09 November 2024
(Note: given the outcome of Tuesday's election, I consider it a blessing I am terminally ill, according to my cardiologist doomed by post-Covid complications of heart and kidney failure to die before next September -- this despite the fact I was fully inoculated. Though the I Ching, Runemal and the Marseille Tarot all predicted in January 2020 the pandemic would kill me, I began to believe by 2023 I had misread these ancient oracles, which for me have always been uncannily accurate. But in June and July of that year I was felled by Covid, abed 10 days with scorching fever and 12 days more for recovery, then learned it had fried my heart and irreparably damaged my kidneys. Thus I will most likely escape the horrors of Trump's promised New American Holocaust.)
*****
As I was allowed to suggest via a New York Times comment thread this morning (8 November 2024), 'I think if we want a truly accurate picture of our domestic future -- financial, political, sociological -- we need look at the Pinochet Regime in Chile. (I say this not only because Elon Musk's pledge of "economic hardship" echoes the neoliberal "shock treatment" Pinochet imposed on Chile, but because of the incoming regime's promises of ideological transformation and vengeance.)' (Links added for DfD readers.) Needless to say, this puts a powerful imprimatur on the following analysis.
*****
WHILE THIS REPORT'S headline may strike some readers as a bit over the top, it will do so only because so much of the capitalists' Mainstream Media Machine, the world's first privately owned, for-profit re-creation of Josef Goebbels' Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda), has already been intimidated into radically downplaying the ecogenocidal counter-revolution President-Elect Donald Trump has promised his violently hateful, lynch-mob-minded legions of supplicants and storm-troopers. In terrible truth, the campaign oratory of Trump, his Vice-President-Elect JD Vance and their fanatical henchmen justifies every word within this rightfully terrifying text. That's why it's so copiously footnoted by links. Trump's republic-killing pledges, including his promise to sic the military on "enemies within" -- presumably anyone who dares even the slightest criticism of his policies and edicts -- is documented here. Other campaign promises are detailed here and here. Even without the unabashed Christonazification proposed by Project 2025, the implications of these promises rationally evoke unprecedented anxiety.
Try as I might, I cannot banish my fear that Trump is the end, forever, not only of the American experiment in democracy, but of any realistic hope for saving our species from extinction or preserving our Mother Earth from permanent reduction to Precambrian lifelessness.
To The New York Times editors' attempt to reassure the world all is well because "the long-term fate of American democracy...remains in the hands of the American people,"1 I can only reply it was those very hands that have imposed the apocalyptic cancer of Trump on the nation and the world, not once but twice. These editors, normally far more usefully insightful, have somehow chosen to echo the misguided optimists who maintained the Germans had surely tasted sufficient democracy in the Weimar Republic to prompt them to eventually oust Hitler. But the Original Nazism proved so compelling that stopping its reign of unspeakable atrocities would never have been accomplished without the indescribable heroism of the Red Army. As Ernest Hemingway is alleged to have said: "Anyone who loves freedom owes such a debt to the Red Army that it can never be repaid.”2 The Soviet Union's monumental sacrifice -- a death-toll present research is pushing toward 40 million -- is as vital a lesson in the requirements of humanitarian survival as any in our species' approximately 300-million years of experience. Yet now it is obvious the U.S. electorate has either tragically forgotten its message or -- more likely in the case of the Trumpite zealots -- rejected its validity. The defiant re-election of Trump despite his inflammatory bigotry, multiple felony convictions and relentlessly repeated vows of ecogenocidal tyranny prove today's Christonazism is no less seductively binding -- and blinding -- than Hitler's original. But this time there is no Red Army to rescue us from the resultant horrors.
Seemingly as much in denial as the Times honchos, Kamala Harris likewise seeks to reassure us, telling us "it's going to be ok." She tries to soothe us as if we were injured children fearfully awaiting medical intervention. Never mind the overwhelming evidence "ok" is the very quality Trump will steal from the collective future of the entire 99.9 Percent and violently rip from the individual futures of any of us who dare rise up to oppose him; Kamala says "it's going to be ok." Never mind his co-conspirators' plans to outlaw unions, rob women of their right to vote and repeal or diminish every other progressive achievement that has defined our 248-year history; Kamala assures us "it's going to be ok." And never mind an entire universe of rival critics -- fiercely unapologetic Marxians and conciliatory united-front communists and democratic socialists and conventional progressives and radical pacifists -- all agree it was the Democrats' craven submission to the demands of their capitalist puppet-masters that passed the termination switch back to Trump and returned the doomsday keys to the Christonazi fanatics; Kamala insists "the light of America's promise will always burn bright...it's going to be ok." Such is the Democratic (sic) Party's post-election strategy.
Are we then so gullible we'll continue believing what we are repeatedly told, that Trump's terrifying triumph is merely the unfortunate result of the Democrats' mistaken judgement, that we are suffering nothing more than the temporary consequences of a series of well-intentioned strategic and tactical errors? Don't we comprehend what is being done to us? Can't we sense the nation-wrecking malice in Biden's extended refusal to resign his candidacy? Why aren't we outraged by the infinite contemptuousness so blatantly evident in the Democrats' carefully scripted effort to conceal the apparent feeble-mindedness that now -- with Josef Goebbels cunning -- does double duty to excuse the president's unprecedented malfeasance? Why do we ignore the overwhelming evidence the slaying of our 248-year-old republic is the intended outcome of a predatory, multi-generation plutocratic operations plan that dates back to the 1930s and the scheme hatched by Hitler, Mussolini and our capitalist overlords to enslave us all by nazification? Are we too numbed by trauma to recognize the Trumpite triumph as tantamount to invasion and conquest? Are we already too sickened by neoliberalism's metastasizing moral imbecility to resurrect the empathy that fosters solidarity? Have we thus become too self-indulgent to embrace the discipline that forges solidarity into effectiveness? Are we too intimidated to organize sustained resistance? Are we indeed the permanently subjugated rabble our predatory masters believe us to be? Have we truly surrendered to enslavement? Have we forgotten we're the working class, the 99.9 Percent without whom human society can neither function nor survive? Will we ever dare rise up again to take back what is rightfully ours?
*****
(Note: the following is a substantially improved version of the comment I posted on the World Socialist Web Site immediately after Trump's victory became overwhelmingly obvious.)
WHILE I AM not at all surprised by the Christonazi triumph, I am both surprised and terrified by the approval of a new American Holocaust implicit in the fact Trump is gaining reelection not just by Electoral College fiat but by winning the popular vote as well.
I can no longer doubt what I've hypothesized for several weeks on several comment threads, those of NYT and the World Socialist Web Site included, that the Biden/Harris candidacy was never more than the Democratic (sic) Party's most plausibly deniable way to throw the election to Trump, thereby fulfilling the Democrats' historically proven post-JFK function as the Fifth Column of the Republican (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party and simultaneously completing the bipartisan, slow-motion nazification process tacitly approved by the Congressional grant of de facto immunity to the Bankers' Plot perpe-traitors in 1934. I hardly need say both are essential aspects of the capitalists’ scheme to expand and perpetuate what today we know as neoliberal tyranny.3
My hypothesis will be confirmed if Trump rewards Biden and Harris by exempting them from the mass arrests by which he promises to punish all his opponents. (Perhaps he will also exempt Obama, whom I long ago dubbed Barack the Betrayer, and whom I have long suspected the Democrats put in the White House for the clandestine, plausibly deniable purpose of resurrecting the fanatical racism that brought us to the present denouement.)
As to the toxic magnitude of that racism, and as to how Trump is winning the popular vote even in states where substantial majorities are approving pro-abortion measures, I believe the answer is implicit in the Pew-Poll data that shows 77 percent of the white adult citizenry4 in denial of the genocidal racism that was so overwhelmingly obvious in Bush II's response to Katrina. I take this data as an accurate measurement of U.S. white-supremacist sentiment. Thus there is a theoretical 77-percent majority of white women who are both pro-choice and enough vengefully racist to vote for a convicted felon who is also an admitted disciple of Adolf Hitler. The election results indicate they are voting away their bodily autonomy to enable Trump’s promised restoration of official white supremacy and simultaneously voting to regain and perpetuate their bodily autonomy via their home states' restorations of abortion rights. Obviously they fail to understand all Trump need do to impose a national abortion ban is yield -- as is his obvious intent -- to the Christonazi demand to reactivate the Comstock Act, which could easily be expanded into a national ban on all forms of contraception. It's former use as a weapon against the LGBTQ community -- which Trump considers part of "the enemy within" -- could also be resurrected. And with Christonazi control of the Senate, there is no longer any possibility Comstock can be repealed.
Significantly, regardless of the odds against its passage, the most recent Comstock-repeal effort was quietly sandbagged by the Biden/Harris Administration -- yet another proof of the Democrats' clandestine function as the Christonazi Fifth Column, which I cite here as a lesser example of the penchant for treachery necessary to throw an election.
And now -- 8 November 2024 -- it appears only a miracle can stop the Trump and his Christonazis from taking the House as well. This final viuctory -- terminal in every sense -- would not only give them absolute control of the federal government; it would end forever any hope the 19 remaining so-called blue states might be allowed to maintain sanctuaries that sustain women's autonomy and preserve the lives of those of us Trump and his lynch-mob followers target for deportation or extermination. Trump has already told us he'll impose martial law to subjugate any cities or states that dare resist. To avoid demoralizing the national military by employing it for the mass murder of fellow Americans, Trump will almost certainly order the long-term occupations policed by one or more of his his militia organizations, much as Hitler did with his infamous Death's Head SS. These extended intrusions will undoubtedly replicate the horrors of unrestrained genocide that characterized the German presence in Poland, the western Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.
Because the populations of most of the 19 blue states are to varying extents forcibly disarmed and often denied the ability to learn and practice marksmanship, they will never be able to organize effective partisan resistance of the sort that was mounted by the Russians, Poles and Yugoslavs. Nor is civil war possible. Federalization of blue-state national guard units to round up immigrants, arrest dissenters and suppress protest demonstrations would place them under defense department command, subjecting all officers and enlisted personnel to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, with death-penalty offenses including mutiny and sedition. The defection of a guard unit to defend a state against federal invasion is not only outlawed by the UCMJ but prohibited by the surveillance that inescapably monitors us all. The blue-state secession about which so many progressives have fantasized is thus also rendered impossible. And it seems there is no hope whatsoever for aid from outside the country. Research indicates the U.S. is so feared and despised, no nation on earth would be willing to provide the assistance necessary to restore its peoples' freedom -- that even the remaining communist nations would rather see the U.S. destroyed than resurrected as a Marxian ally.
We have been voted into the abyss; the apocalypse -- whether by world war, environmental rape or both -- is upon us all.
Confronted as we shall soon be by a violently hostile domestic regime rendered technologically omnipotent by unimaginably advanced weaponry, forever robbed of our privacy by total surveillance, threatened by the regime's promise to criminalize even the most superficial expressions of opposition and severely fragmented by identity-politics divisiveness, the only possible way we might yet preserve our humanity -- and perhaps also eventually arise to help save our species and preserve our Mother Earth -- is by defiantly building the solidarity necessary to collectively embrace Leon Trotsky's ideologically disciplined, no-compromise brand of world-wide socialist activism.
Let us read, re-read and commit to memory the solidarity-building lesson of John Paul Sartre's "Republic of Silence" -- that he and his comrades
...were
never more free than during the German occupation...The circumstances,
atrocious as they often were, finally made it possible for us to live,
without pretense or false shame, the hectic and impossible existence
that is known as the lot of man. Exile, captivity, and especially death
(which we usually shrink from facing at all in happier times) became for
us the habitual objects of our concern. We learned that they were
neither inevitable accidents, nor even constant and exterior dangers,
but that they must be considered as our lot itself, our destiny, the
profound source of our reality as humans...
Let us not forget Comrade Trotsky's cautionary adage that "in every gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana."
Let us nevertheless wholeheartedly organize our minds and bodies for maximum resistance.
This time around, we have nothing to lose but our hopelessness.
______________
1America Makes a Perilous Choice," The New York Times,
6 Nov. 2024. (Linked here but not above because non-subscribers may be
unable to access it without emailed invitations from subscribers .)
2Though
I cannot find an authoritative source for this quote -- hence
"alleged" -- I have heard it repeated since my teens and know enough
about Hemingway (a distant maternal cousin) to find the attribution
entirely credible, particularly as something he might have said as a war correspondent covering (and clandestinely participating in) World War II.
3I
long ago began correctly describing neoliberalism as "socioeconomic
nazism" because I recognized its intent to use genocide by austerity
(rather than by death camps) to create an übermenschen of the
Hitler/Ayn-Rand breed and eventually transform all humanity into a
master race capable of achieving whatever it might imagine. See Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (George Monbiot & Peter Hutchinson, Crown: 2024), especially pgs. 16-24 and 155-158.
4CORRECTION: I somehow misremembered this number as "73 percent." Shame on me; I should have checked it.
LB/6-9 November 2024
"...Far and away the road goes winding..."
-30-
