Two Knuckleheads Versus A Near-Peer

So once again I'm so out of touch with the rest of the world that a couple of acquaintances had to tell me today that the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran before I became aware of this fact.  Why have I chosen to isolate myself to such a degree that I'm not aware of breaking news? Simply because I already know that the world is a messed-up place, and that this is due in no small part to the United States of America.  We are now reaping the chaos that results from over 45 years of behind-the-scenes machinations by white supremacists and American exceptionalists.  The combination of white supremacy and American exceptionalism has worked synergistically to produce an extremely potent social toxin.  That toxin produced Trumpism, but it certainly did not begin with Trump.  Rather, there is an entire cabal of damnably malignant men to blame, an entire coterie of rich and powerful people, an entire demographic of people whose souls are a pile of garbage.

I'll say at the outset that from my limited reading of the situation, the attack against Iran was unprovoked.  It was not an act of retaliation against any Iranian attack on Israel or the U.S.   In other words, Iran did not throw the first punch.  This shows that the regimes of both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are guilty of a criminal act.  (Regarding Israel, my last shreds of sympathy for Israel are evaporating right now.  Netanyahu seems like a singularly rigid, unimaginative, and brittle head of state in such times as these.)  The problem for both nations is that Iran is much closer to a near-peer to the U.S. than Venezuela was, and is much more populous than Israel.  Attacking Iran has probably erased any fault lines that previously existed in Iranian society, and the attack will harden anti-Israel sentiment across the entire Mideast. Israel, having managed to alienate many people by its actions in Gaza, seems bent on escalating the alienation still further.  As for Iran, it has defensive and offensive missile capabilities which pose a serious threat to U.S. military assets in the region.  It has begun to use those capabilities.  And those capabilities are about to be augmented.

It's time for the rest of the world to recognize that the United States is now itself a rogue state.  The rest of the world does indeed have the collective power to bring this rogue state to heel, but only if it presents a united or nearly united front.  As for whether bringing the U.S. to heel involves military responses, I will reserve any comment or opinion.  However, the rest of the world can definitely impose the kinds of steps of economic noncooperation (including even sanctions) that can render the U.S. powerless.  Please decouple from the U.S. - completely.

I'll also say that those members of the U.S. military who choose to obey Trump's orders are men without conscience.  They may be merely people who have chosen to indulge in what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil, or they may have chosen more enthusiastically to support the Trump/America First agenda, but either way they are people who have thereby forever lost my respect.  Right now I don't support our troops.

An additional problem for the U.S. is that this nation's malignant narcissism - expressed through the potent poison of white supremacy and American exceptionalism - may damage and erode the capability of the leaders of the U.S. to discern reality to such an extent that they will choose to launch unprovoked military attacks on nations that are even closer to near-peer status than Iran.  This could result in disastrous consequences for the world in general and for the U.S. in particular.  These consequences may last a very long time.

Focus On The Family Continues to Send Spam Email To People Who Don't Want It

I have to wonder how or why Google blithely gave my email address to people with whom I want no contact.  Why, for instance, have they given my email address to Focus on the Family, a right-wing white supremacist arm of the American evangelical church?  From the screenshot below, one can plainly see that FOTF does not care about religion per se, nor about the worship and obedience to Christ, but only about helping the Rethuglican Party during this year's midterm elections.  

Let me "speak the truth in love" as Ephesians 4 says - but I must warn FOTF that my love is tough love.  You thugs supported the presidency of Donald Trump.  You are utterly corrupt religious parasites and you have no business trying to tell me how to vote.  Don't call me; I'll call you if I ever want to hear from you.  But here's a hint - you probably shouldn't waste time hanging around your phone.

An Unsurprising Surprise (Coping With Nasty Weather)

There are two kinds of surprises in life, I suppose.  The first kind is the sudden event that no one could have foreseen, and the second is the sudden event that could have been foreseen by anyone with decent situational awareness.  Of course, the greater a person's situational awareness, the greater the proportion of events which the person can put into the second category of surprises.  Take lightning, for instance.  Anyone who is outdoors during a thunderstorm should know that he or she can be struck.  But sometimes lightning can strike out of a clear blue sky.  Before the advent of radar and satellite weather imagery, such events could be considered a genuine surprise.  Today, not so much.

Anyone who has watched the political climate in the world and particularly in the United States can see that we have been having some stormy weather.  The latest instance of this is the savage hammer attack against the husband of Nancy Pelosi by David Depape, a 42 year old male drug user aligned with QAnon, anti-Semitism, and right-wing conspiracy theories.  While shocking, such events as this are hardly surprising.  Unfortunately we live in a political climate which has been engineered to produce just such events.  Those who did the engineering are those defenders of white supremacy who are genuinely terrified at the prospect of the emergence of a world which they will have to share on an equal footing with all the other people in the world.  These people were energized into action by the gains of the American civil rights struggle of the 1960's, and have been working tirelessly ever since to roll back those gains.  Their energies were kicked into overdrive by the presidency of Barack Obama, as white supremacists vowed to themselves that they would create a world in which such power-sharing could never happen again.  

We know the result of their efforts.  Under Donald Trump, we got an acceleration of the social and environmental diseases which are typical of Republican, conservative governance: an increase of mass shootings due to easy access to guns, an increase in wealth and income inequality, a shredding of social safety nets, an acceleration of climate change (including life-threatening wildfires on a massive scale), a cannibalizing of government, an increase in persecution, oppression, and outright murder of people of color, and an increasing destruction of the ability of the United States to make large-scale coordinated responses to large-scale emergent threats.  This is why in 2020, so many nonwhite nations in the developing world were so much better than the United States in their response to COVID-19.  

Now the Republican Party is continuing to field political candidates who are nutcases.  We should not be surprised by the political violence we are seeing when we also see these nutcases openly calling for physical violence.  (See this, this, and this also.)  And the Republicans are trying to win elections by their usual strategy of lying.  They say that America is being swept by a dangerous crime wave under the Democrats, even though there is no evidence of this.  (In the city where I live, there are candidates for City Council who are trying to say that our city is suffering increased crime.  If that's the case, I haven't noticed.)  They say that the American economy is suffering under the Democrats.  However, this statement is refuted by the findings of institutions such as the Brookings Institute and the Center for American Progress.  They blame President Biden for the high gas prices we have seen across the United States in 2022.  However, their blame is dishonest, as the reality is that even without the consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, global oil production cannot expand further.  In fact, Saudi Arabian oil production is either very near or at its peak.  And if we buy Russian oil, we finance the evil deeds of a would-be emperor, a dictator and murderer named Vladimir Putin.  The high price of gasoline (petrol for those who are British) should be seen as yet one more proof that the world is going to have to change its way of living very soon.

It could be asked how we who have been historically oppressed let ourselves fall into such a dangerous situation in which an organized group of narcissistic, fascist, supremacist oppressors could become such a threat to the rest of us.  Why, for instance, did we not organize ourselves for our own collective good to build our own nonviolent power?  Why was so much time wasted?  Why did we not create strategies to effectively deal with the increasing concentration of power - media power especially! - which took place from 1980 onward?  Fox News should never have been allowed to become such a powerful cult.  But asking such questions at such a time as this seems almost like asking too late - as if we were a party of golfers who had continued our play even as storm clouds gathered and we found ourselves stricken down by a bolt from heaven, a bolt we should have foreseen, and now those of us who survived were asking ourselves why we had been struck.  A more urgent question is the question of what we should do now.

I myself don't entirely know the answer to that question.  But I do have the following suggestions.

• First, have the right world-view.  According to the world-view which I hold, we live in a moral universe ruled by a righteous Creator who has promised that the soul that sins shall die (Ezekiel 18:4) , that everyone who exalts himself will be humbled (Matthew 23:12), that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), that whatever a man sows, this he will also reap (Galatians 6:7), that those who make themselves great by destroying or oppressing their fellow human beings will themselves ultimately be destroyed (James 5:1-6).  This is why I am confident that those who violently push white supremacy will ultimately fail.  Even now, I see the outworkings of damnation propagating through these people.  Some signs of this propagation I cannot reveal now - although those who read sociological analyses of American society can spot the trends.  Even secular sociologists and economists have lately noticed how those who pursue certain goals are  frequently destroyed by the very means they use to pursue those goals.
• Second, focus on building your own internal power so that you may reduce your dependence on the dominant society.  I am thinking of a passage from Recovering Nonviolent History by Maciej Bartkowski.  (Disclaimer: I really like Dr. Bartkowski's book, but I don't anymore like the organization which Dr. Bartkowski belongs to, namely, the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict.  If you want to know why, please check out some of the links in the sidebar of this blog.)  Page 18 of his book contains the following quote: "...the guilt of falling into the predatory hands of [oppressors] lay in the oppressed society, and, thus, the solution and liberation need to come from that society transformed through its work, education, and civility.  Victims and the seemingly disempowered are thus their own liberators as long as they pursue self-organization, self-attainment, and development of their communities."
• Third, and most important, maintain nonviolent discipline.  The filthiness of the Right has been made abundantly plain over the last several years.  This filthiness has become a powerful liability to them.  In order to remove this handicap, they have tried to claim that both they and their intended victims are filthy.  Do not give them any help in their attempt to blame both sides for a conflict which they themselves started.  By all means, vote.  However, no matter what happens afterward, do not answer the violence of the Right with your own violence.  Beware of engaging in protest marches, as these can be easily infiltrated by violent agents provocateurs from the Right.  Do not give these people any opening for casting blame on you.  Please do me a favor and read the posts I wrote on strategic nonviolent resistance under the heading "From Dictatorship to Democracy."

Mid-Air Self-Destruct

Over the last five or six weeks, I've been very, very busy.  (Being an entrepreneur is not exactly a good way to relax!)  So today's post will be short.  But I was motivated to write today's post by some news items of which I became aware during this past week.  

The news has to do with the ongoing revelations of massive sexual abuse in the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).  The most recent and comprehensive revelations were publicized in a report released this month by an independent investigating committee; however, this is by no means the first report of sexual misconduct and rape by clergy and members among the Southern Baptists.  (See this also.)  To me, the most notable case of Southern Baptist sexual misconduct concerns Paul Pressler, a retired Texas judge and Republican Party operative who figured prominently in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.  It has been revealed that during Pressler's most active political periods, he was also raping boys in his church youth group, and that he was soliciting sex from adult men.  (He is by no means the only SBC pastor guilty of homosexual acts and pedophilia.  See Frankie Wiley and John Langworthy also.)  Paul Pressler had marketed himself as a champion of conservative Christian family values, which brings up a very interesting point that I will address shortly.  But before I address that point, let me add an item of news which falls on the heterosexual side of the rape/abuse line, namely, that many female victims of SBC rape were later forced by SBC leadership to get abortions in order to hide the evidence of the crimes committed against the victims.

And now the point I want to make.  People who study the history of the intersection of religion and politics in the United States should be well able to trace the means by which the Christian profession was transformed, from 1979 onward, into a political weapon of the Republican Party.  The overall strategy was quite simple, consisting of the following elements:

• The loud, strident proclamation that America is in danger of moral decline caused by "liberal" elements and the loss of "family values", particularly those values centering on sexual morality
• The loud, strident proclamation that America is in danger of losing its "liberty" due to threatening outside agents such as the Soviet Union (before the Soviets rolled over and died conveniently in 1989), or Muslims or illegals (who replaced the Soviets as bogeys after the Soviet collapse) or "socialists" (Oops! I mean, sssssssocialistssssss...) (One more parenthesis under this point - Soviet Russia was truly a thug nation, and I do not want to minimize the danger they posed.  But they were a gang that couldn't shoot straight much of the time, just like Putin's thug Russia is now.)
  
• The loud, strident proclamation that only the Republican Party could save America from losing its identity as a "city on a hill", because only the Republicans were willing to openly confess faithfulness to Jesus Christ
• The loud, strident proclamation that the duty of Christians in the United States was therefore to vote Republican and to support Republican solutions to the "crises" being sold to us - solutions which, of course, always involved building more prisons, locking up more people (especially the poor and nonwhite, regardless of whether or not they were actually guilty of any crime), procuring more guns, killing more "enemies", and giving more power to the obscenely rich.

I am ashamed to admit that for many years, I drank that Kool-Aid.  But even in my most Kool-Aid-intoxicated state, I had to notice that whenever I saw Republican candidates for office, they always seemed to be a "disease cure" that had massive undesirable side-effects.  For while the so-called "Christians" who handed out their so-called "Christian voter guides" to people of color like me always told us that we needed to vote for their candidates so that they might "save America from moral decline", closer observation always revealed that these candidates pushed policies designed to murder and oppress the poor and the nonwhite in this country.  Yet we were told that we needed to bear with these side effects because of the much greater importance of the disease these candidates were ostensibly seeking to "cure," the "great issues of our time" which these candidates were promising to address.

The ongoing revelations of ongoing sexual abuse - not only in the SBC, but throughout most of mainstream American evangelicalism - are yet one more proof that all of the assertions of the American Religious Right are utter crap, to borrow a phrase from Liu Cixin.

Listen up, white American evangelicals.  Your real message to all the rest of us is that God supposedly chose you from the foundation of the world to rule all the earth, and that He chose all the rest of us to be your punching bags, your doormats, your slaves, and your trash cans.  The reasons you offer for this supposed choice are that you are supposedly morally superior to everyone else, and that therefore God has granted you the right to re-enact the violent conquest by ancient Israel of the land of Canaan - except that nowadays, you take the place of the "people of promise" and that gives you the right to use the rest of us for target practice in order to "punish us for our evil." However, you're just as evil as the people you want to kill.  Your real agenda is and always has been white supremacy over the entire earth.  The "side effects" the rest of us suffered from voting for your candidates were always your real aim.  This is why you have the gall to tell us that we need to vote for your political candidates who promise to stamp out homosexuality even while you secretly practice the very sin you condemn.  This is why there will always be an avenue for abortion in the United States even if Roe vs Wade is overturned, because when your pastors rape each other's wives and daughters, you will always need some means of destroying the evidence of your crimes.  This is why you so zealously supported the presidency of a serial sex offender, serial adulterer, and serial crook named Donald John Trump.

And this is why you have lost all legitimacy with me.  Believe me, the loss has been a long time coming.  In 2006 I first began to see through you, and your support of Donald Trump was merely the icing on a poisonous cake.  Today, instead of attending any of your churches, I have done some housecleaning and some private Bible reading of my own, and I think I'll sit in my backyard and enjoy the sunshine while I make out my schedule for next week.  But I'll never again listen to any of your sermons.  Do you want to help the proclamation of the Gospel of Christ?  Then shut up.  Just. Shut. Up.

Putin's Trojan Horses

I have been following Cosmic Connie's blog Whirled Musings for a while now.  I like her style and her clear-headedness regarding current events and the hucksters who drive many of these events.  She has done admirable work tracking the shenanigans of the right-wing/white supremacist doofuses who have infected not only the United States but the entire Global North as well.  Her latest post describes the increasingly violent threat posed by these idiots against decent people everywhere.  

I thought it good to add a reminder that the source, the main engine and the leadership of many far-Right/white supremacist organizations nowadays is Russia.  I suggest that the reason for the recent uptick in trouble from these groups is tied closely to the fact that Putin is no longer winning his geopolitical games, and wishes to expand his use of hybrid warfare in his assault against the West.  As I mentioned in my last post, Putin's Russia is now good for nothing.

The Jewel And The Dragon

I need to keep my promises, and one of those promises is to finish writing a concluding series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy, a book which deals with the subject of strategic nonviolent resistance.  But this past week I began to try to build new habits around time management, and the long-range goals I am trying to accomplish with my new time-management scheme include being in bed by 10 PM every night and getting really good on the guitar.  I have about an hour and a half of practice time scheduled for tonight...

Next week, God willing, I will have another post ready.  One thing I do want to mention in the meantime is that I have recently commented several times on this blog about how well the nations of the East (and I mean the Asian nations, not Russia!) have done in navigating global crises which have shown the weaknesses and fault lines of the nations of the West, including the United States.  One particular crisis which the Asian nations have navigated particularly well is the COVID-19 pandemic.

But now it seems that agents of the Global Far Right have infiltrated Asian societies in an attempt to sow division and discord.  This is especially true of the proponents of anti-vaxx (that is, anti-vaccine) propaganda who have made their voices heard in realspace and in cyberspace over the last few months.  One doofus who comes to mind is Brad Bowyer, who was born a British citizen but who managed to insinuate himself into a leadership role in a political party in Singapore - until he made a remark comparing Singapore's efforts to ensure vaccination compliance to the efforts of Hitler to round up Jews for extermination.  That remark has recently cost him his political position.  Let's see if he manages to bounce back.  And let's see if he is successful in his attempted cultural poisoning of Singapore.  Lee Kuan Yew would never have tolerated him.

Mr. Bowyer himself.  Image taken from the Straits Times

Singapore is not the only Asian nation suffering from the attack of the lunatic fringe, as seen in the following articles: "Anti-Vaxxer Propaganda Spreads in Asia, Endangering Millions," "Coronavirus vaccine: anti-vax movement threatens Asian recovery," and "The Inherent Racism of Anti-Vaxx Movements."  Note that last article, and note the murderously genocidal motives of the promoters of anti-vaxx propaganda.  Note also that one of the chief sources of this propaganda is Russia.  Perhaps the common people of Russia are distressed by the fact that Putin can't seem to organize a successful effort to put out the wildfires which are destroying their homeland.  They can take comfort in the fact that their taxes are being used instead to try to destabilize the rest of the world.

The Fall of Liberty's Libertine

Libertine: a person, especially a man, who behaves without moral principles or a sense of responsibility, especially in sexual matters.

- from Dictionary.com (Emphasis mine.)

I am trying to read a technical document just now.  It's for a proposal I'm putting together for an environmental project, and it is a very dry document.  Dry documents tend to make me sleepy, so I indulged myself in a quick bit of Web surfing to distract me from my overwhelming desire to snooze.  (Yes, I know - a better tactic would be to drop and do 25 push-ups.  I'll try that next time.)

My web surfing (when I indulge in it, which is not often) frequently takes me to a consideration of the 1980's, which were a high point for the Republican Party and for the freak show known as white American evangelicalism.  So I googled "evangelical scandals 1980's pastors" and came across a surprising bit of present-day news.  In case you didn't know it, Jerry Falwell Jr., son of the Jerry Falwell who founded and led the "Moral Majority" of the 1980's, resigned this week from Liberty University.  His resignation was not voluntary, but came as a result of the revelation of his involvement in a few sex scandals, and the revelation of a photo of himself and a woman who is not his wife posing together with their zippers down.  (Literally!)

It is no secret that the junior Falwell is racist.  It is also no secret that he has been a rabid supporter of another serial adulterer named Donald John Trump.  Falwell is like many white Evangelical mouthpieces in saying that we must support Trump because he is "a chosen vessel whom God has raised up for a glorious purpose" - and "if God could use a wicked king like Cyrus or Nebuchadnezzar for His glorious purposes, God can use Trump to carry out His mysterious plan!"  Note that in saying such things, both he and others like him are bad-mouthing not only God, but Cyrus and Nebuchadnezzar.  How ironic that in showing himself to be just as slimy as Trump, Mr. Falwell has brought consequences upon himself.  And I expect that Liberty University will not itself survive unscathed.

In my march through the reading of the Old Testament, I am now reading the book of Micah.  And what Micah says is a direct contradiction of Falwell, and of other sketchy people like him, including Franklin Graham.  But I do not write this to moralize.  Rather, I want to make a psychological observation.  Jerry Falwell Jr. seems to me to be yet another manifestation of the pathological, narcissistic raging of white supremacy against a world that is inexorably changing around those who wish to remain supreme.  Like Trump, Falwell Jr. is a symptom of a larger American disease.  He is also yet another example of the outworkings of damnation.

And now, back to work!

The Tribes of the Agents Provocateurs

In a number of posts (here, here, and here for instance) I have asserted that the majority of violence which has taken place at Black Lives Matter protests in the United States over the last two months was caused by White infiltrators.  I have therefore argued that basing a nonviolent resistance struggle solely on the tactic of mass protest rallies and marches is a dangerously short-sighted strategic approach.

But some may wonder whether my assertion that mainly White actors have been responsible for the violence is accurate.  Therefore, I'd like to share the following news stories:

• "‘Umbrella Man’ went viral breaking windows at a protest. He was a white supremacist trying to spark violence, police say", Washington Post.  Note that the "Umbrella Man" made his appearance at one of the first Minneapolis protests against the murder of George Floyd.
• "White Women Tagging ‘Black Lives Matter’ On Starbucks Caught By Black Protestors", BET.
• "Nearly two dozen arrested in Richmond as weeks of peaceful protest turned violent over the weekend," Washington Post.  Note that the mayor of Richmond identified the violent instigators as White supremacists who were outsiders to the community.
• "Why are white supremacists protesting the deaths of black people?", The Conversation.
• "A white supremacist channel on Telegram encouraged followers to incite violence during police brutality protests by 'shooting in a crowd,' according to internal DHS memo," Business Insider.
• "Violence mars Portland protests, frustrates Black community," AP.  Note that the troublemakers are not content to limit themselves to causing trouble at protests, but are part of the White violence against minority businesses and neighborhoods in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests.
• "Finley: Violent white protesters hurt cause of racial justice," The Detroit News.
• "Meet the ‘Boogaloo boys,’ the violent extremists attracting members of the US military," Task and Purpose.
• "As Trump warns of leftist violence, a dangerous threat emerges from the right-wing boogaloo movement," Washington Post.  Note that members of the Boogaloo movement have been linked to the shootings of police and Federal security guards that took place after the murder of George Floyd.
• "Far-right groups like the “Boogaloo” and “O9A” continue to attract troops and veterans," Military Times.  Note that the senior officers of the U.S. military recognize the presence of a far-right element in the U.S. military as a serious problem.  Note also the link between these far-right elements and Satanism.
• "A woman accused of throwing Molotov cocktail at a police car suggests a protester gave her the device," CNN.  Note that although this woman claimed that Black protestors gave her the Molotov cocktail, the police who investigated her discovered that she was lying.  What gave her away was the presence of her fingerprints and the fingerprints of a friend of hers on a note about glass bottles...

A few comments.  First, I am extremely grateful for the many White people who have shown themselves to be both decent and moral in their support for communities of color during the evil reign of Donald Trump.  I am grateful not only for those White people who are sincerely standing for Black lives, but also for those White people who were sincerely revolted by the news that Donald Trump's goons were ripping Latino children from the arms of their parents at the southern border and putting these children into cages and detention centers.  I am a Christian, but I am grateful for those White people who sincerely opposed Donald Trump's attempts at a Muslim travel ban.  I am grateful for the Wall of Moms, the Wall of Dads, and the Wall of Vets.  When I think of the Wall of Vets, I am especially grateful for its founder, a White vet who allowed himself to be beaten by Trump's Homeland Security goons in order to stand against racism and fascism.  I am grateful for those members of the dominant culture who refuse to enjoy the passing pleasures of the sin of being made great at the expense of their fellow human beings on the earth.

However, it must also be noted that there is a deeply dysfunctional element in the American dominant culture.  This element consists of people who have based their entire lives and their entire identity on the power they have been able to exercise in order to dominate, bully and ruin the lives of their intended victims.  They are the forever "Cowboys" - unreconstructed, unreconstructable, and unrepentant - who demand that the rest of us play the role of the forever "Indians" or the forever "slaves".  A woman I recently heard in an online workshop said that bullies have thin skins.  I would also add that bullies are not really sure they exist in the world.  Being afraid of their own ghosthood, they can only reassure themselves of their existence by trashing someone else's life.  The Boogaloo movement, for instance, is one of those far right movements who are trying to push society into chaos so that they can build a fascist, White supremacist empire out of the ashes.  These are the Elliot Rodgers of the world, who seek to ruin in order that they may possess.  Rather like Satan, aren't they?  And if communities of color base their struggle solely on the tactic of mass protest, guess who will come in to hijack the protests!

Therefore, a key response of the historically marginalized, of the communities of color, of the communities which have not been historically dominant must be a response of collective self-organization.  By organizing ourselves to meet our collective needs, we build our social power - power which is to be used not to dominate others, but to help ourselves fulfill our own ontogeny, and to help other afflicted communities fulfill their ontogeny.  And it is collective and sustained self-organization that is the foundation of successful nonviolent resistance movements - not mere protest.  Study Gandhi for instance, and you will discover not only the acts of mass noncooperation against the British, but also his insistence on what he called the constructive program - a key part of an oppressed population liberating itself from oppression by learning to rule itself.

So this brings me to my last comment.  Given the weakness of struggles that rely solely on mass protest, and given the ease with which both State and non-State opponents can hijack such struggles, I once again urge the Black Lives Matter organizers and the organizers of the struggles of other communities of color to look beyond mass protest as your go-to tactic.  Broaden your knowledge of strategic nonviolent resistance.  Please read some good books on the subject.  (Maybe one of my future posts will be simply a list of recommended good books!)  And please learn the art of strategy!

I leave you with one comparison from military history.  World War 1 was almost lost by the British because of one man, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig.  Haig assumed command of British troops in 1914, and proceeded to launch a number of offensives against the defensive German lines.  For over three years, his go-to strategy was to try to wear the Germans down by attrition, and to try to punch a hole in German defenses so that his horse-mounted cavalry could charge to victory.  Such a strategy might have worked in the 1800's...but by World War 1, there were these inconvenient little things called barbed wire, machine guns and heavy artillery.  The Germans also used a tactic known as defense-in-depth.  Haig became highly predictable in his tactics, in the same way that having mass protests day after day for over 60 days in the U.S. in 2020 has become highly predictable.  Therefore, the Germans played rope-a-dope with him, costing him several hundred thousand men.  Britain was saved from defeat by the entrance of the United States into the war.  But did Haig learn from his mistakes?  Not at all, according to a quote of his from 1926.

Basing a strategic nonviolent resistance or liberation struggle solely on spontaneous, poorly-planned mass protest rallies in these days should therefore seem about as stupid as relying on horse-mounted cavalry in modern warfare, shouldn't it?

So...Who's the Dangerous One Again?

I have a couple of posts in the embryonic state, which I hope to develop and publish within the next few weeks.  But something happened that demands a response.  At around 4:30 yesterday afternoon, a male white supremacist began screaming racist and anti-Muslim insults at two young women on a MAX train in Portland, Oregon.  I think it was probably the same line that I often rode home from work at around that time for many weekdays over the last several years.  When some male passengers tried to calm this man down and de-escalate his behavior, he viciously attacked them with a knife, killing two of them and wounding a third.  Then he fled the train.

I wonder what was going through the accursed head of Jeremy Joseph Christian when he started his screaming and shouting, and when he began to kill.  Did he think he was being some kind of hero?  Was this his way of trying to get one last shot of narcissistic glory to compensate for a life wasted as a felon and a loser?  Some prominent politicians and community leaders have called on Donald Trump to publicly condemn the bigotry embodied in Jeremy Joseph Christian, but if I were them, I wouldn't hold my breath, because Trump, like Jeremy, is a loser and a felon who is trying to get one last shot of narcissistic glory before being thrown into an incinerator.  Trump and Jeremy, moreover, are symptoms of a larger national and ethnic narcissism which seems to have permanently taken hold of a certain sector of the American public - a sector which can easily be egged on to re-enact the myth of redemptive violence (see this also) at the slightest provocation because the enactment of this myth enables them to project the shame of their own lives onto convenient targets, even if the choosing of those targets makes no sense, as was the case with Pizzagate.  This is the sector which doesn't believe it actually exists unless it can prove its existence by terrorizing people who don't belong to it.  But it is inescapably - bit by bit - losing its ability to terrorize.  For its members, the future contains only a yawning abyss, because this sector is good for nothing.

I am a Christian and not a Muslim.  But when Muslims are actively performing deeds of reconciliation and healing in a nation and society that is being polarized and torn apart by knuckleheads for the benefit of its wealthiest members, what does that say about America as a "Christian" nation?  Only that "the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you."

A Wolf's Fear Of The Future

As I think about this present time, I am reminded of special days which I have grown to dislike over the years.  One of those special days is, oddly enough, Christmas.  Don't get me wrong - I am all for people taking time out of the year to celebrate the birth of Christ.  What I choke on is being barraged by holiday music and holiday shopping advertisements from the day after Halloween until the day after New Year's.  Another holiday I am not too fond of is Halloween (although I make sure to dress as a grown-up every year).

But the day which I have come to despise most of all in the United States is Election Day.  Indeed, one of the most annoying aspects of life in the USA just now is the fact that we seem to be in a never-ending election season designed to produce maximal angst and fear among those who have to live through it.  A particularly vexing element of this is having to cut through the games played by wolves who want to bury their real agenda behind a bunch of non-issues.  Today's post will attempt to clarify the real issues at stake in the national elections, at least, as I see them.

Many of those who are campaigning for Donald Trump claim that a Trump presidency would bring world peace by ending American neocon attempts to expand American power throughout the world.  Some of these people seek to paint Hillary Clinton as some sort of war criminal, either because some American operatives died at Benghazi after the U.S. had overthrown the lawful government of Gaddafi, or because Ms. Clinton had a personal Gmail account while she was Secretary of State.  (If having a personal email account is a crime, you may as well throw many of us in jail, because we too have personal email accounts in addition to our work accounts.)  Indeed, there are many mouthpieces trying by every possible means to make Mr. Trump palatable enough to get enough votes to win the Presidency.  (Some of these people have actually tried to use the angle that he is "the lesser of two evils."  They forget that by saying this they are admitting that he is evil.)

But if we take Mr. Trump at face value - especially concerning the statements and speeches which won him the Republican nomination - we see the real motive behind the Trump candidacy, and behind the efforts of the American right wing over the last decades.  These efforts are coming to a head now, in 2016.  For the central issue is the survival of white supremacy and First World hegemony.  Trump and his supporters (along with the Murdoch and Breitbart media empires and American evangelical media) believe that this supremacy and hegemony are in mortal danger of being swept away, especially in the United States.  Thus the candidacy of Trump represents a last-ditch attempt to stop the clock, or better yet, to reverse the clock of world history and to bring the 1950's back as a permanent state of world and national affairs.  The 1950's hold special appeal for these people because these were the days in which white America dominated the world and Americans oppressed whomever they wanted to, without any fear of consequences or resistance.  Americans who enjoyed the privileges of the 1950's grew to believe that they would never have a need for politeness, compromise, consensus, respect of differences, or the need to work harmoniously with others.  And they even remade God into their own image (or for a while, as it seemed), as the God who "gave us this great land and promised us that we should rule the world!"

This has been the real agenda of the Right for a long time.  This is the real agenda of the Right at this present time.  This is what is at stake in the current election.  And on a certain level, this agenda is not only national, but international in scope, although on the international level, there are some differences.  (How many of you know that the far-right movements now at work in Europe are partially financed by Russia?  See this also.  And Russia is financing Trump.)  On the international level, the agenda morphs into an effort to maintain the hegemony of the First World over the rest of the earth, by attempting to arrive at a gentleman's agreement over who is allowed to exercise control over particular "spheres of influence".  The gentleman's agreement is then paid for at the expense of the nonwhite majority world, who get to enjoy continuing to be carved up by First World "spheres of influence" while being excluded from the concentrations of wealth which the nations of the First World have amassed by robbing everyone else blind.

The trouble with establishing such an agenda is that the factors which would cause such an agenda to succeed are now changing very rapidly.  As far as the United States, the most recent census data shows that by 2020, the majority of children in the United States will be nonwhite.  From 2011 onward, the majority of births in the United States each year have been nonwhite.  Moreover, many of these children are multiracial.  And they do not have the same agenda as the media outlets whose mouthpieces constantly demonize them as "terrorists," "heathen," "criminals" or "savages."  They don't care about Benghazi or emails.  They (and their parents) just want to live their lives in peace.  But because the current masters of American society continue to engage in conversations which the future majority population doesn't care about, the current masters of America risk becoming irrelevant in very short order.  This translates to a loss of power, if by power one means the power to bully, to oppress, to rob, to dominate, to impose oneself and one's culture on others.

The same trends are at work in Europe, which is why many European far-right groups have arisen to try to stop this process.  It could also be argued that this is a motivation for the Russian intervention in Syria.  Don't get me wrong - I think that the attempt by the West to overthrow yet another country should have been stopped.  However, based on things I have learned and sources I have read over the last several months, I don't believe the Russians intervened out of the goodness of their hearts, but rather, to stop the influx of people considered nonwhite into Europe (and potentially, into Russia).

Trump supporters have the misguided hope that perhaps he can reverse the loss of white supremacy in the U.S. - perhaps by a massive increase in police shootings of unarmed black Americans, or perhaps by wholesale, indiscriminate deportation of anyone who looks foreign or has a non-English last name, even if they were born in the U.S.  (Such deportations have happened before in U.S. history, by the way.)  But there is yet another trend at work which cannot be stopped by any political leader on earth.  And that trend is the continued impoverishment and decline of the global industrial economy owned and controlled by the nations of the First World.  For that decline is driven inexorably by the depletion of the resources needed to make that economy run.  Global production of all petroleum products is now past peak.  Coal production is about to peak, if it has not already.  The same is true of many other resources.  This also translates to a loss of power on the part of those who were formerly dominant.  How will the formerly powerful respond to the impending loss of their power?  Their response will show whether they have learned to become decent people or whether they are still wolves.

In closing, I will mention the church service I attended today.  It was at a Vietnamese church which shares a church building with a Hispanic congregation and a Karen (Myanmar/Thai) congregation.  This Vietnamese congregation held a joint Vacation Bible School with their Hispanic brethren this past summer.  Their youth groups have also had joint worship services together.  A couple of Christmases ago, I visited this church and heard some of the Vietnamese children singing Feliz Navidad.  I have also seen some of the Mexican members of the Hispanic church attending the Vietnamese Nativity service.  Today, the Vietnamese pastor was preaching out of Romans 12:6-8, and he was talking about how there is tremendous diversity in humanity.  He also mentioned that in the Body of Christ, that diversity is part of a unity.  (I was also able to see his sermon notes on a church member's iPad, and in his notes the pastor had alluded to the great evil of trying to persecute each other over our differences.)  The pastor and his congregation are not terrorists or criminals, but they have learned how to get along with others and how to be a blessing to others.  Why is it so hard for mainstream America to learn this lesson?  Could it be that America is infected by a terminal case of narcissism?