Strongmen by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

I will be updating this book report soon to include some of the fascinating details historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat lays out in her playbook for dictators. In the meantime I highly recommend this insightful book to anyone interested in the historical parallels to the autocratic challenge we face today in the USA! USA!!!!

The author, in going back and forth in time between Mussolini, Pinochet, Putin, Saddam, Berlusconi, Bolsonaro, Franco, Hitler and company, presents the unaltered playbook that every one of these “strongmen” uses. It is uncanny how every one of them use exactly the same reality- bending techniques.

The Strongman playbook she lays out is remarkably consistent over the century it has been in use. Every one of these Law and Order Strongmen employs criminals and ambitious sociopaths to subvert the rule of law, intimidate and silence critics and favor and shield those who enable the dictator’s unchallengeable rule. Loyalty and personal use to the Strongman become the sole benchmarks for personalist rulers, like our most recent former president, when hiring henchmen.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat ends her book describing the essential weakness of the Strongman and the path citizens of conscience must take when facing the rise of a Strongman:

The Trump variant

Let’s call the US Delta variant of Covid-19 what it is: the Trump variant.

For the many months the Orange Polyp was downplaying the pandemic hoax and scheming with his allies to fix the election in every way they could imagine, he kept touting the vaccine his scientists were creating in record time. Once we have the vaccine, he promised, this long nightmare will quickly be over. To everyone’s shock, it turned out he was lying.

After record voter turnout decisively ousted the Orange Polyp from office there was a new burning issue for his faithful 39% to rally behind, demonstrated for them again when their leader’s landslide victory was stolen from them by a cabal of Communist Nazis, criminal Blacks and traitorous GOP leaders, all funded by Jew pedophile cannibals – you can’t trust anything the illegitimate government does!

After losing the presidential election in 2020, by a decisive margin, while his party made gains in the House and held most of their ground in the Senate, his rage led him to badmouth the vaccine (which he took secretly, like the entire FOX staff, like forceful anti-vaccine governor Greg Abbott). No longer the Trump miracle that his Operation Warp Speed had produced, taking the Biden Vaccine was strictly a matter of personal freedom.

In conservative regions of the country that take their personal freedom goddamned seriously, the high Covid infection and death numbers, the overwhelmed ICUs, are directly related to low vaccine rates and the reckless anti-science mandates of their GOP state leaders. Note, when discussing personal freedom from government coercion, how many of these right wing Trumpist governors are preventing the personal freedom of those who accept the science and want people to take every precaution against the newly resurgent Trump variant. Inconsistency is never a problem to people who cling to their anger.

Of course, there is a sort of rationale for choosing not to take the vaccine, as there always is when masses surrender logic to the will of demagogues. It’s kind of thin, given the real, ongoing risk of infection and death, and the vaccine’s success in protecting people from death by Covid, but it is a rationale. Government mandates are tyranny, pure and simple. Being forced by the government to wear a mask in public, after all, is just like being made to wear a yellow Jewish star on your coat back in Nazi times. Needle Nazis want to inject you with an unproven drug that will make you one of them. Getting jabbed with the unproven Fauci Ouchi or wearing a mask are both matters of purely personal choice that nobody has a right to judge anybody about. Just because 99% of the hospitalizations for Covid are unvaccinated folks doesn’t prove shit — you can’t just trust that this unproven vaccine works simply because Biden and Fauci claim it does!

Lately the chorus against anti-vax shaming from the 60% who are now vaccinated, and angry that the Trump variant is surging out of control, has grown. You can’t persuade people that what they’re doing is stupid, selfish and reckless, these pundits tell us, by using words like “stupid,” “selfish” and “reckless”. You see what the Left is doing by judgmentally blaming those unvaccinated people who are infecting their children and dying for being dumber than piles of shit? It doesn’t work, pundits remind us urgently.

A gentle reminder: proof itself doesn’t work, for people ready to believe alternative facts. In an election Trump’s party did very well in, particularly after the four disastrous years of his incompetent, corrupt and often criminal administration, somehow only the presidential ballot was rigged, corrupt, fraudulent. It doesn’t faze anyone at the Polyp’s mass spreader events that there is not a shred of proof of this wild assertion. See, to MAGA nation it’s obvious the fucking Blacks and the Jews who control them were determined to get rid of the greatest White Christian ever to rule the modern USA come hell or high water, and with their unlimited power and vast Jew money they had the ability, and the criminal viciousness to do it. Close to 40% of our fellow Americans see it this way, the vast majority of Republicans accept this alarmingly counter-factual alternative fact.

Of course, it can be seen differently. Until the former and future president is indicted and tried, for, at minimum, obstruction of justice (check out the impressively consistent pattern and practice which demonstrates his unflagging intent) and interference in the election (roll the tape of him badgering the Georgia Secretary of State to find him a measly 11,780 votes), it is well to remember that this Delta variant surge is the fucking Trump variant.

Capitalism’s mania for “improvements”

Progress, in capitalism, means steady market growth and constant product improvements, whether people want to be marketed to or have the useful products they rely on redesigned or not. Most people of a certain age are familiar with the term “planned obsolescence”. For those who are not:

a policy of producing consumer goods that rapidly become obsolete and so require replacing, achieved by frequent changes in design, termination of the supply of spare parts, and the use of nondurable materials.

The plan is to make ever greater profits by forcing people to keep buying new things to replace consumer goods designed to become obsolete, outmoded, uncool, unfashionable, useless for their customary purpose. Corporations steadily produce groundbreaking new consumer items, branded, unveiled and advertised with fabulous fanfare, that have to be replaced frequently with updated models. For good measure we have designed a new, improved power cord that won’t fit your current device or older devices, we don’t sell the old power cord anymore, just upgrade your phone and toss all the old ones. This is a trillion dollar business model that has produced countless innovative billionaires (as well as, sadly, a mountain of deadly products left to poison the earth).

Everyone today knows the short term version of the drill as simply “updates” or “upgrades”. In computer and phone-related retail, for the short-term game, all you need to do is force people to constantly update their devices and all sorts of wonderful things can be achieved. My podcast player keeps upgrading its ability to deliver ads that cannot be defeated. The ads of savagely competitive Jeff Fucking Bezos are the best, his undefeatable ads play at top volume OVER the podcast you are trying to listen to. When the ad is done you simply rewind to catch the five to fifteen seconds that were drowned out by the sound of an ear shattering jackhammer being muted, finally, by the noise canceling headphones fucking Bezos is hamfistedly trying to sell to everyone.

Rooms full of Andys [1], creative engineering types on the spectrum, are kept busy constantly tweaking the devices and applications we are constantly using. The “updates” do not always improve the product, often disabling familiar, essential features, but… fuck it, just buy a new device if your old one is giving you crap. Life is change. Capitalism certainly is — as long as the change keeps the extractive engines humming full throttle and new customers are cultivated in every corner of the world.

Here’s a mildly sickening example of forced updates nobody but the seller would ever want. I used to run an animation workshop for elementary school kids, I’d bring a small digital camera, a camera stand, a few small lights and a Macbook laptop computer into the room. Within ten minutes the workshop was humming. While kids choreographed and shot their animations, another team would be swapping out the camera’s SD card, uploading the new frames to the computer, opening the program iMovie and starting to make the day’s single frame animation. Music would be added from a program called Garageband, which allowed kids to improvise and easily remove any mistakes they made. The beauty of the macBook, running Operating System 10.6.8, or earlier, was the seamless integration of its various creative programs. Kids could create music in Garageband, easily drag into iMovie from Garageband. They could overdub multiple tracks of narration on top of the music, frames could be tweaked in an onboard graphics program, dragged into iMovie.

Once I stupidly updated the macBook. The new operating system updated and reconfigured all the programs. Suddenly Garageband became more automated, based on customer feedback, or the quirky whims of a room full of Andys, I suppose, and it became impossible to quickly correct mistakes on the fly. When an 8 year-old sound engineer tried to fix a mistake the old command gave a new result– auto-quantize– make your track adhere more strictly to the metronome. The kids never used the metronome. It was very frustrating how hard it became to fix mistakes that in the previous version were so simple to fix that second and third graders mastered it instantly and quickly taught others to do it.

Yes, an engineer at Apple told me on the phone, not everybody liked the newly disabled programs, he didn’t like it himself, and, of course, they were driven by corporate greed (why give things for free when you can claw them back and sell them?) but once the update was done there was no way to revert back to the previous version of the program. Best bet, he told me, was to buy a used MacBook running 10.6.8 or earlier and never update it. They eventually disabled enough features of iMovie that it became impossible to do single frame animation in iMovie, you had to buy a “professional” program from Apple to do what once came included in your computer.

I am tapping away on WordPress, which “improved” their writing editor in ways that made it more cumbersome than it was before. They touted this brilliant new “blocks” system, which replaced a perfectly useful one, even as they made the “theme” I am using obsolete. The tech term for this is “not supported”. You can use it, but nobody at WordPress can do much except urge you to switch to a supported theme. It’s true you could lose all of your content, which can no longer be backed up easily (we eliminated the RSS feed which used to allow you to cut and paste all content into a form you could save) but your experience will be enhanced, as the rooms full of WordPress Andys designed it to be.

The other day I was able to type on WordPress without straining my eyes. I’d see the words like this:

On the updated viewer, the best one can do is this:

If that’s hard on your old eyes, dude, just get stronger glasses, man. What the fuck do you want us to do, bro? Many people think this is a cool new improvement, (asshole…) OK, we just made that up, everybody hates it, but — you know what? Fuck them all and, with respect, sir, fuck you. We are the vanguard of the new world, innovative masters of the digital universe, and you are a carping dinosaur. Why not just simply go extinct if you don’t like the way we do things now?

Well, anyway, it is hard on my old eyes tapping away here. I devised a workaround, that I will use for all future posts. I will henceforth write in a word processing program, OpenOffice, wonderful, free and open-sourced, then select all, copy, paste into this fucking editor which I can then squint at like the bitter old fuck I am.

And make no mistake, when it comes to predatory fucking capitalism, a massive machine that never apologizes for any crime and is always quick to justify any “externality” (when people are killed in the name of profit, like in Bhopal, India, for example, that’s an “externality” the corporation has to account for, a small portion of the profits will go toward a secret settlement with the families of the dead, assuming they have excellent lawyers that can hold us to account) — I am an extremely bitter old fuck.

[1]

I had a friend named Andy, bright, witty, socially maladroit and occasionally locked up in a laughing academy until his wilder moods could be stabilized, who made a nice living writing computer code. He was responsible for how websites acted, where the buttons were to make things work and so forth. I’d observed many times how idiosyncratic Andy was, he always radically adjusted your desk chair when he sat in it, immediately retuned your guitar (breaking a string once in a while) and so forth. I later realized he was probably somewhere on the Asperger’s spectrum. What was intuitive and useful to him was by no means universal, is what I’m trying to say.

The Wall of Perceptions

A massive danger we now see all around us comes from people convinced that their perceptions, whatever the limitations of their view, whatever anybody else might have to say about these perceptions, are accurate reflections of the world. Opinion, shaped by what we know and endlessly confirmed by the reliable Confirmation Bias (they agree with me, I must be right!) is magnified and hardened by the agreement of others. The particular silo of opinion we spend most of our time in will shape our perception of the world. The anonymous “friend” groups of the internet, we learn, are incredibly powerful in shaping perceptions and opinions. The lonelier and more disconnected the individual, the more they will be influenced by a community online who claims to see things just like they do.

Our perceptions are shaped by a number of things, limited by our point of view, our knowledge and our access to useful evidence. The level and quality of information we take in is as crucial in forming our perceptions as our ability to gather and sort through reliable information. Our general feeling of well-being or ill health, our mood, our level of fear, the people we trust, the ones we hate, all shape our perceptions. How angry or upset we are at a given moment is a huge factor in how we see things (anger and fear will distort perceptions like nobody’s business) and the secret of Trumpism’s otherwise irrational appeal (keep ’em mad as hell at the ENEMY).

Here’s a recent example, from my own life, of how perceptions, and the emotions that color them, can distort your view of what is real. A few months back we arranged a reunion with old friends we hadn’t seen since before the pandemic, a gathering I was greatly looking forward to. A few days before the weekend we all agreed to take the COVID-19 test to ensure that none of us could be contagious to the others, possibly transmit a breakthrough infection. We’d all been vaccinated, so this test was part of an “abundance of caution,” as the saying goes, during the new super-infectious Delta variant surge. Sekhnet and I were tested side by side and were told we’d have a text when the results were in.

The day before the weekend, Sekhnet woke up to a text informing her that her test came back negative. I, on the other hand, got a missed call from the outfit that had done the test. They left me a message: “Hello, I’m calling from New York City Health and Hospitals, we need to speak to you in regards to your recent test and will call you back again soon. Thank you.” I tried calling the number, but it was not a working number. I groaned, snarled, agonized and belly-ached, waiting for the call back, cursing that bane of American existence, “health care” bureaucracy, dreading the bad news the eventual conversation would certainly impart. Meantime, I was helpless.

If it wasn’t bad news, why hadn’t I received the same good news text Sekhnet had, which did they “need to speak to me” regarding my test results? This obvious question was one I could not solve for — it had to be had news, I became convinced. If it had been good news, I’d also have gotten a text, no? At one point I put my phone on charge and went to the bathroom to micturate (as they say in certain prep schools). During the short time it took to empty my bladder I had the promised call back. This time they left no message.

“HIPPA,” offered Sekhnet, at one point, trying to explain why they’d left me no medical information on my phone. As to the simple text informing her of the wonderful, personal, result of her medical test, a text seemingly in clear violation of HIPPA, she had no immediate explanation.

My perception that I must have tested positive became unshakable, and it was driven by anxiety that I would now have to miss the gathering with well-loved old friends I’d been looking forward to. Sekhnet and I had been tested six feet apart, virtually simultaneously. It made no sense that the same outfit would send a good news text to one of us and not the other, if we’d both tested negative. Sekhnet offered theories, maybe they’d gone to different labs, somehow. My mind kept returning to “it makes no fucking sense!”

True, it made no fucking sense. Aggravating though the seven hours was before I was able to confirm that my test too had come back negative, in the end it still made no fucking sense. The wall of perception that kept me convinced it had to be bad news (until I was able to confirm otherwise) was built from a logical assumption. What I hadn’t stopped to consider is how often, in our modern, digital, corporatized society, things simply make no fucking sense.

I had a friend named Andy, bright, witty, socially maladroit and occasionally locked up in a laughing academy until his wilder moods could be stabilized, who made a nice living writing computer code. He was responsible for how websites acted, where the buttons were to make things work and so forth. I’d observed many times how idiosyncratic Andy was, he always radically adjusted your desk chair when he sat in it, immediately retuned your guitar (breaking a string once in a while) and so forth. I later realized he was probably somewhere on the Asperger’s spectrum. What was intuitive and useful to him was by no means universal, is what I’m trying to say.

Anytime I encounter a weird glitch on a website, like a frustrating “help” cul du sac you cannot exit from when seeking further information, I immediately picture a room full of Andys, coders with engineering smarts who do not necessarily think and act like the average person. Feature, bug? Who gives a fuck? The money is in constantly tweaking the code, the algorithms, the arrangement of the menus, the efficiency or complexity of the help features. In fact, just today, a room full of fucking Andys at WordPress changed the settings on the editor, so that the text, as you write, can no longer be blown up to an easily readable font, for old eyes like mine. Everyone, obviously, prefers their text at a steady 10 pt, extending the full width of your screen, without the former ability to work on it with less eye strain in a viewer that let you blow the words up to any size you’d like.

There was some kind of human/machine fuck up at the testing place when Sekhnet got her promised text and I got a call from a nonworking number, then another that left no message, no way to get in touch with anyone. I spent hours, convinced the news I didn’t yet have had to be bad (even the “None Detected” I was eventually able to see online was not reassuring, since Sekhnet had gotten a straight forward “negative” by text), finding nobody on the phone, after each long wait, who could confirm the seemingly simple, now obvious, answer that “None detected” is another way of saying “Negative”.

When, at the end of a long, frustrating day, I finally got somebody from the NYC Covid-testing hotline who could instantly confirm that “none detected” did not mean “test inconclusive” but “negative”, my mind was finally put to rest, having at last the clear answer I’d been denied by various Andys all day long. My doctor friend shook her head at my unnecessary day of aggravation (and the hell poor Sekhnet had been put through), since everybody with any sense should intuitively know that “none detected” means “negative”, something very obvious in hindsight, once you learn they are the same, after numerous help hotline folks did not know that for a fact.

True, obvious once you know, but from my point of view, the illogic of one person getting a promised text and the other endlessly waiting for a second callback that never came, was something I couldn’t simply accept as human error. It made no sense and it was going to directly and immediately effect my life for the worse. I had to verify that “none detected” (which I learned on-line after an hour or so of uncertainty) meant negative. If it is so intuitive, why was nobody in the city health bureaucracy I finally got to speak to able to clarify that for me?

There could have been a note to that effect online (“none detected” is the same as “negative”), where they gave you the test result, true, but none of the Andys involved with the website were told to put a note there. So, fearful that I might have to miss the social weekend I’d been looking forward to for weeks, I called various help lines, and waited, with sinking heart, on endless muzak blasting phone queues because of the huge volume of worried callers who were being helped by representatives who themselves could not confirm the seemingly simple, now obvious, fact that None Detected means Negative.

Knowing that these two terms are identical, having had them confirmed, and shrugged at by a doctor friend who couldn’t understand how I could not know the terms mean the same thing, I can now advise anyone in the unnecessary anguish I was in. Before I knew this undeniable fact? I was trapped behind the wall of my perceptions.

The conversation is tiring, but necessary

There are actual facts on the ground, things like massive surges in COVID infections in states whose leaders preach absolute liberty to infect whoever you want (Florida’s Deathsantis has just muscled his way past NY for worst Covid-19 infection rate in US history), and the heat-related 100 year killer storms that have become common. Certain powerful parties (like Koch-funded “think tanks”) work overtime to promote “experts” to “refute” facts that are bad for business, or bad for maintaining minority power in the face of “majoritarian tyranny.” The threats they deny, a deadly pandemic, deadly climate change, do not cease to exist, though they become immensely harder to find solutions for when tens of millions, naturally, prefer denial. How do we talk sense across this abyss of entrenched, hotly clutched opinion?

The conversation is exhausting, particularly after four years of an American president’s childish insistence that showing a tape of what just happened, or of what he just said, is an unfair, distorted, treasonous lie by the Enemy of the People. The Culture War is doing the terrible work of every other war, creating a zero-sum world with implacable, inhuman enemies on both sides. Hard for me not to smirk when I read that the secretly vaccinated governor of Texas (rivaling Deathsantis of Florida for eye-popping COVID numbers) tests positive for a virus he is actively preventing the public from protecting itself from. In the name of Freedom and the Second Amendment, no less. Facts actually matter, though, as does cause and effect, to at least 65% of us. How about this one, did you hear about this?

Take the heat wave this summer in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, which resulted in an estimated hundreds of heat-related deaths, ruined crops and wildfire outbreaks. The town of Lytton, British Columbia, broke the temperature record for Canada three days in a row. On the fourth day Lytton was all but destroyed by wildfire. These events were so extreme that they were very difficult to imagine, even for climate scientists like us, just two months ago.

source

I’d heard about the record heat in Canada, not as much about the hundreds of heat-related deaths, and had never heard of the connection between the record heat and the wildfire that destroyed the town that set the record for consecutive hotter than hell days.

You can read the piece linked above and learn that scientists now have a method to attribute the heat-related disasters to human burning of fossil fuels and other heat increasing activities.

Or, turn on your favorite talking head and watch this entire liberal scam to destroy America be exposed for the godless Commie plot that it is. It will be debunked once and for all by an expert Climate Skeptical preacher with an online degree in divinity who will hip an audience of millions to the flimflam of these wild-eyed Climate Alarmists. Who you going to believe, someone who’s screaming with her hair on fire or someone cool, talking very calmly and reasonably?

The following is from a nightly email news letter I get from an outfit called Crooked Media. Their snappy come on is: Subscribe to What A Day to get more pithy analysis of the world we live in and how long that world can possibly continue to exist. The newsletter is informative and refreshingly blunt and snarky. From a discussion about booster shots for vaccinated Americans:

The Israel experience suggests we might be poised for boosters, even if Republicans hadn’t encouraged vaccine rejection. But the coming booster season underscores the ugly division they created: On one side, the overwhelming majority of Americans follow public-health guidance and are willing to sacrifice for one another; on the other it’s OK to mass-infect children with a novel virus to hurt political enemies. The stakes of keeping that minority out of power couldn’t be higher.

“On one side, the overwhelming majority of Americans follow public-health guidance and are willing to sacrifice for one another; on the other it’s OK to mass-infect children with a novel virus to hurt political enemies. The stakes of keeping that minority out of power couldn’t be higher.”

Could the stakes for our experiment in democracy be higher? I can’t imagine how. I guess that terrifying, all-powerful cabal of Satanist pedophile cannibal Christ-haters could actually exist, and be in control of our country, and millions of innocent young children could really be at risk of abduction, rape and having their blood drained so that vampire Democrats can slurp down its youth-enhancing properties.

On the other hand, surveys show not every earthling believes in these kind of destructive fairy tales (these screen shots are from NowThis News):

This strikes me as encouraging news in the accepting the evidence of our eyes, ears and brains department. In passing, we note that of the G20 nations, six, or 30%, are currently being run by autocrats, including the murderous “reformer” crown prince of the medieval monarchy of our close allies, the Saudis, a gigantic royal family that sits atop an underground ocean of petroleum.

The conversation with people who want simple answers that do not inconvenience them, that confirm their darkest suspicions about guys like George Soros (and the rest of us Jews, for that matter), that give them a feeling of superiority in a world at a very perilous moment, is fucking exhausting. A bridge to the interests of these folks must be built, exhausting as that project is in the face of everything else we are up against.

I guess an important thing to keep in mind is not to start the conversation by talking about how ignorant and deadly science denial is in our modern age. A slick-talking Jew will never convince an antisemite that Jews would not drink your baby’s blood in a heartbeat, given the chance, but there is a way to have this discussion. And have it we must, or watch our beautiful world be destroyed by pure greed, arrogance and a sadistic lynch mob’s pleasure in the suffering of the powerless.

Culture? You’re soaking in it.

When I was a kid there was a long running TV commercial for a dishwashing liquid whose maker claimed it was so great at softening and moisturizing a woman’s skin that Marge, the manicurist, would soak her customer’s hands in it (on the sly, of course). Marge would quickly work how beautifully this wonderful dishwashing product worked to soften skin into every chat. When the customer asked Marge where she could try this amazing product Marge hit ’em with the punchline “you’re soaking in it!” The startled customer would start to pull her hand back, but Marge would gently but firmly put the hand back in the dishwashing liquid and everybody smiled and remembered the product was so good that you could literally soak in it to soften and moisturize your hands.

“You’re soaking in it” serves as an excellent (if mildly strained) metaphor for how dimly we see culture and most other things that surround us, seemingly immutable things that appear to be inevitable. The way things are, and have “always been”, is a powerful reinforcement of just about anything.

There is a compelling reason the US government doesn’t provide health care to all citizens as a right of citizenship. It’s complicated. Same for the reason that millions of underemployed Americans can’t presently go through a government sponsored training program to become skilled home health aides, with a guaranteed decent income, benefits and a pension. Both have to do with what we’re all soaking in, how the “free market” profit motive drives American health care, the lucrative middle man corporations who rake in billions selling these services, skimming a percentage off the top, usually underpaying the unskilled workers who often provide tender, intimate care to homebound older Americans in their last days. There are laws in place, and overlapping regulations, customs, cultural beliefs, etc. that keep things like affordable health care as a right and the right to decent pay for doing a tough, shitty, very important job out of the public discussion most of the time.

If you watch commercial TV you are going to see television commercials. Duh. Nothing is for free, and our constitution acknowledges, in its copyright clause, that all creativity is motivated by a desire for profit. You want something for free? Pay the premium to not see ads or shut up about the constant commercials. It is unthinkable that anyone in a free society would do anything for free, except perhaps favors for friends and family members. In God we trust, YOU pay cash, brah.

Some men see things as they are and ask, “”Why?”” I dream things that never were and ask, “”Why not?””

We can either, in the great old phrase (made famous by Robert Kennedy, who tweaked a line from George Bernard Shaw), talk about things exactly as they are, limited by existing law and culture, or imagine better things that don’t presently exist and change culture and laws to make them real Maybe our worst failures, as humanists who believe in basic human equality and a right to dignity, are failures of imagination.

To me, one of the features of Hilary’s 2016 campaign that doomed her to win the popular vote by only 3,000,000, and come up 78,000 short in the Electoral College (how about that vestige of slavery and rule by the wealthy for a “why?”) was her assertion that changing institutions takes time, sometimes generations, and that steady, incremental progress is the best we can realistically hope for, that radical change is unwise and uncalled for, no matter how pressing the need might seem, and so on.

The status quo, she implied, while not perfect, was pretty good for most people. Her opponent, the malignant Orange Polyp, spoke directly to the grievances of millions of disgruntled Americans when he said he knew how rotten to the core and corrupt American politics was and that he alone could fix it. He’d drain the swamp, build the wall, repeal Obamacare and replace it with something much better, and cheaper, that would cover everything.

This is a simplistic little post on an obscure blahg by a know-it-all who works for free, but there is hopefully a kernel of a thought in it for somebody. The best, and the worst, are things we imagine in the absence of actual experience. Few things we dread turn out to be as terrible as we fear, not everything we look forward to turns out to be as great as we dream it will be. Still, it’s a useful exercise, I think, in looking for solutions, to suspend disbelief based on the reality of a seemingly unalterable legal/social/cultural arrangement that we are all soaking in and that nobody can change. For generating possible solutions to complicated, miserable, often deadly problems, why not imagine something better and ask “Why not?”

Sanitizing History

It’s a cliche that history is written by the victors, “victors” being a supremely flexible term. By victor we often mean people who remain very wealthy and influential even after their own plans cost thousands of lives and their righteous “cause” turns to shit. We see history today being loudly written and rewritten, in real-time, by powerful, well-funded electoral losers, as it was rewritten by the wealthy, embittered daughters of the defeated Confederacy, decades after their beloved pappies were in their graves after the disgraceful “Northern War of Aggression”.

Trump’s party has removed from the RNC website the bragging page about Trump ending the long war in Afghanistan. The brag was scrubbed almost as soon as Biden made good on Trump’s promise to remove American troops and the Taliban immediately retook control of the nation that has never been militarily subdued by anybody in thousands of years of recorded history. The mess in Afghanistan, all those lost lives and a trillion dollars later, is fucking illegitimate Sleepy Joe’s to try to talk his way out of.

The name of celebrated diplomat and war criminal, Nobel Laureate Henry Kissinger, came up the other night (OK, I probably brought it up). The old Nazi, a one-time orthodox Jew who at 15 fled here with his family from the original Nazi paradise in 1938, is 98 years old, and still getting his ample ass kissed regularly by conservatives as an elder statesman, a supremely pragmatic American genius of international politics. I knew only a fraction of his actual war crimes, and threw a wet blanket over a small party by describing them briefly (without the numbers, which I found out later) the other night. I mentioned his advocacy of carpet bombing in Laos and Cambodia, to destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and the thousands of Cambodian and Laotian civilians killed.

The number, it turns out, is at least 300,000 dead over the four years or so Mr. Kissinger kept his foot on the gas pedal of the secret, illegal carpet bombing (nice phrase, carpet bombing) campaign against densely populated civilian centers in two countries the US was not at war with, during the long “police action” against Communist North Vietnam. Not to mention the panicked instability the continued bombing created, which lead directly to the regime of Pol Pot and his genocide against millions whose remains were later found in the Killing Fields of Cambodia. Shit happens, as Mr. Kissinger might say.

After heading up to bed (my comments about Kissinger immediately reminded everyone it was time for bed) I looked up his biography and the first hit I had was this one:

source

The anodyne weaselishness of “he was later critiqued for some of his covert actions at home and abroad” rivals Mike Pence’s wonderful accounting of the January 6 MAGA riot when the boss he’d obsequiously served sent a crowd to string him up for cowardice and disloyalty. “We may never see eye to eye about that day,” said Pence philosophically, referring to his former boss and him.

“You mean about that day he sent a lynch mob to grab you and lynch you?” asked a wag on the internet.

So, you know, some critical critics critically criticized Kissinger just because he deliberately prolonged the senseless slaughter of the Viet Nam War by at least four years, for political reasons (to hurt Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and ensure Nixon’s election and then reelection) and was the architect of a vast secret, illegal bombing campaign that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.

He indisputably won a Nobel Peace Prize for ending the war (his Vietnamese counterpart didn’t accept his own bullshit Peace Prize, knowing the true facts behind Kissinger’s mass murdering treachery). Biography.com takes no position on whether this critique of Kissinger is fair or not, we merely mention it out of a sense of fairness since so many seem to believe that the mass killings in Asia that he was deeply involved in was an American war crime.

This is how winners write history. Those leftists on East Timor that posed an ill-defined political threat to nearby Indonesia? Well, you visit the leader of Indonesia, give him some excellent weapons and tell him to wait. He waits, until the plane carrying you and Mr. Nixon taxis and lifts off Indonesian soil, then he slaughters one third of the civilian population of that island, including tens of thousands of cringing women and the crying children they tried to protect. Nothing to see here, what had WE to do with THAT?

I heard Kissinger interviewed by Leonard Lopate on WNYC a few years back. Kissinger had a new historical memoir out and was making the rounds of the talk shows. Lopate asked Kissinger about the slaughter on East Timor, which apparently began the moment Air Force One was wheels up, inches above the tarmac of an Indonesian airport. Kissinger responded in self-righteous fury. “You are so arrogant! You know nothing about history! How dare you?!!”

Lopate kept his cool, said something like “well, I may very well be arrogant, I don’t know, but that has nothing to do with my question. I’m reading directly from your book, on page 383 where you write….”

Kissinger attacked again, but the damage was done, among those of us who have long found the icon of international diplomacy to have been a self-righteous, unaccountable, murderous pile of dreck who always argued that in geopolitics the ends justify the means (means necessarily hidden under a cloak of secrecy, much of the time). Any status quo, no matter how flawed, is preferable to international chaos and possible revolution, Kissinger argued. That he was one of America’s greatest beneficiaries of this status quo apparently never entered his calculations.

Kissinger, who was never elected to any government position, greatly enjoyed his vast power of life and death over countless “enemies”, power which he famously called “the ultimate aphrodisiac”. One does not want to imagine Kissinger deploying that aphrodisiac.

Apparently power is a great aphrodisiac, if you think of a certain type — star fuckers, who will let you do anything to them if you are a big star. Apparently they let you walk right up to them and grab ’em by the pussy, LOL! The aphrodisiac effect of power is even more undeniable if consider a sex partner’s apparent lack of reciprocity to be no indication of her sexual appetite not being enhanced by the powerful aphrodisiac of the powerful person who is doing the fucking.

Muammar Gaddafi had unlimited power in Libya and, apparently, an unlimited, if sometimes sadistic, sexual appetite. He had a special crew going through the crowd wherever he spoke, picking out good looking young women to be taken to rooms to wait for the great man to give them a whiff of the ultimate aphrodisiac. Critics later called these rooms “rape rooms”. Mussolini apparently ran a similar game, stayed very busy with as much fucking as possible, but apparently found more willing women than the handsome, charismatic dictator of Libya. Both men ended badly. Fuck ’em.

When Henry Kissinger finally dies he will be lionized as a giant of American politics in the second half of the twentieth century. He will also be criticized, of course, by the critical critics, for what can arguably be called “war crimes,” but . . . well, those are critics who hate him. Who are you going to believe, those who loved the man for his brilliance and his measured, realistic view of world politics or those who hated him just because he might have had something to do with the deaths of a few hundred thousand so-called innocent civilians? Those anonymous kids that were killed would have grown up to hate America anyway, most likely. You can’t win, can you, Henry?

But wait a second —

“he was later critiqued for some of his covert actions at home and abroad”?

At home? Covert actions at home? Wait . . . could Henry have played a Bill Barr-like role, as Nixon’s Secretary of State, in justifying, or even authorizing, say, the murder by hit squad of one of Nixon’s declared enemies? Covert actions at home? Like that squad of federal marshals that jumped out of two SUVs in the state of Washington and opened fire on a guy accused of shooting a militant pro-Trump fighter who’d come to Portland to kick some commie ass [1]? Things like that can’t happen here, they can’t happen here!

They can’t happen here, can they, Henry?

[1]

Barr sent federal troops to protect a federal building in Portland, Oregon, pursuant to an Executive Order about protecting federal property from violence. Violence escalated immediately, once the anti-riot forces arrived on the scene. You recall the unmarked shock troops jumping out of unmarked rented vans to grab protesters, who they drove around, handcuffed and hooded, and released without charges. It was a radical experiment, to see if federal forces could be widely deployed to put down this threatening Black revolution. Black Lives Matter was portrayed as a violent terrorist group, as was antifa. People who claimed that police killings of unarmed Blacks is a serious ongoing problem in America were themselves the serious ongoing problem in America. These lawless rioters would not be tolerated.

Recall how things escalated in Portland. Trump supporters began staging counter protests in Portland. An armed Trump supporter was shot to death one night by a violent “antifa terrorist”. Four days later, the suspected anitfa killer was found 120 miles from Portland and quickly died in a hail of police bullets when federal marshals staged a raid. The story of the original murder of the Trump supporter, was reported, by the Washington Post, at the very end of the article about the police killing of his suspected murderer, this way:.

The incident came after a caravan of Trump supporters, including members of the Patriot Prayer group, made their way through Portland, sparking skirmishes with those who objected to their presence. Portland has seen more than three months of often violent protests after the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis, and the shooting seemed to intensify the persistent tension.

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As for the police killing of the suspected killer of the Trump supporter? From that same article in the Washington Post:

A vocal proponent of the far-left antifa movement who was suspected of fatally shooting a supporter of a far-right group in Portland, Ore., this weekend was shot and killed in a confrontation with law enforcement Thursday, the U.S. Marshals Service said.

Investigators were seeking to take Michael Forest Reinoehl into custody in connection with the fatal shooting of 39-year-old Aaron J. Danielson on Saturday after confrontations between supporters of President Trump and Black Lives Matter counterprotesters.

The agency said Reinoehl was shot by police near Olympia, Wash., after drawing a weapon as officers tried to arrest him.

“The fugitive task force located Reinoehl in Olympia and attempted to peacefully arrest him,” said Jurgen R. Soekhoe, a U.S. Marshals spokesman, in a statement. “Initial reports indicate the suspect produced a firearm, threatening the lives of law enforcement officers. Task force members responded to the threat and struck the suspect who was pronounced dead at the scene.”

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The attempt to peacefully arrest him was accomplished when officers jumped out of two SUVs that had sped to the scene, cut off Reinhoel’s parked car and opened fire on the left-wing suspect, killing him in a barrage of 37 bullets.

The rest of this largely forgotten footnote of an American Death Squad story, of task force members executing a hated enemy while “responding to the threat” from the unarmed man they opened fired on, is here, in the second half of the April 13th post (below the Amazon ad).