DEFEAT FASCISM

 Been much talk lately about how such a frightening percentage of Americans accept buffoonery and debauchery from so many of our political leaders. I'm not too smart nor well educated but I have my thoughts. I think an appropriate analogy for the American psyche at present aligns with the old sci-fi films of the 1950s.

I think the evil is always there within us. It's tribal and genetic. Distrust and violence are embedded in our genes. Tendencies for warfare with strangers are natural.

We haven't subdued them through religion or philosophy. Rather, what we call morality is a result of social contracts, agreements, and barters. I won't kill you or steal from you if you won't kill or steal from me. Let our villages trade with each other, not raid each other. Let us see how peace and harmony works to our benefit. Let us develop a monetary system so we don't have to steal animals for survival. Let us talk, not fight. Peace results from rational thought.

So evil becomes subdued like the 1950s monsters, deep underground.

Then an explosion opens a path for evil to rise, a path to destruction. It isn't from a bomb, but from evil-minded politicians who use our distrust as a detonator. We become engulfed by the results of evil. We need a John Agar to develop a plan of survival that, "Just might work.

With apologies to Steven Pinker.

DEFEAT FASCISM

 A synopsis of the 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis:

"In 1936, American Senator Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip enters the presidential election campaign on a populist platform, promising to restore the country to prosperity and greatness, and promising each citizen US$5,000 per year (equivalent to $113,000 in 2024). Portraying himself as a champion of "the forgotten man" and "traditional" American values, Windrip defeats incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination, and then beats his Republican opponent, Senator Walt Trowbridge, in the November election.

 Having previously foreshadowed some authoritarian measures to reorganize the government, Windrip outlaws dissent, incarcerates political enemies in concentration camps, and trains and arms a paramilitary force called the "Minute Men" (named after the Revolutionary War militias of the same name), who terrorize citizens and enforce the policies of a corporatist regime. One of Windrip's first acts as president is to eliminate the influence of Congress, which draws the ire of many citizens as well as the legislators themselves. The Minute Men respond to protests harshly, attacking demonstrators with bayonets. In addition to these actions, Windrip's administration, known as the Corpo government, curtails women's and minority rights, and eliminates individual states by subdividing the country into administrative sectors. The government of these sectors is managed by Corpo authorities, usually prominent businessmen or Minute Men officers. Those accused of crimes against the government appear before kangaroo courts presided over by military judges. A majority of Americans approve of these dictatorial measures, seeing them as painful but necessary steps to restore American power." - Wikipedia

DEFEAT FASCISM

 Reading “Murder Among Friends” by Candace Fleming. It’s the latest recounting of the murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924 by teenagers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. All lived in Chicago near one another and the murder shocked the world, created new standards in criminal law, and caused generations of concern about mental capabilities.

The two murderers were from wealthy families and well educated. They lived under the Nietzschean idea that some individuals were superhuman and marched to a different moral drum than mere mortals. They chose their victim because he was walking home from school. They simply wanted to experience the thrill of murder.

Disclaimer. I’m no psychiatrist. Nor am I a psychologist. I’m not overly educated. Both degrees originated from state-supported public universities. I do claim the right, however, to be fascinated. I am.
Some analysts suggest that two people acting together will participate in horrific actions that neither would consider when acting alone.

Some increasingly accepted scholarship suggests that interactions with peer groups largely determine our adult proclivities and that parental upbringing contributes little. See “The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do” by the psychologist Judith Rich Harris. (Don’t yell at me.)

What fascinates me is this: In a younger life, I joined thousands of youth, some as young as 17 years, who learned from respected authority figures that it was perfectly acceptable to do what Loeb and Leopold did, i.e. murder a randomly selected youth from another tribe. The burden posited that it was not only okay, but our duty, to murder on demand, whether by hand, pistol, rifle, knife, artillery, or (for the more timid at heart) with bombs dropped from thousands of feet in the air. Almost all of my peer group would have complied if ordered to.

Now we ask ourselves why millions of Americans blindly follow a command to murder the American dream.

Further reading: The Milgram Experiment On Obedience to Authority.

Oh, clicking on an ad helps me fund these efforts.

DEFEAT FASCISM

A Song For The Victors 

One might consider a continuum of justice applied by the victorious to the vanquished. At one end we might find “occupy and govern.” This is a relatively benign situation in which, assuming there is order and tranquility, the defeated peoples go about their business. The Romans often used this, creating the so-called “Pax Romana." Napolean did at times. Even some of the Ottoman conquerors found it efficacious. Within this model, the victors may even contribute to the safety and reconstruction of a ravaged nation.

At the other extreme is the choice of “demolish and destroy.” The defeated are vermin who deserve no modicum of morality or shred of legal equality. The Spanish conquerors found little use for the native inhabitants of a country other than slavery and exploitation. The Nazi hierarchy had determined that Hungary would serve as a vassal state wherein its citizens existed only to serve German masters. Victors “own” the defeated under this concept.

Oddly, America offered a unique path, one hardly mentioned by history. After its Civil War ended, both sides simply went home.

It needs no saying which route America’s current victors have chosen at present. It will be interesting, though excruciatingly painful, to see how it works out.

The Russians have found on two occasions that it is hard to "own" large populations of dissatisfied people.

DEFEAT FASCISM

 A Song For The Victors

Some things make sense. Some things don’t. To a degree, i understand the genesis of what has happened to America. By this I mean that a majority has voted in a government designed to repudiate everything I feel my life has stood for.

Am I justifiably aggrieved? I don’t know. My life has been somewhat disjointed. But, and I believe this sincerely, it has exhibited seeds of goodness. I firmly believe in the views of the Galilean as presented on the Sermon on the Mount.

In short, I am on the losing side of this segment of American history.

As an amateur reader of history, I understand the attitude of the victors. I even appreciate their long-view approach to achieving their ends.

One can easily date the beginning of their war to August 14, 1935, some few days short of 90 years ago.

Yes, that’s a long time to hold a grudge. It is the day that the Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. It is fair to choose the act as mascot of the New Deal Legislation, the most hated output of laws in history to social and economic conservatives.” Key benefits included providing direct relief to the unemployed, stimulating economic recovery through public works projects, and establishing long-term social safety nets. These programs also aimed to regulate industries, strengthen labor rights, and provide relief to farmers.” (AI)

The battle to overturn these wasn’t always successful. Americans learned first to appreciate them, next to depend on them, and finally to accept them as a part of America’s greatness.

Brilliant political maneuvering reversed this view. A big step was mentally to disassociate the benefits as being a part of every American’s life and to lock it into the public sentiment of millions as simply tools of the lowest dregs of society, as defined by the ultra-conservative leaders of the opposition. Anyone with a view that government could be a positive force in their life was a sexual deviant, a criminal, an economic leach, or someone who didn’t belong in America in the first place.

It worked. It now forms the governing philosophy of a majority of our elected officials at the national and many state levels. Whether their government will be good or not remains to be seen. What is true is that Americans are about to get it good and hard, as H.L. Mencken once observed.

What is one thing that is hard to understand? They’ve won. They now rule. The battle now must shift to the underground. What is strange about it all is that those at the highest levels of command, each unknown like the mysterious “Mr. X” of old movie serials, have chosen such a dismal, decadent, depraved, and decency-challenged clown as their front man.

DEFEAT FASCISM

 As the news of a great American victory at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania seeped across America 162 years ago today, another, some say even more important, event occurred some 1,000 miles away at Vicksburg, Mississippi. There, after a five-month campaign and a siege of 47 days, General John C. Pemberton surrendered the city and 30,000 rebel troops to a United States Army under the command of General Ulysses S. Grant.

This opened the Mississippi River to traffic and separated the insurrectionist states of Arkansas and Texas from their eastern counterparts.

President Abraham Lincoln observed, "The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea"

The campaign to capture Vicksburg resulted in 48,000 killed, wounded, captured, or missing, counting both sides. The three-day battle at Gettysburg resulted in as many as 51,000. But on July 4, 1863 the dreams of two separate nations, instead of one, had faded.

Freedom isn't free. That makes it even more precious.

DEFEAT FASCISM

 Today we continue to honor an event of 162 years ago, one which did much to save America from an insurrectionist invasion. On a hot July day, in a small crossroads town in Pennsylvania, some 13,000 men trudged up a one-mile ascent of open land with the intent of doing enough damage to our country to preserve the institution of slavery.

At the top of the rise, near a spot immortalized as “the copse of trees,” a bloodied American army waited, its center containing the Second Corps of the Army of the Potomac led by Major General John Gibbon and under the overall command of Major General George Gordon Meade. As mentioned in an earlier post, General Meade had commanded the army for six days, or the equivalent today of since last Saturday.

The assault involved three Confederate divisions Pickett's, Pettigrew's, (formerly Heth's division) and Trimble's (formerly Pender's division).

Up until, and including, this war, battles featured heroic charges by massed men against unreliable weaponry. Improvements to rifles and artillery would make such charges insanely horrible to imagine. Defensive warfare would become the strategy of choice until air power rained destruction far and wide and mobile tanks replaced horse-drawn warfare.

No, children, neither side had air power back then. The president was wrong.

Let us pause and imagine the carnage before us after the assault as the remnants of the insurrectionist army retreated down the hill back to their beloved general who, despite his masterful attempt at preserving slavery, would become one of, if not the, most revered, warriors for many Americans, even some so-called historians.

Because Pickett’s division consisted of mostly Virginian’s, and because Virginians contributed substantially to writing the immediate history of our Civil War, the assault, commanded by General John Longstreet, has come to us in history as “Pickett’s Charge,” a shameful moniker to the other divisions and a lesson to us that history is a complex affair which can’t be learned from watching “Gone With The Wind.”

DEFEAT FASCISM

 So often when a particularly odious law drifts down upon our cities, it contains the admonition that, when trying to adjust to it, a city must employ the "least restrictive option." This occurs even when lives are not threatened but protected. These laws generally originate in far-right think tanks. That's where most of our proposed land use laws originate these days.

I guess the Protocall for ICE didn't emerge from one of those. Their actions call not for "strict scrutiny" but for no scrutiny, thought the lives of individuals and their families are greatly affected.

I think the first thing the panspermian aliens will do when they start putting it all back together is to resurrect the concept of hypocrisy.

DEFEAT FASCISM

 One of our state’s treasures, a journalist much more intelligent than I and eons better at expressing ideas in words, wrote a piece this week about lingering stress and worry. Seems he’s bothered too.

It caused me to think of a bit I heard on NPR once. A prominent scientist said that there is an archaic genetic trigger in our DNA that serves a mysterious purpose. Its only function is to alert us, when we feel safe, that there is still danger lurking about and we should remain aware.

We could call it the “you just think it’s all okay, Jocko” trigger.

It instantly made sense to me. Complacent animals on the savannah were probably the next ones eaten after the old, infirm, and devotees of Fox news. A feeling of safety probably sent all sorts of inviting pheromones to greedy lions, tigers, crocodiles, and primordial TV evangelists.

As they say in my home territory of LA, “Ain’t no sich thang as being too careful when you walk in tall grass.” Best watch where you step. And keep an eye on the clouds. Calm before the storm and all that. Black swan.  Après moi, le deluge.

They all trigger the sense of pervasive doom in the midst of optimism.

I think I felt it the day after Barack Obama was elected for the second time.