J’Accuse!

This declaration, French for “I accuse” or “I accuse you,” became a familiar declaration in the days, weeks and months after France was liberated from Nazi occupation in 1945, and was directed at persons accused of collaboration with German occupation forces. Although many men were the subject of “J’accuse!,” most of the people at whom it was directed were women who were accused of such collaboration.

Many of them were guilty to varying degrees of this crime against the national pride of the temporarily conquered French, and most of them did so for the prospect of making their lives easier in a time of great peril. They took German lovers, or assisted the Germans in other ways, and for this, once the Gestapo was gone, their neighbors would brand them. Many of the women were placed in chairs and had their heads shaved in public as their fellow citizens hurled insults, accusations, and spittle at them. They then had to live as outcasts for a long time.

Many people thought that J’accuse dissolved into the dustbin of history, but it never did. In twenty-first century America, the act of “J’Accuse!” is used by the republican party to hide what they do. They accuse others; democrats, liberals, et cetera, of supporting the unAmerican policies they actually pursue as a means to somehow cover themselves. The list is pretty long, but I’m only going to write on a few subjects.

Education

First and most importantly, education. Republican politicians, party operatives, and especially the mass of slaves to fox news, newsmax, and infowars, all the way down to the crack-heads of Truth Social that make up their cadres, continually accuse the left (or the radical left, as they call anyone who disagrees with them) of using the public schools to indoctrinate our children.

NOTE: This act of labeling even moderate centrists in this country “the radical left” is yet another example of the right’s attempt to hide their position through accusation.

I suppose this is actually true, the left in this country seeks to indoctrinate our children into one of the most dangerous cults in the history of the world: knowledge born of intellectual curiosity. This indoctrination into knowledge includes, but is in no way limited to, the evils of a holistic and egalitarian view of the world and its peoples, and science as an actual ‘real thing’ that can actually explain various realities we see in the universe around us.

It’s a knowledge that places religion in its proper place, and that place is inside an individual’s heart, and not in our public schools, our statutory laws, nor any governmental policy. It’s a knowledge that honors every tradition of faith that the people of this world have ever produced. It’s a knowledge that speaks against bigotry in all its forms, especially religious bigotry. It’s a knowledge that speaks against racism and hatred, instead of embracing them within a grotesque bubble of nationalistic xenophobia born of hollow, venomous, false patriotism.

If those aspects of knowledge weren’t bad enough, this ‘knowledge’ which the radical left is trying to force upon our children also includes a healthy understanding of both the positive and negative aspects of American history. It’s a knowledge that, without even trying, destroys the republican fantasy shroud of “American Exceptionalism,” whatever that really is.

Their race to conceal uncomfortable truths about our own history from our children has become so all-encompassing that they have passed laws in the states that they control which actually make it illegal for our teachers to inform our children about the function of racism in our history. Remember always that 2 + 2 = 4, but only if both twos are white. If they’re not, then it should be illegal for them to be in the same equation.

God forbid that our children should know things other than the juiciest parts of the Old Testament; a set of documents that try to teach us that God made mistakes in creating certain people; that the people that god created as homosexuals, or who don’t identify their gender or sexuality within the narrow confines of ‘conservative’ social norms, are not actually children of god. It also teaches us that a warmongering, murdering, rapist drunkard was, as they say, “a man after god’s own heart.” Yeah, sure thing, Dave.

The bible, in the hands of republicans, has become no more than a collection of stories in which we are to believe that homosexuality is an abomination before this god, but that the practice of slavery, of holding another child of god as your personal property, of beating them without mercy or recourse on the slightest whim, of raping them whenever you wish without any accountability for your violence, and of actually working them to death in the name of your personal wealth is, for lack of a better term, the shit.

In their righteous opposition to this evil world of knowledge and intellectual curiosity into which the left is trying to indoctrinate our children, republicans have become the gleeful destroyers of knowledge. Their “anti-indoctrination” efforts, from history, to civics, to science and beyond, amount to a decades-long, coordinated effort to indoctrinate our children into the prison of white-centered history, and bible-centered science. After all, science must be taught with the caveat that god can do anything. Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared only until god comes around and decides that it’s not, and then, well, it’s not, and so much for the treachery of your evil science.

Believe me, if the Pharisees of 4 A.D. didn’t know that there is a massive black hole at the center of our galaxy, then there isn’t one. If the closet homosexuals who wrote Deuteronomy need to cover their tracks by telling you that homosexuality is frowned upon by god, believe it. Believe it without question, because we all know, first and foremost, that republicans have a direct line to the divine will that the godless libs, with their love of knowledge and intellectual curiosity, will never have. Remember this, too; Eve took a bite of an apple from the tree of knowledge, not stupidity. What does that tell you?

Weaponization of the Government

This particular republican ploy would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous to the very existence of our republic. As I write, the House Oversight Committee (HOC), under the ‘leadership’ of the troll-under-the-bridge in charge, Representative Roy Comer, is engaged in a bogus attempt to impeach President Biden.

The problem here, is that the entire ‘weaponization’ issue only exists because the vast majority of elected republican officials have the intellects of home-schooled twelve year-olds, and we have twelve year-olds in congress because the mass of racist, christian nationalist republican voters, who have the intellects of unschooled eight year olds are enraptured by the very concept of making America white again.

This weaponization practice really entered the public eye in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the US Embassy in Benghazi in 2012. The republicans tore after Secretary of State Clinton for weeks, to no real end, except that that they were eventually able to assess that mistakes in reading the intelligence coming forward occurred. The United States Government made mistakes in interpreting intelligence? That’s a first. Oh, yeah, and Hillary’s emails.

It’s difficult to calculate exactly how much money the American taxpayer shelled out for that farcical aquatic ceremony, but I guarantee you that the republicans in Congress didn’t care how much it cost. All they cared about was dragging a high-ranking member of the Obama administration through the mud, which they did, ad nauseum.

Now, the republicans, in a blatant act of vengeance against democrats for having defended our republic from the vicious and unceasing onslaught on the very principles upon which this our country was founded by donald trump, have launched an impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden. To this day, February of 2024, we still don’t know what the charges against Joe Biden are, or for what exactly, they think he should be removed from office. It’s like one of these trolls said on fox news in early 2023 (and I paraphrase): “There is no evidence out there. All we have are accusations, but we know that accusations are out there.” Really? Is that it? I think I’m safe in saying “Is this all you can muster, Saruman?” because believe me, the republicans have no bomb shoved into the only weak spot of the defenses of Helm’s Deep, and no methed-up orc with a torch willing to sacrifice his lame ass to set it off. In fact, they have nothing at all; nothing but hatred and the childishness with which their twelve year-old intellects have defiled the formerly hallowed halls of Congress.

Roy Comer, the republican chair of the HOC, is humiliating himself, his party, and to some extent, the entire United States of America with his dog and pony show. Earth to republican boot lickers: not a single witness called before HOC has divulged any evidence against Joe Biden for any wrongdoing, let alone the high crimes and misdemeanors of which his predecessor is accused, and, given the evidence known to date, for which he will hopefully go to prison. Every witness, when asked bluntly “Do you have any evidence, or any direct knowledge to support the claims of the republicans on this committee that President Biden acted in any manner contrary to the law,” has answered “no.”

The republicans scream that the Biden Administration is weaponizing our government, in a vain effort to try to erase from people’s minds the blatant attempts by donald trump to do so. trump, being the idiot that he is, not only bragged about this when he was president, but he continues to do so now. He has stated over and over throughout 2023 and into 2024 that he will use the government as a weapon against those he considers to be his enemies if elected president again. He has been quite clear that he holds the opinion that as president, he should be able to use the entire executive branch, especially the United States Department of Justice, to pursue and persecute his political enemies.

donald trump, from even before his first day in office, tried to turn this government of the people, by the people, and for the people into a weapon that he could place at his disposal. Now, the republican party, in its complete and total surrender to this threat to our republic, endorses this idea, while it points and shouts “J’accuse!” at others blindly in the dark to try to mask their rejection of democracy in favor of dictatorship. The worst part of this is that they don’t engage in these childish antics for the American people, they do it for trump, which means that they do it for Putin.

Like I said, it would be funny, if it wasn’t so dangerous. It’s dangerous for many reasons, but the worst is that this weaponization brings with it both a low level of violence and a general loss of faith in the integrity of our electoral processes. It is the goal of the republican party to insure that both of these dangers to our republic become normalized.

The War on Christianity

The republicans are right about this one. There is a war against Christianity in America, and the people waging it are the white christian nationalist evangelical republicans who try to claim the birthright of the Christ while serving darkness in all its forms. They claim that the left is promoting moral decay in this country because the left stands for letting people live the life they want to live, as long as they don’t actually hurt someone else.

The bare truth of the matter is this: someone privately living the life they want to live is not moral decay. Two consenting adults being in love, no matter who they are, is not moral decay. Practicing your faith in pursuit of salvation and inner peace, no matter what it is, as long as it doesn’t harm others, is not moral decay. Moral decay is trying to force your faith and your lifestyle onto someone else, because you think you are somehow morally superior to them. That is moral bigotry and decadence. Being who you really are, openly, with pride and no regrets is moral purity.

A man by the name of John Fugelsang wrote the following, and I think republicans need to digest the information, if only because it will make them puke.

“Jesus was a radical, non-violent revolutionary who hung around with lepers, hookers, and crooks: wasn’t American, never spoke english; was anti-wealth, anti-death penalty, anti-public prayer; but was never anti-gay, never mentioned abortion or birth control, never called the poor lazy, never justified torture, never fought for tax cuts for the wealthiest Nazarines, never asked a leper for a co-pay; and was a hong-haired, brown-skinned homeless community-organizing anti-slut-shaming Middle Eastern Jew.”

That being said, I have a few bullet points of my own for you christian republicans to digest after you’re finished puking your guts out from having just read Mr. Fugelsang’s short piece. Here you go:

Jesus was not a ripped action hero with a machine gun, and an American flag and bald eagle tattooed across his chest, as you like to portray him.
Jesus would destroy the offices of all evangelical “leaders” who support and lay their hands upon people like donald trump. He did this once before in the temple in Jerusalem, clearing the place of those who had turned it into a den of thieves.
- You have turned Christianity into a den of thieves.
  - Related to this, Abraham Lincoln would slap the shit out of each and every one of you for claiming that your cruel, racist cabal is “The party of Lincoln.”
God did not send donald trump as some savior of unchallenged white rule in America.
- In fact, god did not send donald trump at all, unless it did so as a warning to everyone as to what can happen if:
  - christians place their faith in antichrist preachers who are wealthier than Caesar, sit on golden thrones in TV studios, hire professional telemarketers to divest elderly people of deep and simple faith of as much of their fixed income as possible, and live the gospel of greed as they proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ!
  - It’s also a warning as to what can happen to your country if people don’t vote.
Listening to right-wing christians say “I’m not even allowed to practice my religion anymore” is an absolute joke. Seriously, the rest of us look around when we hear that from you and think; “Really? Because the last time I checked, there was one of your damned fire and brimstone churches on almost every street corner.”
- At least there used to be, before the marijuana dispensaries started taking over.
- No one in America is preventing you from practicing your faith. You’re just pissed off because when you run around telling everyone else how their lives are full of sin, most people rightfully tell you to take your bible and your religion and stick both of them straight up your ass.
  - You are, however, trying to prevent other religions from freely practicing their faith in America. Your bigoted goal is to rid what you see as your white, christian country of Islam and other religions.

While I’m here, let’s talk about your jewel of a free-market theocracy issue you like to tie to Jesus; limited government. After years of observation, I can put into words for you exactly what you want out of this. You want limited government when the subject is the wealthy and powerful of this world exploiting the poor and powerless. That’s when you want government to stay out. However, as soon as we start talking about what consenting adults do in their private lives, especially their bedrooms, then, what you want more than anything, is for government to rush in there like a bunch of storm troopers and control things based upon your own, narrow imperial religious dogma. Oh, yes, I almost forgot, you definitely want unlimited governmental intervention and control when the subject is women’s uteruses.

Christ! How bluntly does someone have to spell it out for you that you people are the ones attacking Christianity!? You’re the ones defiling the teachings of Jesus! It’s you, and each and every one of you needs to be careful that you don’t place the eternal fate of your soul in jeopardy. Seriously, take a big step back and unpack the bag of what is inside of your heart. I guarantee you that the actual teachings and example of Jesus are probably not going to be part of what you pull out, but the imperial bigotry of TBN will be. “The Lord put it on my heart to be a nazi jackass.” Probably not, actually, you did that yourself.

Election Integrity

This one is the biggest joke. For almost twenty-five years now, republicans have been screaming about election integrity. They have been making false allegation after false allegation that the American democratic process has been tainted and destroyed by the left. Their claim, if I have this correct (and I do), is that the radical left and its mindless minions who live off of the free money that democratic politicians hand out in exchange for votes, have devised a nationwide scheme in which millions upon millions of both living and dead people vote multiple times in every election.

Well, okay then. Never mind that our entire electoral system is so decentralized that it would not only be absolutely impossible to set up and coordinate such a system, but it would be even more impossible to actually operate such a scheme. These multiple impossibilities notwithstanding, the republican party claims that the left has figured it out, and is stealing elections through this impossible system.

Let me say this now, just so my opinion is completely transparent. This superhuman ability to do the impossible is proof that we intellectual elites on the left are so smart that we really do need to be running things. I mean, I’m sorry, but if we’re smart enough to figure out how to dupe a system that, by its very nature, is designed to defeat any large scale attempt to tamper with its results, then we need to hold every political office in this country, from the local dog catcher to the president, because we’re obviously the only ones smart enough to fix America’s most pressing problems. So, either we on the left are using our superhuman abilities to steal elections, or god is on our side and is doing it for us.

Earlier in this section I stated that the republicans’ claims that the left is stealing elections are “false allegations.” I say this because like the adults they have to emulate (no matter how painful it is), they know that this concerted effort by the godless libs about which they rant and rave does not exist. Either that, or the entire planet, especially the US judiciary system, is not only against them, but is trying to keep the truth hidden from us all.

Now, there are anecdotal examples in every election of mistakes being made by voters on both the left and the right, so I’m going to throw in a couple. Let us consider a couple of examples from the great states of Florida and Nevada. In 2018 a 79 year-old Florida woman, was arrested for voting illegally after she received a notice on how to register to vote from a private firm. She mistook the form for one coming from her county election board, because these companies do their best to create forms the look ‘official.’ So, she registered, and cast her ballot. However, Florida law states she was actually not allowed to vote while she was still on probation. Though she was initially arrested, the District Attorney recognized the “innocent mistake” and dropped the charges.

In the 2020 election in the state of Nevada, a ballot was received and votes thereon were registered in the name of Dorothy Hartle, who died in 2017 of breast cancer. Kirk Hartle, her grieving husband, contacted the local news outlets, screaming that this was proof of voter fraud by the left. Fox News picked up the story, and zoom, off it went. Kirk Hartle became the poster boy for the right’s claims that the left was steeling elections through voter fraud. Mr. Hartle claimed during his several featured interviews on Fox News that he never received the ballot, and that he was “sickened” by the possibility that someone would do such a thing. However, in October of 2021, Mr. Hartle, a registered republican, was arrested and charged with voting twice in an election, a class D felony. Mr. Hartle voted and also did so in the name of his dead wife…for donald trump.

The Attorney General of Nevada wrote the following when a plea agreement was announced on November 16, 2021: “Though rare, voter fraud can undercut trust in our election system. This particular case of voter fraud was particularly egregious because the offender continually spread inaccurate information about our elections despite being the source of the fraud himself…” Fox News dropped the story. Whoops. J’accuse!

Of course, these are just simple examples of individuals making mistakes, whether the intent was innocent as with our 79 year-old woman who had found herself in trouble with the law some years earlier and was not yet eligible to vote, or, not so innocent, as in the case of Mr. Hartle. Certainly, there are examples of the godless libs trying to steal elections in the 21st century in which the scheme was much larger and more organized. Ah, I have some juicy tidbits for you! Let us look at the case of the 9th congressional district in North Carolina in both the 2016 and 2018 elections.

What happened here is that a long-time political operative in this district, and a high ranking member of the campaign staff of congressional candidate Mark Harris obtained a list of all of the absentee ballots mailed in the district. He and his army of zombie warriors went house to house, claiming to be officers of the election commission with orders to collect and mail all absentee ballots for the voters. They then took these ballots and fraudulently completed that ballot for their preferred candidate, forged the signature of the voter, and turned them in to the proper election board. Ten people were eventually indicted in this case, and the state ordered the entire election redone. As I’m sure you have surmised, all of the people indicted in this scheme to steal an election, as well as the candidate, Mr. Harris, for whom they cast these fraudulent ballots were republicans, and in 2016 they also cast fraudulent votes for trump.

Since they first started screaming about election integrity, republicans have not only refused to take steps to make the voting process more secure, but they have blocked efforts by the godless libs to do so. Instead, they have decided that effectively disenfranchising voters who they think will not vote for republican candidates is the best answer to a problem they dreamt up in order to cover their crimes in polluting or democratic processes. To wit, they have done the following in two different states; Georgia and Kansas.

The Georgia case is most famous, but only, I suppose, because Georgia’s minority populations are more numerous, and, of course, because Kansas is the very essence of ‘fly over’ country. The process for the republican-controlled government in Georgia was simple. First, you reduce the number of polling stations in heavily populated, urban areas where democrats seem to congregate. This causes immense lines and hours upon hours of waiting in line to engage in the most basic of constitutionally guaranteed rights: the right to vote. Second, you make it illegal to offer refreshment to anyone waiting in line to vote. The purpose is to make voting as difficult as possible.

Kansas, although less famous, is an even more extreme example of republicans’ attempt to steal elections through the effective, if not legal, disenfranchisement of large sections of the electorate. Take the case of Dodge City. Yes, the famous Dodge City from all of those westerns. Over the years, Dodge City became more and more populated by voters who were members of racial and ethnic minorities. Therefore, the republican controlled government; the legislature and the republican Secretary of State specifically, banded together and did the following.

First, the Secretary of State, the person who runs elections in each state, removed all poling stations from Dodge City. You read correctly, they removed ALL polling stations from Dodge City, which required any citizen living within Dodge City who wanted to cast a ballot to drive to a surrounding town to do so. The legislature then passed a law, which was signed by the republican governor, making illegal to give another person a ride to cast a vote. Yeah, J’accuse.

*******************

Republicans…just stop! Your efforts to defile our political system so that you can establish some sort of christian untethered, unregulated, free-market theocracy dedicated to the proposition that donald trump should be able to reign over this country as some sort of white power dictator is a sham, and the rest of us won’t let it happen! The rest of us actually outnumber you by about 30-1, so your chances of doing this are just a little bit less than zero. Seriously, your horrendous and painful-to-watch existence of falsehood upon falsehood, screaming like banshees that the left is doing what you are actually doing is becoming old hat. You really do need a new schtick, but we all know that there isn’t one. You’re stuck with being the childish liars you are, and love being.

Actually, I have a great idea for a new schtick for you. It’s called honesty. You really should try it, but be very careful, because the second you start being honest with the rest of the world and, more importantly, with yourselves, you’re going have to come out of the closet. Now, we on the left know that a lot of you will come out of the closet as homosexuals, transgender men and women, or other variants of the LGBTQ+ community. That’s fine. It’s about time. We accept you and will help you adjust to your new life of pride in who you really are, who god made you to be. On the other hand, the vast majority of the rest of you, when you come out of the closet, are going to stand up proudly and declare that you are racists, neo-nazis, white supremacists, etcetera. I’m sorry, but we will not be so kind to, or accepting of you.

I read a wonderful science fiction series. years ago titled “The Lensman Series” by E. E. “Doc” Smith. In this tale, one of our heroes, who was, of course, fighting to save civilizations throughout multiple galaxies from enslavement, openly declared one of his tactics. It was to, as he said: “Conceal himself by his own obviousness.” This is the tactic the republican party is using today to undermine our democratic institutions, principles, and processes, and their success to date can largely be traced to the fact that they are doing it right out in the open, concealing themselves by their own obviousness, while accusing others of the same, or worse actions.

J’accuse.

The Lure of Dictatorship

To be a citizen of a republic really is a hassle. Seriously, I’m not joking. So much is expected of you. I mean, think of it. First, you are expected to stay informed about various issues that affect you, your fellow citizens, and your country as a whole. Not only are you expected to do this, but you are expected to make time for it on your own, and unless you’re one of those people who ‘works well without direct supervision,’ then it’s not going to happen.

Most people would not only have to be led to the water of staying informed, but they’s also have to be made to drink it, and republics that function on a set of democratic processes aren’t really set up to force people drink information. Republics of this nature are set up to make the water available for people to drink, but the decision to either drink the water of information and knowledge, or to sit, thirsty, in the parched dryness of ignorance is theirs to make.

Second, not only are you expected to stay informed, but you’re also expected to stay informed with the truth. That means that you’re expected to pull your face out of your algorithm directed social media apps for a few seconds (yeah, good luck), and look something up. Never mind that the pervasive internet and the evolving G networks everywhere make that the easiest task, ever. Forget it. People don’t care about the truth, because the truth sucks. The truth means they have to be truly awake in some manner, other than just walking through life with a fake smile on their faces, and see the world as it really is. If people do that, then, well, there go all of the smiles, fake or not.

Third, and this is the worst part, ever. Not only are citizens of a republic expected to stay informed with the truth, but they’re also expected to vote. I know, I feel like screaming and crying when I thank about that, too. “Voting? Are you serious? Nah, that’s not happening. Vote? Are you crazy? Don’t you know that Jesus died on the cross so that we could just hand all that shit over to god? Damned atheists and your voting!”

“Look, can’t we just get somebody in office that’ll just take care of all of this, so that I don’t have to worry about it? I mean, I don’t want to use the term ‘benevolent dictator,’ but… Well, hell, let’s just call a spade a spade and go there; say it out loud. Can’t we just get some benevolent dictator in the White House who will make it all happen, so I don’t have to worry about it?”

That short monologue, unfortunately, is all too common within the American electorate, and it is that attitude which may pose the greatest threat to this republic. Humans have a love of republicanism that functions on the democratic process, but don’t want to accept responsibility for their own governance. They don’t want to stay informed with the truth. They don’t want to maintain anything even resembling a meaningful understanding of the issues confronting their country and the world. They don’t even want to vote.

In the short term, individuals like trump come and go and their influence on this republic rises, then fades. Over the long term, though, it is dictatorship itself that draws people into its web, where it waits, like the venomous spider it is. The lure of dictatorship lies in the apparent ease of existence it offers the individual. Yet we all know that this apparent ease is merely an illusion; it is the veil of lies that conceals the evil that lies within. Fortunately, this veil is not opaque, and in fact, its transparency is its greatest flaw. Dictatorships have this lure within them, and yet its transparency of what it really entails for the individual and the nation, even those within the dominant racial/ethnic/religious/sexually oriented, and gender identifying group (dominant group), is what makes it so abhorrent.

To be the minion of a dictatorship is easy, it really is, provided, of course, that you are a member of the dominant group in your country. If you are, then all you have to do is nothing. Consciously and actively do nothing, even when you see injustice meted out to people of minority or marginalized ethnic, racial, sexually oriented, or gender identifying groups, do nothing. The state will take care to insure that you are cared for and protected against what it sees as anything infringing on your quiet, non-political life. For many people, this ‘doing nothing’ is easy, but for the rest of us it is incredibly difficult, and this difficulty is one of the factors that first lead to the rise of republicanism as a form of government in the first place.

Over time, all governments develop institutions that help propel their existence. This is especially true of both monarchies and republics, much more so than civil and military dictatorships. Monarchies develop institutions based around the blood line of a particular set of people, and if it is what is known as a ‘constitutional monarchy,’ then two parallel sets of institutions develop; one protects the privileges of the noble class, and the other protects the rights of the monarchy’s subjects. Republics, on the other hand, develop institutions based upon their body of laws, their nation’s constitutional rights, and the liberties and responsibilities of the individual.

The self-propelling institutions developed by civil and military dictatorships are based upon and centered around a single, charismatic figure, and are designed to keep that person and their inner circle in power for as long as possible. Since these persons are rarely in power more than twenty years, thirty years at the most, the institutions designed to propel their rule find it difficult to take root in the national psyche. This is what makes North Korea such an anomaly; the institutionalization of the rule of the Kim family over the decades has come to resemble an absolute monarchy more than a dictatorship.

So there is this constant, dual, opposing, pull on the individual. There is the desire for republicanism and democracy, but a republic that functions on the democratic process requires constant attention of the citizens to maintain it in a healthy state. Dictatorship, on the other hand possesses its lure because of its myth of the easy life in which the individual doesn’t have to maintain the political system that governs them. The system, the myth says, is self sustaining. All the citizen has to do is nothing. Consciously, actively, and intentionally do nothing, because if any citizen attempts to intervene with the state on behalf of others, that person will find themselves to be a target of the state, and that will not end well for the individual.

The vast, vast, vast majority of those people who secretly long for the establishment of a dictatorship in the United States understand that such a dream neither can, nor should, ever become a reality, because they know that it would mean the destruction of everything they hold dear in this world in terms of their country and what it has tried to stand for in this world. They have these fleeting desires for the benevolent dictator when they see inefficiency and ineffectiveness in their government’s efforts to right wrongs. They dream, periodically, of the dictator because they see unintentional, yet unfixed, waste of the people’s tax revenue. They dream of the dictator because someone once told them that “Well, at least under Hitler, the trains ran on time,” and they believed it without trying to find out if it was true. They believed it and purposely hid from their own minds their internal knowledge of the suffering dictators bring with them wherever they go.

Then there are those people for whom dreams of a dictatorship in America are not fleeting, because creating a dictatorship in the United States of America is their dream. They are the people who actively seek ways to subvert our democratic institutions on a daily basis in an attempt to sweep our republic into the thrash can of history. They are the people who live within the realms of white supremacy, white nationalism, and white christian nationalism. They are the people who hoard assault rifles and study how to bring down large areas of our electrical power grid as they wait for the start of their “shootin’ war.” They have always been among us, but have decided, since the political rise of donald trump, that their time to come out of the shadows is now. They actively attempt to recruit our young people into their ranks through their right-wing media outlets, the algorithms of YouTube and other social media platforms, the right’s decades-long decimation of our educational system, and, yes, their sheer visibility.

These people are the greatest threat to our republic since King George III of England, and if you cannot see this, then you are purposefully blind. If you are purposefully blind to this threat of dictatorship, then you are, whether you realize it or not, within their ranks. You are, more than likely, a “Who, me?” racist, and an “I’m the one who’s going to heaven” bigot, and you represent an even greater threat to this republic than the people described in the paragraph above this one. You are the greater threat, because you will walk out of a republic and into a dictatorship secretly thinking that you will be the one who will benefit from it as you proclaim your innocence for its occurrence.

One day you will wake up to find this republic and its democratic processes gone and say “What? I didn’t do it!” Yes, you did, because you saw it happening and purposefully closed your eyes and looked the other way. Then again, it is not just you who will bear responsibility for the destruction of this beloved republic and its democratic institutions, but the rest of us as well, because really, we all see it coming, and if we all do nothing, we will all bear responsibility.

Peace to All

Niemand

Trump’s Further Reductionism: It Really Is Strange

One might think that having alienated the vast majority of the American electorate during his first term, Donald Trump would figure out the basic math of democracies: the person with the most votes wins. Unless you’re talking about the election of the President of the United States, and then it’s the person with the most electoral college votes wins. That’s very weird, and needs to end.

This essay is a revision and an evolution of a previous essay on this site titled “Reductionism, and the Strange Politics of Donald Trump.” It is updated from the original essay published in 2020 to account for events that have occurred since then. You know, indictments, insurrections, convictions and a host of strange actions and decisions made by a politician who wishes to succeed.

One of the most basic tenets of politics in the age of democracies is that politicians will generally try, as best they can, to appeal to as broad a base as possible. This is not to say that all politicians do this at the expense of the things in which they believe, but that they moderate their stance on these beliefs, realizing that compromise is the hallmark of a functioning democracy…and adulthood.

Donald Trump is evidently trying a different approach. Mr. Trump seems determined to reduce his constituency to the absolute smallest number possible, and hope that this will win him a victory in November, 2024. Over the space of his entire political existence, Donald Trump has sought to insult, degrade, and alienate every group of people in this country not solidly behind his political aspirations. It does not matter whether that group is identified by their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, political views, or any other characteristic. If they are not within his base, his hatred and complete contempt for them is proudly brandished every day.

Who are these people who make up Trump’s political base? They are primarily members of three basic groups: conservative christian evangelicals, white nationalists, and gun toters. Make no mistake, together, they make up a significant portion of the electorate, but they also overlap to a great extent, sharing several common characteristics which limits their percentage of the overall electorate. Many, if not most of them, are actually gun toting white nationalist christian evangelicals.

Specifically, they are politically unsophisticated, with little or no perception of what comprises a republic and its mechanisms of operation through the democratic process. They have little or no concept of the art of compromise, and how this purely adult form of conflict resolution serves to preserve and perpetuate any republic that functions on said democratic processes.

For the most part, they are poorly or under-educated and rarely have any college experience. Those who do lack a unified, holistic, and egalitarian view of the world outside of what is told to them by the governors of the Southern Baptist Convention (the religious teachings of which are essentially bigoted, exclusionary, nationalistic, and imperial), Fox News, Newsmax, and various other right wing mass media propaganda outlets.

They do not seek the truth. Rather, they are willing slaves to the algorithms that take them farther and farther down the rabbit hole of their racist comfort. If they sought truth, they would be in a different place altogether, and really, different people.

Encompassing the three groups mentioned above, Trump’s base consists almost solely of white people who live in a continuous cycle of fear, perpetuated by the propaganda outlets above, of non-white, non-heterosexual, non-conforming people. This fear cycle peaks when these groups demand equal justice under the law, and equal legal rights and treatment within society as a whole. When a member of the neoconservative right wing in this country argues against the ‘gay agenda,” remind them that this agenda consists of being treated with love, compassion, and basic respect afforded cis-gender, heterosexual white males in this country. Everybody should have this agenda…everybody.

The inherent problem with Trump’s strategy in 2020, and resumed unabated in 2024, is that people either on the fringes of this base, or who simply, for whatever reason, did not want to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016 are gone. They had four years of the carnival show that was the Trump presidency to completely alienate them from Trump and his personal brand of American fascism. Added to his time in the white house, they now see his flagrant threats to elected officials (“Mitch McConnell must have a death wish.”), multiple indictments for blatant criminal activity whether in office or out, vows to pardon insurrectionists who attempted to overthrow the will of the American people on January 6, 2021, and more to come.

His purposeful alienation of the portion of our electorate that looks critically at candidates for public office with little preference for party affiliation reflects the true manner in which Trump has decided to practice this strange reductionism. He has enthusiastically and horrifically driven from him every rational and truly patriotic American who does not worship him, as does his base, but who may have considered supporting him in previous elections.

What, then, could his overall strategy be? It must be this: Donald Trump previously banked on the chaos and destruction that his core base would bring upon America when he lost the election in 2020. He promised, and to some extent delivered on January 6, 2021, the chaos he promised when asked what his strategy for reelection would be earlier in the cycle. His candidacy in 2024 looks to be more of the same.

When he rightfully lost the 2020 presidential election he issued his call to arms, claiming that the liberals had stolen the election, that they are out to destroy America, and that he would save them if only they would go out and kill, maim, and burn America to the ground in his name and for his sole benefit. He has said many times: “I am the only person who can save America,” and I will tell you this right now; when someone says something like that, and you don’t immediately flush your support for them straight down the toilet, you have no business living outside of a facility for the criminally insane, let alone voting. If you continue to support them, you have no business calling yourself an American.

The bloody and murderous insurrection of January 6, 2021 — which, if you’ll pardon the colloquial speech, really was some pathetic punk-ass bullshit. I mean, if you pin your hopes for revolution on a couple of thousand stupid, hillbilly jackasses with some pepper spray and no plan, you’re just an amateur, stupid jerk-off — is testament to what a person like Donald Trump can do to people who are intellectually akin to rudderless vessels drifting through space and heading for a black hole. As he said in an interview in the 1990s “If I ever go into politics, I’ll probably do so as a republican. Those people will believe anything you tell them.” He was right. Those people who make up his ever shrinking base will believe anything he tells them. But that’s okay, he had a television show.

If he somehow wins the republican nomination, and afterwards, of course, loses the general election in November, 2024, I think he will be surprised at how few people will actually be willing to go out and destroy America on his behalf. It will happen in small, sporadic events, make no mistake, but we must be willing to absorb this spasm of violence of his core base and continue, as one nation, dedicated to the propositions laid out in our Declaration of Independence, and codified in our ever evolving Constitution.

Eventually, Donald Trump will fade into history as a sickening footnote of what can happen to any nation when the people do not actively participate in its democratic procedures and allow religious fanatics to gut their education system.

When asked what type of government he and the other framers of the Constitution had designed, Benjamin Franklin is rumored to have said the following: “A republic, if you can keep it.” Today, Donald Trump is the greatest testament since Adolf Hitler, that we must rededicate ourselves to keeping it.

Related to Mr. Franklin’s attributed statement above is the following: “All it takes for evil to prevail, is for good people to do nothing.” We must, as a nation, in every peaceful and constitutionally protected manner possible, repudiate in the strongest possible terms, the toxic, racist politics of Donald Trump and make certain that his political aspirations die in 2024. We must then rededicate ourselves to keeping the republic that Franklin warned us would be constantly under attack from enemies both outside and within our own country. If we do not, then believe me, evil people like Donald Trump and his white nationalist, gun toting evangelical followers will prevail.

Peace and Love to All

Christoph Niemand, Citizen X

A Pillar of Republicanism: Secularism

“The government of the United States is in no way founded on the Christian religion. The United States of America should have a foundation free from the influence of the clergy.”

~ George Washington

In order to speak about secularism as a foundational principle of modern liberal republicanism, I need to talk about the historical relationship between the church and the state, and how that relationship affects and relates to the nation and the individual. I must also offer a few definitions:

The church: An institutional entity that seeks to exercise control of people’s visions of the nature and will of god.

The state: An institutional entity that exercises civil governance over the people within a single society and also within a specific geographic area.

The nation: That group of people over which both the church and the state seek control within any one society and within their prescribed sphere of influence.

The individual: Any person who is a member of any nation within what is referred to as a ‘nation state.’

I believe, in large measure, that the interests and power of the state and the nation are always at odds and are thereby, in most respects, inversely proportional to one another. This means that as the power of one increases, the power of the other must decrease proportionally. Power between these two actors is a zero-sum game, and yet this does not mean that the two cannot both flourish within a society. If we find the proper balance between the two, both the nation, and thereby the individual, and the state can exist in a healthy symbiosis; each supporting the other and possessing an appropriate and manageable amount of power.

Also, under this scenario, the power of the state includes other institutional actors who seek control over the nation and the individual. For our purposes here, this other actor can be broadly defined as “the church.” More specifically, it means any society’s dominant religious sect, and in the United States, this group encompasses the multiplicity of denominations which broadly comprise the fundamentalist evangelical protestant church.

The power playing field between these actors has never been level, because it has always been two against one: the church and the state verses the nation, and within the nation, the individual. For centuries, the church and the state, in close collusion with one another, were able to completely subjugate the nation. The rise of modern, liberal republicanism changed that equation and may have actually leveled the playing field, because the nation, under the principles of republicanism, is generally able to resist the ambitions of both the church and the state.

From the formation of the most primitive human governments, to the kingdoms of post-Medieval Europe, the church and the state made war against each other over absolute control of the population. The conflict was bitter and physical, with kings finding themselves condemned to hell by the church, and the lands and assets of the church being seized by the state. A number of high-ranking officials on both sides lost their lives in this centuries-long war. All of this was for control of the mass of peasants, artisans, and all others outside of the nobility who comprised the nation; the ‘mass of folk,’ as it were.

Eventually, during the early Renaissance period in Europe, the church and the state came to terms, made peace, and split the spoils of social control. Instead of fighting one another for absolute, unlimited control, they joined forces and supported each other’s control over a more limited segment of the individual’s existence.

The peace they forged, as durable as it has been, has always been marked by an intense distrust and dislike of one for the other. The church and the state despise each other, and each covets what the other has. This, of course, begs the question “what, exactly, does each of them have?” The division was, and continues to be marked out in the following manner: the state has control of the individual’s life, and the church has control over the individual’s death. In colloquial terms, the state owns your ass, and the church owns your soul.

Unfortunately, for both the church and the state, this peace, and the division of power over spheres of social control which came from it (as unforeseen as it may have been at the time) led to the birth of secularism as a sine qua non of modern republicanism.

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Amendment 1 to the Constitution of the United States

“Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances”

The First Amendment to the Constitution begins with the prohibition of collaboration between the church and the state. It separates them, placing a wall between them. The church is not allowed to meddle in the affairs of the state, and the state is not allowed to meddle in the affairs of the church. In order to solidify this division, the state does not tax the church. The purpose of this practice is to remove the church from any interest in the the affairs of the state. Since the church pays no taxes to the state, it has no right to even attempt to influence the politics or policies of the state.

I understand that in the United States of America in the early twenty-first century, this separation is, at the very least, blurred, if not erased altogether, but that theory/practice dichotomy is not yet a subject of this essay.

The political philosophers of the Enlightenment to which modern republicanism owes it origins had an awareness of history and current events that seems to have been lost in the United States of America in the twenty-first century. Because of this awareness on their part, secular republicanism is meant to limit the effect that both the church and the state have on each other, and more importantly, the effect and amount of control each has over the nation and the individual. Secular republicanism is, in some ways, the practical expression of the victory of the individual over the state and freedom of the individual from the church.

What, then, are some of the practical applications of secularism as a pillar of republicanism? I have identified three very important aspects, or rules, regarding the relationship between the church and the state in a secular republic on which I will elaborate below

Rule number one: The state cannot favor one religious sect over another. It cannot favor Islam over Judaism, just as it cannot favor any sort of polytheistic, or animistic religions over Christianity. The religions chosen by human cultures to help people weave their way toward salvation and some form of personal nirvana are as numerous as the cultures themselves, and the state cannot discriminate between them.

This is not to say that the state cannot place limits on how religions practice their belief systems, but these limits must be very, very circumspect. The state has the right and the responsibility to protect people from abuse by others, whether the abusers be secular thieves, religious leaders, or other devotees of the individual’s faith, but it must always cast a wary eye on creating and enforcing various limits on religious practice.

Consenting adults have the right to voluntarily subject themselves to all sorts of strange and bizarre acts in the pursuit of almost anything. It doesn’t matter whether the goal is to bring them closer to god, or to orgasm, the state must stand afar and not intervene. However, when the circumstances move from consent to coercion, then the state may, and should, step in to protect the individual from such abuse by anyone, especially the church. This is because any religious sect can and will, if allowed, exercise incredibly intense forms of control over the individual.

Rule number two: The state cannot use the nation’s tax dollars to support the endeavors of any religious sect. This act immediately violates rule number one, as the state cannot afford, unless it seeks to tax the nation into absolute poverty, to support the religious endeavors of every church and/or religious sect operating within the society over which it has governance. If the state uses the nation’s tax revenue to support the endeavors of the church, it will inevitably favor one sect over all others, and this favoritism will then, inevitably, lead to collusion between that particular religious sect and the state, which will then, inevitably foster animosity between religious sects, which will then, inevitably lead to people hating one another.

Financial support of the church through use of the nation’s tax revenue not only creates tacit, if not blatant support for that religious sect’s belief system, but it alters that sect’s dogma so that the church begins to support and validate the actions of the state as an extension of the will of god. Before too long, the nation will find itself saddled with a hybrid government that is no longer a secular republic free of religious interference, but one that is a partnership between the wealthiest secular interests in society, and a theocratic support system that subjugates the nation into obedience under a non-democratic state.

Unless you are completely unaware of twenty-first century American history, you know that this rule has already been violated by the United States government. When President George W. Bush announced that the United States government would support humanitarian endeavors of various Christian denominations through what were called “faith-based initiatives” with the tax dollars of the American nation, I was appalled. This was a clear violation of one of the most important foundational principles of modern republicanism; the separation of the church and the state.

Likewise, if you think that there is not clear competition between religious sects in any society, then you have not eyes to see, nor ears to hear. Each devotee represents an increase in the profitability of that sect. Any religion (what I have also referred to as sects) which has the financial backing of the state gains an immediate advantage in the acquisition of new devotees over other sects. This financial association gives them not only the freedom to spend their revenue on increasing the size of their congregations, but it also allows them to advertise their sect as preferred by the state, and tie their dogma to hollow, populist patriotism.

Financial support of the state for any religious sect, will invariably affect both the dogma of that religious sect, and the politics of the state so that they move ever closer to a single unit seeking control over the nation and the individual.

Rule number three: Secularism is an essential principle of modern republicanism because it protects both the church and the state from each other. I mentioned this earlier in this essay, but shall elaborate on it here.

Patriotism and faith are two elements of the life of any individual that should never be intertwined. When they are, the result is a state that will begin to claim that its rule is derived from the will of god, and a church that will give ecclesiastical support to the worst imperial tendencies of the state. When this happens, no republic can long survive.

Republics are always under pressure from non-democratic forces in this world. The secular forces of totalitarianism, and the totalitarian forces of religion are always attempting to undermine the rights of the nation and the individual, thereby subjugating both to their will. We must remember that in no religious sect’s vision of heaven is that place a democracy. In fact, heaven is the most totalitarian realm ever created in the human imagination. A god does not put its decisions before the committee.

Both the church and the state possess within themselves the worst drives of the human animal; the lust for power for its own sake, and this is true regardless of your personal opinion of either of these two institutions. Since I have placed that statement in this essay, I feel I must remind the reader that I am not speaking about the deep and sincere faith held by any individual, but the disingenuous propaganda of any institutional church that directs the course of that faith. When the subject is god, people are about faith, churches are about power.

Because of this, republics must be secular in nature. This doesn’t place the state in a position above the church, it places the state in a place completely separate from the church. It allows both the church and the state to conduct their business without interference or influence from the other. Secularism, as a foundational principle of republicanism, is not only supposed to prevent favoritism of the state for one religious sect over another, but it is also a mechanism designed to prevent the church from favoring one political party over another. Therefore, the state cannot offer financial support, nor even comment on the righteousness (or lack thereof) to any religious sect’s dogma for any reason. Likewise, no church has the right to speak in favor of any candidate for public office, or allow its facilities to be used for any political purpose, even if that link is somewhat tenuous.

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Each of us is aware that the principle of secularism, of a strict separation of the church and the state has been under attack in this country for at least a couple of generations, and even though it is the forces of the the political right and their “conservative christian” allies that have sought to erase this separation and thereby establish their “free market theocracy,” we are all responsible for allowing it to happen.

Every time a person speaks of the good of bringing god into the political life of this nation, and another person within earshot who understands the true nature of patriotism doesn’t immediately confront this person, the wall of separation between the church and the state is torn down just a little bit. When someone speaks of such things, it is the responsibility of each of us to remind them that their faith is their business, and since we all have the benefit of living in a secular republic, it has no place in the political life of this nation, or in the life of any other American.

Every time someone says that “we need to bring prayer back into the public schools,” a place where prayer has rightfully never been welcome, and another person doesn’t confront this assertion in the strongest possible terms, the wall is demolished a little more. Tell me that there is a Christian who calls for prayer in our public schools who would support a multi-day regimen of prayer in which Christian prayer is observed on one day, Muslim prayer is observed on another day, Buddhist prayer on yet another, and so on down the line, until all of the world’s religions are represented in this exercise. I tell you that if such a person exists they would be excommunicated from their church forthwith upon discovery of such a rational and blasphemous opinion.

I maintain an acceptance of the ancient dictum that money is the root of all evil; I accept that as truth. I also maintain, perhaps even more fervently, that religion is the root of all hatred. It is the father of all intolerance and the mother of all bigotry.

In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is error alone that needs the support of the government. Truth can stand by itself.”

~ Thomas Jefferson

There may be no more important thread upon which our republic hangs than the complete and total separation of the church and the state. More importantly, there may be nothing more intensely tied to our daily freedoms, liberties, our constitutionally guaranteed rights, and the right to worship as we choose, free from unwanted interference than this separation. This is, of course, because both the church and the state have a propensity to overstep their boundaries in all matters of social control, and if we allow them the slightest collusion, the fate of this republic, and the principles of reasoned enlightenment upon which it was founded, may be doomed to an early grave.

Each Of Us Must Now Choose a Side

“These aren’t people, they’re animals.” These are the words of an American President.

I really need for each of you to allow that to sink in for a second. A person who is supposed to be the leader of this ‘nation of immigrants’ and the ‘free’ world has declared, publicly, that the poor and marginalized people who are risking their lives to try to find a better life for themselves and their families are not even human, they are animals; they are brownish…or, really, more of a sandstone, medium to dark tan. Anyway you look at it, they’re not moderately wealthy, Western Europeans. They’re from shit-hole countries, and we don’t want them.

[Aside: no sane, Western European would ever want to come here. I wonder why.]

If you have not actually listened to Mr. Trump’s comments, then you need to. The person to whom he was responding made a comment regarding MS13 gang members, but Mr. Trumps comments, after he declares these people to be animals, quickly ventured into speaking about Latin American immigrants in general with no delineation between them and the criminal element about which he began his comments. This was not accidental. This was not an oversight. This was Donald Trump revealing his inner-most thoughts about our Latin American neighbors. He has declared more than once that in his view these people who are fleeing the most horrid conditions any imperial, white citizen of the United States can imagine; people seeking asylum and safe harbor in the one country on this planet that is, by its very nature, supposed to welcome them, to be animals, something less than human and undesirable.

Please don’t mistake my meaning here. I’m not trying to minimize the brutality of drug smuggling/human trafficking cartels like MS13 and syndicates like them. However, as father Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit Priest who has spent almost his entire adult life working with the toughest gangs in Los Angeles states; he has never met a member of any gang who wasn’t running from something. That something is hopelessness, despair, poverty, and a host of other factors that can take any person from the loving image of God in which they are born, and transform them into the hating image of a devil sent to steal, kill, and destroy.

Every example from the life and teachings of Jesus, the Christ, was quite clear that people should not, and from a secular perspective the President of the United States CANNOT EVER, refer to people as something less than human.

Folks, this can no longer stand. This is the issue on which we MUST confront our legislators in this country. Each of them must declare whether or not they stand with Mr. Trump on this issue, or if they stand against him. However they stand, we must demand that each of them state so, publicly, on the floor of the House or Senate. They must place their cowardly asses on the record. Here, now, in light of these words spoken by the president, it is now plainly (if not painfully) clear that you can stand with Jesus, or you can stand with Trump, but you can not do both.

Jesus said it best in His sermon: “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” ~Matthew 6: 24

I wrote in my last post that we have to ask ourselves if this is what we want America to be, because as long as Mr. Trump sits in the White House, this is what America is.

These words are how it begins. When you begin to characterize people as less than human, as animals, it makes it a lot easier to deport these people, to destroy the families of these people, to slaughter these people. In a sermon I gave a little over a year ago I quoted from Father Martin Niemoller, a dissident priest during the Third Reich in Germany. He said the following:

“When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent. I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent. I was not a social democrat

When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out. I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews, I remained silent. I wasn’t a Jew.

When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.”

I concluded my commentary on those remarks from Father Neimoller with the following admonition: “People, we are at a crossroads in the social evolution of this country. We do not, any of us, want to have to ever say the following; ‘First they came for the immigrants…,’ because believe me, I don’t care who you are, if you don’t speak out, eventually they will come for you, and when that happens there may not be anybody left to speak out.” Christ spoke truth to power, and if we are to be his followers, then so must we.

Even more frightening is that words like those spoken by Donald Trump a couple of weeks ago are the first steps toward genocide. Words like those spoken by Donald Trump a few weeks ago are what allowed presidents and politicians of the 19th century to subject Native Americans to a systematic genocide. Words like those spoken by Mr. Trump led to the lynching of black Americans. Telling a nation that other people are less than human is what allowed people to stand silently by while almost nineteen million people, six million of them Jews, were sent to concentration camps and murdered by the Nazis and their henchmen.

Like Smoky the Bear used to say: “Only you can prevent genocide,” or something like that. The only way to make smoky smile now is to do two things: always speak truth to power, and call out politicians without allowing them to double-speak their way out of an answer.

Niemand

Dangerous Norwegians!

The following article is from “The Nation” magazine’s daily online email feed.

I didn’t receive any permission to put it here, but it’s all for educational purposes, and if some of you decide to sign up for The Nation and order the email feed and/or the print magazine, then I’m really a free-lance salesman. Enjoy!

Norwegians for DACA

If Republicans Knew the Truth About Norway, They’d Be Clamoring to Build a Second Wall

A mass of Norwegian immigrants would pose a genuine threat to Donald Trump’s America.

By Ann Jones

In the past couple of weeks, thanks to the president’s racist comments about Haiti and African countries he can’t even name—remember “Nambia”?—as well as the stamp of approval he awarded future immigrants from Norway, we’ve seen a surprising amount of commentary about that fortunate country. Let me just say: Those Norwegians he’s so eager to invite over are my ancestral people and, thanks to years I’ve spent in that country, my friends. Donald Trump should understand one thing: if he and his Republican backers really knew the truth about life in Norway, they would be clamoring to build a second “big, fat, beautiful” wall, this time right along our Eastern Seaboard.

One thing is incontestable: A mass of Norwegian immigrants (however improbable the thought) would pose a genuine threat to Donald Trump’s America. They would bring to our shores their progressive values, advanced ideas, and illustrious model of social democratic governance—and this country would never be the same!

It’s hard even to begin to imagine what a Norwegian-ization of the United States might mean. But just for a moment, try to picture how strange our country would be. After all, based on life in Norway, you would have to assume that our beloved land would lose many of its 21st-century landmarks. Gone would be its precious ghettos and slums, its boarded-up schools, hospitals, and libraries in the heartland, not to speak of its heirloom infrastructure: collapsing bridges, antique trains, clogged roads, and toxic drinking water.

To grasp what’s at stake, consider how such immigrants would have reacted to the Republican tax-“reform” bill, praised by the president as “the greatest achievement” of his first year in office (which, by his own account, is the greatest year in American history). That bill, filled with miscellaneous handouts meant to ensure the votes of individual Republican legislators, guarantees that the super-rich and their mega-corporations will get richer still in perpetuity. It is, in its own way, a glorious hymn to future heights of economic inequality (in a country already ranked the most unequal in the developed world), as it cleverly passes on to the children of the un-rich classes a national deficit inflated by an extra $1.5 trillion.

It is, of course, the nature of any tax plan to redistribute the wealth of a nation in some fashion, even though Republicans use the word “redistribution” only to assail Democrats who occasionally suggest a little something to help the poor. But redistribute those Republicans did in a masterful way, surrendering yet more of our national wealth to the tiny team of people (many of whom also happen to be their donors) who already pocket almost all of it. As the Republicans were writing the tax bill, the top 20 percent of households were already taking home 90 percent of the American pie. Now they will get more.

That’s exactly the kind of “achievement” that no Norwegian parliament would ever approve. All nine parties now in that country’s parliament, from left to right, would have joined in tearing up that Republican tax bill and replacing it with a much simpler one aimed at redistributing the nation’s wealth equitably to every last one of its citizens.

As a start, they would have tossed in the trash can the single most basic project of Trump and the Republicans: making the rich richer. Norwegians have long worked to do just the reverse, based on a well-established conviction that inequality creates elites that corrupt and destroy democracy. That’s where politics come in: devising multiple systems to regulate a capitalist economy and safeguard democracy.

Equitable paychecks may slow down the creation of Norwegian billionaires, but the country’s overall standard of living is among the world’s highest. The United States ranks much lower on international evaluations, although with its immense and still rapidly growing gap between the plutocrats and the rest of us, it’s hard to calculate a meaningful “standard.”

While those new Norwegian immigrants were at it, they would quickly move to simplify our tax system. That, of course, is exactly what Trump and the Republicans promised—you remember that “postcard” you were going to mail to the IRS—even as they made everything yet more complicated. In Norway, the government not only simplifies the tax system, but figures out, on a progressive scale, what every taxpayer owes and then sends out the bills.

Those dangerous Norwegians are peculiar enough to be grateful. They gladly pay up because taxes fund the country’s universal public welfare system, which guarantees that strikingly high standard of living to a whole society. (That phrase “whole society,” by the way, is the meaning of the word “social” in the phrase “social democracy.”) Keep in mind that all Norwegians have the right to universal public health care, universal public education through professional schools or university and beyond, care of the elderly and disabled, paid parental leave for mothers and fathers, subsidized early childhood education (from age 1), affordable housing, state of the art public transport, and a raft of other services that take the worry out of daily life. The catch is—and I can already hear the thundering footsteps of the Republican herd as it heads in panic for its top-secret bunker —if Norwegians can’t trust the government, they kick it out and elect another.

We Americans, on the other hand, have been taught not to trust any government, but rather to admire our brilliant super-rich people who own this one, and so to let them pocket our tax money and think none the less of them for their dependence on Republican handouts like the tax bill. Consider the situation this way: Norwegian Governments spoil their citizens, while President Trump and the Republicans despoil us ordinary Americans. And that just goes to show how much they trust us to take care of ourselves — so much so that they’re now planning to slash Medicaid and Medicare, leaving us ‘free’ to set forth into sickness and death on our own. And if that isn’t the good old American spirit of free enterprise, what is?

STRIKING “OIL” WITH FAIR WAGES FOR WOMEN

To explain how Norway pays for all those social programs, almost every American commentator, even when theoretically sympathetic to the Norwegians, points to the income from the country’s North Sea oil fields, discovered and developed in the 1960s. On that, however, they are mistaken.

Norway’s welfare state programs are supported not by oil revenues but by taxing the citizenry. (While some of those citizen taxpayers are paid for working, directly or indirectly, in the oil business, as of 2016 they made up only 7 percent of the Norwegian workforce.) So to understand how Norway can afford to pay for the genuine well-being of its people in such an impressive way, you need to look at those tax rolls, which very nearly doubled in the 1970s when women walked into the workplace (and politics) in a major way—and at wages close to matching those of men. In 2016, the Ministry of Finance calculated that the labor of women added to the net national wealth a value equivalent to the country’s “total petroleum wealth” created by that North Sea oil and held in the world’s largest sovereign -wealth fund, worth in 2017 more than $1 trillion.

It’s pretty scary to think of hordes of immigrants from such a country landing on our shores, considering the radical reality I’ve just described, the startling idea that you could upgrade an economy in a wholesale way just by requiring fair wages for women. Not to mention that with the taxes those women pay, you could fully fund free universal child care, the lack of which drives American women from the workplace back home, where Republicans think they belong. In the United States, none of our good-old boy leaders would dream of enacting programs so… well, unpatriarchal. Or how about another idea I’ve heard from many Norwegians: that gender equality is the key to the good life?

But about that North Sea oil money: It, too, represents a kind of thinking utterly alien to this country. Oil is something we Americans believe we understand. Spill it in Alaska, spill it in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, drill for it in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (thanks to the need to secure Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski’s vote for that tax “reform” bill), as well as up and down the coasts of the country (except for Florida, the home of Trump’s favorite golf club). We don’t mind what you do with it, as long as you keep down the costs of propelling our outsized vehicles over our outdated highways.

Norway, on the other hand, owns 67 percent of the shares in Statoil, the Norwegian oil company that controls those North Sea wells, even as it leads the world’s changeover to electric vehicles. It’s a country with a remarkable record of developing and adopting new technologies while phasing out the old, so its workforce is always employed. By law, the government spends no more (and usually less) than 4 percent of its yearly oil profits on current expenses. The other 96 percent or more, it pours into that trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund. That, in turn, has been set aside for the future, for the country’s children and their children, although some Norwegians, famous for their worldwide humanitarian and peacemaking activities, now propose to give much of it away to other lands that may need it far more.

Here’s a question for future American administrations: Could they apply for some of that Norwegian money to build an East Coast wall against Norwegian immigrants or maybe to help our kids pay off that estimated $1.5 trillion in debt Trump and the Republicans just handed them in the new tax bill? Could we take advantage of those radical Norwegians without even letting them into our country? I’ll bet Trump could finagle that.

SELLING F-52S TO NORWAY

It’s likely that Norway came to Trump’s mind in that meeting with Senators Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham (among others) as some idyllic source for future white Republicans only because, the day before, he had met with its substantial and very white prime minister, Erna Solberg. (Surprised observers of the meeting tweeted that Solberg speaks better English than the American president—as most Norwegians do.) “Erna,” as Norwegians—for whom everyone is equal and on a first-name basis—call her, is the leader of the Conservative party. She heads a coalition government in which the top three positions are held by women. That in itself might have caused Trump to keep his hands in his pockets, but apparently he wasn’t told. It’s likely he mistook “Conservative” for “Republican,” but as a matter of fact, all nine of Norway’s political parties now in parliament are well to the left not just of the Republicans but of the Democrats and, yes, even that independent “democratic socialist” from Vermont.

At the moment, only one Norwegian cabinet member, Silvi Listhaug of the right-wing Progress Party, might be considered sufficiently neoliberal, über-Christian, and mean to fit into Trump’s regime. Perhaps that’s because her early training included a 2005 internship in the Republican-controlled US House of Representatives.

In Norwegian terms, Erna often tilts dangerously to the right under the pressure of US and British neoliberal economic theorists. It has to be hard for the leader of a small country—five million people, half the population of Haiti—to resist pressure to conform to the autocratic example of a nation that styles itself the most exceptional on Earth. Erna herself is a polite, circumspect politician who, on returning from her visit to the White House, assured reporters in Oslo that President Trump was “a normal man” with “a sense of humor.” Apparently she didn’t mention Trump’s self-proclaimed political acumen, intellectual brilliance, or awesome “America First” foreign policy. Norwegians reading their morning papers could, however, fill in the blanks.

At a joint press conference with Erna, Trump proudly announced that, last November, the United States had delivered the first F-52 and F-35 fighter jets to Norway, part of a $10 billion order of American military equipment. Norwegians are, in fact, stubbornly averse to war and think of their reluctant acquisition of way too many over-priced, overdue, bug-plagued F-35s as a surcharge on NATO membership. But F-52s?

That thoroughly fictional plane, as it turns out, exists only in the video game Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. (Do you suppose Trump spends his executive time playing commander in chief?) Norwegians are having a good laugh, while their commentators are saying “thanks, but no thanks” to Trump’s immigration invitation. If they really mean it, then perhaps we can relax and forget about that wall along the Eastern seaboard.

On the other hand, judging by their press, an awful lot of Norwegians are even more appalled and angered than we are by Trump’s racist slurs about “shithole countries.” What’s more, just days after returning to Norway, Erna Solberg rolled out her new government, a coalition of three parties, all led by women, and a gender-equal cabinet to run ministries focused not only on defense or finance, but also on climate and the environment, eldercare and public health, research and higher education, family and equality. Erna announced that the platform of this new government would be “greener” and committed to sustaining the welfare state. And this, in Norway, is a center-right government.

You see what I mean about Norwegian ideas being totally at odds with Trump’s America. Still, Trump might play that to his advantage. If he and his Republican supporters in Congress decide to build that East Coast wall after all, they might be able to get the Norwegians to pay for it—not to keep them out, but to keep us in.

I hope this piece has been somewhat enlightening regarding this country and its place among the other nations of the world. I will soon have a new essay posted regarding our society and what would possibly result in the election of someone like donald trump to its highest political office.

Practice Peace,
Niemand

Thoughts in Brief

I’m angry, and I don’t like to be angry.

This piece is not a singular, torturously long essay on a single subject, but rather a collection of a few thoughts in brief. Sometimes I think I would like to change the format of the site in general to such a thing, but I just don’t think I have it in me.

I would enjoy making a point in brief and then waiting for people to comment requesting that I explain myself in greater depth on a certain subject, but no one sends comments on any of my essays, so that wouldn’t work. Perhaps about 1% of the people I notify of a new post actually read them. That’s okay. If this entire thing is nothing more than an exercise in personal speech from me to me, then so be it.

Who is my enemy?:

In any political system, especially a republic, the state (Caesar) does not have the right to tell you who your enemies are. That is and must be left to the sole discretion of every citizen and their freedom of conscience; for this principle is the absolute cornerstone of democracy.

The state can tell you of people or groups that they feel act in a manner that is counter to what they see as the ‘national interest,’ but that is all the state has the right to do. From that point forward it is my right, your right, our right to decide who is and who is not our enemy.

This is the sort of foundational, unalienable right that is disappearing from the American social and political landscape. It is not Trump, or his supporters. This process has been going on for almost thirty years, and at this point, may be impossible to stop.

Please don’t worry, you will be able to choose between glazed, chocolate, or jelly far into the foreseeable future. However, you may not be able to choose to remain silent, know protection from unreasonable search and seizure, be able to dissent without fear of governmental reprisal, or decide who is and who is not your enemy for very long.

The Satanists are showing themselves.

Before I begin this portion, I must offer my gratitude to Mr. Benjamin L. Corey, whose blog posts I read on a regular basis. He recently posted an essay which has helped me to focus my thoughts on this issue.

Our embarrassment in chief recently stood before the United Nations General Assembly and spoke to the leaders of the nation-states of this planet. This organization, established in the wake of the destruction and genocide of the Second World War, was formed and established for many purposes. Chief among these is to offer the nations of this world a forum through which they can settle their differences in a peaceful manner; realizing through that process that the actions of two states toward one another affect all other states of the world as well.

Simply stated, the United Nations is an organization established to promote peace and to help realize Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” throughout the entire planet. These four freedoms, as laid out by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, are: freedom of speech and expression, freedom to worship God in one’s own way, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

However, Trump stood before this body and threatened to kill twenty-five million people in retaliation for the actions of, let’s say for the sake of argument, two hundred people, or, really, maybe, just five people. The gathered persons of the General Assembly were rightfully appalled at his comments. The fact that he would stand in that hallowed chamber and defile the very purpose of the United Nations is, in and of itself, disgusting enough, but the worst part is yet to come.

Several high-ranking “Christian” evangelicals came out cheering this speech, saying that it is about time that a president spoke up for America. They praised this speech and all of the threats of death it carried with it. They praised this speech that was diametrically opposed to anything Jesus would have said or done. They praised this speech and the man who spoke its words in worship of the enemy of God. Prominent among these were Franklin Graham and Robert Jeffress; two of the most evil men to ever walk this planet. The satanists are showing themselves.

Not until white people start doing it:

Recently, several professional athletes of color have been kneeling during the national anthem at the start of games of the National Football League. This has drawn a mix of boos at the event and cheers afterward. What are they trying to say? I don’t really care what they’re trying to say, but here’s what I’m saying in support of them: “Not only do I don’t buy the lie anymore, but I refuse to sell it, too.”

Selling the lie, you say? Yes. Every time that song plays, and every time the pledge of allegiance is recited and you participate, you are selling something to the person next to you. You are trying to sell them the idea that you support what this country does in direct opposition to what its propaganda says it does, and over what it says countries and peoples should do. You’re trying to sell them on your patriotism; that you think “my country, right or wrong” is a valid argument for doing anything. You’re trying to sell them the fact that you continue to buy the lie, no matter how expensive it is. If you know me, then you know that patriotism, as a rationale for any action, pretty much makes me want to vomit. It is, after all, “the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

Colin Kapernick is a man of incredible bravery and conviction, and it cost him his career (to date). The problem, however, it this; everything these black athletes do and say (most of them quite eloquently) won’t amount to anything in terms of solid change within our police forces and social policy until your average joe white guys start joining the fight. Are you brave enough to suffer the momentary admonitions of a few jingoistic hyper-patriot jackasses to stand…I mean kneel beside him?

I’m going to stop right here and ask each of you to do something when you finish reading this post. No. In fact, please stop reading the post and do the following: Look up the email address and phone number of your state and national legislators, write them on something, and put that something on your refrigerator. The saying that “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” is true (although ‘get’ is not really a word) and if each of us squeaks just a little bit, it’ll make a big noise in the end. If you place a phone call once in a while on a subject that means something to you (or the republic), that will squeak. It will take three minutes and you’ll feel really good about it when your done. You’ll also find out just how scared of you these people are.

Here’s a little something to spur some thought on this matter: One year ago the statistic was the following: an unarmed black American dies at the hands of the police every nine days in this country. I don’t know what the number is now, but I think we can all agree that it’s not decreasing. On top of this, the police are now targeting the mentally ill of all racial and ethnic origins; using their inability to immediately process orders barked at them as justification for murder. It has to stop, and if demonstrating that you understand that murder by the police is what this flag, its pledge, and the anthem of this country really represent means taking a knee when they are recited, then do it. Unless, of course, if you think that all of this is okay, and very cool.

America is a strange, ‘wild west showdown’ sort of place. It really is. This is because at some point in the history of our culture we decided that it was okay for the police to kill people. Not all societies have made that decision, and it is not as common as you may think. We, as a society, need to ‘undecide’ that. We need to say “No, it is NOT okay for the police to kill people. This is especially true in a society which is witnessing the rapid militarization of its police forces.

If there is one cornerstone to the system of republican governance that stands beside freedom of conscience mentioned in the first part of this post, it is that one is considered innocent until proven guilty in open court by a jury of one’s peers. This, my friends is disappearing quickly at the hands of our militarized police forces. They now posses the power and the authority to act as judge, jury, and executioner in the most real terms imaginable. Sadly, our politicians are, for the most part, fully behind them, for the police murder in defense of the status quo.

This should all be reason enough to join our black brothers and sisters in calling attention to this brutality by refusing to participate in hollow patriotic rituals. However, if you need more, just ask me and I will supply them.

Enough is enough!:

Las Vegas was it. That’s enough. I’m sick and tired of people being slaughtered in this country because the nut-jobs of the right wing seem to think that ever more guns will cure our cancer of gun violence. Here is what I propose each of us do in order to cure ourselves of this disease:

Confront the pro-NRA people in our midst. The thing about these people is that they will shout their insanity in public places with the understanding that no one will speak up in opposition. That has to stop. Confront them and tell them honestly that they are the murderers of Las Vegas. It wasn’t that mentally ill guy who went off the rails, it was them. The lives of the dead are on their shoulders. The shattered lives of the wounded and the witnesses who will carry the horror of that night to their graves are on their consciences. They are the killers in and of this country.
Tell them honestly that it will not be the government that will come for their automatic weapons and assault rifles, but the good people of this country who are sick and tired of them and their willingness to watch innocent people die because they think some foaming-at-the-mouth interpretation of the second amendment is what the framers of our constitution intended. “Hey, boy, The 2nd Amendment’s all the 1st Amendment I need!”
Tell all members of congress with anything ‘better’ that a ‘C’ rating from the NRA that they will be a target singled out for defeat in the next election. Here is the call you need to make: “Hello, Senator Makeamericagreatagain’s office.” “Yes, I am a constituent of Senator Makeamericaahellhole. What is the senator’s rating with the NRA?” “Oh, why the senator has an A+++ rating with that wonderful, patriotic organization!” “Good, then tell the senator that he now has a target on his back. He is a A+++ target for defeat in the next election. Unless, of course, he decides to leave the money of the NRA for the American people.” It’s that simple. They need to either fully enter the 21st century as human beings, or find themselves out of a job. Then they can sit at home and watch all of the westerns they want; they just won’t be allowed to foist their insanity on our society anymore.

Note to the right wing: Chuck Connors’ character is not real, and you are not “The Rifleman”…or maybe you are. Yes, you are! You are “The Rifleman” on the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay.

Question for the right wing: How many souls can you have on your individual consciences before you change your stance on gun control? I think is must be in the hundreds of millions, because you do not, to my memory, ever support the policies of government that enhance life; only those that enhance death.

You oppose funding for general, public education, and support the most bloated military in the history of humankind. You hide this perpetual war (off of which you and your shareholder friends make millions of dollars) behind the shroud of ‘protecting’ the American public. You refuse to see basic healthcare as a human right and hold fast to the belief that exploitation of American families for the benefit of the insurance-pharmaceutical cartel is, in and of itself, good. Cartel? Yes, the term is appropriate, because what your politicians do and the policies you both support kill more people than the collective wrath of every Latin American drug gang in existence.

Really, I think the political right wing in this country is repulsive. The worst thing about its adherents is that the vast majority profess to follow the religion known as Christianity. They have turned this church; this beautiful extension of the body of the Christ into a parasite that feeds off of the blood of any it can infest, and defiles the name of Jesus with every moment of its existence.

Enough is enough.

Sometimes I think that love won’t work; that the only thing that will save us is wrath. Sometimes I think that the time for peace is past.

Love and peace to all

Niemand

One Total State, One Autocracy, and Us

This essay begins at the first half of one central question: “Can it happen here?” The answer, of course, is yes, it can happen here. In fact, it can happen anywhere. The evil in the human heart is universal, and each of us battles to subdue it every day. Well, that’s not exactly true. I am certain that there are lots of people who do not fight the evil within them, but I don’t personally know anyone in the Trump Administration.

Also, in case you have absolutely no historical consciousness whatsoever and, therefore, no concept of what this question means, I suppose it is my responsibility to save you the trouble of ‘googling’ it. ‘Can it happen here?’ refers specifically to the question as to whether or not a regime as totalitarian and brutal as the Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler in Germany between the years 1933 and 1945 can happen here. For us in the United States the question is specific to our society. In fact, every nation must ask itself this question often and take the steps necessary to insure that it doesn’t happen here (wherever ‘here’ for them is).

Unfortunately, in the United States of America, it is happening here. In the wake of Charlottesville, we must all come to grips with the reality that there are vast cadres of willing Sturm Abteilung (Storm Troopers) standing ready for a single word from their would-be Hitler, Donald Trump. The moment he says “go,” they will unleash their violent fury on every minority person, women’s organization, individual they may suspect as being a member of the LGBT community, and ‘liberal’ they can reach. Their reach will be long and they will be, for the most part, protected by local police forces.

Since I began this essay, one particular event has occurred that requires mention. On Friday, August 25th, President Donald Trump extended a presidential pardon to convicted felon, Joe Arpaio. Mr. Arpaio, the former sheriff of Mariposa County, Arizona, was convicted in federal court of criminal contempt of a court order to stop policing Mariposa County in a clearly and unapologetic racist and bigoted manner. He instructed his deputies to engage in blatant ethnic profiling of Latino Americans and held them without cause or trial in conditions which one can only describe as ‘barbaric’ at best.

This is clearly anathema to everything for which we have been told, since we were children, that America stands and means; both to us and the world at large. To put it in simpler terms, Joe Arpaio is as un-American as one person could possibly be; he stands in opposition to every reason why the good people of this world come here to make better lives for themselves and their families. Mr. Arpaio slouches through his day as the darling little poster child for the white supremacists and nazis that have come out of the darkness since the election of Donald Trump. It is happening here.

Since we are all, now, acutely aware that it can happen here, the second half of the central question becomes the relevant point we must address: Can it succeed here? This, my friends, is really the core of the central question. Since it is happening here, the question is, can it succeed here? The answer to this question is also ‘yes,’ but it will not be easy, and in this vein I will discuss the total state and the autocracy mentioned in the title.

The Total State:

We all know that it succeeded in Germany, and this success has, since the defeat of the Third Reich in the Second World War, given rise to what is known among historians of this period as “The German Question.” Simply posed, The German Question asks: Is there something about the German that predisposes him to such brutal, totalitarian rule? I believe the answer is ‘no.’ However, I do believe that there is something about humans that predisposes us to such brutal totalitarian rule. A political map of our world showing the locations of political prisons should be proof enough.

Why did it succeed in Germany? After their team finished second in the First World War, Germany had a government imposed on it that was completely foreign to its history and the consciousness of its people: the Weimar Republic.

This experiment in republicanism in Germany might have succeeded, were it not for the circumstances in which it had to try to take root. The government of Weimar became the scapegoat amongst almost all politicians across the political spectrum in Germany for the country’s social and economic woes. The generals and politicians that led her into the disastrous war of 1914 – 1918 did not have to shoulder the blame for their actions, as many also blamed the republic for Germany’s defeat in the war, even though it was not even established until 1919.

We must also understand that the domestic circumstances in which Germany found itself in the late 1920s and early 1930s made the nation ripe for the message of a madman like Adolf Hitler. A small sampling of these circumstances are: hyper-inflation which reduced the value of the Reichsmark to a low of four trillion marks to the dollar in the 1920s (it required a wheelbarrow full of money just to buy a loaf of bread), massive unemployment across all sectors of the economy and labor force, political unrest that saw the two opposing extremes, communists and fascists, engaged in regular street brawls, and perhaps most importantly, a vengeful peace imposed upon Germany by the Treaty of Versailles which stripped it of land in the Ruhr Valley (the heart of its industrial sector), much of its armed forces and, as many saw, its pride. These are only a few of the elements that made the German people susceptible to the lies of the nazis. Add to all of this the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, which gripped every industrialized nation on the planet, and you have a socio-political recipe for disaster.

Most importantly, however, within this context, is the fact that Germany had no history of liberal republicanism of which to speak. In stark social and economic times a nation will revert to what it knows in order to find solace and peace. The political system of Germany proceeded from numerous kingdoms, principalities and small city-states to one central government, essentially imposed upon it by Prussia, and under the rule of Kaisers Wilhelm I and II in the period from 1871 to 1918. In the midst of their depression and humiliation the German people were ready to submit their liberty for the security of a new Kaiser. Strange though it may seem, German unification into a single powerful and dangerous nation-state in 1871 occurred in a ceremony at the Bourbon palace of Versailles in France. So I guess we can blame the French for Germany.

That’s joke, please laugh.

In order to be successful, a republic that functions through the democratic process must be something that the people choose. It cannot be imposed, it must evolve from the desires of the people for freedom. Luckily, people will always, as far as I have been able to deduce, choose to be a ‘citizen of a republic’ over a ‘subject of a kingdom,’ or a ‘minion of a total state.’ It is unfortunate for Germany and, indeed, the world as a whole, that the German people did not have the opportunity to experience this evolution among its political leadership prior to 1933. The Federal Republic of Germany of the twenty-first century has over seventy years of democratic rule behind it and this should, for the present time, hold it securely.

The Autocracy:

It succeeded in Germany in 1933 and it is succeeding in the Russian Federation in 2017.

I’ll give Vladimir Putin one thing (other than my foot in his ass). He is a very astute politician. This is not because he turned Donald Trump’s entire inner circle of advisors (and a good portion of his family) into his personal bitches. You don’t have to be astute, or even very smart to do that, you only have to be awake to wrangle a deal like that out of Trump.

I don’t like Vladimir Putin’s politics, but I can tell you this; he will go down in history as one of the most adaptable and renowned political minds of the early twenty-first century. Regardless of the undemocratic nature of the policies he pursues and the autocracy he is trying to establish in Russia, his political legacy will far outlast his human life. Unfortunately, that legacy will be what he is making of it; a return to the cruel and jack-booted rule of the Soviet Union.

The question for this essay is ‘why is Putin succeeding?’ I think it is, again, just like with the Germans of the Weimar Republic, a lack of history of political and personal liberty. If Putin has his way, this will be the downfall of democracy in Russia. We must remember that the people of Russia went from centuries of monarchical rule ending in the Romanov Dynasty, straight to the totally enveloping rule of the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Union. It was only in the late 1980s and early 1990s that the Russian people finally tasted anything even approaching western liberal society and its basic freedoms and personal liberties.

Unfortunately, this liberalization of society was accompanied by a steep and noticeable decline in Russian military power on a global scale, and it is this decline that Putin has exploited to his full advantage. As Russia turned inwards to try and heal the scars of Soviet rule, the United States government basked in a false glory of having ‘won the cold war’ and sought to establish a unipolar world pecking order with itself and its corporate partners at the top.

Russia, as a new democracy, had the opportunity to seize the initiative in pushing for democratic reforms in many, if not all, of her former satellite states, and she did, for a while, but the momentum could not be maintained. The reasons for this are many, but the continued push of the United States into areas of former Soviet influence was as much to blame as anything else. The results of these influences are — just as it was in Germany — a descent into the familiar; the strong man.

“To be an Englishman is a fact, to be a Frenchman is a fact, to be a German is a fact. The be an American is an idea.” We have to ask ourselves a very important question: “What is the ‘idea’ of being an American becoming?” Not to us, but to the rest of the world. It is becoming this: “I guarantee you, you sons of bitches, that the last thing I want here is your damned tired, your filthy poor, and your nasty huddled masses yearning to breathe free camping out in my back yard.” That may sound harsh, but it’s the truth. That is the new voice of America in the world.

The true America of today, in relation to that which it has always appeared to be to the rest of the world, is now nothing more than a bad joke. Trump is the harlequin, the fool, the court jester running the tiny dog show. His dogs are Scott Pruitt, Steve Bannon, Betsy DeVos, and a host of others who bounce about him in a sycophantic delirium seeking to destroy all this country has marketed itself to be in this world.

Essentially, regardless of the problems we face internally as a society; rampant and increasingly vocal racism, a growing culture of unbridled exploitation of the worker, a corporate consumerist culture that devours the soul of any who buy into it, and a dominant fundamentalist evangelical religion that defiles the name of Jesus in the name of the American empire and ever greater profit for itself, America still represents something special to the huddled masses of the world. America, since it is an ‘idea’ above all else is, first, last, and always, how others in the world perceive it.

Michael J. Koplow wrote quite well in his article in Foreign Policy Digest [Jan. 30, 2017]: “…people around the world have historically seen the United States not just as a place on the map, but as something bigger. The power of the American dream and the iconography of the Statue of Liberty mean something. They have value far beyond feel-good expressions of patriotism. They represent America as something for which to strive, as an expression of hopes and dreams for a better life, as a fulfillment of a quest for ultimate safety and prosperity and liberty. They represent America not just as a place for Americans, but, as John Winthrop stated, ‘a shining city upon a hill for the entire world.’ The power of the United States comes from many sources, but more than anything else it comes from the strength of the American idea.”

He continues a few paragraphs later with this: “This is the challenge that we now face…in evaluating everything that comes over the next four years, do not lose sight for a moment of how powerful and important for all of us it is to maintain America as an idea. Doing so will be more important than the sum total of every individual policy outcome. In all instances, do your best to ensure that we continue to lift our lamp beside the golden door. Because when the idea of America is snuffed out, we forever become just another country.”

So, here is the crux. The only thing that will prevent it from succeeding here is our history of personal liberty and the freedom of the individual. This has been the core of this great American experiment ever since its inception and all of American history revolves around this core set of values.

Yet therein also lie the great problems. First, our ‘history of personal liberty and the freedom of the individual’ is a lie and in truth applies only to white males over the age of twenty-one. The dissipation of this ‘white male privilege’ as ‘human rights’ to all genders, and racial and ethnic minorities is the exact thing that Trump, his henchmen, and their solid voting block of poor white deplorables hope to destroy.

Second, though many will say that our constitution will protect us from such a power grab in this country, I think we all know that those who believe such a thing are living in a dream world. No constitution is worth the paper or parchment upon which it is written unless the people governed by its articles and amendments are prepared to stand up and enforce its ideals and principles when it is challenged. If we are unable or unwilling to defend our republic (in the streets if necessary), then we’re already done. We’ve lost and it will succeed here. If we leave it to the cowards in state and national Houses of Representatives and Senate chambers to defend our republic in the halls of government, then we’re already done. We’ve lost and it will succeed here.

My friends, we have to do it. The time will come, it is inevitable. It will come in our lifetime. The survival of America as an idea is in our hands. We must not fail ourselves, our children, or, indeed, the world. We cannot stop it from happening here (we are too late for that), but we cannot allow it to succeed here.

Peace and love to all,

Niemand