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The other week, feeling sick, I spent a day on my couch with the TV on and was reminded of an odd fact of American life. More than seven months before Election Day, you can watch the 2016 campaign for the presidency at any moment of your choosing, and that’s been true since at least late last year. There is essentially never a time when some network or news channel isn’t reporting on, discussing, debating, analyzing, speculating about, or simply drooling over some aspect of the primary campaign, of Hillary, Bernie, Ted, and above all — a million times above all — The Donald (from the violence at his rallies to the size of his hands). In case you’re young and think this is more or less the American norm, it isn’t. Or wasn’t.
Truly, there is something new under the sun. Of course, in 1994 with O.J. Simpson’s white Ford Bronco chase (95 million viewers!), the 24/7 media event arrived full blown in American life and something changed when it came to the way we focused on our world and the media focused on us. But you can be sure of one thing: never in the history of television, or any other form of media, has a single figure garnered the amount of attention — hour after hour, day after day, week after week — as Donald Trump. If he’s the O.J. Simpson of twenty-first-century American politics and his run for the presidency is the eternal white Ford Bronco chase of our moment, then we’re in a truly strange world.
Or let me put it another way: this is not an election. I know the word “election” is being used every five seconds and somewhere along the line significant numbers of Americans (particularly, this season, Republicans) continue to enter voting booths or in the case of primary caucuses, school gyms and the like, to choose among various candidates, so it’s all still election-like. But take my word for it as a 71-year-old guy who’s been watching our politics for decades: this is not an election of the kind the textbooks once taught us was so crucial to American democracy. If, however, you’re sitting there waiting for me to tell you what it is, take a breath and don’t be too disappointed. I have no idea, though it’s certainly part bread-and-circuses spectacle, part celebrity obsession, and part media money machine.
Actually, before we go further, let me hedge my bets on the idea that Donald Trump is a twenty-first-century O.J. Simpson. It’s certainly a reasonable enough comparison, but I’ve begun to wonder about the usefulness of just about any comparison in our present situation. Even the most nightmarish of them — Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, or any past extreme demagogue of your choice — may actually prove to be covert gestures of consolation, reassurance, and comfort. Yes, what’s happening in our world is increasngly extreme and could hardly be weirder, we seem to have the urge to say, but it’s still recognizable. It’s something we’ve encountered before, something we’ve made sense of in the past and, in the process, overcome.
Round Up the Usual Suspects
But what if that’s not true? In some ways, the most frightening, least acceptable thing to say about our American world right now — even if Donald Trump’s overwhelming presence all but begs us to say it — is that we’ve entered uncharted territory and, under the circumstances, comparisons might actually impair our ability to come to grips with our new reality. My own suspicion: Donald Trump is only the most obvious instance of this, the example no one can miss.
In these first years of the twenty-first century, we may be witnessing a new world being born inside the hollowed-out shell of the American system. As yet, though we live with this reality every day, we evidently just can’t bear to recognize it for what it might be. When we survey the landscape, what we tend to focus on is that shell — the usual elections (in somewhat heightened form), the usual governmental bodies (a little tarnished) with the usual governmental powers (a little diminished or redistributed), including the usual checks and balances (a little out of whack), and the same old Constitution (much praised in its absence), and yes, we know that none of this is working particularly well, or sometimes at all, but it still feels comfortable to view what we have as a reduced, shabbier, and more dysfunctional version of the known.
Perhaps, however, it’s increasingly a version of the unknown. We say, for instance, that Congress is “paralyzed,” and that little can be done in a country where politics has become so “polarized,” and we wait for something to shake us loose from that “paralysis,” to return us to a Washington closer to what we remember and recognize. But maybe this is it. Maybe even if the Republicans somehow lost control of the House of Representatives and the Senate, we would still be in a situation something like what we’re now labeling paralysis. Maybe in our new American reality, Congress is actually some kind of glorified, well-lobbied, and well-financed version of a peanut gallery.
Of course, I don’t want to deny that much of what is “new” in our world has a long history. The present yawning inequality gap between the 1% and ordinary Americans first began to widen in the 1970s and — as Thomas Frank explains so brilliantly in his new book, Listen, Liberal — was already a powerful and much-discussed reality in the early 1990s, when Bill Clinton ran for president. Yes, that gap is now more like an abyss and looks ever more permanently embedded in the American system, but it has a genuine history, as for instance do 1% elections and the rise and self-organization of the “billionaire class,” even if no one, until this second, imagined that government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires might devolve into government of the billionaire, by the billionaire, and for the billionaire — that is, just one of them.
Indeed, much of our shape-shifting world can be written about as a set of comparisons and in terms of historical reference points. Inequality has a history. The military-industrial complex and the all-volunteer military, like the warrior corporation, weren’t born yesterday; neither was our state of perpetual war, nor the national security state that now looms over Washington, nor its surveilling urge, the desire to know far too much about the private lives of Americans. (A little bow of remembrance to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover is in order here.)
And yet, true as all that may be, Washington increasingly seems like a new land, sporting something like a new system in the midst of our much-described polarized and paralyzed politics. The national security state doesn’t seem faintly paralyzed or polarized to me. Nor does the Pentagon. On certain days when I catch the news, I can’t believe how strange and yet humdrum this uncharted new territory is. Remind me, for instance, where in the Constitution the Founding Fathers wrote about that national security state? And yet there it is in all its glory, all its powers, an ever more independent force in our nation’s capital. In what way, for instance, did those men of the revolutionary era prepare the ground for the Pentagon to loose its spy drones from our distant war zones over the United States? And yet, so it has. And no one even seems disturbed by the development. The news, barely noticed or noted, was instantly absorbed into what’s becoming the new normal.
Graduation Ceremonies in the Imperium
Let me mention here the almost random piece of news that recently made me wonder just what planet I was actually on. And I know you won’t believe it, but it had absolutely nothing to do with Donald Trump.
Given the carnage of America’s wars and conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa, which I’ve been following closely these last years, I’m unsure why this particular moment even got to me. Best guess? Maybe that, of all the once-obscure places — from Afghanistan to Yemen to Libya — in which the U.S. has been fighting recently, Somalia, where this particular little slaughter took place, seems to me like the most obscure of all. Yes, I’ve been half-attending to events there from the 1993 Blackhawk Down moment to the disastrous U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion of 2006 to the hardly less disastrous invasion of that country by Kenyan and other African forces. Still, Somalia?
Recently, U.S. Reaper drones and manned aircraft launched a set of strikes against what the Pentagon claimed was a graduation ceremony for “low-level” foot soldiers in the Somali terror group al-Shabab. It was proudly announced that more than 150 Somalis had died in this attack. In a country where, in recent years, U.S. drones and special ops forces had carried out a modest number of strikes against individual al-Shabab leaders, this might be thought of as a distinct escalation of Washington’s endless low-level conflict there (with a raid involving U.S. special ops forces following soon after).
Now, let me try to put this in some personal context. Since I was a kid, I’ve always liked globes and maps. I have a reasonable sense of where most countries on this planet are. Still, Somalia? I have to stop and give that one some thought to truly locate it on a mental map of eastern Africa. Most Americans? Honestly, I doubt they’d have a clue. So the other day, when this news came out, I stopped a moment to take it in. If accurate, we killed 150 more or less nobodies (except to those who knew them) and maybe even a top leader or two in a country most Americans couldn’t locate on a map.
I mean, don’t you find that just a little odd, no matter how horrible the organization they were preparing to fight for? 150 Somalis? Blam!
Remind me: On just what basis was this modest massacre carried out? After all, the U.S. isn’t at war with Somalia or with al-Shabab. Of course, Congress no longer plays any real role in decisions about American war making. It no longer declares war on any group or country we fight. (Paralysis!) War is now purely a matter of executive power or, in reality, the collective power of the national security state and the White House. The essential explanation offered for the Somali strike, for instance, is that the U.S. had a small set of advisers stationed with African Union forces in that country and it was just faintly possible that those guerrilla graduates might soon prepare to attack some of those forces (and hence U.S. military personnel). It seems that if the U.S. puts advisers in place anywhere on the planet — and any day of any year they are now in scores of countries — that’s excuse enough to validate acts of war based on the “imminent” threat of their attack.
Or just think of it this way: a new, informal constitution is being written in these years in Washington. No need for a convention or a new bill of rights. It’s a constitution focused on the use of power, especially military power, and it’s being written in blood.
These days, our government (the unparalyzed one) acts regularly on the basis of that informal constitution-in-the-making, committing Somalia-like acts across significant swathes of the planet. In these years, we’ve been marrying the latest in wonder technology, our Hellfire-missile-armed drones, to executive power and slaughtering people we don’t much like in majority Muslim countries with a certain alacrity. By now, it’s simply accepted that any commander-in-chief is also our assassin-in-chief, and that all of this is part of a wartime-that-isn’t-wartime system, spreading the principle of chaos and dissolution to whole areas of the planet, leaving failed states and terror movements in its wake.
When was it, by the way, that “the people” agreed that the president could appoint himself assassin-in-chief, muster his legal beagles to write new “law” that covered any future acts of his (including the killing of American citizens), and year after year dispatch what essentially is his own private fleet of killer drones to knock off thousands of people across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa? Weirdly enough, after almost 14 years of this sort of behavior, with ample evidence that such strikes don’t suppress the movements Washington loathes (and often only fan the flames of resentment and revenge that help them spread), neither the current president and his top officials, nor any of the candidates for his office have the slightest intention of ever grounding those drones.
And when exactly did the people say that, within the country’s vast standing military, which now garrisons much of the planet, a force of nearly 70,000 Special Operations personnel should be birthed, or that it should conduct covert missions globally, essentially accountable only to the president (if him)? And what I find strangest of all is that few in our world find such developments strange at all.
A Planet in Decline?
In some way, all of this could be said to work. At the very least, it is a functioning new system-in-the-making that we have yet to truly come to grips with, just as we haven’t come to grips with a national security state that surveils the world in a way that even science fiction writers (no less totalitarian rulers) of a previous era could never have imagined, or the strange version of media overkill that we still call an election. All of this is by now both old news and mind-bogglingly new.
Do I understand it? Not for a second.
This is not war as we knew it, nor government as we once understood it, nor are these elections as we once imagined them, nor is this democracy as it used to be conceived of, nor is this journalism of a kind ever taught in a journalism school. This is the definition of uncharted territory. It’s a genuine American terra incognita and yet in some fashion that unknown landscape is already part of our sense of ourselves and our world. In this “election” season, many remain shocked that a leading candidate for the presidency is a demagogue with a visible authoritarian side and what looks like an autocratic bent. All such labels are pinned on Donald Trump, but the new American system that’s been emerging from its chrysalis in these years already has just those tendencies. So don’t blame it all on Donald Trump. He should be far less of a shock to this country than he continues to be. After all, a Trumpian world-in-formation has paved the way for him.
Who knows? Perhaps what we’re watching is the new iteration of a very old story: a twenty-first-century version of an ancient tale of a great imperial power, perhaps the greatest ever — the “lone superpower” — sinking into decline. It’s a tale humanity has experienced often enough in the course of our long history. But lest you think once again that there’s nothing new under the sun, the context for all of this, for everything now happening in our world, is so new as to be quite literally outside of thousands of years of human experience. As the latest heat records indicate, we are, for the first time, on a planet in decline. And if that isn’t uncharted territory, what is?
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
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One does not need to appeal to the pseudo-science stupidity of global warming to know that the planet is in decline.
OTOH, everything man has touched, and is doing, is in decline because man refuses to acknowledge his creator. When you turn your back on God, what you see now in the world, is what you get.
Sometimes an honest glance in the mirror repulses us. You think, “How did I get to be so fat?” or old, or whatever.
Those would be the “seasonally adjusted” figures, and not the ones that show no meaningful warming over the past 17 years or so?
Clinton, Dubya and Obama are all liars, murderers and traitors. And Trump will somehow be worse? People who believe the avalanche of hate and lies about Trump (and Putin) have their head up their ass.
most of all the Trump = Hitler shrieks reflect the extent to which americans have been dumbed down, stupefied by holocaust hoaxers.
hitler was a far better rhetorician than trump, and had an actual plan, not just bumper-stickers and a baseball cap.
You need to browse the Trump website and look at some of the position statements … yep, there are some to be had, and many seem like reasonable steps in a planned approach.
“Truly, there is something new under the sun. Of course, in 1994 with O.J. Simpson’s white Ford Bronco chase (95 million viewers!), the 24/7 media event arrived full blown in American life and something changed when it came to the way we focused on our world and the media focused on us. ”
Wow! That triggered a thought. Can you imagine the audience they would draw if they staged the 2016 Presidential debates (I’m still betting Trump vs. Hillary) in the back of a white Ford Bronco travelling on an LA freeway? The best of all possible worlds. They would draw people who have absolutely no interest in politics and shatter all previous viewership records.
You could commend Tom for not fantasizing Trump as Hitler. Mussolini or Stalin.
Except that, suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, he imagines Trump as actually worse.
Somehow, textbook Liberals like Tom in the end can’t help themselves from preferring the establishment and recoiling from populism. In the end, they are reactionary and regressively elitist, just as Frank postulates.
It’s just not fair to knock the humble number sticker, since inception those sticky little suckers have been marketing gold, punching way above their weight in the dollar bouts of the campaign funding wars.
Bumper stickers are really just the great-grandchildren of the simple poster and the humble handbill, it was those simple, cheap tools that started a revolution which became the United States of America and they could still be used to good effect today. It’s what’s on them that counts, they certainly can be seem by many, many people if stuck on subways, busses, elevators and doorways etc.
Keep on Truckin’
i like it…textbook liberals with their magic words and puerile beliefs in Peter Pan race equality, and equality in general, a phantom , a mystery concocted by jews and Revolutionaries…etc.
What seems to be happening is that class and race are back, with race trumping class, but class still counts, as it should.
The liberal awakens like Rip Van Winkle….say what? Trump? How boorish, how impolite, how low-rent. etc. Egad!
Liberals: love me, love me, love me…I’m a liberal.
Joe Webb
“Its like Rambo on the Beach.”
I think, Tom, the “terra incognita” you are referring to, is this bizarre era of perpetual war that goes on, like a machine, completely independent of any oversight , authentication or legitimization .
Having now blessed into law “the war on terror”, nobody even needs to know why or how someone is chosen to be bombed in Somalia, or anywhere, it is just important that the bombing takes place and the money gets spent to do it.
Everything is about the spending on war making now.
We are at the point where pretexts, already may be obsolete, since having to utter them, they could be challenged…….rather it is all about the liquid profits of 24/7 war making for which the bell tolls.
Its like “Rambo on the beach”, unloading his 55 caliber at sunbathers and beachcombers,where nobody even questions or cares what the beachcombers have done, the important thing is that ammunition is spent, so we have to make more ammunition and buy more ammunition.
And thats ALL it is Tom, its all about the spending and the profits of war. Rambo doesn’t even care about “taking the beach”……or stealing the money in the wallets of the bullet ridden sunbathers.
Rather, whats important, is that he return in a few months…and repeat.
Its all about the ordnance, now.
Spending on war has become its own “closed” loop.
The terra incognita, you are referring too…..is the hum in the background…of the war machine purring along……….knowing that it hardly needs a pretext now…to kill…….just the funding.
Like a twisted pun of the old Dragnet line….”just the facts, ma’am.”
Only for “our” war machine..today..the facts don’t matter…”just the funding, ma’am.”
“Just the funding.”
Engelhardt evaporates the new cultural pessimism of the Old Left. And as in most cases, cultural pessimism relies on a stupid idealization of the past.
People in former times had no TV, but mass media developed over centuries, and of course every such development had its problems.
And of course, the super-rich had always an influence on American politics. And in a lot of cases it was the odd billionaire who won the vote in a struggle against the super-rich class. There’s nothing new in all that. Engelhardt’s view of the past is deranged.
Technology drives history and human evolution.
If you spend your day staring at TV, as Tom says he did, yes you can get the impression that this is a 24/7 election with all-Trump-all-the-time. That’s because now there are hundreds of channels, about three of which do nothing but rehash daily events to get ratings.
If you had stared at newspapers 24/7 in days of yore during elections, you would have had election stories in front of your face all day.
Likewise, drones, electronic surveillance and such would have been used by establishments and presidents past, if they had existed. We’ve been fighting the Barbary Pirates forever.
What’s new is the technology, as always.
Trump is a demagogue?
Well if that is true, then they don’t make demagogues like they used to.
Who is the “you” who has critically turned his back against the Creator that Hindus, animists and Buddhists never adopted? And given that there are now more believing Christians and Muslims in the world than ever before what are the criteria by which you judge that critical back turning has occurred?
The analytical texts you should study to understand this new world include:
Robocop [the original- I think it’s the one in which the citizens are always glued to some game show whose addled host is constantly repeating the catchphrase “I’ll buy that for a dollar”.
The Running Man- a more violent game show, but one in which the show has a more prominent role in society and criminal justice and in which people are actually killed
Blade Runner- I don’t know about the androids, but the rest of it looks prescient
Either of the Judge Dredd movies- the first one has a more epic theme and sets the stage with a bit of historical reflection, but it’s still cartoony; the second one probably depicts the real potential future of society- it’s basically a sci fi take on the gated off urban slum favela policed by gangs
There’s plenty more just in cinema. And I’m sure some of the early stories of Jerry Pournelle offer some insight. One-party rule behind a façade of democracy, citizens corralled into “Welfare Islands” and the vote restricted to the “Taxpayer” caste [I admit that’s probably justifiable].
The US has been driving for world domination and there’s a lot of pesky people out there who don’t want to be dominated, hence the resistance. Of course, all those who have the temerity to resist are labeled as terrorists or rogue states. The natives everywhere are being subdued. International law is just a pretense; we hire lawyers who are paid to say that killing and torturing those we don’t like is all well and good and perfectly legal. There is no law, no morality, the only restraint on US actions is that of those who can defend themselves. Might makes right should be on US coins as the real true guiding principle.
JoeWebb: nice reference to the late Phil Ochs. Anyone else get it?
The ghastly civilian-targeted bombings of WW2 forever tarnished us. We will never get our innocence back, no matter how much gratuitous head patting we perform on ourselves for “liberating” the world. The problem is, the world doesn’t really seem all that liberated. Or grateful.
There’s also the international relations scholarship of the so called English School, especially Hedley Bull and others who developed the theory of neomedievalism.
The breakdown of the national state, the rise of supra and subnational and overlapping allegiances and identities, the (re)privatization of war and its return to an endemic, low-level condition and most overseas and professional rather than sporadic, huge and unavoidable, and engaging the homelands of the major powers directly. All worked-over themes.
And SF in written form has taken on some of its themes in works too numerous to mention, some focusing on the gated communities and the segregated cities, some the barren and unpoliced countrysides, some the fungible borders, some the corporate allegiances, surveillance tech, AI, class stratification, collapse of the modern economic model of large collective employment in favor of the endless, soul and body destroying hustle to survive, etc.
We have lived in easy times by the standards of most of history, the prize that North America claimed in 1945 and re-exported to Europe by the 1950s and to the fringe of Asia later on. The capital is nearly exhausted for regular people now.
AS to the wars of empire, yes they are distasteful. But someone has to do it. America benefited at the margins when Britain policed the seas and facilitated the emergence of the Americas as a no-go zone for [at least open] European imperialism. Britain managed this through the wealth and power of empire, at the fringes of which it’s regular army and local hirelings were probably at war somewhere every day of Victoria’s reign and that of her immediate heirs. It was what professional soldiers did. Britain would never have considered drafting men to go off and die among the Pathans. If America can do most of it with drones, so much the better. I just wish it would be a tad more discriminatory on the grounds that the targets can strike back. The Pathans couldn’t do anything to London or Manchester, and probably would not have thought to do so. They assumed the British had as much right to rule them as previous Indian rulers [none] but as much right to defend their empire also against raids over the metaphorical wall.
SO it is for America, unless it is willing to cede its top position to another country, which will then organize the world according to its interests and values and make similar demands of America as America has made of its allies.
On a more historical note- if a US citizen had been taken in arms against the United States circa 1800 on foreign soil in Tripoli, in the pasha’s [dey’s?] forces, would he have been held over for civilian trial back in the US? If spotted while the battle was ongoing, would he have been spared pending arrest, or shot as a valid target? Did US naval captains require a declaration of war to take on pirates back in the day?
Not to be overly cynical, but the limits to the rights of a citizen identified under such circumstances, and the limits on the normal international law requirement for a declaration of war, are actually quite old. On the latter, I just passed over and am again seeking a reference that even in the ritualized 18 century, in the endless cabinet wars of European princes, less than half were preceded by formal declaration. The real institutionalization of this practice may not predate the 20th century.
White Guy Trump Bros
Why did you allow the Democratic Party to import its highly racialized-high fertility nonwhite Democratic Party Voting Bloc for 51 years? You know about passage of the 1965 Immigration Reform Act?..Ever heard of it?
Why were you guys shocked when Obama was elected POTUS in 2008+2012?
If Trump loses on Nov 8 to Hillary…Game Plan B?…Back to Fantasy Football and WFAN?
If only General Lee had won at Gettysburg. I strongly suspect that in 2040 Turban Sihks will be used as Federal Troop re-enactors in future movie-PBS versions of the Battle of Gettysburg.
Game Plan B…post-Nov 8 POTUS election night?
Yes, Trump would be worse. He can’t win the general, though, so consider moving to Russia since you are a fan of Putin.
Global temperatures aren’t “seasonally adjusted” obviously. And yes, there has been warming over the last 17 years.
“…but it still feels comfortable to view what we have as a reduced, shabbier, and more dysfunctional version of the known.”
This is actually a great description of our infrastructure as well. Other than sports stadiums and condominium/apartment buildings, we really don’t build any massive infrastructure anymore. Unless you count the $200million dollar street trolley that runs in a straight line up and down 15 blocks of NE Washington DC.
So that’s one vote for Trump needing to be more like Hitler. Interesting.
Sadly, it’s even worse than Englehardt describes..
For your consideration: In Florida recently a routine marital spat involving neither violence nor remotest threat of violence resulted in the Police State becoming involved when the wife decided that the husband who had just left the home and refused to answer her calls may harm himself. There was no threat of self-harm. There was no history of self-harm. There was only his departure from the marital home and his refusal to answer the phone. Still, less than eight hours after he left, the Police State was using his cell phone to track his location (obviously without a warrant). In less than 24 hours, the Police State had tracked him and staged a full scale assault involving no fewer than eight armed trigger men. When the husband pulled into a Walgreen’s to purchase a cold beverage in the midday Florida sun, a mob of armed Police State thugs popped out of the bushes all pointing their loaded weapons at him, barking conflicting orders (“put your hands over your head!” “Put the things in your hands on the ground (car keys & cell phone)!” “Turn around!” “Get on the ground!” “Hands behind your back!” Etc), and generally appearing eager to assassinate a taxpayer. Now this was a middle aged and well groomed white guy, driving a late model luxury vehicle, in an affluent leisure area, surrounded by middle age and older white folks, in mid afternoon. No weapons, no violence, no threats. Just a spat with a wife followed by an unlawful electronic surveillance and tracking that included changing his iTunes password and hacking his email account followed by a full scale military style assault.
Oh, but the story is just beginning! Our humble husband is disabled by severe spinal injuries and traumatized by the Police State stooges assault, forced to lie face down on a Walgreen’s parking lot at gunpoint, then tightly handcuffed and ordered to sit in a position causing severe pain, before being interrogated. The Police State stooges ransacked his automobile and searched his person finding, of course, no evidence whatever of any illegal activity. Nor, of course, was there any evidence found to support this fantasy of suspected “self-harm.” In fact, quite the opposite was revealed by the sheer terror and trauma of the assault and our friend’s benign compliance with the Police State gunmen’s illegal assault and search.
Rather than ending here with apologies for their attack, however, the Police State was just getting warmed up. They forced our poor victim into the back of a police cruiser, still very tightly handcuffed, into a space far too small for his bulk where he was twisted and contorted and obviously in a great deal of pain. The Police State stooges kept our victim so bound for an extended period while driving him he knew not where. They told him he was *not* under arrest yet they’d kidnapped him at gunpoint, ransacked and impounded his automobile, taken away his prescribed medications, and inflicted enormous psychological as well as physical trauma. But this was all for *his* benefit according to the Police State thugs. Our victim was eventually removed from the police cruiser (he could by then hardly stand unassisted) and led into a secure building where the handcuffs were finally removed and another interrogation would soon begin. This time the Police State thugs were replaced by State apparatchiks most interested in knowing his health insurance provider and policy number. Our friend, you see, was now imprisoned in a “psychiatric” “evaluation” prison. He had no right to legal counsel, no right to view any evidence against him (there was none), and would be thus imprisoned in bright 24/7 light, surrounded by mentally ill patients (all but himself voluntarily committed themselves and most appeared homeless), and denied *all* medical treatment for his disabling spinal injuries, for 72 hours. For three full days, our victim was thus held. During this imprisonment, again, he had no legal redress under Florida law, no medical care, no privacy, no access to his personal property.
Ah, but now our friend’s ordeal is nearing the end. Upon the 72nd hour of his imprisonment, when his insurance would no longer reimburse the Police State, and he would obtain finally habeus corpus “rights” of legal representation and judicial review, it was miraculously discovered that he in fact presented no risk of “self-harm” and he was summarily kicked out of the secured building onto the street in midday some 70 miles from where the Police State had separately imprisoned his automobile. For the sum of $130 he could obtain transportation to his automobile’s location and for another $400 he could have his car returned to him. And here our story ends. Our friend had the right to *no* legal recourse for his kidnapping, threat of assassination, confinement, and three days of torture. All of this, you see, was done for “his safety.” Had our friend objected to and protested his treatment more assertively, he would likely have been simply murdered by the Police State thugs or, at minimum, confined and tortured even longer (for as long as his health insurance would have paid the Police State), assuredly even forced to endure mind altering psychiatric drugs. Resistance, you see, is evidence that one requires more “treatment” and only submissive compliance affords the possibility of escape.
THIS is the America we have today. As terrifying as anything the communists could conjure in East Germany or Stalin could do in Russia. Again, this all happened to a respected, professional, middle aged, mild mannered, law abiding, physically disabled, well groomed, white husband and father all for committing the apparent Police State offense of leaving his home after a verbal disagreement with his wife and refusing to answer her telephone calls. And, most alarmingly, this could easily have been far far worse for our victim. He’s really quite fortunate to be alive today.
thanks, and should have been, Li-ber-allll. Thanks Phil.
Joe Webb
I cannot believe that he would not be able to obtain damages for false imprisonment at common law unless the police were able to make a very convincing defence that they acted reasonably as well as in good faith. Or is there some Florida statute providing immunity innquite sweeping terms?
the hysteria mounts here. First, the Jewish Wars in the middle east are ALL cuz of Izrael.
Second, there are over 300 million folks in the US and one turd of them are turd world, who do a lot of crime and mayhem, and welfare, and spoils system zero sum gaming of the system
Reading about Rome falling into Empire….its wars even against its own Latin brothers is Italy, and then the imperialism generally began to bring in great wealth. This wealth stimulated the extension of slavery on Roman farms, and of course, war brought lots of slaves. These slaves were usually damned foreigner worthless blood, and then other worthless blood were made citizens, and virtu was lost and , and, and…the Republic was lost due to corruption starting with fantastic wealth.
more or less private armies of Romans clashed. White cussedness on display. Caesar and Octavian destroying the senate, along with grifter senators, and huge class conflict.
So the effects of war, immigration, greed, empire. But we are imperialists in middle east, for that shitty little country over there….biggest factor being Protestants luving jews.
I disagree that the US is an Empire. Surely it throws its weight around, like any other country. The leverage that crazy ideas like zionism and jew Power and Liberalism…is immense. Archimedes was a jew.
If this were a normal country, meaning white, none of this would be happening, no jews, turd worlders, Obongo, etc. We would just be competing and rivalry of the normal type would exist.
The cumbaiyah loonies have delivered us into the beginning of chaos. Racial Equality!!!
White folks stretched on Procrustean bed…and we are mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore. that simple. No more Big Ideas, Stoic ideas, Equality Ideas, Human Brotherhood, the Word Magic of War.
Joe Webb
So global warming, which has been demonstrated by thousands of studies conducted by thousands of scientists, is “pseudo-science stupidity” but “the creator”, who has never been shown to exist by a single empirical study, is The Truth?
I love it when commenters make their own arrogant ignorance so explicit and concise that I don’t have to bother reading another word they ever write.
“The ghastly civilian-targeted bombings of WW2 forever tarnished us. We will never get our innocence back, no matter how much gratuitous head patting we perform on ourselves for “liberating” the world. The problem is,…]”
Atomic bomb scientist Robert J. Oppenheimer had some nagging second thoughts about their undertaking and he said something like: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” from Hindu scripture.
Rather than saying “uncharted” I think you need to say, uncharted by the usual Chosen Ones who do all the “charting.”
Not saying Trump may not be one of the “charters” himself, but just the mere uncertainty of it all seems to send the Chosen Ones into epileptic seizures just thinking about it. They’re WAY behind schedule and seeing it all slip away, after 2,700 years of planning, plotting, scheming and more “charting.” Trump says, if nothing else, “you don’t own me.”
Even if they do, in fact, own him, just hearing it is enough to aggravate their ulcers. So if that’s what you mean by “uncharted territory”, I think I agree and couldn’t be happier about it.
Cite please
March 31, 2016 A 2016 interview with Socrates: I was Athens’ ‘wacky conspiracy theorist’ for honoring my military/citizen Oath: are people today to live as educated humans, or remain obedient sheeple? (3 of ?)
*language warning*- Socrates and I speak in the same direct language that caused his execution for “corrupting the young.”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/03/2016-interview-socrates-athens-wacky-conspiracy-theorist-honoring-militarycitizen-oath-people-today-live-educated-humans-remain-obedient-s.html
Dec 18, 2015 Donald Trump: The Establishment Candidate
While his rise in the polls is attributed to his challenging the establishment and the political status quo, let’s look at the many ways Donald Trump, when it comes to his political positions, represents that very same status quo. From the Fed, to war, to civil liberties, the “anti-establishment” Trump takes no positions not already endorsed by the establishment.
Video Link
When was it? — it was when the Jew took over our government.
Tom Engelhardt is a good guy – it gets it – he sees the outward manifestation of the problems.
But he will not discuss the cause – he will not say Jew, Zionism, Israel.
How can you fix something – how can you hope to make a correction if you do not expose the cause?
Why? Is Tom a Stockholm victim? Has he lost his freedom to speak, to a terrorist faction – and does he identify with his capture.
Trump is like Bernie, both are Stalking Horses, as are the whole raft of smaller GOP ”knockoffs” to ensure an easy transition to Cleenton II. All Hail the Queen!
This is the blueprint as Abe Lincoln laid out in his time that government schools do not teach.
Thomas DiLorenzo – The ‘Real’ Abe Lincoln
From The Tom Woods Show, Professor Thomas DiLorenzo shares the gist of his scholarly works on Abe Lincoln. He demonstrates the reality of Abe is very different from the fairly tale version taught in government schools.
Video Link
He should (1) divorce the woman or cheat on her regularly if divorce would be too costly;
(2) sue the police;
(3) wait a while and report that the wife is both threatening to kill him and threatening to kill herself.
It is all a Hollywood staged skit with no real actors other than the Corporate bought actors of government.
Oct 22, 2015 Hillary Versus Herself on Benghazi
At the new Benghazi hearing today, Hillary is saying she took responsibility… A bit of a rewriting of history, no? Then again, what difference, at this point, does it make?
Video Link
The intensity of media coverage of the Trumster is an indication of how powerless the media actually is. Most people don’t trust the media, and only a small percentage of people base their voting decisions on what they see, hear or read in the media.
The primary determinates of how people vote are:
-how their friends, family and co-workers vote
-how well they are doing economically
-the general policy positions of the individual candidates running for office and how they compare with their personal values and concerns
If the media was as powerful as media pundits claim then politics wouldn’t be so predictable in an ethnic and geographic sense. We knew in advance Cruz would win Kansas and Utah, Trump would do well in the South, Hillary would do well with black votes, while Sanders would do well with white voters, and none of these outcomes were determined by the increasingly impotent MSM.
Don’t feel bad Tom, Class of ’64, going on 70 yrs. it could be worse. But why is it that the young seem so laksidasical about the, what maybe you and me might think of as a looming ”Dystopia” that seems sure enough to be coming to be.
Well, for one thing, the seeds for complete overhaul of human society have been sown long ago, and WW1-2 were huge movers in that effort, From the horse and buggy era, to atom bomb era, (or WTF do they call this modern time now?) The last one hundred years is huge for the complete utter overthrow of all traditional means and methods.
But the master plan, sure as hell doesn’t believe any hype about unlimited carrying capacity of the Earth of this exponentially increased human population that has taken place! The late author/journalist/muchraker: Michael Rupport seemed to obsess on a vary reasonable hypothesis, that human population has increased mainly because of the presence of a windfall of resource from petrochemical exploitation, which when depleted, will be decisive in a massive collapse, followed by nothing, End GAme!
Now that is if, it comes to that point, before the other likely disasters happen, like fill in the blanks, but prime it with: disease epidemics, nucs, etc.
But somewhere in Ivory towers there may still be (Aldous Huxley or G,B. Shaw… etc. clone types), thinking of all these grand schemes of how to mold humans this way and that to get to this or that Utopian dream… !
Now while I kind of think it all went off the rails by about now, and they are mostly gone and they left to, us to figure it out, and any of us, so disposed, ain’t the ones in position to make much of difference, because, well, to go to a cheap metaphor to get done here, from the H.G Wells: Morlocks who fed on the Eloi, in the Time Machine”, The mammon based GReed based, and basically materialistic humans, have complete hegemony.
Or, Sociopathic elements have become dominant as usual, but with the new technology divorced and unmitigated by the traditional mores, and so on and so forth, you get this once off, confluence, where it may be impossible to do any ”C change”.
Agree on both. Anyone ignorant enough to not know that the “Global Warming” ruse is just a scam to sell carbon credits, should remove themselves from political discussion.
Not only is man made global warming a fact, but is also the cause of the melting polar ice caps on mars.
The fool in his heart says there is no God…
Florida has some “interesting” laws and the ability of the State to imprison people based on nothing whatsoever “for their own good” is one of the more “interesting” legacies of the State that has given us the Rubio/Bush Cuck team. Remember Florida is the State where politicians (Bush) decided he could prevent a husband from pulling the plug on his brain dead permanent vegetative wife (Schiavo).
Thanks for keeping those big words coming, I benefit from the exercize turning dictionary pages, but ”C change is a once in a hundred years thing, you should have said, a U-turn, or done a 180. And no reason to get too pessimistic, it isn’t that bad… yet.
Which is part of what I forgot to respond to at Tom’s piece. which was to do with the young, and why are they so unconcerned about things. Which, to me is because the education that they recieve, is more than a little bit, intentionally Dumming Us Down to bring up another title from the Libary, by John Taylor Gatto, who taught school and has interesting theories.
Yes, indeed. And that’s why I’m turning you in.
I find this “Trump is Hitler” stuff fascinating, if totally idiotic. MAYBE…… if Trump learned how to paint, learned some history, became a vegetarian, grew a conscience, spoke in complete sentences, had a plan, EARNED some respect through military service, knew philosophy, understood even BASIC causal relationships between America and her enemy for the last 15 years….. he MIGHT, just MAYBE….. earn the compliment of being compared to The Great One.
Very deficient Hitler indeed. But not much different from GWB in his deficiencies. And probably not different from Reagan who however could speak in complete sentences, at least when telling a joke.
You left out, if Trump screwed his niece and if he murdered his beard-wife on their honeymoon.
Quite possible a century ago, with boys hawking on street corners throughout the day several time-sensitive editions of several competing papers in every major city.
Then blow your mind with this fact: the residents of Dakar, Senegal, on the Atlantic are physically closer to the Somalis of Minneapolis than to the Somalis of Bosaso on the Horn of Africa.
That’s how far away Somalia is. Mogadishu, in the west of the country, lies farther east than Baghdad.
How ‘good’ white people think.
1. ‘Racism’ is worst.
2. ‘Bad’ white people are the worst because they are ‘racist’.
(‘Racism’ used to mean hating other races for no reason. Now it means your people wanting to keep their own nation.)
3. My ‘goodness’ is measured by hating those ‘bad’ ‘racist’ white people.
4. I will do ANYTHING to defeat those ‘bad’ white people.
5. If that ANYTHING destroys myself and my nation along with those ‘bad’ white people, it will have been worth it. So, the value of this ANYTHING is measured primarily by how much harm it will do to ‘bad’ white people regardless of long term consequences.
In a nutshell, for ‘good’ whites to be good, they must destroy ‘bad’ whites. That is such a priority that all considerations are secondary. As long as it destroys ‘bad’ whites, it is ‘good’. It doesn’t matter if it destroys ‘good’ whites along with ‘bad’ whites in the end.
It is a kind of moral fixation whereby evil is defined very narrowly. Evil is associated with ‘bad whites’ and only with ‘bad whites’. So, ‘good whites’ are blind to dangers posed by non-whites since their only concept of evil is ‘bad whites’. So, if non-whites can be used to destroy ‘bad whites’, it is good. As for what non-whites do to ‘good whites’ in the long run, no one thinks that far.
But there have been so many historical examples of ‘good guys’ using outsiders to destroy ‘bad guys'(of their own kind), only to be destroyed and taken over by the outsiders.
The #1 animating force of Western demise is the ideology and idology that made so many whites define their ‘goodness’ by viciously hating ‘bad whites’.
It is a religious fervor, the ONLY moral-spiritual uplift in their lives. You could see it in the SJW who messed up a Trump rally or the guy who tried to charge him.
It is a mad kind of hate.
It is the core of white cancer. Without such zealous hatred that ‘good’ whites feel for ‘bad’ whites, PC globalism would fall apart.
The religion of whites is ‘good’ whites hating ‘bad’ whites. This religion has spread to American Conservatives too. National Review’s hatred for ‘bad whites’ is of that kind.
It is a white spiritual civil war. It is not about economic or political issues. It is a spiritual issue since ‘good’ whites feel it so deeply and strongly. And people like Soros know this is the central weakness of whites. He funds this church of white division.
‘Good whites’ have been converted to the religion of ‘anti-racism’ where whites are uniquely guilty, and their guilt can only be expiated by redemption of ‘good whites’ burning ‘bad whites’ at the stake. It is a religious war, like Catholics vs Protestants.
good piece. I remind folks that this universalism started in Greece after the collapse of the polis following the disaster of the Pelopponesian War.
Stoicism basically started from the idea that there was too much particularism with regard to the polis system of political organization. The solution would be to persuade oneself and others that some kind of a world system would alleviate the problems of particularism.
Stoicsim became the fundamental notion in Hellenism, not that Greek culture in general did not have a huge appeal.
Hellenism and Stoicism became the guiding principle for the late Roman Republic. The Empire was probably also inspired by such nonsense, which then blew up in their faces.
We , myself included, have usually thought this equality and race equality nonsense was a product of Christianity, 1789, etc. No, it started in White brains circa 300 BC in Greece.
So much, as I often remark, for philosophy.
Then there is White altruism…a specialization, genetic variety, of Whiteness. Altruism leads to things blowing up in one’s faces. As in right now in Europe and the US.
Sort of like Open Marriage of the 1970s, let’s love one-another. Take my wife, please. uhh…you do and I will kill you.
Joe Webb
The primary motivating factor among whites(in US as well as in EU) is not how they see non-whites but how they see each other.
If whites had white identity(as in the past) and saw things in terms of us whites vs them non-whites, there would be no problem.
Instead, whites see the world and morality in terms us ‘good whites’ vs them ‘bad whites’.
The ‘bad whites’ are the main OTHER for many whites.
‘Good whites’ may indeed concede that the migrants/immigrants are a lot of headache and trouble. But to the extent that enough of these non-whites will undermine white power forever—meaning the impossibility of the rise of right-wing nationalism ever again—, the ‘good whites’ see it as Mission Accomplished. It’s like a cancer patient willing to go through chemo and radiation that does great harm to the body to get rid of the cancer.
Whites have been led to believe that white pride, white power, white unity, and white nationalism are the biggest cancers in the world.
As long as too many whites feel that way, they will see the value of massive of non-whites. They see the harm too, but they see it as destroying the greater harm: white rightism. Suffer from chemo to kill the cancer.
This is the great revolution in white thinking. Prior to rise of May 68 generation, most white Europeans thought in terms of us whites vs them non-whites.
The new mentality is us ‘good whites’ vs them ‘bad whites’. ‘Bad whites’ are the WORST thing in the universe. So, if bringing in lots of non-whites will make it impossible for ‘bad whites’ to ever gain power, that is seen as Mission Accomplished, Disease Cured.
Sure, there will be horrible social costs. But at least ‘white racists’ will never gain power again.
But then, such crazy ideas existed with the radical right too. Hitler thought it was worth it to ally with Asiatic Japanese to defeat fellow Europeans. Nazism was us ‘superior’ whites vs them ‘inferior’ whites(the Slavs).
And white Americans are into us ‘good’ Americans vs them ‘bad’ Russians.
This idiocy has to end.
Despite his talents, I also doubt that Trump could ruin his country so thoroughly, or shame his people so deeply.
“The demagogue, once removed from legitimate grievances, finds little support.” I cannot remember who originally made this quote but it’s sound.
Substitute the word terrorist for the word demagogue and it’s still sound.
Stan, thanks for this story. You are so right. I watched an episode of Cops recently (I’m not proud of it but there was nothing better on the TV and I was settled in to watch something). A couple of guys were pulled over for being in an area that made their presence suspicious and the next thing the cops were going through their pockets and searching the car on a completely baseless fishing expedition. They found a little bit of weed but in doing so the “heroic” cops killed quite a bit of what used to be America.
More than even I knew! I ran a quick search and found a statistic claiming FL State thugs snatched over 180,000 people this way in a single year. YouTube has a number of videos of assassinations under this pretext (FL “Baker Act”). A worried mom or wife calls the Badged Thugs because son or hubby is distraught and refusing to “talk about it calmly” with the woman. She thinks the TV cops are like Oprah or Dr Phil. Thugs arrive with guns drawn and safety off, fingers on the trigger. Predictably (at least for those of us who can see), the State Assassins kill son/husband (and often the family’s pet poodle). That’s our America circa 2016. Our “Police Departments” are paramilitary occupying forces jacked up and bald from steroid misuse, driving MRAPs still carrying sandy dust from Iraq or Afghanistan. On the rare occasion a Badged Thug is killed while working, it’s national headline news. For the thousands of unarmed citizens murdered each year however, there is complete silence unless the State Assassin is white and victim is African or Mestizo (the thousands of unarmed white men murdered by the State each year are flushed down the memory hole before occupying an inch of newsprint or moment of film). And the Africans who are so killed are invariably career criminals which leaves most rational law-abiding citizens little sympathy thus ensuring this State sanctioned murder festival will continue unimpeded. It’s all the logical and ultimate end of Sam Francis’ “Anarcho-Tyranny.”
very good question for libtards,airheads,rino/dino….
I would love to move to Russia. But I can’t because I’m old and poor and Russia does not accept immigrants who will not benefit Russia.