Category Archives: History and Politics

Calling things what they are, Mr. Orwell. Holodomor, anyone?

I need to read George Orwell.   In terms of debilitating lies, regularly told via mass media to advance a false narrative, we are living in grimly Orwellian times.  What we call something makes all the difference, as all American Needle Nazis, health care professionals advocating mass vaccination during a deadly worldwide plague, know very well.  This kind of re-framing and renaming happens everywhere right now, in every space, during virtually every argument over anything.  What we call what we are fighting about is often the difference between prevailing and failing.

There are countless examples of this kind of force fed bullshit in our political culture — End Mask Mandate Tyranny (surprisingly never brought to state legislatures as the Freedom to Infect Act), Stop the Steal (only fraud found — a few cases of overzealous Trump voters), Voting Integrity Laws (to ensure only voters with the right kind of integrity have their votes counted), Right to Life (fetuses only, bitches), Death Tax (paid by entitled living heirs of the super rich), Death Panels (without these nobody would ever have to die!), Climate Change Skepticism (you just keep bringing more proof, we have FAITH!) and on down the list.   This kind of crap is increasingly common in a world where an obvious lie can be shrugged off as “alternative fact,”  if you believe it, faith-based person, it’s irrefutably true for YOU and everyone in your tribe.   

A big part of this kind of Orwellian lie is insisting on the opposite of what a powerful group is actually doing.  The pompous idiots who wrote Trump’s hastily prepared 1776 Report, a junior high school level American history term paper “refuting” the 1619 Project’s version of a slave-based economy during much of US history, focused on white, Christian values (First Amendment be damned to hell), began by stating the cardinal principle of our democracy — that here all are equal under the law.    This was insisted on, with a straight face, after Trump’s third attorney general had engaged in all kinds of obstruction of justice on behalf of the president and his inner circle jerks, after the president had pardoned a rogue’s gallery of select criminals, including one arrested by Trump’s own DOJ (DeJoy’s postal service, actually)  for ripping off Trump’s own loyal, credulous base with a fake Build the Wall scam.  After the president himself proved that obstructing justice, for the wealthy and connected, may be done with impunity if you have enough lawyers to tie everything up in court for years and a spineless enough opposition party.

Of course, since almost everyone in my family was ‘euthanized’ under Nazi supervision (though none of them made it to the camps), I always think of the famous sign worked in the wrought iron gates of Auschwitz, the famous “work camp” for slave laborers — Arbeit Macht Frei, Work Liberates.  The Nazis were pioneers in Language Rules, strict Sprachregelung, what you can and cannot say in Nazi Germany.   They had some good ones.   You had the bulk of the Jews in the category of Transport Juden, otherwise innocent Jews taken by train to the “work” camps, their papers marked Sonderbehandlung (special handling), and Schutzhaft Juden, (Jews in protective custody) criminal Jews who had a much higher status than the ordinary “workers” and tended to survive, even thrive, in places like Auschwitz. Nazi logic speaks for itself... to Nazis.

Think of it, though, how you name something is crucial for success or failure.  Every marketer, brander, advertiser, lobbyist, public relations consultant knows branding and proper messaging makes all the difference. Which banner would you rather fight under during a deadly pandemic “Freedom to Infect” or “Freedom from Overreaching Government Tyranny”?  A fucking no-brainer.    Putin, after invading Ukraine in an intended Shock and Awe blitzkrieg, immediately made a law criminalizing anyone who referred to the move as an “invasion”, “war”, “blitzkrieg”, “hostilities”, or, actually, anything but a humanitarian, fully necessary peacekeeping mission.    See?  That was easy, wasn’t it?

Speaking of Russians keeping the peace in Ukraine, ever heard of the Holomodor?   Not many here have, though everyone in Ukraine is well aware of this mass atrocity:

The Holodomor, also known as the Terror-Famine or the Great Famine, was a famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The term Holodomor emphasises the famine’s man-made nature and alleged intentional aspects such as rejection of outside aid, confiscation of all household foodstuffs and restriction of population movement.

Wikipedia

Holodomor, man-made famine that convulsed the Soviet republic of Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, peaking in the late spring of 1933. It was part of a broader Soviet famine (1931–34) that also caused mass starvation in the grain-growing regions of Soviet Russia and Kazakhstan. The Ukrainian famine, however, was made deadlier by a series of political decrees and decisions that were aimed mostly or only at Ukraine. In acknowledgement of its scale, the famine of 1932–33 is often called the Holodomor, a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger (holod) and extermination (mor).    https://www.britannica.com/event/Holodomor

The body count of those who died (or more accurately, who were killed by Stalin) during the year of the Holodomor was a shade under four million.   Four million murdered Ukrainians, in a fraction of the time it took the New York Times’s Mr. Hitler to get rid of six million pesky Transport Juden.   Like many other atrocities (though few have been on this scale) it has largely been forgotten in history by all but the offspring of the victims.   Don’t we all know how that goes?

Putinism and Trumpism (sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g)

I heard a great podcast yesterday from someone I’ve never heard of, she calls herself the Politics Girl.  She makes all the connections between Manafort, Trump and Putin and outlines Putin’s long-term psy-ops plan, a deliberate and clever information war to sow discord and violent division to destabilize “the West” dating back a decade or more. 

Manafort, of course, worked for a years to the get corrupt pro-Russian, anti-Nato Putinist Viktor Yanukovych, elected president of Ukraine. In 2004 then-Prime Minister Yanukovych lost a second run-off election for president after the first runoff was marked by massive fraud on his behalf. [1] In the new runoff election demanded by the “Orange Revolution”, and ordered by the Ukrainian court, Yanukovych lost 52% to 44% to a candidate who had been poisoned with a high tech toxin during the campaign (and lived) [2]. Paul Manafort arrived too late to swing the 2004 election to Putin’s man, but after six years of grooming the the savvy political dirty trickster helped Yanukovych win the presidency in 2010, only to see him ousted for corruption by a popular uprising, the “Orange Revolution”.  Putin, who had annexed Crimea earlier in 2014 was furious at the setback, and kicked up his radical psy ops/disinformation war against democracy.

Soon after Yanukovych’s ouster Manafort, of course, still in contact with pro-Putin oligarchs in Russia and Ukraine, was managing Trump’s campaign for free. Manafort was in a Trump Tower conference room for that “dirt on Hillary, I love it!” meeting with Don. Jr., Jared Kushner and the Russian lawyer and also, according to Marco Rubio’s Senate Committee, had many communications with and gave sensitive polling data (about key states that would be narrowly won by Trump) to a GRU agent named Konstantin Kilimnik.   The Politics Girl describes Putin’s long psychological war, and his skillful use of social media, including innovative work with bot farms to convince Americans that millions followed Trump early on. Putin did much to effectively sow discord in the US and other western democracies (he did similar yeoman-like work on Brexit). She sadly concludes he did a great job convincing that volatile 39% of our countrymen that lies are truth, that the true enemy of good Americans are anti-fascists and anti-racists, that Putin good, Ukraine bad, that only Trump can save them, etc.   I need to transcribe several sections of that longish talk, there is some great stuff in there, very well-said.

Here’s a slice, from about ten minutes in, explaining why so many on the right are suddenly fans of Putin’s, and support mob violence to oust dangerous radical far-left Communist Joe Biden, after laying out the predicate stuff beautifully:

The whole segment is here.

[1] from Wikipedia

Between the two rounds of the election, dramatic increases in turnout were recorded in Yanukovych-supporting regions, while Yushchenko-supporting regions recorded the same turnout or lower than recorded in the first round. This effect was most marked in eastern Ukraine and especially in Yanukovych’s stronghold of Donetsk Oblast, where a turnout of 98.5% was reportedly claimed—more than 40% up from the first round.[2][3] In some districts, turnout was recorded to be more than 100% than the previous ballot, with one district reported by observers to have recorded a 127% turnout.[2][3] According to election observers and post-election investigations, pro-Yanukovych activists traveled around the country and voted many times as absentees.[2][3] Some groups dependent on government assistance, such as students, hospital patients and prisoners, were told to vote for the government candidate.[7]

[2] Despite his poisoning Yushchenko survived and won the election by a wide margin:

Manafort arrived in Ukraine in the wake of the Orange Revolution, a popular uprising that had blocked the pro-Russian Yanukovych from taking power in 2004. One of the leaders of that revolt, an economist named Viktor Yushchenko, fell suddenly ill as his movement for European integration was gaining momentum that fall; doctors determined that he had been poisoned with dioxin, a substance that turned his telegenic face into a mask of green and yellow scars.

https://time.com/5003623/paul-manafort-mueller-indictment-ukraine-russia/

Draw the line between Paul Manafort and Volodymyr Zelensky

A short and pretty straight line it is, actually.

Paul Manafort worked, for years grooming the preferred Ukrainian presidential candidate of Putin and the oligarchs, an oligarch-friendly, pro-Russian brute named Yanukovych. Manafort worked for these oligarchs for years, finally getting their man elected. Soon enough Yanokovich became notorious for his corruption and collusion with Putin. He became so hated in Ukraine that a mass uprising of Ukrainians drove him from power in 2014.

Democratic elections were held to fill the presidency vacated by Putin’s friend, who took refuge with Putin while being convicted in absentia by Ukrainian courts. A well-known Ukrainian politician was elected to serve the rest of Yanakovich’s term.

Manafort, a clever man of refined tastes who apparently loves wearing clothing made from the skins of exotic endangered species, found himself in desperate need of money and volunteered to work as Donald Trump’s campign manager, for free, no strings attched. Manafort knew from past experience (his long partnership with Rodger Stone) how lucrative it was to be able to give access to the current. U.S. president, he’d been doing it since Reagan. Working for free to get Trump elected, with guaranteed access, seemed like a win-win for Paul Manafort, until his many connections with Putin and Russian oligarchs became known and he was forced to step down as Trump’s campaign manager. He was later replaced by members of the secretive right-wing Council for National Policy, Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway (Ginni Thomas is also a member) . These were who Trump was talking about when he said he got the best people, the best people.

Meanwhile, in Ukraine,Volodymyr Zelensky, a popular Jewish comedian, trained as a lawyer, was elected in 2019 by write-in vote, with a 73% majority. Zelensky was the young, brand new democratically elected president of Ukraine as the embattled Trump was gearing up for the Rigged 2020 Election while transacting assorted quid pro quo pardons with Manafort, Roger Stone and others, for their help obstructong investigations into his shady activities and connections with Putin. Putin was threatening the Ukraine border and Zelensky, the new president, was awaiting the weapons that the US Congress had already approved for sale to Ukraine. There was the little matter of just a small favor though and within a few months after being outed by treasonous whistleblowers (Barr’s attempt to quash the legally required investigation of the perfect shake down call having failed) the president released the aid to Ukraine that he is now bragging about giving them back in 2019.

Paul Manafort, pardoned felon. No harm, no foul, he kept his mouth shut to protect his boss, and it’s all good. Zelensky is parrying Putin’s assassination attempts as his country is bombed and Manafort’s friends continue to support Putin. Some are even featured on Russia’s state TV.

“strength” versus “weakness” American style

In a smash-mouth culture like ours, ruled by the pernicious myth of the rugged individual, someone who prevails to get billions, after receiving nothing but a modest several million dollar head start, strength is seen as decisiveness (no matter how bad the decision), a willingness to discuss, deliberate and compromise before acting is seen as a vice of the weak.

Strength here is an unhesitating punch in the fucking face. Weakness, pausing to consider the effects of giving in to a strong desire to punch somebody in the fucking face.

The party of Trump has no hesitation to talk about building more gallows, executing traitors, torturing the families of terrorists (as long as they are Muslim terrorists, of course). This kind of tough talk makes frightened people feel strong. You join the lynch mob and now you are powerful, nobody can fuck with you, especially if you are armed and law enforcement is on your side.

You know what strength is here? The power to overturn a 98 to nothing Senate vote to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act, signed by a president who shares your conservative views, with an ideologically driven opinion pulled directly from your asshole. Strength is the ability to keep lying to angry crowds, whipping them into a frenzy while pointing out you have never been charged with any crime, ever. Weakness is finding yourself having to explain why no action can be taken yet to stop an insane, violent cheerleader for violence. The “strong” party would be howling to lynch anybody like that on the other side.

This false and prevalent notion of strength and weakness is only possible in a culture where most people have lost the ability to make critical distinctions about anything; a culture where ruthless wealthy bullies are seen as heroes. Well done, Charles Koch.

In the days before Reagan ended the Fairness Doctrine the Soviet propaganda network was called Pravda, which translates to “truth”. By a surreal coincidence the compulsive liar Donald Trump’s new post-truth social media app is called, in Russian, Pravda. Very strong, sir!

Another giant of the Senate

A reminder of this great American statesman and defender of democracy, from today’s Washington Post:

Even before Jan. 6 itself, Graham had evaluated and rejected Trump’s claims about fraud. A scene in the Bob Woodward and Robert Costa book “Peril” depicts aide Lee Holmes discussing with Graham purported evidence of fraud passed along by the White House in a series of memos.

“Holmes found the sloppiness, the overbearing tone of certainty, and the inconsistencies disqualifying. The three memos added up to nothing. …”
“Holmes reported to Graham that the data in the memos were a concoction, with a bullying tone and eighth grade writing.”


“Graham looked over the memos. ‘Third grade,’ he said.

Holmes said part of the claim was based on an affidavit.

“Graham said, ‘I can get an affidavit tomorrow saying the world is flat.’ “

You sure enough can, Lindsey, thousands of ’em.

History versus Propaganda

History (well-researched and written with integrity) teaches us lessons from the past we can learn from, propaganda makes us believe things that are not necessarily true. Would-be dictators hate history that accurately reflects the facts of the past and portrays a reasonable cause and effect of events.   History often directly contradicts the strongman’s stilted message.  The only use dictators have for history is selectively highlighting some things that happened, and hiding others, to convince unsophisticated citizens of the righteousness of their grievances, the historical holiness of their cause.  

If you would rule a conformist state, where thought and belief are strictly regulated, you will obviously get rid of certain books, criminalize certain ideas, make a pious, public show of punishing dissent, and in the end destroy the ability to think critically in the masses who will chant your name.   False history, written to benefit a small, powerful group, can rule public perceptions for generations, as the Lost Cause myth of the Civil War did here during a century of racism at law and free reign for terrorist enforcement of the racist worldview.

This influential school of American history, the Dunning School, started at prestigious Columbia University in New York City, not in the former Confederacy.   The Lost Cause theory was based on racist assumptions (slavery actually was mostly benign and benefited the racially inferior Blacks by protecting them) and spread the false idea that the war waged by the states that seceded was not based on protecting The Peculiar Institution (a popular euphemism for American chattel slavery) but on the glorious cause of fighting encroachment of States’ Rights by a tyrannically overreaching federal government.  

In this telling, the viciously biased federal government broke a Constitutional guarantee, under which slavery, never named in the founding document itself, was protected in perpetuity via three or four discreet clauses crafted by fine lawyers who negotiated the compromise with the self-evident proposition that “all men are created equal”.  The glorioys Lost Cause history was taught in classrooms all over the country to several generations of young people, supported by many of America’s greatest historians.  My friends who grew up in Tennessee heard nothing but this story in relation to the Civil War — that it wasn’t fought over slavery at all, it was fought over local sovereignty, something everyone can get behind.  You want unaccountable federal bean-counters running your life, or your friends and neighbors?   The States’ Rights rationale is still pushed by right-wing ideologues to justify all kinds of racial and class warfare motivated mischief.

An obvious problem with this kind of distorted historical story is that it can’t withstand much scrutiny.  Each of the eleven states that seceded from the Union after Lincoln’s election (and Lincoln was not even on the presidential ballot in any of those states, mind you) promulgated Articles of Secession.  You can look them up.  Each list of irreparable grievances began with the federal government’s intended interference with the sacred constitutional right to hold “such persons as the states shall see fit” in servitude without limitation.  And the horrors of slavery, and a century of legally tolerated lynching after the Civil War, are also well-documented.   

I heard a great simple correction of the List Cause myth by a black woman who’d been one of the first in her small southern town to go to school with white kids after Brown v. Board of Education.   She said it was fine if you want to say the Civil War was fought over States’ Rights — it was fought over states’ rights to hold slaves.  

For Professor Dunning and his progeny it was a matter of de-emphasizing or omitting details like the incriminating Articles of Secession, the real atrocities of slavery and all other evidence that contradicted their preferred narrative of a glorious lost cause fought for righteous ideals.  Focus instead on the alleged post-war corruption of little over a decade of Reconstruction (the federal government again sticking their fingers in the glorious South’s eye by forcing them to allow thousands of ignorant Blacks to vote!).  Cite the way some slaves were loyal to their masters as proof that there was nothing so terrible about being owned like a cow, goat, horse and used similarly.  The only truly terrible thing, in the immensely influential Dunning version of history (supported by Supreme Court rulings, mind you) was the pious, hypocritical tyranny of the federal government.  This popular myth was indispensable for the white southern bigots who filibustered proposed federal anti-lynching and voting rights laws for decades.

What was one of Putin’s first moves after he attacked Ukraine?   Make it a crime to call his totally justified invasion an attack, a war or an invasion.   No!  It is peacekeeping police action, like the US did in Viet Nam and many other places!   Say otherwise and it’s fifteen years in the jailhouse for you, lying dissident criminal.

The impulse of fascists is always the same — manipulate public opinion, don’t hesitate to lie, lie big and lie constantly, promulgate your alternate “history”, attack so-called “fact” and vilify the superior elites that do things like write critical books and encourage intelligent debate based on known facts.  There will be no intelligent debate based on anything, only debate framed by our terms and conducted under our rules and laws.  If you are a young gay person, shut the fuck up.  If you are a victim of racism, shut the fuck up.  If you are Black or poor and want to vote, forget about it.   If you are raped and become pregnant there is no harm in being forced to carry the fetus to term, giving birth and putting the baby up for adoption.  You have an absolute right to carry a gun and if you kill somebody because you were really afraid of them, it is no crime.  If you teach history that embarrasses innocent white kids or makes them feel bad, you have violated a new zero tolerance law.

It is tempting to call a party that embraces these tactics of fascism Nazis.  Read the story of Adolf Eichmann set out by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem.   He was an ambitious man of limited intellectual curiosity who blindly followed the current of history that swept Hitler into power.   He did what he was told to further the eventually murderous goals of his superiors.  How was he any different than any of Trump’s loyal enablers?  What is the difference between the mentality of Eichmann and Jeffrey Clarke, the DOJ appointee who eagerly stepped up to put Trump’s stolen election lie on DOJ letterhead to try to overturn the certified election results in states Trump lost?  A guy like Clark, with his fervent desire to serve a strong, unprincipled leader, is basically a Nazi.

Remember, the Nazis did not sweep into power and immediately build death camps and start mass murdering.   It took eight or nine years in power, a declaration of war and the blitzkrieg, before they took the gloves off and began secretly implementing their insane leader’s wildest dreams of extermination.   They did it one step at a time, preparing the population by feeding them false history and fake news (while coining the term fake news — die lugenpresse).   

It was more than a year before Hitler took care of political rivals by having a coordinated national killing spree history recalls as The Night of the Long Knives.   One famous general he had executed stood up in his office when the assassins entered, confirmed that he was von Schliecher, and was killed in a hail of bullets along with his wife.  At first Hitler told Germany the “treasonous” general had been shot while resisting arrest, a week or two later he nonchalantly referred to “when I had Schliecher shot.”    It was more than five years before the first organized nationwide pogrom against Jews in Germany, Kristallnacht.  It took a controversial gassing program that targeted “lives unworthy of life” (lebensunvertes leben) in mental hospitals, Hitler’s humane euthanasia program (they put a noble spin on everything with strict language laws), to prepare Germany for the gassing of millions of others.   In fact, the Fuhrer had to stop killing Germans in mental hospitals due to the increasing discomfort of other Germans.   Jews, Gypsies, Communists, Homosexuals, Poles?   Not a problem, just euthanize ’em somewhere else.

American Nazis, neo-Confederates, white supremacists, white nationalists, Trumpists, the RNC or whatever you want to call them, never sleep or take a day off.  They may yet gain control of this country, through insane state election integrity laws passed by partisans cynically exploiting the Big Lie, though they must be fought at every step if we have learned anything from the last time their ilk controlled a vast industrialized nation.  They constantly rail against things like the Child Tax Credit that briefly lifted millions of children out of life-scarring poverty as “communism”.   A plan to increase the budget for IRS enforcement of the tax laws, targeting wealthy “tax avoiders” — Communism!  Voting Rights — partisan commie bullshit to enable more massive commie fraud, Commies!   Ethical rules for the Supreme Court, Radical activist Leftist commie child blood drinking drivel!   

The debate we have here is not a debate in the classical sense of two sides presenting clashing ideas and the better idea prevailing, based on the respective arguments, it is Newt Gingrich’s total war.  One side scorches the earth and dares their enemies to do something about it.  The other side publishes thoughtful, morally upright things like this (while the architects of US torture ply their hideous trade and escape all accountability, fuck you, LIBS!):

There is history worth reading and there is propaganda.  Here’s some recent American propaganda commissioned by the dumb dictator-worshiping fuck who still insists he won a rigged election in a landslide. It begins by piously reciting the truth that nobody in our system is above the law, as the former president continued to lie about winning an election he lost and insist that he is above the law. I love the fact that immediately after his inauguration Biden had this bullshit taken down — I’ve preserved a few bits of it, for posterity. 

Read, but think.   Read, but verify facts that can be demonstrated with evidence and discard fiction.  There is a big difference between useful history and the propaganda spread by cravenly ambitious useful idiots.