asked them where do you think they went? Directly after I get called a conspiracy theorist! Figures.
Russia also made a pact with Hitler and took part of Poland when Hitler invaded in 1939. Russia also took parts of Finland and Romania. Only became Allies with the West when Hitler invaded their country.
And what was she supposed to do? When she was ignored throughout Hitler buildup deliberately so he could implement what he wrote in Mein Kampf? Munich being the culmination of that?
War with Finland was why? Finland was a Hitler's ally and stationed German forces against Soviet objections. Leningrad would not stand if borders had not been moved. Finland rejected the territory swap which would have avoided war while allowing them to stay Hitler's friend.
Moving borders to the West after Hitler invaded Poland was achieving the same goal. No one in the USSR was under illusion that Hitler eventually would not move. He stated it explicitly all over the place, and any agreement with him was worthless - well known by that time.
Read "Appeasement" by Tim Bouverie where the focus is on who's at fault. "The Gathering Storm" by Churchill is also good since at the time he wasn't in power so felt free to criticize.
It is not my argument. It is something supported by facts if you look at the 1930s timeline and actions and roles of various actors. Also, the behavior of the Brits when they stalled their negotiations with the USSR in 1939 which finally prompted the latter to take the path they took.
Currently youngsters do not hear about the role of the USSR in the WWII at all. There anecdotes that some Japanese think it's the USSR that dropped atomic bombs on them. The USA is either not mentioned or mentioned as little as possible.
To think that you were brought up in an environment when you were presented with everything that was going on back then would be a little presumptuous, don't you think?
Stalin asked Churchill and Roosevelt to open a second front to take the heat off Russia, they delayed doing so until Russia had won in the East. D-Day was essentially a mop up invasion. 30% of the troops were Canadian.
The USA "played" both sides of the war hoping the Russians and Germans would beat each other to a pulp and they would step in as the ultimate victors and taking both countries. The Dulles brothers were heavily involved with Nazi Germany helping to finance Hitler's rise. Ford motors provided vehicles and Joseph Kennedy sold them oil.
The West's visceral hatred directed at both Russia and China is rooted in their ability to defy American conquest over the past hundred years. The whole world is now being held hostage to Washington's delusional ambitions up to and including nuclear Armageddon. The US is playing a very reckless and irresponsible game of brinkmanship against these two countries we should not be silently condoning.
World peace and security will only arrive when Washington realizes militarism is ruining America and shows genuine atonement. Getting rid of NATO is a top priority as it is the enabler of Washington's wars.
"World peace and security will only arrive when Washington realizes militarism is ruining America and shows genuine atonement."
That won't happen at all. The people have to be educated to understand what is happening to them, then organized to elect representatives with a peace program. Needless to say this is nowhere near happening. Joe Sikspak's love of weapons and violence isn't going to go away. 1984 is here and shows no sign of leaving.
The government is busily shutting down mass means of communication so that the masses will remain uninformed.
It s very hard to predict out comes, but my guess now is that barring a nuclear confrontation the collective West (NATO) will slip into being failed states while the rest of the world moves on . NATO has been waging war for the last 50 years and now all the bills come due social and fiscal. The East has been building for the future and will benefit accordingly- the Belt and Road Initiative was a very smart move for China, South Asia and Africa. Europe could be part of it but it is thoroughly colonized by the US and unlikely to break loose any time soon.
The wild card now is Washington desperate enough to go nuclear? If it does everybody loses.
The Collective West is paying one hell of a price for its despotic intransigence.
With the current communications capabilities now available to all and the lack of action of the people, it is clear proof of how controlled people are by propaganda. Caitlin couldn't be more right in her essays. The best way I can think of to describe people is"Comfortably Numb".
But the whole point of the censorship is to deny current communications capabilities. Without communication you can't lead, without leadership you can't organize, without organization you can't win.
Do you think that the government benefits more from misinformation, out right lying and disinformation through the media or from shutting down communication? I don't think they will shut down communication but they will monitor it. As they have been doing. As things stand trying to organize over the internet is like walking into the FBI and handing them a plan for overthrowing the government. Anyone trying to lead or organize can be nullified simply by deleting their bank account or making them disappear. It's what the Survialance Snowden revealed is all about. They can steer society in the direction they want.
Russia provided Hitler with the fuel to invade Europe. Without that fuel, no invasion of France, no Auschwitz. And who developed Baku? American plutocrats bringing know-how and capital.
Roosevelt knew France was the enemy and Stalin, a friend. Actually some joked that the leader of the Kremlin was Averell Harriman, who developed the offshore Baku oil field for his collaborator Stalin.
So Roosevelt did not help France militarily. Instead he recognized Vichy and sent his right hand man, four star admiral Leahy as ambassador. But as soon as the alliance between Hitler and Stalin dissolved, Roosvelt sent gigantic quantities of all sorts of weapons to Stalin, including air superiority fighter planes. That saved the Kremlin in 1941.
Right this is a sequel. Stalin killed six million Ukrainians in his holocaust of 1932-33, the Holodomor.
Hmmm. Russia has always supplied cheap resources to Germany. This was the reason for Hitler's attack on Russia, a blitzkrieg bid to seize oil fields south of Stalingrad; Grozny, Baku etc.
Without the Haavara agreement (between German Zionists and the Hitler government) which broke the economic boycott on Germany, perhaps Hitler's Chancellorship would have collapsed and not just 60,000 Jews would have been saved but the 50 million who died in the whole war....yeah..we can go down the rabbit holes of ifs and ands but in truth the allies helped Russia win the war. Russia defeated the Nazis (The Germans underestimated the Russians ability to mobilise at such a scale and overestimated their ability to supply their army in the caucusus).
The idea that Stalin deliberately murdered Ukrainians in a 'Holodomor' is somewhat specious and still much disputed amongst historians. Russia also suffered a major famine in 1932/3...( a million dead) in fact Ukraine and Russia had experienced droughts and/or famines periodically every 7-10 years for over a thousand years...collectivisation is often blamed for the famine but many other factors contributed (Ukraine's farmers opposed to collectivisation burned their crops which exacerbated the problem) Stalin's exporting of grain (an important cash source for the USSR to enable indutrialisation and Russia's economic stabiity) was probably another. But Ukraine and Russia have never suffered famines since which contradicts the idea that Stalin's collectivisation was to blame. Make of that what you will.
All of what we read/know in the west about Stalin is written by anti-communists. They get published, but alternative more nuanced and academically based works don't. So, we have to be careful about a lot of what we were taught as fact when all it was was propaganda, as with the 'Uyghur genocide'/Tiananmen massacre etc. which are provable lies. (N.B. I am not a Stalinist).
I'm curious about the Uyghur genocide being a provable lie. Most of the dissent from the mainstream is dated to 2021, and the UN posted their indictment on the topic in August of 2022. I can't seem to find dissent after that post. Is there anything you can reference to disprove the UN's research? Grayzone stops covering the topic in 2021, and Jeffrey Sachs (author of the article Caitlin links) doesn't seem to have anything after the UN's post either. Am I missing something?
While there is no genocide there is severe repression including mass incarceration in re-education camps. I've been to Xinjiang. My niece spent five years there studying the situation, speaks Uighur and Mandarin fluently, had contacts in the government, and so forth.
You will find reports of people that WERE actually in the area and have seen it by themselves. The guy that wrote all the nasty stories is Mr Zenz and he has an axe to grind (besides he was I think ONCE in China!!). You will find facts in different places in the internet (also a detailed official report of the Chinese, I know who would believe them?? But google street view of the area helps too - you can see what Chinese money DID! BTW same in Tibet - I was there!!). Also the first report of the UN lady was totally different from the official report she posted as she already left her post with the UN (does this ring a bell??)
You might find this article on the recent UN Human Rights Committee report on China helpful (which incidentally, the Chinese government fully engaged and cooperated with).
I would not assume that a US-led neoliberal global reform organ like the UN only propagates facts; the "common sense" of some people is but their shared opinion, of no special epistemic value, and is often wrong for reasons of self-identity.
If you really read the history, it shows that the so called holodomor took place in other parts of the USSR too, so to paint it a Ukrainian holocaust is a recent story!!
Once, according to Nobel prize Winston Churchill, Stalin joked in a conversation that he had killed even more Russians than Hitler did. And Hitler had killed on the order of twenty million Soviet soldiers and citizens, at least.
The Holodomor refers to the man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933. It was primarily concentrated in Ukraine. However, it also affected other regions of the Soviet Union, particularly areas with predominantly non-Russian ethnic populations. These regions included parts of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and the Kuban region of the North Caucasus.
Kulaks, the prosperous peasants, often with large landholdings, had opposed collectivization, tht is forced expropriation. Stalin reacted with deportation and extermination. Many Ukrainians were sent to Eastern Siberia, and their descendants constitute a large part of the population there.
While Ukraine bore the brunt of the Holodomor and experienced the most severe consequences, the policies and actions that led to the famine were part of a broader Soviet agricultural and political strategy. The Soviet government implemented collectivization and grain procurement policies that disproportionately affected Ukraine's rural population, leading to widespread starvation and loss of life.
The exact extent of the Holodomor's impact on non-Ukrainian regions is a subject of ongoing historical research and debate. While evidence suggests that the famine had significant consequences outside of Ukraine, the scale and severity of the famine varied across different regions.
Some countries and international organizations recognize the Holodomor as a genocide. For example the French Republic officially recognized the Holodomor as a genocide against the Ukrainian people. The vote in the French National Assembly was followed by a vote of the French Senate on 28 March, 2023, and the law was signed by the president. Holocaust denial is a crime in France punishable by prison.
I know all that, but re Mr Churchill: he is another mass murderer ... (India) so who are we to talk about this and a one-sided (because it is now mainstream opinion of the western rules based international order) acknowledgement of this so called holocaust is (in my opinion) WRONG!! Stalin was a very intelligent psychopath (we have enough of them around NOW) and certainly a ruthless killer.
Churchill simply stated that Stalin was not shy about his mass murdering ways. That Stalin killed roughly as many Soviet citizens as Hitler is well documented. Stalin's armies used "blocking sections"... which Putin also uses (soldiers retreating without orders are killed).
What is more troubling is that the Roosevelt administration, in its desire to weaken Europe, decided to ignore the mass murdering ways of Stalin, as it had with Mussolini, Hirohito, Hitler and Franco (chronological order). This is how the US based international order was forged...
Gandhi got more than ten million citizens of the subcontinent killed, with his insistence in declaring independence way too early, ahead of the assigned calendar, and also with his hostility to Muslims. So Gandhi is the measure of holocausts in India.
I was not aware that Churchill mass murdered Indians. Care to give the details?
The Holodomor is very important because it is chronologically the second mega-death holocaust of the Twentieth Century.
"Western based international order" is propaganda from dictators Xi and Putin. International law, worldwide is defined by Roman Republican law, which is more than 25 centuries old.
Hey, smartypants. Suppose it's true. That is, that it was a deliberate targeting of Ukrainians as an ethnic group as opposed to the fact that it was a famine and the wheat generally doesn't grow well in Siberia and so could not have been confiscated from Khanti, Mansi, Yakuts, etc.
Instead the famine was throughout the country and the confiscations happened where the harvests were - Volga region, current Kazakhstan, etc. So who was being targeted there?
But ok, suppose your shit tale is true. What does it mean? Does it mean that any atrocity from the past never gets forgotten or somehow resolved? If yes, then what should be happening to Germans, Japanese, the US (atomic bombing, napalm in Vietnam etc.), French, Belgians, Spaniards, Portuguese, and on and on?
Well sorry - you live on a different planet than I (re Massmurder Churchill I can only recommend Shashi Tharoors book 'An era of darkness', or just google it). There is nothing important about the holodomor, it is just the Western hobby horse now - we did not give a DAMN about all the other mass murders). The international rules based order IS USED by the US government and many others!
Of yeah, PRC "social credit scoring"...who are we fooling?
As is the case with practically all of the institutional hierarchies in history, particularly those of dominant powers and empires, the US has always had its own means of social credit scoring. It's called a Credit Rating.
Nowadays it's as publicly obvious as a Visa Black credit card, a Marley Hodgson credit card wallet, Louis Vuitton handbags, Cartier sunglasses, and a thousand other markers of social capital and social status competition signifiers in this pervasively ranked society. The details have been outlined by astute social observers from Thorstein Veblen and Vance Packard to Paul Fussell, Tom Wolfe, and Gary Shteyngart.
At the top levels of government power, social credit scoring has long consisted of elite credential signifiers like Ivy League degrees, Rhodes Scholarships, etc. It's gotten much more stratified over the past 40 years, of course- https://money.cnn.com/2014/06/10/luxury/preschool-new-york-city/index.html
""You think college is bad? Try getting into preschool on the Upper East Side," said Amanda Uhry, president of Manhattan Private School Advisors, which charges between $15,000 and $35,000 to 1,500 clients each year to help their kids land a spot in private school. "Some of these preschools get 400 recommendations for 16 spots..."
Really. What is that about, if not initiation into a social credit scoring regime at a level intended to be maintained for a lifetime?
As for the increasing role of digital technology, basic access features like personal vehicle parking are increasingly foreclosed to anyone without a smartphone and credit card. I've heard that in much of northern and western Europe, businesses no longer do cash transactions.
I find this ominous. I don't mind being disdained as a country slacker hillbilly hippie nonentity based on my well-worn clothes and uncombed hair, but at least allow me to park my car on the street and pay for my lunch in cash.
Yes - ominous. I feel sorry for the next generation of Americans coming up - the boomer generation has had it pretty good in comparison. The future: likely an Orwellian society - more corporate right-wing ideologues/warmongers in charge - more victimization of the poor and divide of society between the haves and have nots, until things get so bad, open rebellion commences - most likely violent. And then the unfolding, increasing disasters of climate change - and more loss of common wealth and more conflict over dwindling resources. This will unfold over the next number of decades. Baby boomer generation, including myself - will have long since departed to the great beyond. If there is any such place.
I find it ironic how many people buy into the climate change lies, its nothing more than a narrative of control, every element of the climate change sham is promoted and profited from by the rich. Ask yourself what personal experience do you or can you have that climate change is real ? The weather is about all we as individuals can see yet we have little information to base a global long term trend on from our localized short term observations.
Notice that the MSM, rich, powerful and governments focus on the dangers of an invisible gas not on the worldwide very visible destruction of ecosystems, pollution and blatant poisoning of the world. Climate change focuses the overall eco-debate on minimized industrial controls that can be profited from that supposedly impact far off indigenous peoples because its an emotional manipulation instead of real science. How often do you hear about the evils of strip mining, the destruction of ecosystems and industrial waste compared to CO2 ?
Not going to even bother arguing about it, since the argument has been over for about a decade. Climate change exists, whether you have the balls to admit it or not.
Americans choose to stratify themselves through social status indicators, the state does not need to ostracize people when they do it themselves. The status signals are as powerful as a persons position in society but sadly for western societies are only an indicators of money, not ethics, not education, a stupid person can buy their way into the upper class social circles as has been done many times. Most of the stories around successful penetration of the upper class revolve around poor or middle class people faking their way into the club.
I take your points about social status- which is why I prefer to refer to the system as Credentialism rather than Meritocracy, which would be the development of elites based on factors like ethical integrity, proven competence at making predictions, command of historical knowledge, and that exceptional level of ordinary good sense known as perspicacity. I'm fine with authentic merit elites. The mechanics where I take my car to get fixed are aces, and ethical as well. Within their wheelhouse, they have elite skills. I couldn't care less where they learned them. They really know what they're doing.
By contrast, college admissions, graduate school admissions, employment screening, and consideration for high appointed posts in the Federal government based on Credentialism is an actual thing. Ivy League degrees are primarily about social capital (and social class conditioning), not some extra level of Empyrean academic excellence imparted to the students. Nepotism is an actual thing, too- there's no affirmative action program that's anywhere near as effectively targeted as being a family relation, or that invaluable social capital referred to as "knowing somebody.".And I'm okay with a modicum of that, as long as it doesn't turn into tolerance for corruption and incompetence.. But it's inherently about the construction of an aristocracy, not meritocracy. Someone can be both, but they have to pay the dues to have the meritocratic part down. In general,
I don't want to compare the American surveillance society with that of the PRC; it's clear which country imposes a more stringent set of controls over the Internet, for example. It means that we have to put up with a lot of fallacious nonsense, sophistry, and intellectual fraud, but I remain confident that it's worth it.
I always expected that the wider information access of the new technology would involve a steep learning curve. What I didn't anticipate is the data mining model of surveillance capitalism; the very real slippery slope of preemptive censorship; the information stovepiping and epistemic bubbles of social media; and the increasing acceptance of the phone as an information source with the same capabilities as a laptop or desktop, when it should be clear from the inherent physical space-time limitations that it isn't even close. And now I'm seeing my page screen space shrink on my laptop due to sidebars and top or bottom banners, on a lot of sites!
"A normal country wages war with the goal of getting back to peacetime. The US wages war with the goal of getting to the next war."
Close. But there is no connection between the wars. They have no strategic purpose. The goal is to maximize the number of wars, thus maximizing the value of the stocks owned by Congresspeople and providing an excuse to employ their constituents. It's the force of corruption combined with a widespread but marginally effective jobs program.
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"The US won WW2 and then immediately plunged into the Cold War."
I'd say the Cold War began in 1919 when Western troops invaded Russia to help put down the Bolsheviks. The US had made no secret of its hatred of the USSR and supported the Nazi buildup. You could say the Cold War stretched from 1919 to 1991, with World War II an anomaly when the Nazi thing went haywire and turned on the West.
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"The US won the Cold War and then immediately set to work destroying the Middle East."
The Cold War was won in 1991 while the Middle East thing began in 1948 with the declaration of the state of Israel.
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"The US destroyed the Middle East and then immediately started another cold war in preparation for another world war."
Iran broke loose in 1979 and is still holding out. Syria was hard pressed but rescued by Russia. The MIddle East is war torn but undestroyed.
After a period of subjugation of Russia Mikhail Gorbachev in 2014 informally declared Cold War II. https://time.com/3630352/mikhail-gorbachev-vladimir-putin-cold-war/ I personally would set the date of Cold War II as 2006, when Russia began forcing out Royal Dutch Shell. The West didn't like that at all.
At the time I didn't understand that. He wrote that the permanent war sustained the hierarchy. But how? What good does it do?
Having lived through it I now see the purpose as endless massive transfers of wealth to established interests without resistance from or benefit to the people. Which is another way of saying it sustains hierarchy (once all this gets established).
It teaches that contest is a source of objective truth, that winners are entitled to subordinate losers, and that losers are improved by the subordination, among other things.
The permeant war aspects of 1984 are largely ignored or downplayed, while other aspects of the book are emphasized. It's not just about wealth transfers - social control, mind control, diversion, and a basis for the surveillance state to enforce discipline.
Cupidity is a religious narrative, therefore false. In fact, for many centuries after Christian religious managers inveighed against man's "intrinsic" greed, craftsmen and artists stuck to "target incomes" and took time off instead of increasing their hoards. The idea apparently preceded the facts because it was a lie.
They have war because conflict is the basis of their value system. Money is basically irrelevant except as a means of enforcing subordination.
I've always hated needless suffering, and those who think it is good in itself - the flagellators - of themselves and others. It's not normal. It's ugly. But a lot of people seem to have a high tolerance for it. Hopefully, that will come to an end soon. Perhaps this Fall and Winter when the cost of fuel quadruples in Europe and elsewhere because of an irrational animus toward Russia and all things Russian.
"I've always hated needless suffering, and those who think it a good in itself - the flagellators - of themselves and others. It's not normal. It's ugly. But a lot of people seem to have a high tolerance for it"
I believe the idea of tolerance for suffering comes mostly from the mythos of Christianity. Not all cultures see it the same way, it is an interesting and unique brain worm.
Suffering is intrinsic to the human condition. I don't like it, but it's part of the material realm. Different cultures have different ways of addressing that reality.
Buddhism (for centuries) has had as one of its central tenets: "Life is suffering." Most of the major organized religions address suffering with some level of tolerance, since it is an aspect of life that is unavoidable, and some would argue, even necessary for life to exist.
When contrasting religious thought on suffering, I'm thinking mostly of the philosophy of Epicureanism, which I think rightly identified suffering as something bad and that should be avoided by individuals and society as a whole (while also recognizing it as unavailable, and trying to provide you with tools to deal with it). The Christian view of redemption via suffering, or heaven as a reward for earthly suffering, has a tendency to make people accept unacceptable and immoral situations with the thought that they'll be rewarded in the afterlife.
Well it isn't just Christian ignorance that can lead people to choose unacceptable/immoral situations. Many kinds of misconstrued philosophies/theologies can lead one down a primrose path of immorality and self-sabotage. The Western idolatry of consumerism and profit seems like as good a candidate as any. Jung often wrote the only way to heal a neurosis is to accept it and move through it - somewhat similar to the only way to live a life, is for one to live it - despite the obvious suffering for so many of us. The Romans use to have a saying: "Amor Fati" Love your Fate.
There is a great short statement by Arthur Miller about the US cultural denial and avoidance of suffering and all that it leads to. I can't remember where I saw this short video, perhaps in a documentary by Adam Curtis? Century of The Self? I Can't remember.
Your comment reminds me of something Robert Aziz wrote in his book on Jung and religion:
"Speaking with an acquaintance at his home in Kusnacht in 1938, Jung, reflecting on this problem of suffering, commented that in the East the objective is to eliminate suffering, "by casting it off," whereas in the West people resort to drugs seeking to suppress it. Suffering, Jung continued, is a serious problem and we must seek to overcome it, yet in actual fact the "only way to overcome it is to endure it." #p44
Europe gets no fossil fuels from the Putin Reich from now on. Putin's agents will hope in vain.
To lessen further needless suffering, the Russian military, Wagner PMC and Prigozhin should arrest Putin and his collaborators and send them to La Hague to answer the charges for the crimes against humanity they committed.
Actually Europe gets much of its fossil fuel from Russia. It goes through third parties such as India and Saudi Arabia that charge a markup, so it just costs more.
Europe has got to have that fuel for its heavy industry. So the players just pretend they don't notice this happening.
It is also a little-known fact that the Russian pipeline through Ukraine is still operating and has been throughout the war. Ukraine needs the transit fees and the fuel itself. Amazing, eh?
If Putin goes to the Hague, surely Biden, Blinken, Nuland, Sullivan and so forth -- the list is probably pretty long -- should "meet him halfway." We can try them all together.
This is really insightful material. I'm allergic to 100% agreement with anyone, but our conclusions mostly align, and I arrived at most of them independently of yourself, or of any particular school of thought, or as the acolyte of any one thinker. I was around age 55 before I got there. Considerable disillusionment was involved.
I remain idealistic, and as optimistic as the contingent limits of reality allow. Terminal cynicism and despair cedes entirely too much to the adversary.
Keep in mind that the Soviet collapse led to massive corruption, radical decline of society (including sharp reduction in life expectancy), and the Oligarchs (all engineered by US Neoliberal "shock doctrine" economists and corporations).
The cultural and political tendencies right now in the US would be to consolidate Fascism in government, should there be an economic and/or ecological collapse. Any "revolution" would be from the far Right.
"the Soviet collapse led to massive corruption, radical decline of society (including sharp reduction in life expectancy), and the Oligarchs (all engineered by US Neoliberal "shock doctrine" economists and corporations)."
I don't think it was engineered. It was more of an inertial situation. Bliss ninny capitalist ideologues imagining that capitalism is so inherently valorous that great things would inevitably follow the opening of capitalist markets. Much as with globalization and outsourcing to China, in fact. Neoliberalism is almost entirely about elevating the "efficiency" of laissez faire capitalism to enable the easy movement of investment capital and profits all over the world. The result of removing as many trade barriers as possible is inertial; the money sluices toward those who already have the most to invest. And toward already prosperous consumer markets, wanting even bigger price bargains. Inertia again.
The USSR could have used some Western-assisted "engineering", in fact, in order to help Gorbachev keep the public sector, socialist part of a mixed economy healthy and functioning. A gradual transition that preserved features of collective enterprise in some sectors would have been much healthier for Russian society, and it would have preserved both the safety net and the rule of law. But I never even heard that discussed. The economic foundations of the society were just dismantled, and replaced by a void that was supposed to be filled with "free markets." Somehow or another.
The Western capitalists imagined that they'd either find (or cultivate) a thousand free enterprise flowers blooming from the rubble, or (particularly in the case of the resource extraction sector) that they'd find a compliant oligarchy subordinate to their wishes, like compradors on commission. A third world model.
Not so fast. The Russians had their own ideas about privatization. They weren't interested in conforming to the model the foreign capitalists were used to. The former socialist bureaucrats in charge of the lucrative extraction economic enterprises simply seized them and cashed them in to people with ready cash, mostly other Russians. The capitalist economy was actually a large chunk of the Soviet economy already; it consisted of the black market, which accounted for around 25% of the total economy by the 1980s. Most of it was run by organized crime and smuggling gangs, of course, with the collaboration of corrupt police and state bureaucracy. That's how the Russian oligarchs prospered. They had the inside track. They had the liquidity to capitalize the banking sector.
Russians have always been very wary of foreigners meddling with their society. They much prefer the devil they know and can converse with to the devil they don't know. And they aren't a little country with a small cohort of landowning elites that can easily be bought off, favorites played and rivals dispensed with, and the political leaders coup'ed if they don't play ball with the outside investment elites. The Westerners rushed into Russia with dollar signs in their eyes. Some of them got tossed out on their asses, or tossed out of windows. The most successful Russians had a very cynical approach to conventions of contract law, and its practical limitations within Russian territorial borders.
You might want to investigator how the shock doctrine Neoliberal economic ideology was linked to fascist politics and regime change government in Chile. That was engineered too. Neoliberalism is about a lot more than markets.
The examples of Cold War era Chile and post-Cold War Russia are entirely different. Chile already had a lot of Western investment in place, and a Chilean capitalist class that had friendly ties with foreign investment. The coup was enabled in order to protect those interests.
It's difficult to say exactly when "neoliberalism" began, or even what it is. The impacts vary depending on the national perspective. The global economy was internationalizing early in the 20th century; by the late 1920s, the US was about where the PRC is today- the US made about 25% of all global production. And overseas investment had begun in earnest by the 1920s- not just Brown Brothers Harriman investing in the USSR and Germany, but Europeans like Deterding and Rothschild competing for investment in in Caucasus oil fields, and Swedish firms like Bofors putting in factories in Japan to build cannons for the Japanese Imperial Navy. For that matter, much of the US (and other foreign) investment in Germany preceded the ascension of Hitler to power in 1934; it isn't so much that American firms went all in for the Nazis after Hitler assumed power in 1934, it's more like they didn't cancel their patent sharing and their contracts in order to boycott the regime. (We still don't have anything like a consensus global rule of law that makes economic boycott tactics ironclad, and effectively enforceable; that's a lot more difficult than it sounds.)
Neoliberalism is the paradigm that turned the US economy from its former primary function as a producer of manufactured goods in the 1960s into an exporter of raw materials and a consumer economy dependent on foreign imports by the end of the 1990s. I view its fundamental premise as inertial- and that inertial movement of capital is the source of most of the problems. I'm not sure what's gained by calling it an engineering project. The results of complete trade deregulation, the shifting of production overseas, and the replacement of self-sufficient food crops with cash crops in agricultural economies work more like a wrecking ball. I'm not a knee-jerk autarkist ideologue, but I don't like seeing self-sufficient sustainable prosperity replaced with the global servility of every domestic economy to the whims of private megacapital investment elites.
"Now I just dismiss electoral politics altogether..." - glad more and more people are beginning to see through the scam. Good thing also is they can actually do something about it - stop participating in it.
Unfortunately labor is even more kaput, and every effort will be made to keep it that way. Every effort will be made to keep the havenots down. I suppose the system will continue to lurch forward in its unpleasant and frightening manner to some unknown denouement. https://science1arts2and3politics.substack.com/p/us-politics-in-a-supernutshell
UPS is about to go on strike. There is a Writer's strike in Hollywood (or about to be). These I find to be all good signs - and the only possibility of change. So, I don't quite see labor movements as completely done.
As the oppression continues unabated, I expect more on the street rebellion in the future, despite the obvious dwindling of Unions over the last number of decades - I suspect ordinary people will try to fight back anyway.
But yes - we may enter into a type of sci-fi dystopia where striking becomes criminalized as free speech is slowly becoming. A dark future to be lurching toward and it could very well become a reality. And then what? Probably a century of dark oppression before something happens - because something always does happen - the sense of justice is inborn, you can't stamp it out - as Steinbeck wrote in The Grapes of Wrath.
You're absolutely right about the size of the problem, but militant organized labor (perhaps combined with electoral politics) is definitely the only path. Only other possible path I can imagine is to start setting up independent self-sufficient communities.
You're the one imagining that you can dictate the details of my personal religious ideals to me, as if you knew so much about the subject that you had final wisdom and the authoritative narrative frame to construct a pigeonhole and shove me in there.
I haven't done anything similar with you, or with any other participant in these discussions.
I reject your liberal theories of moral economy as erroneous. By exercising your whiny middle-class moral entrepreneurship, you are creating pollution and noise that has no value and you are inflicting harm on me using the law as an instrument, and what mental illness makes you think you have a right to restrict other people based on your infantile emotional fictions, and not be turned into sausage merely for thinking you have a right?
That's an alternative worth pondering. Your observation that only 10% of voters take advantage of the option to rank choices definitely makes that process less effective than it should be.
The original suggestion of simply abandoning the popular franchise and having no elections at all reminds me of the right-wing GOP solution to the flawed work of the Food and Drug Administration- to abolish the agency.
Or did it? My quick superficial search tells me that if only first choices were counted -- the old system -- then Eric wins the Democratic nomination with a plurality of 32%. The system narrowed Eric's margin of victory from 9% to 1% and he subsequently called it "a problem."
The character of the contest was noticeably different, at least to me. It looked more like a pure popularity contest without much examination of the candidates' other possibly relevant attributes, partly because there were more candidates and a number of them were pretty marginal. And so Adams was The Cop, Wylie The Liberal, etc. If there was even that much distinction. Again, this is just my unstudied view of it.
“…. Too many people look at authoritarian measures like government surveillance, online censorship etc in terms of how it will directly affect them personally rather than how it shapes society as a whole.….”
Well it’s not too many if you understand that by now everyone has been brought up under the narrative that there is no such thing as society. Only individuals who are “consumers”, and the more narcissistic the better.
So what you see there is the result of many decades of the left failing to rise up when the right do everything under the sun to indoctrinate people into the individualism and kill all ideas of social collaboration, and collective action and collective ownership.
It’s only the warped dualism of corporate power brokers who pray to the god in the sky and curse the devil in hell, and literally believe that a heterogeneous culture can be all good if only everyone can be convinced to drink their koolaid.
Following The Great Depression, when the federal government used tax dollars to address the widespread deprivation across the land, the ambitious industrialists of the day were conspiring to remove the president and buy the legislators to end this mockery of their constitution. They had no interest in moderation or “justice for all.”
This sick vision has been the guiding force for all of the determined barons who invested their vast resources into holding the line against idealists and naive humanists who believed the government represented them.
We have been taught to view the final solution, I.e., Hitler’s intended extermination of those he and his viewed as sub-human, with horror. Likewise we were taught to hate Stalin and hate Pol Pot. But All of these people - our corporate players, the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge - all followed the dualist playbook.
It’s a gift from the grand Judeo-Christian heritage. All good can be achievable as long as no evil is tolerated. For Stalin, the traitor was evil; for the Nazis the non-aryan fit the bill; for the Khmer Rouge it was the intellectual; and for our corporate masters, “we” the proverbial us are the evil. Our fornicating, drug-ingesting, propagating, contrary selves are undesired by our rulers, who are just like the rest of us, but with lots of money.
If by "failure to rise up" you mean failure to dispose of the entire current order, well, that is a significant undertaking, to put it mildly. The coordination goods for that sort of thing aren't easily available and there is no slaver who's going to hand the slaves the means to destroy his fences. A nihilistic scorched-earth destruction of every person of property might work, but again, coordination goods for such an undertaking aren't available.
There really isn't such a thing as "society", though; there are societIES and there are networkS. The notion of Total Unity is a rapey Christian ideology.
Nope, I mean the so called left fail to rise up when each brick of the commons and social ownership and action are dismantled.
For example, right now in the US the so called left are championing sa right wing ideal: dismantling of universal public education and privatising it all aka “charter schools”. What sort of a society do they expect from this? Any ideas of common identity and social ownership no. What will these schools teach? Commercialisation? yep.
So the left fails to rise up when these ideas are peddled and implemented. In fact they champion them,
Thats why there is no concept of the society.
This has nothing to with the huge load of red herring and diversion you dropped. Which is of zero value and zero relevance to the point I made.
Oh, so you didn't mean to erase the current order, you just meant for people to participate in your religious ceremonies, bless your rule-conjuring rituals, and validate your Protestant emotional performances in support of bourgeois commercial society.
They would be better enslaved and forced to make food than spending their time on cultivating their emotional self-importance.
It has been a painful and depressing path to accepting the U.S. government is corrupt beyond redemption. The bureaucratic machine has taken control and will use any means to prevent the exposure of their incompetence and crimes which are so heinous their only alternative is to continue until they have complete totalitarian control or they are imprisoned and tried for their crimes.
Such people are seldom tried. Example : In Cambodia Pol Pot and his buddies went free. I suppose his freedom was part of a peace deal.
Whenever I encounter the words "held accountable" I think, "dream on." Deposed, sie. Tried, non. Trials only happen in the case of utter defeat, and even then are not extensive. A few prominent victims, that's it.
Same with corporate crimes the lower people pay while the higher ups get paid. Same with the "Criminal InJustice" system we have the crooks walk free and the victims pay the price.
They're doing what the system requires, which is usually the opposite of what the people require for their own part. Can't keep slaves if they can just run off, can't make Indians work in white factories and plantations if they can just eat buffalo whenever they like.
Fascism is not a deviation from the state, but its purest form. The people raised up System (or Law, or Submission, or Truth, or whatever other abstract obsession they most recently made up) above themselves and enslaved themselves to it based on no good reason and with no exit strategy; not to blame them, but they are getting what they asked for.
As I read this piece, there are a many likes as there are comments (~150). And some comments are thoughtful, offering historic context. Impressed. Now just everybody, grab a pitchfork and go to work!
Only an essay, unfortunately; Bourne tragically died of the Spanish flu leaving it unfinished. Then again, anarchist books are generally short because they don't need to manufacture tools that make permanent power possible.
"Civilization" is a white man's reified emotion for the entire world under dominance. Only mentally ill people need to be dominated by imaginary friends.
FDR and Churchill worked behind the scenes to kick off WW2. Watch or read whatever you can find by David Irving. I'd post some links but the Zionists have removed damn near all of them. The UNZ Report still has some up. Check Goodreads for Irving's books; last I looked there were still many reviews up.
A less tendentious version of the story has been described on pp50-52 of the 1973 book _Indispensable Enemies: The Politics of Misrule in America_ by Walter Karp:
"Having blocked reform for one year, Roosevelt quickly set out to block it by more permanent means. He now began to trump up foreign dangers and overseas alarms, an effort which was certain, at the height of American isolationism, to breed further mistrust of the President, further distract Congress, further split reform ranks and put yet another nail in the coffin of Western Democratic Congressmen. Roosevelt began this operation by delivering one of his most unpopular speeches in the part of the country where it was certain to be most ill received. This was his famous “Quarantine the Aggressors” address given in Chicago in October 1937, referring to the Japanese attack on Peking. Having begun to recover somewhat from the long court fight, Congress and the country now heard from Roosevelt that warfare ten thousand miles away threatened the security of the United States. In Roosevelt’s January 1938 message to Congress—still a radical Congress— reform legislation was virtually for gotten. The heart of the President’s annual message was the need for national defense."
Caitlin does a superb job of demolishing false narratives and propaganda. But there is a downside to claiming that it's ALL about narratives - and the problems are very similar to the shift in politics to identify politics and way from economic and corporate power and class based politics.
There is a material reality and no narrative construct can change it.
The climate deniers have tried to do exactly that for decades.
There is corporate power and economics is not merely a capitalist narrative, there are material conditions at play.
When a society ignores all that and focuses exclusively on narratives and identity, we are doomed.
My understanding is that the Japanese were already defeated at the time of A-bomb drops, so an invasion of the Home Island was unnecessary. Interesting book by Paul Boyer, "By the Bomb's Early Light" (1985), which provides a lot of print evidence that Americans were pretty shook up by the bombings, which led to a massive propaganda campaign to justify the use of nukes, or WMD, as we say now...
Actually it was Russia that won the war on the Eastern Front at Stalingrad, the greatest land battle ever fought. Russia took 27 million casualties in the war far outnumbering all Allied casualties. WW ll saw 87 million people die.
Even while the Nuremberg Tribunals were in session, the Dulles brothers and others were plotting the new Cold War.
David Talbot's, The Devil's Chessboard is essential reading for what was happening then and understanding what is happening now.
The wars being fought now are steeped in history and in too many ways a sequel to WW ll.
The US did provide a considerable amount of weaponry and supplies to Russia. Without which, one wonders if they could have fought off the massive German onslaught.
But that being said - yes, the manpower of Russia on the Eastern front, dwarfed anything put together by the Allied powers in the West, including the D-Day landings.
The USA financed the Hitler and NAZIs until 1942. Without that money, no war.
Those Nazis are still here and continue to be funded. The Bush family has deep ties to that very funding of Hitler and brought many Nazis into the CIA and many other organisations where they remain today. That's the real reason this bunch of warmongering whores have no problem supporting Nazis in Ukraine.
The fact that G. Bush became head of the CIA really says it all. The CIA rejects anyone for security clearance for minor infractions or "unpatriotic beliefs" and yet his father directly supported the Nazis. Then he becomes president and nary a word mentioned about it in the press. It's beyond disgusting.
Nazism, Leninism, Progressivism, all of the same Scientific Management movement of liberal legalism. They are all centered on that other people should be managed, mangled, and destroyed in service of some emotional state projected on some long-dead idiot by some soi-disant seer guild.
Everyone should read Ehrenreich's essay on the professional-managerial class to understand their role in the order and how they are in no way the friends of human emancipation, in fact quite the opposite. It's all emotive theater.
Being or supporting Nazis is not unpatriotic. It's not against the law to fly swastika or promote Nazism in the US. The US consistently voted against the UN resolution to condemn it, along with Ukraine. Last year a bunch of its puppets - Germany included - joined.
https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/3997769?ln=en
By the way, currently Ukrainian flag flying in the West means the same as swastika back in the 1930s in the US, UK, etc.
Just goes to show how disgusting these people are. No wonder we get nothing but canned pre-scripted responses from our representatives since we did not have a say in this decision they obviously made it for us and don't need to tell us anything.
That's the thing too when I hear people on Robert Reich's substack page who I asked this question of they say they see no evidence of the Nazis still being here! I asked them where do you think they went? Directly after I get called a conspiracy theorist! Figures.
Russia also made a pact with Hitler and took part of Poland when Hitler invaded in 1939. Russia also took parts of Finland and Romania. Only became Allies with the West when Hitler invaded their country.
And what was she supposed to do? When she was ignored throughout Hitler buildup deliberately so he could implement what he wrote in Mein Kampf? Munich being the culmination of that?
War with Finland was why? Finland was a Hitler's ally and stationed German forces against Soviet objections. Leningrad would not stand if borders had not been moved. Finland rejected the territory swap which would have avoided war while allowing them to stay Hitler's friend.
Moving borders to the West after Hitler invaded Poland was achieving the same goal. No one in the USSR was under illusion that Hitler eventually would not move. He stated it explicitly all over the place, and any agreement with him was worthless - well known by that time.
Read "Appeasement" by Tim Bouverie where the focus is on who's at fault. "The Gathering Storm" by Churchill is also good since at the time he wasn't in power so felt free to criticize.
I have to admit, this is the first time I've heard an argument supporting Russia's pact with the Nazis to parcel up Poland in 1939 - weird argument.
It is not my argument. It is something supported by facts if you look at the 1930s timeline and actions and roles of various actors. Also, the behavior of the Brits when they stalled their negotiations with the USSR in 1939 which finally prompted the latter to take the path they took.
Currently youngsters do not hear about the role of the USSR in the WWII at all. There anecdotes that some Japanese think it's the USSR that dropped atomic bombs on them. The USA is either not mentioned or mentioned as little as possible.
To think that you were brought up in an environment when you were presented with everything that was going on back then would be a little presumptuous, don't you think?
Though I am largely inured to propaganda, I was particularly repulsed by a cover of Time magazine that read D-Day the Day That Won The War.
Stalin asked Churchill and Roosevelt to open a second front to take the heat off Russia, they delayed doing so until Russia had won in the East. D-Day was essentially a mop up invasion. 30% of the troops were Canadian.
"The Kremlin Letters: Stalin’s Wartime Correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt" is a fascinating read on the topic.
Stalin was very angry about it. He made his disgruntlement known and on VE day took an unfriendly even hostile stance.
That's because 27 million Russian lives are a small price to pay for Warmongers making a profit!
The USA "played" both sides of the war hoping the Russians and Germans would beat each other to a pulp and they would step in as the ultimate victors and taking both countries. The Dulles brothers were heavily involved with Nazi Germany helping to finance Hitler's rise. Ford motors provided vehicles and Joseph Kennedy sold them oil.
The West's visceral hatred directed at both Russia and China is rooted in their ability to defy American conquest over the past hundred years. The whole world is now being held hostage to Washington's delusional ambitions up to and including nuclear Armageddon. The US is playing a very reckless and irresponsible game of brinkmanship against these two countries we should not be silently condoning.
World peace and security will only arrive when Washington realizes militarism is ruining America and shows genuine atonement. Getting rid of NATO is a top priority as it is the enabler of Washington's wars.
"World peace and security will only arrive when Washington realizes militarism is ruining America and shows genuine atonement."
That won't happen at all. The people have to be educated to understand what is happening to them, then organized to elect representatives with a peace program. Needless to say this is nowhere near happening. Joe Sikspak's love of weapons and violence isn't going to go away. 1984 is here and shows no sign of leaving.
The government is busily shutting down mass means of communication so that the masses will remain uninformed.
It s very hard to predict out comes, but my guess now is that barring a nuclear confrontation the collective West (NATO) will slip into being failed states while the rest of the world moves on . NATO has been waging war for the last 50 years and now all the bills come due social and fiscal. The East has been building for the future and will benefit accordingly- the Belt and Road Initiative was a very smart move for China, South Asia and Africa. Europe could be part of it but it is thoroughly colonized by the US and unlikely to break loose any time soon.
The wild card now is Washington desperate enough to go nuclear? If it does everybody loses.
The Collective West is paying one hell of a price for its despotic intransigence.
With the current communications capabilities now available to all and the lack of action of the people, it is clear proof of how controlled people are by propaganda. Caitlin couldn't be more right in her essays. The best way I can think of to describe people is"Comfortably Numb".
But the whole point of the censorship is to deny current communications capabilities. Without communication you can't lead, without leadership you can't organize, without organization you can't win.
Do you think that the government benefits more from misinformation, out right lying and disinformation through the media or from shutting down communication? I don't think they will shut down communication but they will monitor it. As they have been doing. As things stand trying to organize over the internet is like walking into the FBI and handing them a plan for overthrowing the government. Anyone trying to lead or organize can be nullified simply by deleting their bank account or making them disappear. It's what the Survialance Snowden revealed is all about. They can steer society in the direction they want.
Russia provided Hitler with the fuel to invade Europe. Without that fuel, no invasion of France, no Auschwitz. And who developed Baku? American plutocrats bringing know-how and capital.
Roosevelt knew France was the enemy and Stalin, a friend. Actually some joked that the leader of the Kremlin was Averell Harriman, who developed the offshore Baku oil field for his collaborator Stalin.
So Roosevelt did not help France militarily. Instead he recognized Vichy and sent his right hand man, four star admiral Leahy as ambassador. But as soon as the alliance between Hitler and Stalin dissolved, Roosvelt sent gigantic quantities of all sorts of weapons to Stalin, including air superiority fighter planes. That saved the Kremlin in 1941.
Right this is a sequel. Stalin killed six million Ukrainians in his holocaust of 1932-33, the Holodomor.
Hmmm. Russia has always supplied cheap resources to Germany. This was the reason for Hitler's attack on Russia, a blitzkrieg bid to seize oil fields south of Stalingrad; Grozny, Baku etc.
Without the Haavara agreement (between German Zionists and the Hitler government) which broke the economic boycott on Germany, perhaps Hitler's Chancellorship would have collapsed and not just 60,000 Jews would have been saved but the 50 million who died in the whole war....yeah..we can go down the rabbit holes of ifs and ands but in truth the allies helped Russia win the war. Russia defeated the Nazis (The Germans underestimated the Russians ability to mobilise at such a scale and overestimated their ability to supply their army in the caucusus).
The idea that Stalin deliberately murdered Ukrainians in a 'Holodomor' is somewhat specious and still much disputed amongst historians. Russia also suffered a major famine in 1932/3...( a million dead) in fact Ukraine and Russia had experienced droughts and/or famines periodically every 7-10 years for over a thousand years...collectivisation is often blamed for the famine but many other factors contributed (Ukraine's farmers opposed to collectivisation burned their crops which exacerbated the problem) Stalin's exporting of grain (an important cash source for the USSR to enable indutrialisation and Russia's economic stabiity) was probably another. But Ukraine and Russia have never suffered famines since which contradicts the idea that Stalin's collectivisation was to blame. Make of that what you will.
All of what we read/know in the west about Stalin is written by anti-communists. They get published, but alternative more nuanced and academically based works don't. So, we have to be careful about a lot of what we were taught as fact when all it was was propaganda, as with the 'Uyghur genocide'/Tiananmen massacre etc. which are provable lies. (N.B. I am not a Stalinist).
I'm curious about the Uyghur genocide being a provable lie. Most of the dissent from the mainstream is dated to 2021, and the UN posted their indictment on the topic in August of 2022. I can't seem to find dissent after that post. Is there anything you can reference to disprove the UN's research? Grayzone stops covering the topic in 2021, and Jeffrey Sachs (author of the article Caitlin links) doesn't seem to have anything after the UN's post either. Am I missing something?
While there is no genocide there is severe repression including mass incarceration in re-education camps. I've been to Xinjiang. My niece spent five years there studying the situation, speaks Uighur and Mandarin fluently, had contacts in the government, and so forth.
You will find reports of people that WERE actually in the area and have seen it by themselves. The guy that wrote all the nasty stories is Mr Zenz and he has an axe to grind (besides he was I think ONCE in China!!). You will find facts in different places in the internet (also a detailed official report of the Chinese, I know who would believe them?? But google street view of the area helps too - you can see what Chinese money DID! BTW same in Tibet - I was there!!). Also the first report of the UN lady was totally different from the official report she posted as she already left her post with the UN (does this ring a bell??)
You might find this article on the recent UN Human Rights Committee report on China helpful (which incidentally, the Chinese government fully engaged and cooperated with).
https://jerry-grey2002.medium.com/whats-missing-from-the-un-report-and-why-b5260fe4e42e
The entire Uighur movement traces back to one reactionary zealot named Adrian Zenz.
https://chollima.org/who-is-adrian-zenz-the-christian-fundamentalist-leading-the-global-xinjiang-narrative/
I would not assume that a US-led neoliberal global reform organ like the UN only propagates facts; the "common sense" of some people is but their shared opinion, of no special epistemic value, and is often wrong for reasons of self-identity.
If you really read the history, it shows that the so called holodomor took place in other parts of the USSR too, so to paint it a Ukrainian holocaust is a recent story!!
Once, according to Nobel prize Winston Churchill, Stalin joked in a conversation that he had killed even more Russians than Hitler did. And Hitler had killed on the order of twenty million Soviet soldiers and citizens, at least.
The Holodomor refers to the man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933. It was primarily concentrated in Ukraine. However, it also affected other regions of the Soviet Union, particularly areas with predominantly non-Russian ethnic populations. These regions included parts of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and the Kuban region of the North Caucasus.
Kulaks, the prosperous peasants, often with large landholdings, had opposed collectivization, tht is forced expropriation. Stalin reacted with deportation and extermination. Many Ukrainians were sent to Eastern Siberia, and their descendants constitute a large part of the population there.
While Ukraine bore the brunt of the Holodomor and experienced the most severe consequences, the policies and actions that led to the famine were part of a broader Soviet agricultural and political strategy. The Soviet government implemented collectivization and grain procurement policies that disproportionately affected Ukraine's rural population, leading to widespread starvation and loss of life.
The exact extent of the Holodomor's impact on non-Ukrainian regions is a subject of ongoing historical research and debate. While evidence suggests that the famine had significant consequences outside of Ukraine, the scale and severity of the famine varied across different regions.
Some countries and international organizations recognize the Holodomor as a genocide. For example the French Republic officially recognized the Holodomor as a genocide against the Ukrainian people. The vote in the French National Assembly was followed by a vote of the French Senate on 28 March, 2023, and the law was signed by the president. Holocaust denial is a crime in France punishable by prison.
End of real history reading!
I know all that, but re Mr Churchill: he is another mass murderer ... (India) so who are we to talk about this and a one-sided (because it is now mainstream opinion of the western rules based international order) acknowledgement of this so called holocaust is (in my opinion) WRONG!! Stalin was a very intelligent psychopath (we have enough of them around NOW) and certainly a ruthless killer.
Churchill simply stated that Stalin was not shy about his mass murdering ways. That Stalin killed roughly as many Soviet citizens as Hitler is well documented. Stalin's armies used "blocking sections"... which Putin also uses (soldiers retreating without orders are killed).
What is more troubling is that the Roosevelt administration, in its desire to weaken Europe, decided to ignore the mass murdering ways of Stalin, as it had with Mussolini, Hirohito, Hitler and Franco (chronological order). This is how the US based international order was forged...
Gandhi got more than ten million citizens of the subcontinent killed, with his insistence in declaring independence way too early, ahead of the assigned calendar, and also with his hostility to Muslims. So Gandhi is the measure of holocausts in India.
I was not aware that Churchill mass murdered Indians. Care to give the details?
The Holodomor is very important because it is chronologically the second mega-death holocaust of the Twentieth Century.
"Western based international order" is propaganda from dictators Xi and Putin. International law, worldwide is defined by Roman Republican law, which is more than 25 centuries old.
The troll is back with the holodomor tale. Check.
Hey, smartypants. Suppose it's true. That is, that it was a deliberate targeting of Ukrainians as an ethnic group as opposed to the fact that it was a famine and the wheat generally doesn't grow well in Siberia and so could not have been confiscated from Khanti, Mansi, Yakuts, etc.
Instead the famine was throughout the country and the confiscations happened where the harvests were - Volga region, current Kazakhstan, etc. So who was being targeted there?
But ok, suppose your shit tale is true. What does it mean? Does it mean that any atrocity from the past never gets forgotten or somehow resolved? If yes, then what should be happening to Germans, Japanese, the US (atomic bombing, napalm in Vietnam etc.), French, Belgians, Spaniards, Portuguese, and on and on?
Well sorry - you live on a different planet than I (re Massmurder Churchill I can only recommend Shashi Tharoors book 'An era of darkness', or just google it). There is nothing important about the holodomor, it is just the Western hobby horse now - we did not give a DAMN about all the other mass murders). The international rules based order IS USED by the US government and many others!
The Holodomor is a Nazi political narrative, and partisan piety is a mental illness.
See also Oliver Stone’s documentary series, “The Untold History of the United States.”
Of yeah, PRC "social credit scoring"...who are we fooling?
As is the case with practically all of the institutional hierarchies in history, particularly those of dominant powers and empires, the US has always had its own means of social credit scoring. It's called a Credit Rating.
Nowadays it's as publicly obvious as a Visa Black credit card, a Marley Hodgson credit card wallet, Louis Vuitton handbags, Cartier sunglasses, and a thousand other markers of social capital and social status competition signifiers in this pervasively ranked society. The details have been outlined by astute social observers from Thorstein Veblen and Vance Packard to Paul Fussell, Tom Wolfe, and Gary Shteyngart.
At the top levels of government power, social credit scoring has long consisted of elite credential signifiers like Ivy League degrees, Rhodes Scholarships, etc. It's gotten much more stratified over the past 40 years, of course- https://money.cnn.com/2014/06/10/luxury/preschool-new-york-city/index.html
""You think college is bad? Try getting into preschool on the Upper East Side," said Amanda Uhry, president of Manhattan Private School Advisors, which charges between $15,000 and $35,000 to 1,500 clients each year to help their kids land a spot in private school. "Some of these preschools get 400 recommendations for 16 spots..."
Really. What is that about, if not initiation into a social credit scoring regime at a level intended to be maintained for a lifetime?
As for the increasing role of digital technology, basic access features like personal vehicle parking are increasingly foreclosed to anyone without a smartphone and credit card. I've heard that in much of northern and western Europe, businesses no longer do cash transactions.
I find this ominous. I don't mind being disdained as a country slacker hillbilly hippie nonentity based on my well-worn clothes and uncombed hair, but at least allow me to park my car on the street and pay for my lunch in cash.
Yes - ominous. I feel sorry for the next generation of Americans coming up - the boomer generation has had it pretty good in comparison. The future: likely an Orwellian society - more corporate right-wing ideologues/warmongers in charge - more victimization of the poor and divide of society between the haves and have nots, until things get so bad, open rebellion commences - most likely violent. And then the unfolding, increasing disasters of climate change - and more loss of common wealth and more conflict over dwindling resources. This will unfold over the next number of decades. Baby boomer generation, including myself - will have long since departed to the great beyond. If there is any such place.
Such might come sooner than you expect.
I find it ironic how many people buy into the climate change lies, its nothing more than a narrative of control, every element of the climate change sham is promoted and profited from by the rich. Ask yourself what personal experience do you or can you have that climate change is real ? The weather is about all we as individuals can see yet we have little information to base a global long term trend on from our localized short term observations.
Notice that the MSM, rich, powerful and governments focus on the dangers of an invisible gas not on the worldwide very visible destruction of ecosystems, pollution and blatant poisoning of the world. Climate change focuses the overall eco-debate on minimized industrial controls that can be profited from that supposedly impact far off indigenous peoples because its an emotional manipulation instead of real science. How often do you hear about the evils of strip mining, the destruction of ecosystems and industrial waste compared to CO2 ?
Not going to even bother arguing about it, since the argument has been over for about a decade. Climate change exists, whether you have the balls to admit it or not.
Of course, the climate faithful believe so there is no debate possible. Enjoy your faith.
Hope you're not in Texas right now ...
Preach Jamenta, is there some form of Amen that goes with climate prayers ?
Americans choose to stratify themselves through social status indicators, the state does not need to ostracize people when they do it themselves. The status signals are as powerful as a persons position in society but sadly for western societies are only an indicators of money, not ethics, not education, a stupid person can buy their way into the upper class social circles as has been done many times. Most of the stories around successful penetration of the upper class revolve around poor or middle class people faking their way into the club.
I take your points about social status- which is why I prefer to refer to the system as Credentialism rather than Meritocracy, which would be the development of elites based on factors like ethical integrity, proven competence at making predictions, command of historical knowledge, and that exceptional level of ordinary good sense known as perspicacity. I'm fine with authentic merit elites. The mechanics where I take my car to get fixed are aces, and ethical as well. Within their wheelhouse, they have elite skills. I couldn't care less where they learned them. They really know what they're doing.
By contrast, college admissions, graduate school admissions, employment screening, and consideration for high appointed posts in the Federal government based on Credentialism is an actual thing. Ivy League degrees are primarily about social capital (and social class conditioning), not some extra level of Empyrean academic excellence imparted to the students. Nepotism is an actual thing, too- there's no affirmative action program that's anywhere near as effectively targeted as being a family relation, or that invaluable social capital referred to as "knowing somebody.".And I'm okay with a modicum of that, as long as it doesn't turn into tolerance for corruption and incompetence.. But it's inherently about the construction of an aristocracy, not meritocracy. Someone can be both, but they have to pay the dues to have the meritocratic part down. In general,
I don't want to compare the American surveillance society with that of the PRC; it's clear which country imposes a more stringent set of controls over the Internet, for example. It means that we have to put up with a lot of fallacious nonsense, sophistry, and intellectual fraud, but I remain confident that it's worth it.
I always expected that the wider information access of the new technology would involve a steep learning curve. What I didn't anticipate is the data mining model of surveillance capitalism; the very real slippery slope of preemptive censorship; the information stovepiping and epistemic bubbles of social media; and the increasing acceptance of the phone as an information source with the same capabilities as a laptop or desktop, when it should be clear from the inherent physical space-time limitations that it isn't even close. And now I'm seeing my page screen space shrink on my laptop due to sidebars and top or bottom banners, on a lot of sites!
"A normal country wages war with the goal of getting back to peacetime. The US wages war with the goal of getting to the next war."
Close. But there is no connection between the wars. They have no strategic purpose. The goal is to maximize the number of wars, thus maximizing the value of the stocks owned by Congresspeople and providing an excuse to employ their constituents. It's the force of corruption combined with a widespread but marginally effective jobs program.
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"The US won WW2 and then immediately plunged into the Cold War."
I'd say the Cold War began in 1919 when Western troops invaded Russia to help put down the Bolsheviks. The US had made no secret of its hatred of the USSR and supported the Nazi buildup. You could say the Cold War stretched from 1919 to 1991, with World War II an anomaly when the Nazi thing went haywire and turned on the West.
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"The US won the Cold War and then immediately set to work destroying the Middle East."
The Cold War was won in 1991 while the Middle East thing began in 1948 with the declaration of the state of Israel.
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"The US destroyed the Middle East and then immediately started another cold war in preparation for another world war."
Iran broke loose in 1979 and is still holding out. Syria was hard pressed but rescued by Russia. The MIddle East is war torn but undestroyed.
After a period of subjugation of Russia Mikhail Gorbachev in 2014 informally declared Cold War II. https://time.com/3630352/mikhail-gorbachev-vladimir-putin-cold-war/ I personally would set the date of Cold War II as 2006, when Russia began forcing out Royal Dutch Shell. The West didn't like that at all.
https://science1arts2and3politics.substack.com/p/when-did-cold-war-ii-begin
Orwell got it right in "1984" - permanent war serves many purposes.
At the time I didn't understand that. He wrote that the permanent war sustained the hierarchy. But how? What good does it do?
Having lived through it I now see the purpose as endless massive transfers of wealth to established interests without resistance from or benefit to the people. Which is another way of saying it sustains hierarchy (once all this gets established).
It teaches that contest is a source of objective truth, that winners are entitled to subordinate losers, and that losers are improved by the subordination, among other things.
Neither did I.
The permeant war aspects of 1984 are largely ignored or downplayed, while other aspects of the book are emphasized. It's not just about wealth transfers - social control, mind control, diversion, and a basis for the surveillance state to enforce discipline.
Cupidity is a religious narrative, therefore false. In fact, for many centuries after Christian religious managers inveighed against man's "intrinsic" greed, craftsmen and artists stuck to "target incomes" and took time off instead of increasing their hoards. The idea apparently preceded the facts because it was a lie.
They have war because conflict is the basis of their value system. Money is basically irrelevant except as a means of enforcing subordination.
Good criticisms.
I've always hated needless suffering, and those who think it is good in itself - the flagellators - of themselves and others. It's not normal. It's ugly. But a lot of people seem to have a high tolerance for it. Hopefully, that will come to an end soon. Perhaps this Fall and Winter when the cost of fuel quadruples in Europe and elsewhere because of an irrational animus toward Russia and all things Russian.
The European leadership are proud of how out of touch they are with their own citizens.
"I've always hated needless suffering, and those who think it a good in itself - the flagellators - of themselves and others. It's not normal. It's ugly. But a lot of people seem to have a high tolerance for it"
I believe the idea of tolerance for suffering comes mostly from the mythos of Christianity. Not all cultures see it the same way, it is an interesting and unique brain worm.
It's beyond tolerance, it's something closer to a sadomasochistic fetish.
I'm not sure how that narrative explains the bloodletting rituals of the ancient Mayans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting_in_Mesoamerica
I can find many similar examples.
Suffering is intrinsic to the human condition. I don't like it, but it's part of the material realm. Different cultures have different ways of addressing that reality.
Buddhism (for centuries) has had as one of its central tenets: "Life is suffering." Most of the major organized religions address suffering with some level of tolerance, since it is an aspect of life that is unavoidable, and some would argue, even necessary for life to exist.
When contrasting religious thought on suffering, I'm thinking mostly of the philosophy of Epicureanism, which I think rightly identified suffering as something bad and that should be avoided by individuals and society as a whole (while also recognizing it as unavailable, and trying to provide you with tools to deal with it). The Christian view of redemption via suffering, or heaven as a reward for earthly suffering, has a tendency to make people accept unacceptable and immoral situations with the thought that they'll be rewarded in the afterlife.
"unavailable" = "unavoidable". annoying you can't edit posts to fix auto-corrects.
Well it isn't just Christian ignorance that can lead people to choose unacceptable/immoral situations. Many kinds of misconstrued philosophies/theologies can lead one down a primrose path of immorality and self-sabotage. The Western idolatry of consumerism and profit seems like as good a candidate as any. Jung often wrote the only way to heal a neurosis is to accept it and move through it - somewhat similar to the only way to live a life, is for one to live it - despite the obvious suffering for so many of us. The Romans use to have a saying: "Amor Fati" Love your Fate.
There is a great short statement by Arthur Miller about the US cultural denial and avoidance of suffering and all that it leads to. I can't remember where I saw this short video, perhaps in a documentary by Adam Curtis? Century of The Self? I Can't remember.
Your comment reminds me of something Robert Aziz wrote in his book on Jung and religion:
"Speaking with an acquaintance at his home in Kusnacht in 1938, Jung, reflecting on this problem of suffering, commented that in the East the objective is to eliminate suffering, "by casting it off," whereas in the West people resort to drugs seeking to suppress it. Suffering, Jung continued, is a serious problem and we must seek to overcome it, yet in actual fact the "only way to overcome it is to endure it." #p44
Europe gets no fossil fuels from the Putin Reich from now on. Putin's agents will hope in vain.
To lessen further needless suffering, the Russian military, Wagner PMC and Prigozhin should arrest Putin and his collaborators and send them to La Hague to answer the charges for the crimes against humanity they committed.
Wotta lotta bullshit!!! You have everything exactly backasswards-amazing.
Yes, I noticed that in his earlier comment too. Remarkable consistancy.
In your dreams. P has an 85% approval rating.
Actually Europe gets much of its fossil fuel from Russia. It goes through third parties such as India and Saudi Arabia that charge a markup, so it just costs more.
Europe has got to have that fuel for its heavy industry. So the players just pretend they don't notice this happening.
It is also a little-known fact that the Russian pipeline through Ukraine is still operating and has been throughout the war. Ukraine needs the transit fees and the fuel itself. Amazing, eh?
It's great. The boys are learning about cooperation! But not so good for the pore old Environment.
Too bad there's no "laugh" button underneath comments. Would have used it.
I note that the Kremlin killing 6 million Ukrainians in the Holodomor amuses you.
Kremlin BAD, Ukraine GOOD. Enjoy your day.
Thanks, you too. Kremlin bad since 1240 CE, and Nevsky infamous alliance with the Golden Horde. Pretty architecture, though...
Expand on that, will you? Alliance why?
If Putin goes to the Hague, surely Biden, Blinken, Nuland, Sullivan and so forth -- the list is probably pretty long -- should "meet him halfway." We can try them all together.
This is really insightful material. I'm allergic to 100% agreement with anyone, but our conclusions mostly align, and I arrived at most of them independently of yourself, or of any particular school of thought, or as the acolyte of any one thinker. I was around age 55 before I got there. Considerable disillusionment was involved.
I remain idealistic, and as optimistic as the contingent limits of reality allow. Terminal cynicism and despair cedes entirely too much to the adversary.
The ruling power usually appears immovable. Recall what a surprise was the collapse of the USSR.
Keep in mind that the Soviet collapse led to massive corruption, radical decline of society (including sharp reduction in life expectancy), and the Oligarchs (all engineered by US Neoliberal "shock doctrine" economists and corporations).
The cultural and political tendencies right now in the US would be to consolidate Fascism in government, should there be an economic and/or ecological collapse. Any "revolution" would be from the far Right.
"the Soviet collapse led to massive corruption, radical decline of society (including sharp reduction in life expectancy), and the Oligarchs (all engineered by US Neoliberal "shock doctrine" economists and corporations)."
I don't think it was engineered. It was more of an inertial situation. Bliss ninny capitalist ideologues imagining that capitalism is so inherently valorous that great things would inevitably follow the opening of capitalist markets. Much as with globalization and outsourcing to China, in fact. Neoliberalism is almost entirely about elevating the "efficiency" of laissez faire capitalism to enable the easy movement of investment capital and profits all over the world. The result of removing as many trade barriers as possible is inertial; the money sluices toward those who already have the most to invest. And toward already prosperous consumer markets, wanting even bigger price bargains. Inertia again.
The USSR could have used some Western-assisted "engineering", in fact, in order to help Gorbachev keep the public sector, socialist part of a mixed economy healthy and functioning. A gradual transition that preserved features of collective enterprise in some sectors would have been much healthier for Russian society, and it would have preserved both the safety net and the rule of law. But I never even heard that discussed. The economic foundations of the society were just dismantled, and replaced by a void that was supposed to be filled with "free markets." Somehow or another.
The Western capitalists imagined that they'd either find (or cultivate) a thousand free enterprise flowers blooming from the rubble, or (particularly in the case of the resource extraction sector) that they'd find a compliant oligarchy subordinate to their wishes, like compradors on commission. A third world model.
Not so fast. The Russians had their own ideas about privatization. They weren't interested in conforming to the model the foreign capitalists were used to. The former socialist bureaucrats in charge of the lucrative extraction economic enterprises simply seized them and cashed them in to people with ready cash, mostly other Russians. The capitalist economy was actually a large chunk of the Soviet economy already; it consisted of the black market, which accounted for around 25% of the total economy by the 1980s. Most of it was run by organized crime and smuggling gangs, of course, with the collaboration of corrupt police and state bureaucracy. That's how the Russian oligarchs prospered. They had the inside track. They had the liquidity to capitalize the banking sector.
Russians have always been very wary of foreigners meddling with their society. They much prefer the devil they know and can converse with to the devil they don't know. And they aren't a little country with a small cohort of landowning elites that can easily be bought off, favorites played and rivals dispensed with, and the political leaders coup'ed if they don't play ball with the outside investment elites. The Westerners rushed into Russia with dollar signs in their eyes. Some of them got tossed out on their asses, or tossed out of windows. The most successful Russians had a very cynical approach to conventions of contract law, and its practical limitations within Russian territorial borders.
You might want to investigator how the shock doctrine Neoliberal economic ideology was linked to fascist politics and regime change government in Chile. That was engineered too. Neoliberalism is about a lot more than markets.
The examples of Cold War era Chile and post-Cold War Russia are entirely different. Chile already had a lot of Western investment in place, and a Chilean capitalist class that had friendly ties with foreign investment. The coup was enabled in order to protect those interests.
It's difficult to say exactly when "neoliberalism" began, or even what it is. The impacts vary depending on the national perspective. The global economy was internationalizing early in the 20th century; by the late 1920s, the US was about where the PRC is today- the US made about 25% of all global production. And overseas investment had begun in earnest by the 1920s- not just Brown Brothers Harriman investing in the USSR and Germany, but Europeans like Deterding and Rothschild competing for investment in in Caucasus oil fields, and Swedish firms like Bofors putting in factories in Japan to build cannons for the Japanese Imperial Navy. For that matter, much of the US (and other foreign) investment in Germany preceded the ascension of Hitler to power in 1934; it isn't so much that American firms went all in for the Nazis after Hitler assumed power in 1934, it's more like they didn't cancel their patent sharing and their contracts in order to boycott the regime. (We still don't have anything like a consensus global rule of law that makes economic boycott tactics ironclad, and effectively enforceable; that's a lot more difficult than it sounds.)
Neoliberalism is the paradigm that turned the US economy from its former primary function as a producer of manufactured goods in the 1960s into an exporter of raw materials and a consumer economy dependent on foreign imports by the end of the 1990s. I view its fundamental premise as inertial- and that inertial movement of capital is the source of most of the problems. I'm not sure what's gained by calling it an engineering project. The results of complete trade deregulation, the shifting of production overseas, and the replacement of self-sufficient food crops with cash crops in agricultural economies work more like a wrecking ball. I'm not a knee-jerk autarkist ideologue, but I don't like seeing self-sufficient sustainable prosperity replaced with the global servility of every domestic economy to the whims of private megacapital investment elites.
"Now I just dismiss electoral politics altogether..." - glad more and more people are beginning to see through the scam. Good thing also is they can actually do something about it - stop participating in it.
That isn't "doing something about it." It's doing nothing at all.
I prefer working for the reform of Ranked-Choice Voting. It deserves a chance to be the rule in national level elections.
The American political system is kaput.
The only way forward now will be labor movements.
Unfortunately labor is even more kaput, and every effort will be made to keep it that way. Every effort will be made to keep the havenots down. I suppose the system will continue to lurch forward in its unpleasant and frightening manner to some unknown denouement. https://science1arts2and3politics.substack.com/p/us-politics-in-a-supernutshell
UPS is about to go on strike. There is a Writer's strike in Hollywood (or about to be). These I find to be all good signs - and the only possibility of change. So, I don't quite see labor movements as completely done.
As the oppression continues unabated, I expect more on the street rebellion in the future, despite the obvious dwindling of Unions over the last number of decades - I suspect ordinary people will try to fight back anyway.
But yes - we may enter into a type of sci-fi dystopia where striking becomes criminalized as free speech is slowly becoming. A dark future to be lurching toward and it could very well become a reality. And then what? Probably a century of dark oppression before something happens - because something always does happen - the sense of justice is inborn, you can't stamp it out - as Steinbeck wrote in The Grapes of Wrath.
You're absolutely right about the size of the problem, but militant organized labor (perhaps combined with electoral politics) is definitely the only path. Only other possible path I can imagine is to start setting up independent self-sufficient communities.
They will send in the unconstitutional militarized police when they have had enough of those.
Aha, you mean not-yet-organized labor.
Kautskyism is a failed religious movement, and Luxemburgism is too stupid to die.
Your personal need for totalitarianism and big imaginary friends who tell other people how to behave warrants nothing.
You're the one imagining that you can dictate the details of my personal religious ideals to me, as if you knew so much about the subject that you had final wisdom and the authoritative narrative frame to construct a pigeonhole and shove me in there.
I haven't done anything similar with you, or with any other participant in these discussions.
I reject your liberal theories of moral economy as erroneous. By exercising your whiny middle-class moral entrepreneurship, you are creating pollution and noise that has no value and you are inflicting harm on me using the law as an instrument, and what mental illness makes you think you have a right to restrict other people based on your infantile emotional fictions, and not be turned into sausage merely for thinking you have a right?
Thank you for sharing. You've cleared up a lot of unclarity- not only about your political views, but your personal temperament.
Shut up and haul the food in you whining parasitic gas bag.
You've inspired another article. Why Runoffs Are (Much) Better Than Ranked Choice Voting.
https://science1arts2and3politics.substack.com/p/why-runoffs-are-much-better-than
That's an alternative worth pondering. Your observation that only 10% of voters take advantage of the option to rank choices definitely makes that process less effective than it should be.
The original suggestion of simply abandoning the popular franchise and having no elections at all reminds me of the right-wing GOP solution to the flawed work of the Food and Drug Administration- to abolish the agency.
Now do approval voting instead of another childish war reenactment.
Well, Ranked Choice gave us Eric Adams in New York City. That's something to consider, not that the mayor has much power outside his little realm.
Or did it? My quick superficial search tells me that if only first choices were counted -- the old system -- then Eric wins the Democratic nomination with a plurality of 32%. The system narrowed Eric's margin of victory from 9% to 1% and he subsequently called it "a problem."
The character of the contest was noticeably different, at least to me. It looked more like a pure popularity contest without much examination of the candidates' other possibly relevant attributes, partly because there were more candidates and a number of them were pretty marginal. And so Adams was The Cop, Wylie The Liberal, etc. If there was even that much distinction. Again, this is just my unstudied view of it.
“…. Too many people look at authoritarian measures like government surveillance, online censorship etc in terms of how it will directly affect them personally rather than how it shapes society as a whole.….”
Well it’s not too many if you understand that by now everyone has been brought up under the narrative that there is no such thing as society. Only individuals who are “consumers”, and the more narcissistic the better.
So what you see there is the result of many decades of the left failing to rise up when the right do everything under the sun to indoctrinate people into the individualism and kill all ideas of social collaboration, and collective action and collective ownership.
A left,any left to fail...has to exist.
It’s only the warped dualism of corporate power brokers who pray to the god in the sky and curse the devil in hell, and literally believe that a heterogeneous culture can be all good if only everyone can be convinced to drink their koolaid.
Following The Great Depression, when the federal government used tax dollars to address the widespread deprivation across the land, the ambitious industrialists of the day were conspiring to remove the president and buy the legislators to end this mockery of their constitution. They had no interest in moderation or “justice for all.”
This sick vision has been the guiding force for all of the determined barons who invested their vast resources into holding the line against idealists and naive humanists who believed the government represented them.
We have been taught to view the final solution, I.e., Hitler’s intended extermination of those he and his viewed as sub-human, with horror. Likewise we were taught to hate Stalin and hate Pol Pot. But All of these people - our corporate players, the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge - all followed the dualist playbook.
It’s a gift from the grand Judeo-Christian heritage. All good can be achievable as long as no evil is tolerated. For Stalin, the traitor was evil; for the Nazis the non-aryan fit the bill; for the Khmer Rouge it was the intellectual; and for our corporate masters, “we” the proverbial us are the evil. Our fornicating, drug-ingesting, propagating, contrary selves are undesired by our rulers, who are just like the rest of us, but with lots of money.
Fornicating with more money - on a big yacht.
Absolutely.
Yup. And Margaret Thatcher ("no such thing as society") and Ronald Reagan (freedom) pounded the final nails in the coffin.
If by "failure to rise up" you mean failure to dispose of the entire current order, well, that is a significant undertaking, to put it mildly. The coordination goods for that sort of thing aren't easily available and there is no slaver who's going to hand the slaves the means to destroy his fences. A nihilistic scorched-earth destruction of every person of property might work, but again, coordination goods for such an undertaking aren't available.
There really isn't such a thing as "society", though; there are societIES and there are networkS. The notion of Total Unity is a rapey Christian ideology.
Nope, I mean the so called left fail to rise up when each brick of the commons and social ownership and action are dismantled.
For example, right now in the US the so called left are championing sa right wing ideal: dismantling of universal public education and privatising it all aka “charter schools”. What sort of a society do they expect from this? Any ideas of common identity and social ownership no. What will these schools teach? Commercialisation? yep.
So the left fails to rise up when these ideas are peddled and implemented. In fact they champion them,
Thats why there is no concept of the society.
This has nothing to with the huge load of red herring and diversion you dropped. Which is of zero value and zero relevance to the point I made.
Oh, so you didn't mean to erase the current order, you just meant for people to participate in your religious ceremonies, bless your rule-conjuring rituals, and validate your Protestant emotional performances in support of bourgeois commercial society.
They would be better enslaved and forced to make food than spending their time on cultivating their emotional self-importance.
You cannot “erase the current order” when the masses are fully indoctrinated in it and the “left” is actually participating in the indoctrination.
It has been a painful and depressing path to accepting the U.S. government is corrupt beyond redemption. The bureaucratic machine has taken control and will use any means to prevent the exposure of their incompetence and crimes which are so heinous their only alternative is to continue until they have complete totalitarian control or they are imprisoned and tried for their crimes.
Such people are seldom tried. Example : In Cambodia Pol Pot and his buddies went free. I suppose his freedom was part of a peace deal.
Whenever I encounter the words "held accountable" I think, "dream on." Deposed, sie. Tried, non. Trials only happen in the case of utter defeat, and even then are not extensive. A few prominent victims, that's it.
Same with corporate crimes the lower people pay while the higher ups get paid. Same with the "Criminal InJustice" system we have the crooks walk free and the victims pay the price.
They're doing what the system requires, which is usually the opposite of what the people require for their own part. Can't keep slaves if they can just run off, can't make Indians work in white factories and plantations if they can just eat buffalo whenever they like.
Fascism is not a deviation from the state, but its purest form. The people raised up System (or Law, or Submission, or Truth, or whatever other abstract obsession they most recently made up) above themselves and enslaved themselves to it based on no good reason and with no exit strategy; not to blame them, but they are getting what they asked for.
were the Killing Fields merely a "narrative"?
I think you mean "corporate control". You confuse the puppet with the puppet master.
As I read this piece, there are a many likes as there are comments (~150). And some comments are thoughtful, offering historic context. Impressed. Now just everybody, grab a pitchfork and go to work!
"War is the health of the State" - Randolph Bourne
A great book that should be a must read today.
Only an essay, unfortunately; Bourne tragically died of the Spanish flu leaving it unfinished. Then again, anarchist books are generally short because they don't need to manufacture tools that make permanent power possible.
Yes it is an essay, but I read it as a book - I think on line at an anarchist press.
Fair enough, I suppose it is rightly pushing book length, by anarchist standards.
Yeah, we thought the Military Industrial Complex was birthed after WW2. Bourne saw the unstoppable war drive right after WW1.
The USSR won world war 2. Look up how many German divisions they smashed compared to the Allies.
I read recently that a native "american" chief said the only thing he fears is the look of fear in the white mans eyes.
If I had a TARDIS, I'd sink the Mayflower. And warn the people around the globe to NEVER allow Europeans in.
Not until we 'civilised' again, as we were before Rome.
No 'standing armies'. No monotheist intolerance. No invading others for their stuff and lives. CIVILISED.
It was the Roman Barbarians that barbarianised the European continent.
And later the World bled. :'( >_<
"Civilization" is a white man's reified emotion for the entire world under dominance. Only mentally ill people need to be dominated by imaginary friends.
"Civilisation" is a conflicted word for sure.
Well written.
And also, we have "social credit scores" in the west already.
We've had them for decades.
They're just called "credit scores".
But now they're rolling out something called 'ESG scores' which will be more comprehensive or whatever and that's real, not a fiction.
Well I mean it IS a fiction but it is something that's really being talked about.
I mean if we're going to invent a new game i don't think I want to entrust that to the same people who currently run the old one at all.
It needs to be coming from a grass roots kinda place.
FDR and Churchill worked behind the scenes to kick off WW2. Watch or read whatever you can find by David Irving. I'd post some links but the Zionists have removed damn near all of them. The UNZ Report still has some up. Check Goodreads for Irving's books; last I looked there were still many reviews up.
A less tendentious version of the story has been described on pp50-52 of the 1973 book _Indispensable Enemies: The Politics of Misrule in America_ by Walter Karp:
"Having blocked reform for one year, Roosevelt quickly set out to block it by more permanent means. He now began to trump up foreign dangers and overseas alarms, an effort which was certain, at the height of American isolationism, to breed further mistrust of the President, further distract Congress, further split reform ranks and put yet another nail in the coffin of Western Democratic Congressmen. Roosevelt began this operation by delivering one of his most unpopular speeches in the part of the country where it was certain to be most ill received. This was his famous “Quarantine the Aggressors” address given in Chicago in October 1937, referring to the Japanese attack on Peking. Having begun to recover somewhat from the long court fight, Congress and the country now heard from Roosevelt that warfare ten thousand miles away threatened the security of the United States. In Roosevelt’s January 1938 message to Congress—still a radical Congress— reform legislation was virtually for gotten. The heart of the President’s annual message was the need for national defense."
Caitlin does a superb job of demolishing false narratives and propaganda. But there is a downside to claiming that it's ALL about narratives - and the problems are very similar to the shift in politics to identify politics and way from economic and corporate power and class based politics.
There is a material reality and no narrative construct can change it.
The climate deniers have tried to do exactly that for decades.
There is corporate power and economics is not merely a capitalist narrative, there are material conditions at play.
When a society ignores all that and focuses exclusively on narratives and identity, we are doomed.
My understanding is that the Japanese were already defeated at the time of A-bomb drops, so an invasion of the Home Island was unnecessary. Interesting book by Paul Boyer, "By the Bomb's Early Light" (1985), which provides a lot of print evidence that Americans were pretty shook up by the bombings, which led to a massive propaganda campaign to justify the use of nukes, or WMD, as we say now...