03.02.16

Just sayin’

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall, The Corporate Bund, WhiteManistan at 2:58 pm by George Smith

Excerpt’s from George Orwell’s review of “Mein Kampf”:

“What he envisions … a continuous state of 250 million Germans with plenty of ‘living room’ (stretching to Afghanistan or thereabouts), a horrible brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder.”

“He had crushed the labor movement and for that the property-owning classes were willing to forgive him almost anything.”

“[His] is the fixed vision of a monomaniac and not likely to be much affected by the temporary maneuvres of power politics.”

“[The slogan] ‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end’ is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.”

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What the mainstream media and Gawker didn’t get over the weekend in having a good Twitter laugh about tricking Donald Trump into quoting Mussolini: The people who are going to vote for him don’t care. In fact, they’ll find it affirming, (1) because they don’t really know anything about Il Duce if they knew about him at all, and (2), they’ll agree with Trump, it’s a quote that’s great for re-tweeting.

So no prize to Gawker or anyone else smirking when there’s a 50-50 chance the election will throw them to the Devil and merciless statistics in November.

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From Truth-out today, on a matter I covered for over a decade:

But as much as the Republican Party created Trump, it shares parentage with the transpartisan national security complex. Politicians, generals, CIA directors, think tank warriors and terrorism “experts” have been dinning a message of fear into our heads for a decade and a half, a fear that works on many voters like catnip on a feline.

The author continues:

The fear, of course, can only be exorcised by a policy of nonstop militarism. Congratulations, patricians of the Beltway: However disdainful you are of the vulgarian Trump, you helped put him where he is today …

I’d estimate the odds at about fifty-fifty that this country ends up with something resembling a fascist political system, if not in 2017, then at some point in the next decade. We may never hear it called that: The prestige media have up to now mostly maintained an embargo on words like “fascist” or “authoritarian”; it will be fascinating to see at which point in the coming year – if at all – the embargo is lifted. No, we won’t have black uniforms and goose-stepping. In the US cultural vernacular, it would be more like Lee Greenwood played on an endless loop, with patriotic ceremonies even more lugubrious and hypocritical than the ones now at professional sporting events.

So when you read those stories about how Michael Hayden went on Maher to claim the military wouldn’t follow some of Donald Trump’s orders were he President, to these you should say: Bullshit it won’t.

The Wehrmacht’s general staff, those that survived, was said to have many principled men who detested the Fuhrer. And that made such a difference.

The point to be made is not that the United States is like the Third Reich.

When it fails big time, it will do so in a way unique to itself, of its history. But people haven’t changed. Americans, US military men, don’t have some special DNA or secret patent trumping the regular human condition. They make the same historical mistakes, again and again, always thinking we’ll be different this time because …

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Yes, Trump is about racism, Islamophobia and making America great “again.” But you’re missing the point if you don’t see that supporting him is also about saying fuck you to the political class, if not the political system. Of course, there are more constructive ways to do this. — Barbara Ehrenreich, on Facebook

The revenge vote is going to be strong. Four decades of slump is a long time to have been keeping a lid on the growing rage. Hillary Clinton will never understand it.

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