- We Survivors of Authoritarianism Have a Message America Needs to Hear: This is Exactly How it Happens, and It’s Happening Here.
This is kinda where I am at right now, too. Regardless who wins in November, Humpty Dumpty has fallen off the wall and won't be put back together again. Something new will be in its place. Because, even if Biden wins, he has been left with a giant bag of shit that he now needs to force down all of America's throats; a responsible and effective response to Coronavirus will see mandatory lockdowns, mask-wearing, vaccinations, and other panic-buttons of the lunatic right. Crushing white supremacy is effectively like trying to squash our own Taliban... they practice in private, in their own groups, and work towards any goal that is contrary to the ruling party. In the 1970's and 80's the FBI and various agencies tried to do this with the various Michigan Militia loonies, and that just led to Ruby Ridge and Waco. Addressing climate change in a massively aggressive manner will require Americans to swallow the hard pill, and change their views on solar panels and windmills and on entire (dead) industries, like coal and drilling for oil. Changing the American psyche away from the coal miner and oil-stained field worker, and towards making heroes of guys in man-buns putting up solar panels, or wearing OSHA-approved harnesses while servicing a windmill is going to be a tall order for ANY Madison Avenue ad agency. And that doesn't even touch on the health insurance system (because we don't have a healthcare system, we have a business bring propped up by exorbitant prices and flat our extortion), and revamping that wasteland. Biden is fucked. He can't even compel a friend to make him a sandwich, must less get that vocal asshole 10% of America to turn around and stop slinging shit long enough for him to get something done. AND, when he gets into office on Day 1 and fires all of the Trump donors who have been put in charge of demolishing all of the various Federal agencies, he has now created the exact "deep state" that we all fear; a bunch of morally bankrupt corporate cronies with deep inside knowledge of the very agencies they want to destroy. And those people will go to work for the truly shitty organizations that have had paved the road to the Great American Demise for decades: Exxon, Philip-Morris, Blackwater, Foster Farms, etc. So Biden's efforts to rehabilitate our democracy will be sour pills that everyone has to swallow, and then vote for him AGAIN, as austerity and humility and embarrassment become our daily bread. That doesn't even begin to touch on issues like the desperate need for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission or something to prosecute those who have pissed all over our Constitution, like Bill Barr and Rudy Giuliani. Think about Nazi Germany. What if the people had risen up and ousted Hitler? There would still be tens of thousands of people who still believed in him, his philosophies, and his platform. Those people would still meet regularly to discuss how to gain power again. They'd go to work for the key companies, climb corporate ladders, and attempt to construct the Fourth Reich, because they were never beaten in battle and proven to be wrong. Without a full on civil war, how do we castrate the psychopaths that would throw out our Constitution, Bill of Rights, and our entire democracy for their authoritarian white hellscape? An election won't do it. And especially one where some milquetoast like Biden wins, who is the least inspiring thing since... ever. Augh.
Thanks for this. I need to shout at something. It is a failing of our educational system that the only frame we have for authoritarianism is Hitler. Thus, when a Pakistani-born son of an economist who lives in London says "Trump is Hitler" we all nod sagely and rend our shirts. Trump is terrible. Trump is racist. Trump is authoritarian and incompetent, which beats authoritarian and clever, which is what Hitler was. Hitler was hell-bent on genocide and believed that the entire world was conspiring to keep the Germans down and that if the Jews could wipe out the Germans they would, which would be only appropriate because only the strongest must survive and if that isn't the Ubermensch then they aren't really the Ubermensch. Everyone remembers Hitler and rightly so; nobody remembers Mosley because he fucking failed. Not all authoritarians are Hitler, and not all crises of democracy are the Weimar republic. We've got seriously racist shit to worry about here. It's a different kind of racism. Hitler was ideologically racist. Trump is opportunistically racist. Cops kill Black people more often than white people because their method of engagement is asymmetrical force and areas of poverty have more crime. They also have more minorities. Thus do "minorities" and "crime" get linked and thus is asymmetrical force applied. The Tulsa Massacre was awful and shameful but it didn't spread. America's problem is it's shamefully tolerant of pockets of violent white racism. Germany's problem, Syria's problem, Iraq's problem, Pakistan's problem, Burma's problem, China's problem is that their federal governments sanctioned and sponsored religious and ethnic pogroms. The Jews were exterminated in Poland because the Nazis came and said "you can murder your neighbor and take his farm or you can join him in the ditch." The Khmer Rouge followed suit, as did the Baath party. It's what wiped out Biafra. In this country? All the Okies blown out by the Dust Bowl got to start over when we interned every Japanese farmer on the West Coast. The Greatest Generation was John Wayne storming Iwo Jima and George Takei behind barbed wire in Arkansas while FDR went for his third and fourth term. But clearly authoritarianism has never happened in the US until now. Letters: Kent St., and Jazz I'm not exactly a neophyte when it comes to history but I've been doing even more doomreading lately. And you know, the movie (but not the book) Capital in the 21st Century makes the point that WWI and WWII were wars of capital first and foremost. We learn "the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand" as if it means fucking anything when the fact of the matter is the Germans waged total war through Belgium in order to conquer all of France for its farmland and industrial production which caused France, England and Germany to all indebt themselves to the gills until everyone was stuck in a trench and losing a thousand lives for every ten feet of advance and everybody stopped, and nobody won, and the next ten years were a battle over who was going to pay for the fucking thing. British, French and American policy was to lend as much money commercially to Germany as they could, at as high rates as they could, on the assumption that it would foster international cooperation. What it did was treat Germany like a giant junk bond. All that marvelous interregnum German architecture and public works projects? Built at a high rate of interest with Allied money. What caused the Depression? When everyone realized the Germans couldn't pay it back. You transfer the debt from the asset column to the liability column and suddenly you're broke. Meanwhile Germany has a 40% gold reserve requirement and is paying impossibly high interest rates so they get hyperinflation not once, but twice so you cut Germany's obligations, but not enough because their banks are about to collapse, and then along comes Hitler to blame it all on the foreigners and blame it all on the Jews. Which, let's be honest, Europe has been doing since the Diaspora. The great thing about blaming it on the Jews is you get to take their shit. Worked for the Soviets, too - the great thing about blaming the merchant class for your woes is you get to pump up your coffers without having to tax your base. Worked at Manzanar! But it doesn't work for Trump, it never will, and it's why we all lose when we see Hitler under every MAGA hat. The people vilified by the fascists are the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of the teeming shore. You can't goose the economy by letting cops shoot Black people. You can't Make America Great Again through neglect. If you want a historical analog for Trump, it's Hoover not Hitler. Did nothing in the teeth of the Dust Bowl, presided over Smoot-Hawley, let the economy collapse. FDR? FDR was Huey Long Lite and that mutherfucker won four fucking terms just for creating a bunch of make-work so people could eat. I am honestly scared about the potential outcomes of this election. I am appalled by how racist the institutions in this country have revealed themselves to be. But I grow tired of the endless, obsessive need to view 2020 through the lens of the Weimar Republic. This is a new time with new problems and you don't need a swastika tattoo to be a fascist.I was at Ohio State University when the Kent State University shootings took place. That was the spring we learned to distinguish between tear gas, pepper gas and mace, continually sprayed from helicopters day and night; the spring that I heard a National Guard commander tell his ROTC contingent to chamber live rounds and aim their weapons at us; the spring that I heard relatives actually state, "They should have killed more of them"; the spring that made me decide to leave Ohio for good.'
I still think my Hitler parallel is apt: What if the Nazi Party had lost or been thrown out, before war broke out? We know what actually happened. But what if it had gone differently, and the Nazi's never got the chance to start a war? There were still tens of thousands of average Germans that had been inculcated with Hitler's beliefs and believed in his solutions/plans. Shit, even after WWII there were still supporters. Hitler isn't the actual problem. He could get bumped off or just fade into obscurity. All that would have done is leave a vacuum for the next-craziest disciple to follow him and rally the despondent dregs of the Nazi Party. If everything goes well, November 5th we will be in that position; a vast number of armed, radicalized, racist, psychopaths who will have even more reason to do something even more radical. Their election was "stolen". Their rightful god-head was deposed by a vast child sex trafficking ring that goes from the President of the US to the CEO of MGM. Beliefs just as loony and unrelated to reality as anything the Nazi's believed in. So how do you quash Y'all Qaida? (Or, in my example, what could Germany have done to defuse the Nazis if Hitler had lost power?) You can't, if you adhere to the US Constitution. And if you temporarily suspend specific protections in an effort to root out the evil, you have become that which you despise, while also opening the Pandora's Box of possibilities that temporarily suspending the rights of Americans creates. The ONLY path forward in the real America of today is further degradation. The ultimate power of, and failing of, Democracy is that it expects people to be generally good and decent to one another. Today, that basic assumption of humanity is lost. When you grow up in a system which has been specifically gerrymandered to disenfranchise and dehumanize entire swathes of the population, they aren't even human to you, so your humanity is lost as well. That central leg of democracy is broken. You make a good point that there's no money to be made on vilifying the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free... but the private prisons, police departments, government contractors, and politicians would beg to differ. Which brings us back to the unbalanced sway that industry/business/corporations hold over our democratic institutions. In the end, we come out of this whole thing in 15 years either looking a lot more like Sweden, or the African National Congress; either a strongly socialist society that helps the less fortunate thrive and is devoted to the education and health of the entire populace, or a loose affiliation of back-stabbing mostly-failing nation-states that do performative diplomacy in public, and sabotage those same 'partners' in private. And yes, I'd say a Pakistani-born son of an economist who lives in London is the exact right person to deliver this message, because he has lived through it and seen it with his own eyes. He has the gift of hindsight. We don't.
One of the other extremist parties would have taken over. Look - John Gardner made a great point in The Art of Fiction that teachers don't teach the best examples of stuff or the most thought provoking examples of stuff they teach the easiest stuff that makes their point. Thus if you want to learn the kids about fascism you throw The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter at them, not Rhinoceros. You whip out Uncle Tom's Cabin because no one is going to criticize you for Harriet Beecher Stowe whereas if you whip out John Brown's Body the social studies department is going to hate you. So we frame our struggle between good and evil as "Truth, Justice & The American Way" against "fascism, genocide and Adolph Hitler" because you know what? He's as close to Satan Incarnate as we can get. Think about it: how much more do you think you know about Weimar Germany than you do about Imperial Japan? Why is that? Were they not also an Axis power? It's fucking us all over royally right now because our only level of concern is "Break Glass In Case Of Hitler" which means entirely too many people go "Not Hitler? No Problem!" while entirely too many people go "I sense a problem, therefore it must be Hitler!" So now we pay Richard Spencer $5k to schlep his ass from the trailer to a Holiday Inn Express to sit in front of a green screen so we can ask him if he believes that Jews should be sent to the gas chamber and when he says "of course not I love Depeche Mode and they've gotta be Jewish" the press can stroke their chins and conclude that since the Alt Right is not literally Hitler there must be no problem. Meanwhile that guy with too many guns who calls Mexican restaurants "beaner joints" is going to snap from "friend of mine with problems" to "lost cause of the fascist right" the minute you have one too many Facebook convos and your perspective becomes that the racist is calling from inside the house while his perspective is that you're so busy believing in Nazis that you can't see the very real problems facing America today. Friend of mine stopped talking to me for four months because I observed that Democratic worship of the Kennedys was horrifically overblown, considering they stumbled into Vietnam, almost caused WWIII twice and did exactly fuckall for civil rights because we create these myths so we don't have to think. It's one of the reasons I fucking hate Nick Taleb - he literally intros The Black Swan by arguing no one could have predicted the rise of Hitler despite the fact that Wilson predicted the rise of Hitler, Churchill predicted the rise of Hitler and the international business community held summit after summit to stave off the rise of German authoritarianism. Hitler rose to power among four political parties. He created a fifth. On the far left were the Communists. On the center left were the Social Democrats. In the center was the Center. On the far right was the German National People's Party and then the Nazis, once the Reichstag permitted them to be a party after they foreswore violent overthrow of the government after the Beer Hall Putsch. Frankly? Hitler would have risen to power much, much quicker in America because once you take over one party you've got half the playing field. Except that "murder all the Jews" thing would have run into trouble with AIPAC so maybe "murder all the Muslims" which would have run into trouble with the Saudis so maybe "murder all the Shia" except there aren't enough so maybe "murder all the Mexicans?" Each one of these calls for violence comes with its own dynamic which makes things very different. I mean, that shit coulda gone real wrong, too. How many Jews did the Communists murder in the USSR? Fuckin' Stalin wiped out over a million people before the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Bottom line? Germany was a monarchy that went for broke to take over the world and forced all of its opponents to do the same. Then everyone was broke but the Germans were broke and losers although they didn't think so and nobody did a fucking thing while they re-armed to take over the world because nobody wanted their payments to stop coming in. And look - Nazism stopped after WWII. Stopped for a good long while. You keep pointing at the day after the election as if somehow all these guys rallying around the President will rally exactly the fucking same under a different regime. As if legitimacy isn't the very fuel of their fire. All those guys screaming about gay marriage - what did they do when the Supreme Court legalized it? You really want to believe that Trump causes racism and totalitarianism when really, he authorizes it. Here, make my point for me: Obama abolished private prison contractors. Police departments exist to protect and serve and are legally bound by civil rights laws. "government contractors?" "politicians?" Ours is a country that insists that racism is not okay while actually doing something about racism requires enforcement. And enforcement is being held lax because it's not a priority. "Round up the Mexicans because they're here illegally" is bad. "Round up the Mexicans because they're Mexican" is worse, and the power structures we're dealing with still have to pretend they're protecting law and order, not the Aryan bloodline. Whites are dwindling demographically, as well as socioeconomically. Industry/business/corporations exist to make money in a maximally amoral way which is why Facebook gives no fucks about racism - their bread is buttered by racists. Make it expensive to cater to racists and they'll profit some other way. It's just business. Here in These United States the Army used to exist primarily to break strikes. Private security guards used to shoot labor protesters. An entire generation of talent was crushed under suspicion of being communist. And while Germany descended into the Third Reich the United States limped through with the New Deal. We both agree - Hitler isn't the problem. But Hitler's disciples aren't the problem, either - every time we look through a Hitler-shaped lens we miss a Pol Pot, an Idi Amin, a Hafez Assad, a Moammar Qaddhafi. And every time we break the glass because must be Hitler, we lose all ability to examine the facts of the ground instead of hailing back to our cartoon of history.What if the Nazi Party had lost or been thrown out, before war broke out?
The German National People's Party was formed in late 1918 after Germany's defeat in World War I and the November Revolution that toppled the German monarchy. It combined the bulk of the German Conservative Party, Free Conservative Party and German Fatherland Party with right-wing elements of the National Liberal Party. The party strongly rejected the republican Weimar Constitution of 1919 and the Treaty of Versailles which it viewed as a national disgrace, signed by traitors. The party instead aimed at a restoration of monarchy, a repeal of the dictated peace treaty and reacquisition of all lost territories and colonies.
You make a good point that there's no money to be made on vilifying the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free... but the private prisons, police departments, government contractors, and politicians would beg to differ.
Which brings us back to the unbalanced sway that industry/business/corporations hold over our democratic institutions.
Yea having read Caro's book on LBJ and what I have learned of JFK it seems a reasonably good bet that JFK would have followed the same path LBJ took with Vietnam, but JFK would have floundered and failed to get the civil reforms passed, where LBJ succeeded. I still dont know what to make of Bobby Kennedy, he comes across as being a very angry person, even before his brother's death.Friend of mine stopped talking to me for four months because I observed that Democratic worship of the Kennedys was horrifically overblown, considering they stumbled into Vietnam, almost caused WWIII twice and did exactly fuckall for civil rights because we create these myths so we don't have to think.
I've now read like three different hot takes on the Diem assassination and all three of them were basically at "yeah so the adults were on vacation so we basically ended up destabilizing Vietnam because we were too stupid to not let our principal ally get murdered over the weekend." Fuckin' Cuban Missile Crisis? We had these missiles? And they sucked balls? So hard that while they were supposed to be joint Army-Navy-Air Force in the end the only force that would put up with them was the air force? And in order to be even vaguely threatening to Moscow they basically had to be in the next zip code? So we tried putting them in France and De Gaulle told us to fuck off? So we tried putting them in Italy? And the Italians insisted that they be Italian missiles? So the only ones we really had control over were in Turkey? Which shared a fucking border with the USSR? And the only reason these missiles even got deployed was that Kennedy fucking made up a "missile gap" out of fucking whole cloth? Two different accounts of Bay of Pigs hold that LeMay prohibited Bissell from having any decent imagery on Cuba so that the invasion would fail and Bissell would get booted because LeMay resented Bissell having the A12 and U2 under CIA control. Why is it an SR-71? Because 71 is the number that comes after 70, which stands for XB-70, which was LeMay's glorious supersonic penis-in-the-sky. Why is it "SR?" Because it was supposed to be "RS for "reconnaissance-strike" where "strike" was LeMay saber-rattling at the Soviets with the YF-12 and then LBJ announced as the "SR-71" 'cuz it sounded better and then McNamara fucked over LeMay because of course he did and the amount of infighting that the Kennedies didn't prevent? Despite two brothers being president and attorney general? Is fucking appalling. Kennedies seem to be principally useful for incompetence, rape, murder and dying young. That this is the family the East Coast liberal elite have decided to mantle over and over again says a lot about American politics.On four occasions between mid-October 1961 and August 1962, Jupiter mobile missiles carrying 1.4 megatons of TNT (5.9 PJ) nuclear warheads were struck by lightning at their bases in Italy. In each case, thermal batteries were activated, and on two occasions, tritium-deuterium "boost" gas was injected into the warhead pits, partially arming them. After the fourth lightning strike on a Jupiter MRBM, the USAF placed protective lightning strike-diversion tower arrays at all of the Italian and Turkish Jupiter MRBM missiles sites.
The missile gap fiasco is its own special saga. According to Ellsberg, who had access to the raw intelligence, during the Kennedy campaign, the CIA, navy, the army, and the air force each had their own estimates of Soviet ICBM numbers, which ranged from 100 to 1000. Whereas the actual number was known exactly, and that number was 4. F.O.U.R. He doesn't assert, if I recall correctly, that Kennedy knew that number, although he may have.
You think that until you dig into the Diem assassination. Or Bay of Pigs. Or any of the Castro assassination attempts. The Kennedy administration makes fucking Archer look like a documentary. Not to downplay the "we are fully aware of four missiles, but let's just round that up to a thousand" aspect of Kennedy foreign policy, just to point out that Democrats live in glass houses whose walls are already spidered with cracks. That's in a semi-functional intelligence community. Kennedy era was the opposite of.The missile gap fiasco is its own special saga.
Wow. Thank you for ALL of this! But what happens to the Proud Boys and Y'all Qaida when Trump loses? They don't go home and quietly lick their wounds and think about the error of their ways... a Trump loss is the galvanizing event for them. A Biden landslide is even more galvanizing because it isn't proof that Americans are better and more tolerant and repudiate everything Trump stood for... it's because the election was stolen. The President is illegitimate. And we can predict all the old Michigan Militia platform planks they will pull out of the closet to become domestic terrorists. What do we do about them...? (In another thread, mk called them the disaffected 10% that aren't happy with the result, and work actively against the winners to undermine their every effort. All it takes is a few shitheads with ARs and Biden has to clamp down... further strengthening the righteous resolve of the 10%...)
Not sure which sobriquet I prefer, Y'allQaeda or Vanilla ISIS. I've had a patch on my hooligan bag since December 2016: Nobody wants to talk about it, but the modern Klan is largely a Hollywood construct. DW Griffith made it cool to run around in white hoods burning crosses to protect the master race, so a bunch of white racists put on white hoods and burned crosses and terrorized Black people. Woodrow Fucking Wilson screened Birth of a Nation at the White House. It did $100m at the box office, back when a Duesenberg SSJ was five thousand dollars. We had a great run where screaming white men with torches were simply not tolerated outside of primal scream therapy. That all changed with Birtherism and the media both-sidesing the issue. Now here we are with brodozers and bear spray. Lawn darts went away. 3-wheel ATVs went away. Hoverboards went away. 4Loko went away. All were mourned by their proponents. I grew up with a bunch of racists. Literal skinheads. They were, almost to a man, "woo hoo!" racists as opposed to "let me share with you my highlighted copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion" racists and frankly, in an environment that condemns the performance of racism they were largely fine. Hung out with native americans, hung out with hispanics, were forced to be polite to the handful of african americans that were about. Shit gets dangerous when you let them 1-up each other in performative racism. Before too long some asshole is driving a Dodge Challenger through a crowd. In no way do I mean to diminish the very real problem of latent racism. But the problems of latent racism are less immediate than the problems of active racism. And an environment that is hostile to active racism has less of it than an environment that isn't.
There is a suicide epidemic going on right now. Here's an NYT article about it. I found out about it because I went to the big box store and wasn't able to purchase rope I needed for a project. The employee I asked about the missing stock of rope related products wasn't even permitted to say the word "rope" instead saying that "this part of our inventory is out of stock for the duration of the pandemic and we will not be getting more" while her eyes pleaded with me to drop the subject.
DHS Says It’s “Working on” a Black Lives Matter Crackdown “Well, this is something that I have talked to [Attorney General William Barr] personally about. I know that they are working on it,” said Wolf, ... OK, so, the leaders of BLM are...? Are we gonna arrest Kaepernick for kneeling? Because he helped start a movement during which some people started rioting and looting, people that may or may not have much of anything to do with the movement? Is it that we feel the need to assure the good folks of White America that Black Americans will be arrested soon? Luckily, it's much easier to go after antifa, where the leaders are...? We have progressed to the point of "I feel comfortable enough in my position of power to threaten mass arrests of anyone associated with an anti-fascist movement". And not doing it quietly, this is like "I can't wait to go on Tucker Carlson tonight and announce how we plan to suppress dissent". LOL, do you really think these people will allow themselves to lose the election?After months of Donald Trump recycling Fox News lines equating those protesting racial injustice to domestic terrorists, the president’s acting Department of Homeland Security secretary appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show on Monday to tease what sounds like the department’s potential mass-arrest plan. Carlson pressed DHS chief Chad Wolf on why “the leaders of antifa and BLM” have not yet been rounded up, suggesting that they should be “arrested and charged with conspiracy under, say, RICO like the heads of Mafia families were.”
America died some time ago. It's just only now starting to affect most of us which is why there's all this angst all of a sudden. But I also don't think American Authoritarianism will take the same form as previous regimes, simply because it's never had to and likely never will.
I agree America began decaying some time ago, but I don't believe the analogy to death is apt. It is more like a slow descent into schizophrenia. What are the symptoms of schizophrenia? - Delusion (we are the greatest country in the world) - Hallucinations (red scare and threat to american nuclear hegemony) - Disorganized thinking & speech (cold war politics and the pivot to asia) - Disorganized or abnormal motor behavior (what crisis has america actually solved recently?) - Negative Symptoms (collapse of the social safety net and a crisis of social mobility and healthcare) I think it is clear how America will act in its authoritarian period. Any individual pursuit of liberty will be denied unless sanctioned by authority or financed by extreme personal wealth. All others will be marginalized and rendered destitute unless they fit in the corporate picture. Young people don't see much hope. A lack of hope turns into fear. Fear leads to anger, and we all know where that will end up.