A national pissing contest

Crazies of the left have caused no end of chaos and destruction in cities all over America, every day and every night, for more than three months.

And the crazy right?

What, a day and a night at Charlottesville?

Who is the grave threat to the republic, to democracy, to the rule of law, to domestic tranquility and ordered liberty?

Trump, too stupid, ignorant, and incompetent for the the role, and anyway with no institutional support to speak of, awaits his cue to step forward as . . . Pinochet? Fujimori? Franco?

What would that be like?

The second time as farce?

Or the third?

Whatever.

A more dangerous would-be Fuhrer?

Smarter, more competent, more capable, and much more mentally stable.

Tom Cotton Declares His Candidacy for 2024

Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas launched his 2024 presidential campaign yesterday. 

His op-ed in the New York Times has created a blizzard of protest both within the nation’s most elite liberal newspaper (for publishing it) and beyond (for what it says). 

Both debates are valid. 

However, his column is best understood as a marker: Cotton is laying down a stake on a future debate, not one in the present.   

Titled “Send In the Troops,” the column does indeed say that “it’s past time to support local law enforcement with federal authority.” 

Federal troops are necessary to crack down on the “anarchy” unleashed by “cadres of left-wing radicals,” Cotton writes. 

(No, he doesn’t bother with the nuisance of proving such “cadres” exist.) 

Only military force can smash the looters and rampaging criminals, who include “the thrill-seeking rich as well as other criminal elements.”

. . . .

In the op-ed, Cotton, a veteran Republican from Arkansas, calls on President Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and send the military into cities, writing, "One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers."

The essay is a demagogic hash, as greasy as the bacon Senator Ted Cruz once cooked on the muzzle of an AR-15.

But if you’re a precocious right-wing senator with a strong attachment to personal advancement and a weak one to pluralistic democracy, then you might view Cotton’s piece as pretty smart.

If President Donald Trump is re-elected in November, or somehow manages to retain power without the benefit of election, Cotton’s hysterics will be completely forgotten.

No harm, no foul.

But if Trump is defeated, the battle for the 2024 nomination will begin immediately, and Cotton will have a message that resonates across the plains and valleys of racial and cultural resentment that define the Republican base: “Who lost Washington?”

Has anybody explained why actual troops would do a better job than the thousands of trained police and NGs now on the streets all over the country?

Does he imagine armored personnel carriers machine-gunning the crowds?

Tanks reducing buildings in which protesters hide to rubble, like a battle-scene from a movie about WW2 in Europe?

Perhaps both he and the Duce - the current Republican Admired Leader - are both bluffing and sticking with the idea that their best move is to let this drag out in hopes it will hurt the Democrats more the longer it goes on.

But it may not play out that way as clearly or strongly as I feared in the earliest days.

Again, today, the daytime mass protests all over the country are overwhelmingly peaceful and racially mixed, and remind me at least as much of the female-led Resistance demonstrations of 2017 as the race riots of the mid-20th century.

The Floyd protesters are more often male, but nearly as often white and, during the daytime, nearly as uniformly peaceful.

And that makes a big difference.

Peaceful in DC last night and huge crowds peaceful now. Mostly white, now?

Have the crowds gotten whiter with the passing of the days, as more young whites were emboldened to join in?

NYC peaceful last night, too.

If anything, the crowds today in the major cities may be bigger.

James Mattis Denounces President Trump, Describes Him as a Threat to the Constitution

Esper Breaks With Trump on Using Troops Against Protesters

Trump news – live: Divide between president, Pentagon and military top brass laid bare, after Mark Milley orders personnel to ‘stay true to the idea that is America’

What's the next step?

In the walk away from liberal institutions toward authoritarian or even fascist rule that MSNBC has been warning of since Trump reached the White House, I mean.

Anne Applebaum on Morning Joe this morning said the next step is for the party of the would-be authoritarian leader to try to steal an election to stay in power.

Since no coup is really possible without the consent of the military we may yet be glad that Trump has not been able to install Trumpists as military Chiefs of Staff.

Not in his power. But just what we want, anyway, eh? Weird, huh?

Trump signs executive order to narrow protections for social media platforms

He's such an idiot.

He doesn't get to override laws by executive order, though I'm sure both he and his fascist-without-knowing-it (or maybe they do know it) supporters wish it were so and don't know or care that it's not.

It's the protection of that legal provision that allows these media to let his and his allies' and Russian and Chinese and anybody's lies run riot online, all the while washing their hands and refusing responsibility.

Take away that protection and they are faced with legal liability for everything posted on their platforms, just as newspapers and electronic news media are responsible for the work of their employees.

The move was welcomed by observers who argue that Facebook and Twitter should be held responsible for their content and subject to the same laws as the New York Times and other mainstream outlets.

But many in the business and technology sectors argue the order could curb freedom of speech on the internet and it conflicts with existing law – which only Congress, not the president - can change.

Matt Schruers, the president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, told the Associated Press: 

“The irony that is lost here is that if these protections were to go away social media services would be far more aggressive in moderating content and terminating accounts." 

Trump. Too stupid to live.

A bit late for pro-Soviet propaganda, isn't it?

Europeans and Russians should remember what bound them together: anti-fascism

Apparently not.

"Mississippi Burning"

Watched it for the nth time on Amazon streaming video last night.

The same battle being fought then against white supremacist, nationalist, racist terrorists who enjoyed widespread community support and political cover is still with us, today.

Even down to the denunciations of the press for printing lies, distortions, and "fake news" about the poor maligned South, Southerners, and especially organized racist killers and their official enablers and collaborators.

All of those almost-Nazi bastards ("almost" because the Klan and its sympathizers were never officially sympathetic, much less than committed, to the fascist theory of government or the tenet of government the Germans called the Führerprinzip) were soi-disant defenders of traditional white Christian Protestant Anglo-Saxon civilization against nonwhites, papists, and Jews, especially alarmed and angered by the prospect of mongrelization and pollution of the white race through miscegenation.

The Duce notably defended the white anti-American racists at Charlottesville as "good people".

So, who doesn't think he's got it? Bolsonaro coughing his head off at a rally against anti-virus measures

Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro denounced for joining pro-dictatorship rally

Not exaggeration, not hyperbole, not figurative rather than literal language.

They mean it outright, and it's true.

Former presidents, politicians and newspaper editorial boards have lined up to denounce the “moronic” and “anti-democratic” behaviour of Brazil’s far-right leader after he hit the streets to egg on protesters demanding a return to military dictatorship.

As the number of deaths caused by Covid-19 rose to nearly 2,500 on Sunday, Jair Bolsonaro left his presidential palace in Brazil’s capital, Brasília, to fraternize with flag-waving radicals.

Among the demands their banners listed were an end to the social distancing measures opposed by Bolsonaro, the closure of Brazil’s congress and supreme court, and a re-run of a dictatorship-era decree used by military rulers in the late 1960s to suffocate their political opponents.

. . . .

“The era of roguery is over. Now it’s the people who are in power,” Bolsonaro proclaimed outside the Brazilian army headquarters, coughing repeatedly as he spoke.

“Everyone in Brazil must understand that they must yield to the will of the Brazilian people.”

. . . .

On Monday morning Bolsonaro denied he had been attacking Brazilian democracy but told reporters: “I am actually the Constitution”.

Bolsonaro is a longstanding fan of the military men who ruled Brazil from 1964 until 1985, and autocrats including Chile’s Augusto Pinochet.

So you say you like small government and states' rights better?

We get that that's code.

It means - among other things and leaving aside such stuff as white nationalism, white supremacy, white Nativism, fascism, authoritarianism, and populism - that you like crime better than government.

You think that the cure is worse than the disease.

Worse for you, because you're a white male, a plute, a 1 percenter, or a crook.

And if you talk like that you're probably all four.

Not yet a tyrant. But it wouldn't take much.

The killing of Matteoti with impunity was widely believed to be ordered by Mussolini.

And this drove home the lesson that he could murder anyone who crossed him.

And that more than any other one thing helped make him a tyrant.

Trump has not yet been given impunity for murder by the courts or by the congressional Republicans, but if and when they do it, especially if for a real or supposed political murder, that will do it.

If you through your minions can kill your political opponents with impunity and everyone knows it, you are there.

That would not make him a fascist or the Republicans fascists.

Fascism is an ideology justifying tyranny, executive absolutism and not merely authoritarianism, as a political principle.

Neither Bozo nor the Republicans espouse any such ideology.

But they may yet espouse the thing.

He is already close with his idiotic bullshit about Article II of the Constitution.

And they, the congressional Republicans, are already so very, very close to condoning and covering for absolutely anything.

Watching Bernie clips on You Tube

AOC in Iowa, campaigning for Bernie, is urging an agenda of the working class and working class power.

Socialism is the opium of lots of people, but anybody who has the balls to campaign for working people (Bernie, AOC, etc.) rather than "the middle class" has my attention.

The agenda is what it is, a modest dose of social democracy that is of immense value to tens of millions of ordinary Americans that will cost the plutes of America much more than they ever thought they would have to pay for social peace.

They are the authoritarian, almost fascist plutes.

And they pretend to be terrified by the socialism of AOC, Bernie, and an entire wing of the Democratic Party when they are merely enraged by it.

The threat is not AOC, Bernie, or their "socialism".

The threat is the billionaires who might rather sink the republic than see such advances for the working people of America, with its consequences for everybody above them in the social scale.

At what point do they all decide to back Trump in a coup?

Most of the upper echelon in the White House and part of the Cabinet, at least, are co-conspirators, as are at least some in the House and the Senate, in Ukrainegate or Russiagate or both.

None of them is in a like case with Trump, protected from immediate prosecution by an arbitrary monarchist dogma of the Justice Department.

None of them, Trump included, is protected from eventual prosecution.

Trump might pardon everybody, but no court has upheld the idea of a presidential self-pardon or of the validity of pardons transparently intended to obstruct justice - though that was the egregious intent of Ford's pardon of Nixon that no one ever challenged.

And so might the Duce first and the others in consequence come to support the idea of a coup, an altogether unconstitutional declaration by Trump that the election of 2020 or 2024 will not take place or will be ignored, as their only path to safety from eventual prosecution, imprisonment, and ruin?

And then as in Rome at the time of Augustus and in England at the time of Charles I and in so many other places at so many other times it will all depend on what the military wants to do.

They are all sworn to defend the constitution and to disobey illegal orders, but does the rot go further than we think?

Are high level military officers, generals and admirals, in a position to put aside the constitution, themselves participants in either Ukrainegate or Russiagate, like Flynn?

Many Democrat opinionators have said for months that exactly this coup is coming, and many Republicans have urged that either successful deposition of Trump or the actions of the next Democratic president regarding gun rights will and ought to provoke a civil war.

The Republican civil war looks like all mouth and bullshit to me.

But the idea of a coup by the crime boss in the White House to protect himself and his cronies - and so, of course, as Rudi the Dick would insist, to further the public good - looks increasingly likely, especially when we consider how much compelling evidence of crime upon crime continues to pile up in public against all of them, and will continue over all that time.

Admiral Mullen Sounds Alarms Over Trump's Nixonian Enemies List

Perhaps he and we should worry more about a purge of non-Trumpists from the higher ranks of the military, starting with the Joint Chiefs.

And an even wider purge of non-Trumpists from at least the leadership of the entire national security apparatus and the "deep state" in general.

The constant barrage of Democratic propaganda to the effect that Trump is pathetically stupid is very dangerous and might well make us miss what he and his leading allies are certainly cunning enough to prepare.

Mass politics

It could be said that an essential attribute of a successful regime in the age of mass politics is vulgarity.

But there is a considerable difference between the mere vulgarity of style and propaganda of the liberal regimes and the profound vulgarity of values of authoritarian and, even worse, fascist, racist, or Nazi regimes.

And right now many leading Western nations are sliding from the former toward the latter.

Are regimes, parties, or movements of the further left also committed to vulgar values?

Or is that another difference between them and regimes of the vicious right, from the merely authoritarian even to the totalitarian?

Questions that arise while watching on Amazon video Detective De Luca.

How do we account for the key fact of our age?

That the worst and least qualified among us think they are entitled to rule everything?

And that so many others encourage this belief.

This is the real Revolt of the Masses.

It is what democracy as a cultural as well as political obsession corrupts into.

So, this happened.

For all I know, he's right.

But the dictatorship was so awful that that benefit seems almost an unintended side-effect brought about by people determined to carry out horrific crimes of their own.

I was fifteen that year.

And he was nine.

Fujimori saved Peru and Pinochet saved Chile, the latter launching a dictatorship that was also an orgy of murder and other crimes.

Brésil : le coup d’État de 1964 a “sauvé” le pays, selon la présidence

Voilà plusieurs jours que l’ordre donné par Jair Bolsonaro au ministère de la Défense d’organiser des fêtes de commémoration dans les casernes, en hommage au coup d’État militaire de 1964, faisait polémique. 

Face aux critiques, le président brésilien, ancien capitaine de réserve, avait même paru faire marche arrière, affirmant jeudi qu’il ne s’agissait pas de fêter mais juste de se souvenir de cet événement, point de départ de deux décennies de dictature (1964-1985). 

Vendredi, une juge fédérale de Brasilia avait ordonné l’interdiction de toute commémoration.

Mais dès le lendemain, une autre magistrate de la cour d’appel brésilienne a annulé cette décision. 

Dimanche 31 mars, jour du 55e anniversaire du coup d’État, le palais présidentiel a ainsi pu diffuser une vidéo “qui évoque [cette date] comme un moment de l’histoire où l’armée ‘a sauvé’ le Brésil” de la menace communiste, relève le journal O Globo.

Brazil military takes up coup commemoration at Bolsonaro's behest

Brazil’s armed forces on Sunday paid tribute to a 1964 coup leading to a two-decade dictatorship, after far-right President Jair Bolsonaro - who argues that military intervention saved the country from communism - reversed an 8-year-ban on celebrations.

. . . .

The move has stirred debate and underscored Bolsonaro’s support for a military government that executed hundreds, tortured thousands, shuttered Congress and left most Brazilians with dark memories of the period.

The military has not been allowed to observe the 1964 coup since 2011, when former President Dilma Rousseff, a one-time leftist guerrilla who was imprisoned and tortured under the dictatorship, ordered an end to events marking the date.

Brazil’s Defense Ministry said the armed forces will not hold public commemorations on Sunday. Bolsonaro is traveling abroad, but scheduled an event at the presidential palace on Friday to mark the anniversary with top military brass.

Bolsonaro, a retired Army captain, has long praised the 1964-85 military government and often said its biggest mistake was not killing enough leftists. 

Early in his political career [That would be early in the 1990s. PV] he said on the floor of Congress that he was “in favor of a dictatorship” and that Brazil would “never resolve grave national problems with this irresponsible democracy.”

He's way further out on the right than I thought.

It's one thing to chose a capitalist dictatorship as a lesser evil (if it is a lesser evil) to avoid a Communist takeover.

It's quite another to flat out prefer dictatorship to representative government.

Rather surprising that the US media did not call more attention to just how far right he is when reporting on his White House visit in March.

'Trump of the Tropics': Five things you should know about the Brazilian president's visit with Trump

Not a word about his attitude towards dictatorship and democracy.

Does Trump know any of that?

Would he have been briefed?

Is it part of what he likes?

"Cultural Marxism"

The term used to refer to Gramsci's idea that mature and entrenched capitalism cannot be overcome without a preparatory stage in which the pervasive cultural hegemony of bourgeois values is gradually replaced over time with a cultural hegemony of values of and favoring the working classes.

Those using the expression "cultural Marxism" were generally right wingers like Pat Buchanan and others wishing to spread alarm that the transitional process in the West is well underway, pointing to the influence of the left, and particularly of political correctness and those called "social justice warriors" on American campuses.

But a YouTube clip of James O'Brien talking with an anti-alt.right caller led to O'Brien claiming it is somehow tied to some right wing and specifically anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

You know, Marx, Trotsky, and a lot of the others were Jews, as were members of the Frankfurt School.

So I guess that was going to happen.

And it is after all a central theme uniting Nazi anti-Semitism with Nazi anti-Communism.

What the Fascists did to Gramsci.

On 9 November 1926, the Fascist government enacted a new wave of emergency laws, taking as a pretext an alleged attempt on Mussolini's life several days earlier. 

The fascist police arrested Gramsci, despite his parliamentary immunity, and brought him to the Roman prison Regina Coeli.

At his trial, Gramsci's prosecutor stated, "For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning".

He received an immediate sentence of five years in confinement on the island of Ustica and the following year he received a sentence of 20 years' imprisonment in Turi, near Bari.

Over 11 years in prison, his health deteriorated: "His teeth fell out, his digestive system collapsed so that he could not eat solid food... he had convulsions when he vomited blood, and suffered headaches so violent that he beat his head against the walls of his cell."

An international campaign, organised by Piero Sraffa at Cambridge University and Gramsci's sister-in-law Tatiana, was mounted to demand Gramsci's release.

In 1933 he was moved from the prison at Turi to a clinic at Formia, but was still being denied adequate medical attention.

Two years later he was moved to the "Quisisana" clinic in Rome. 

He was due for release on 21 April 1937 and planned to retire to Sardinia for convalescence, but a combination of arteriosclerosis, pulmonary tuberculosis, high blood pressure, angina, gout and acute gastric disorders meant that he was too ill to move.

Gramsci died on 27 April 1937, at the age of 46.

White nationalist terrorism in New Zealand

New Zealand Shooting Live Updates: 49 Are Dead After 2 Mosques Are Hit

Forty-nine people were killed in shootings at two mosques in central Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday, in a terrorist attack that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described as “an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence.”

4 people in custody, one charged with murder.

They were unknown to NZ and Aussie police.

Reporters on CNN are saying they watched some or all of the 17 minute video made by the killer, a video of his killing spree, posted on social media.

Why?

Before the shooting, someone appearing to be the gunman posted links to a white-nationalist manifesto on Twitter and 8chan, an online forum known for extremist right-wing discussions. 

The 8chan post included a link to what appeared to be the gunman’s Facebook page, where he said he would also broadcast live video of the attack.

The Twitter posts showed weapons covered in the names of past military generals and men who have recently carried out mass shootings.

In his manifesto, he identified himself as a 28-year-old man born in Australia and listed his white nationalist heroes.

Writing that he had purposely used guns to stir discord in the United States over the Second Amendment’s provision on the right to bear arms, he also declared himself a fascist. 

“For once, the person that will be called a fascist, is an actual fascist,” he wrote.

Bozo, Breitbart, and white nationalist terrorists.

Heard just now on CNN, Steve Bannon at Breitbart urges people to read "Camp of the Saints", as Pat Buchanan used often to do.

I once tried to read it but I could not get through it.

A racist nightmare dripping with hate.

Is this Kosher?

The fight over Rep. Ilhan Omar exposed deep divisions in the Democratic caucus

In a society in which nobody is afraid to complain about and denounce white nationalism how is it out of bounds for people to denounce Zionism, commitment to Israel as an expressly Jewish state?

Ethnic, "blood and soil" nationalism is the belief that some or all ethnic groups (aka nations or nationalities) are entitled to live in sovereign and independent states inhabited and ruled chiefly if not exclusively by their own members.

Zionism, commitment to Israel as a Jewish homeland, a Jewish state, is exactly that kind of nationalism.

White nationalism in the United States is a broader form of ethnic nationalism that partly reflects the success of the melting pot, but also reflects the continuing influence of racism, in making all our tribes of whites see themselves as one tribe, the white tribe.

Such nationalism does not entail or require any degree of belief in the biologically intrinsic and inherited superiority or inferiority of any ethnic group or race; nor does it exclude such belief.

Nor does it entail or require political domination of any nation over any other nation; nor does it exclude such domination.

European nationalism in most of the 19th Century favored and partly drove the revolt against the ancien regime and the rise of representative government.

But at every point in the 20th Century it drove the rise of such horrific phenomena as fascism and nazism, the most devastating wars in European history, ethnic cleansing, and mass genocides.

As a result, ethnonationalism especially, though also increasingly any form of nationalism, is now often looked upon as an absurd and dangerous political commitment capable of causing the most extravagant harm and no good.

So how is it out of bounds to denounce Jews and Christians who are Zionists?

Support for the existence and defense of Israel as a Jewish state is being made mandatory and criticism of it is being smeared as anti-Semitism.

You are not allowed to reject the right to exist of Israel as an expressly Jewish state without being denounced and perhaps punished as an anti-Semite.

And that is altogether deplorable, however true it is that almost all Muslim hostility to Israel is clearly and viciously anti-Semitic and does not seek to make Israel over into a non-ethnic and secular state in which Jews and Muslims live together in bonds of citizenship and equality but to utterly destroy Israel.

As for me, I support the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.

When two or more ethnic groups living in the same state cannot get along peacefully with each other partition may be the best solution, allowing each to live in a state of its own.

For that matter, partition may be the only way to safety even when the warring groups are one by blood, language, and culture in general but differ in religion, as Serbs differ from Croats.

And since we already know that things would go very badly, indeed, in Israel, if it were not on the whole an overwhelmingly Jewish state, we may on that good ground concede its right to be a Jewish state, despite people like Ms. Omar who think otherwise.

To be clear, I oppose denying Ms. Omar any of her committee assignments over this.

No, hers was not some sort of Steve King moment.

Globalism or America First?

This is a piece by an academic who wrote a book about FDR getting us into the war in Europe.

Republican leaders need to remember what happened the last time America chose to be isolated

She quotes Henry Luce's The American Century in opposition to Trump's America First policy and his hammer blows against American globalism.

Luce published his famous article, "The American Century," in February 1941, seven months after all the European democracies -- except Great Britain -- had surrendered to Hitler's ruthless armies. 

Luce traced this catastrophe to the end of World War I when the Senate rejected Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations and the United States began its retreat from world affairs.

In the 1920s and '30s, Americans embraced "the moral and practical bankruptcy" of isolationism, Luce wrote, and "failed to play their part as a world power." 

That unwillingness to confront Hitler's aggression in the 1930s, he underscored, brought "disastrous consequences" to "all mankind."

All the same, the idea that we should or had to eventually enter the war to keep Hitler from conquering the world is exactly the sort of childish twaddle that it appears, and Luce himself said just that in this very piece.

Even the British, whose regime and empire Hitler vastly admired, could probably have negotiated a separate peace without accepting any degree of nazification.

And Luce in this piece concedes that an American defense of North America against all enemies, if that was what Americans wanted, could well have worked.

Anyway, there was no convincing argument against that notion.

For Luce, the question whether America should send armies to fight in Europe to stop Hitler depended on what Americans wanted to do.

Defend only their own democracy in their own country, or defend and advance "so-called democratic principles" and government throughout the world?

Isolationism or engagement?

In the latter part of his piece, Luce presents a brilliant and sweeping picture of what American internationalism could and should be.

It is, today, a stirring and powerful defense of the kind of international liberal order built up after the Second World War.

But what it really comes down to, today, is whether we continue our engagements in NATO, in the Far East, in Oceania, and elsewhere, along with participation in global institutions like the UN and the WTO and support for pan-European institutions like the EU.

All for the encouragement, construction, and consolidation of a civilization of global democratic capitalism.

Or instead let it - or even make it - all fall apart.

And risk enemies rising up everywhere, surrounding fortress North America and forcing us to risk fighting a war to save ourselves right here in our home turf, rather than far lesser wars, often proxy wars, at a very great distance from ourselves.

PS. Luce in this piece suggests America commit itself to feeding everyone in the world who would otherwise go without, at taxpayer expense, with food produced by American agriculture.

But we have not done it and are very unlikely to.

We won't even feed all our own.

Not quite truthful

Madeline Albright comes close, but does not admit that the republic was dead the moment the Spanish generals rebelled, and the "Republican" side was never that, but was an inevitably failed alliance of Stalinists and anarchists.

Franco's victory was both inevitable and best.

Fascism: a warning.

Dread is entirely in order

Will Trump attempt a coup?

I ask as I contemplate the copy of Fascism: A Warning that sits, so far unread, on the low bureau beside my bed.

Update, the following day.

And as I read about his speech in Michigan.

There is video of the entire speech at RCP.

View at the risk of despair.

Or maybe a panic attack.