• Studies in Decadence: Bravo Real Housewives CAN be entertaining, but their pathological selfishness and infinite pettiness is eventually tiresome.
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This essay is part of a series on cultural, scientific and esoteric matters.
Margo Stiles
The current cast of the Beverly Hills housewives franchise, one of Bravo's most successful shows. Lisa Vanderpump, a British restaurateur, and the only one with a visible social conscience, is third from left.
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen you talk decadence in a world overrun by morally indifferent humans, Bravo's shows, an NBC property nurtured by Andy Cohen, take the cake. This is particularly true for the Real Housewives franchise.
I admit watching them often: they CAN be entertaining. But what bothers me no end is how this bunch of mostly well-off people WASTE their celebrityhood in endless petty bickering punctuated by bouts of outrageous self-pampering. Their egos are so fragile, their vision of life so myopic, that the slightest real or imagined slight is cause for a feud that can last ages.
OK, I get it. That's how the rich usually live (although the housewives lot hardly qualify as "the rich"—their average wealth puts them in the underbelly of the super-rich, where the real moguls live, the 0.0001% who own this country, its politicians, its media, and much of the planet. For example, none of these women are in the billionaire class (so you just can imagine THEIR excesses and character flaws), although some may eventally make that dubious grade. Kyle Richards and hubby Mauricio Umansky, for example, seem likely to make that dubious grade, as the guy, a real estate mogul in the making, is nothing if not an unrelenting money-accumulating machine.
That said, what gets me is that NONE of these women (except for Lisa Vandepump), EVER EXHIBIT THE SLIGHTEST interest in any of the multitude of urgent issues afflicting this planet, or its animals, for example. Yes, Bravo is not into actual realities, let alone the harsher ones that the audiences are probably trying to escape. American media is a a lying, escapist machine and Bravo is certainly no exception. Fine. But still, it's supposed to be a reality show, which implies at least a semblance of reality. If so, the obsessive pettiness is real; and it's all about me, me, me and ME! Seemingly around the clock.
Sometimes, for a heap of banal reasons, some of these housewives profess involvement in one of the fashionable issues of the day, like identity politics; being champs for "trannies" or some other LGBTQ category, and so on. But as anyone reading these lines probably knows, charity by the rich is normally a band-aid on the very problems they create. So it gets tiresome rather quickly. My remote hope is that if any of these moral pygmies ever got involved or learned about some truly urgent cause that reached them, that ignited their woefully small empathetic imagination, that they could apply their tons of free time and celebrity and money to pushing back against the crimes festering in this corrupt and desperate humanity. In the process I think they would grow in ways they can hardly envision. So let me toss something out: Have any of these "housewives" ever heard about the horrid plight of the Pangolin, for example? Just about the MOST endangered animal in the world. More even than elephants, tigers, lions, and rhinos. That or any similar cause would be a swell beginning, ladies. Give it a try!.
Moral atrophy is a cultural epidemic
The same plague of self absorption and moral indifference exists in other groups featured on Bravo, in varying degrees. After all, the channel is a peeping hole into what extreme bourgeois values are all about, something just about everyone in America, and certainly its corporate media, take for granted. So have a look at the Southern Charm franchise for example. It would be difficult to find a group of more physically stunning people—both the women and the men. They are almost all uniformly gorgeous. Magnificent specimens in their prime. Yet their shallowness—as a rule— is also breathtaking, a terrible contradiction, with some again standing out, like the apparently irredeemable Shep Rose, a poster boy for trust-fund babies, still too immature to see how a real man acts in life. Perhaps not accidentally, the notable (and wonderful) exceptions are mostly the women on this show, especially those who actually work in earnest for a living, in this case Madison LeCroy, Chelsea Meissner, and even part-time model Kathryn Dennis, whose decency, despite the deformations implanted on her by her social milieu, is palpably obvious.
BELOW: The Southern Charm crew.
But I'm not writing these lines to berate these people for the hell of it. I'm not envious. I'm PISSED.
We are in an unprecedented global war against a multitude of crises, ecological, social, political, etc., and in this war information power is a precious commodity, especially when underwriten by a hefty bank account and social visibility. But this is an era when the tweets of a moron can reach tens of millions in a few minutes, while desperately needed messages go begging for attention. Money and fame —singly and especially jointly—give you freedom to work on these issues. That these people, in general, do nothing of significance to improve this world, that they do not lift a finger to help a single creature, that they do not use their celebrity platforms to help move forward some much needed causes, is simply despicable. It is the biggest reason why their class and decadent ways are doomed to extinction—as they should be.
Jimmy Dore: The US is a MAFIA STATE! (A superb summation—do not miss.)
Another important dispatch from The Greanville Post. Be sure to share it widely.
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hat the Deep State hates most about Trump (besides his rantings about NATO costing too much, his tendency to seek non-belligerent relations with Moscow, or getting rid of the global alliance and what not, and his general discombobulating of the carefully constructed, super-expensive US empire) is that he lets the true face of the US and associated ruling classes show through in all their appaling ugliness and criminality. He's good and effective at implementing what the US empire wants, including giving the super-rich everything they ask for, from ridiculous low taxation, and non-existent regulation, to a defenceless environment, but Trump remains a dumb oaf, an embarrassment, a bad and erratic front man in the p.r. department for a system that requires enormous amounts of dissimulation to remain tolerably "legitimate" in the eyes of the increasingly suspicious hoi polloi. Here's Jimmy Dore's brave summary of what the US really is, cosmetics and lies aside.
We speak to political commentator Jimmy Dore on the Mueller report’s summary showing no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, he says the media has no credibility and is bought by the people they’re supposed to be investigating, says the failure of the American neoliberal system led to Donald Trump and gives his take on US regime change attempts in Venezuela.
ABOUT THE SHOW: Three times a week Afshin Rattansi and his team go underground to discover the stories that aren’t being covered by the mainstream UK media. From GCHQ to Occupy protests, and everything else in between, Going Underground is here to bring a fresh perspective to our audiences around Britain.
Jimmy Doe is not just a terrific standup comedian, he's also almost unique in the perceptiveness and didacticism of his political commentary, a true heir to George Carlin. Only Lee Camp measures up in this league. The rest —from Oliver to Colbert and Maher —are all overpaid courtiers for the system.
Be sure to get the most unique history of the Russo-American conflict now spanning almost a century! The book that every American should read.
Nuclear Armageddon or peace? That is the question. And here’s the book that answers it. CLICK HERE to buy The Russian Peace Threat.
Propaganda in World War 1, an Illustrated Account
HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.
By Terje Maloy
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]hese stories are not unique cases from a remote war. The same methods are constantly rinsed and repeated, the mentality in our ruling elites is the same, and the risk of a major conflict is as great today as in 1914.
These examples concentrate mostly on British/American perception management and propaganda. First of all, because they are masters of the art, and secondly, as victors they still dominate the narrative.
Arthur Ponsonby and Falsehood in Wartime
Arthur Ponsonby
After the Great War came a huge backlash of disillusion and revulsion. Calmly analysed, most of what had been told in the war turned out to be lies and half-truths. «Falsehood in War-time, Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War» was the title of a book published in 1928. Written by Arthur, Ponsonby, it discussed 20 instances of lies in wartime.
The contents of the book can be summed up in the Ten Commandments of War Propaganda:
We do not want war.
The opposite party alone is guilty of war.
The enemy is the face of the devil.
We defend a noble cause, not our own interest.
The enemy systematically commits cruelties; our mishaps are involuntary.
The enemy uses forbidden weapons.
We suffer small losses, those of the enemy are enormous.
Artists and intellectuals back our cause.
Our cause is sacred.
All who doubt our propaganda, are traitors.
The "Hun" bayoneting children.
The enemy is the face of the devil
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he perception of German atrocities in World War 1 has had is up and downs during the decades. They ‘Huns’ were indeed quite ruthless, and freely executed several thousand suspected franc-tireurs and hostages when they invaded Belgium and Northern France in 1914.
However, the theme of barbaric, nun-raping, baby-bayonetting Huns was so carried to excess by the Entente propaganda machine that there came a backlash in public opinion after the war. By the 1920s, the disillusionment with the war and its aftermath was so great that all of these stories were dismissed as atrocity propaganda, which again would backfire in 1939, when there was reluctance to believe stories of – this time real – massive German atrocities.
The same theme was used more recently, with the infamous tale of «Iraqis ripping babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals», in the warm-up to the Gulf War in 1990. Before the US Congress, a young woman in tears testified how she as a nurse in Kuwait witnessed Iraqi soldiers ripping prematurely born babies out of their incubators, leaving them to die on the floor. The story was later repeated by an equally moved President George HW Bush.
The public later found out that the woman was in fact not a nurse, but the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington, and the story was concocted as part of the propaganda effort by the PR-Agency Hill & Knowlton.
Mussolini Changes his Mind – Italy should join the war
Italy at first stayed neutral, then chose to join the Entente. This turned out to be a really bad decision, killing a generation of young men, and with not many gains to show for it in the peace treaties.
The decision was partially helped by subsidies from English and French intelligence to the Italian press. The Italian journalist Benito Mussolini (picture: in white coat, arrested during a scuffle with police in 1914) had a change of heart, and went from a leading socialist and war opponent to a fierce advocate of Italy joining the war.
According to a note written in November 1922 by the French secret services in Rome, Mussolini (who was described in another note from the same service as «an agent of the French Embassy in Rome») had in 1914 collected ten million francs «to support Italy’s war alongside the allied powers». In 1915, he was one of the founders the Fascist movement, which later took power in 1922.
The Difference Between Declared War Aims and Real Ones
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n August 1914, when an almost unanimous German parliament voted yes to war, it was presented to the German public as a defensive Schutzkrieg against conniving enemies. With the exception of one member, Karl Liebknecht, the entire 110-member delegation from the Social Democratic Party bowed to the war euphoria and voted yes to war loans.
The perception presented to the public during the first few years of fighting, was of a Germany fighting a defensive war for survival, not a scheme for imperial aggrandizement. But in reality, already in September 1914, in the first few weeks of the war, a secret plan for an extensive redrawing of Europe’s borders was prepared for Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, the Septemberprogramm (see map).
After the Brest-Litovsk separate peace with the Bolsheviks in 1917, the eastern part of these war aims were achieved, where Germany occupied or created puppet governments in Poland, Ukraine, the Caucasus and Baltic areas, and created a dependent state in Finland.
Although a victory, this led to great disillusionment in the German liberal-left, which so far had supported a war to preserve the country. Now the myth of a defensive war was exposed as a lie, and the treaty showed it to be a war for imperial expansion.
The Sinking of the Lusitania
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n May 1915 the British Government was in trouble. The European war was not going well. Instead of reacting to aggressive British blockades by begging for mercy, Germany was sinking more and more British ships with her U-boats.
The Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine on Friday May 7 1915, 12 miles off the coast of Ireland, killing 1198 people. The ship was running at two-thirds speed and in a straight line, rather than the recommended zigzag used to avoid torpedoes. The passengers were mostly US citizens (including millionaire Alfred Vanderbilt).
Her cargo consisted mostly of undeclared weapons and explosives, a fact finally confirmed in 1960, and which explained why she sank so fast. She was bound for the UK, sailing all alone, inexplicably without escort from the Royal Navy and right into a known U-boat hunting ground.
No members of the press even considered asking why Lusitania had been steaming so slowly and in a straight line, or why the British Admiralty had chosen to withhold the usual naval escort.
The numerous travel warnings posted by the German government in US newspapers, warning people they traveled on British shipping into British waters at their peril, was left out of the narrative. The German explanation, that the Lusitania was a legitimate target because she carried armaments, was dismissed out of hand.
And totally forgotten was the aggressive policy of starving Germany to its knees that had prompted the U-boat campaign in the first place. After the war began in 1914, Britain immediately began a naval blockade of Germany. Since even food was classified as “contraband,” the Germans had to ration food. By all estimates, several hundred thousand people ultimately died of starvation due to the blockade.
The sinking of the Lusitania was one of the main causes that brought the United States into the war, saving the war for the British.
An inconvenient Peace offer: «What does he want to butt in for?»
Who would have guessed? The Pope actualy intervened to denounce the warmakers. These days, as the winds of war acquire gale force, the Vatican remains basically submissive and silent.
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n July 1915, Pope Benedict XV published the apostolic exhortation «To the Peoples Now at War and to Their Rulers.» Two years later, in 1917, this became The seven-point plan, a peace note presented to the warring parties. It was based on a peace linked to justice rather than military conquest, cessation of hostilities, a reduction of armaments, a guaranteed freedom of the seas, international arbitration, and Belgium restored to independence and guaranteed «against any power whatsoever.» (But it tacitly implied that Germany would gain some territory in the east).
In American mythology anglophile W. Wilson is always presented as a peaceloving idealist, but nothing is said about his government creating the first office to "market" the European war to the Americans, or his unconstitutional persecution of pacifists, communists and other antiwar agitators. The notorious Palmer Raids in 1919-20 took place under Wilson's regime.
The initiative failed: Although the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary) were positive to the mediation after three years of exhausting war, no one on the Entente side showed any interest. (The collapse of the Russian imperial government a few months later reduced the German willingness to negotiate.) Britain did not even show the Holy See the common courtesy of a proper reply. The French and Italian replies were hostile, and the rejection on behalf of the alliance was made by president Woodrow Wilson of the United States, who had initially remarked of the pope’s proposal: “What does he want to butt in for?»
The decision to reject any proposal from the Vatican was already decided in 1915. The threat was that a peace mediation from someone like the Pope might create so much pressure from a war-weary populace that it might just gather enough momentum to force the powers to accept.
The secret Treaty of London (1915), committing Italy to the Entente (Britain, France and Russia) contained a clause, article 15, where Italy is given carte blanche to do whatever is deemed necessary to silence the Church: «France, Great Britain and Russia shall support such opposition as Italy may make to any proposal in the direction of introducing a representative of the Holy See in any peace negotiations or negotiations for the settlement of questions raised by the present war» .
From Women’s Liberation to a tool for the state
Emmeline Pankhurst addressing a pro-war rally in 1914
There is nothing new about liberal social reformers falling into lockstep when the country goes to war. British Emmeline Pankhurst was the most prominent member in the Women’s Suffrage movement. She founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1902. After a remarkable and highly radical campaign for women’s rights, including hunger strikes, arson and window smashings, the group changed from a reformist program to a hard right reactionary nationalism as soon as the war broke out.
In 1914-15, bands of women roamed the cities of England handing out white feathers of cowardice to men wearing civilian clothes. The ‘White Feather Brigade’ was established by admiral Charles Fitzgerald, a war hawk who wished to see Britain institute mandatory military service. The campaign spread through the country with astonishing rapidity.
The highly successful White Feather campaign, shaming British men to enlist.
Not unconnected, the WSPU successfully carried out secret negotiations with the government, and on the 10th August 1914, the government announced it was releasing all suffragettes from prison. After receiving a £2,000 grant from the government, the WSPU organised a pro-war demonstration in London. Members carried banners with slogans such as «We Demand the Right to Serve» and «Let None Be Kaiser’s Cat’s Paws».
Pankhurst founded the Women’s Party in 1917. Excerpts from the program:
(1) A fight to the finish with Germany.
(2) More vigorous war measures to include drastic food rationing, more communal kitchens to reduce waste, and the closing down of nonessential industries to release labour for work on the land and in the factories.
(3) A clean sweep of all officials of enemy blood or connections from Government departments. Peace terms to include the dismemberment of the Hapsburg Empire.
(8) Irish Home Rule to be denied.
In the Suffrage Movement’s defense, many members chose a different and more honorable stance, like her daughter Sylvia Pankhurst. In 1915, Sylvia gave her enthusiastic support to the International Women’s Peace Congress, and she later became a leading international voice in the resistance to Mussolini’s attack on Ethiopia.
Edith Cavell – Nurse and (a hundred years later), a spy after all
[dropcap]F[/dropcap]ew incidents created bigger outrage in the First World War than when the British nurse Edith Cavell was executed by firing squad for helping Allied soldiers escape occupied Belgium. In the trial, she admitted to leading a people smuggling network.
But the German charges also claimed that Cavell was a spy, sending sensitive intelligence through the same network, a claim which was strongly denied by both Cavell and the British government.
The government’s insistence on her innocence was taken as implicitly true in Britain, and she became a symbol for victims of Hunnic habitual cruelty. This perception also had great impact on public opinion in the still neutral United States. The implicit presumption of innocence lingered for many years, and was a useful propaganda tool for many decades.
In a BBC-program in 2015, a hundred years after Cavell’s death, Stella Rimington, former head of the MI5, revealed that she had discovered documents in Belgian archives indicating that Cavell was in fact a spy.
This is of course a limited hangout. MI5 would have known this all along, being Cavell’s boss, but naturally chose to keep quiet about it, since the idea of her innocence was so convenient.
Rimington said her evidence showed «that the Cavell organisation was a two-pronged affair» and that espionage was the other part of its clandestine mission.
The documents included an account by Herman Capiau, a young Belgian mining engineer who had brought the first British soldiers to Cavell in 1914 and was an important member of her network.
He wrote: «Whenever it was possible to send interesting intelligence on military operations, this information was forwarded to the English intelligence service punctually and rapidly.»
Capiau referred to information about a German trench system, the location of munitions dumps and the whereabouts of aircraft.
Since she was in fact guilty, it would make her case similar to the famous spy Mata Hari, who was unceremoniously executed by the French in 1917, without any international outcry. Of course, Cavell’s case is worse, since she used a humanitarian cover for her activities, putting all medical personnel under suspicion.
Most of our opinions are formed by men we have never heard of
Edward Bernays, Freud's nephew, distinguished himself as the "father" of public relations.
A young man, Edward Bernays, started working for it, and quickly learned his trade there. He later became known as «the father of public relations», and a pioneer in the modern PR-industry, where he, among other things, arranged the media part of the CIA-regime change operation in Guatemala in 1954. The full quote from him is as follows:
«The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.»
The invasion of 1910 – a book commissioned to tell the public who the next enemy is
Ad in The London Times for the book (1906)
Describing an imagined German invasion of England, the book The Invasion of 1910 was written by William le Queux on commission from the press magnate Lord Northcliffe and serialized in his newspaper the Daily Mail in 1906. After the detente with France and friendlier relations with Russia, British elites circles agreed on who the next likely enemy would be. But the British public still wasn’t ‘with the program’, and a large campaign was started to prepare them mentally. In the years 1906-1914, a torrent of books and articles on the terrible Hun menace poured out from a number of authors, including Arthur Conan Doyle.
Bits by bits a war memorial day gets a new meaning
Cadets march in the 2014 ANZAC day parade (Picture: Flickr/Chris Phutully)
World War 1 was a bloody affair for the Commonwealth countries. Most Australian country towns or even small villages have a cenotaph or monument with a shockingly long list of local men lost in WW1. ANZAC-day (on 25th of April, the anniversary of the Anglo-French campaign to conquer Gallipoli and the Dardanelles, where Australia played a part) was decided as a holiday in 1921 to commemorate these war dead, in a rather sombre spirit. The holiday and ceremony was a quiet affair for most of last century, apart from the usual right-wing forces trying to capitalize on it. It reached its nadir in the late 1970s, after the Vietnam war.
A marked change started in the 1990s, with a concerted and very well funded campaign from the government to militarize Australian history. Now the ceremonies are huge, military-political events, full of pathos, cant and sentimentality. By spending huge sums to connect the public idea of Australianness to a glorification of its military glory, it seems Australian participation, like in 1914 by choice, in the next bloody world war is inevitable – nothing learned Down Under.
Neutral Countries are the Winners
This Swiss cartoon by Karl Czerpien, is captioned «The wooing of the Neutrals», where orators from the warring countries are trying to entice neutrals to join them. The different alliances spent large efforts to tangle neutral countries into their imperialistic intrigues (see the case of Italy above). For smaller neutral countries, war between the great powers is always a dangerous time, but by trying to stay neutral, they are rather better off than by joining an alliance. A lesson for our time, when small countries in Europe seem very eager to get the honor of being the battlefield in the next war.
1924 – The pacifist Ernst Friedrich shows the real faces of war
In 1924, in the book War against War, the German anti-war activist Ernst Friedrich breaks a taboo in war reporting, by showing real war injuries. Such horrific pictures were – and still are – generally very rarely shown in war reporting, both in the corporate media and in anti-war literature.
This unwillingness contributes, intentionally or just because the pictures are too shocking to handle, to an almost idealized image of war, where our dead are always beautifully serene and the wounded well wrapped in bandages.
The article is Creative Commons 4.0 for non-commercial purposes.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Terje Maloy is a Norwegian citizen, with roots north of the Arctic Circle. Nowadays, he spends a lot of time in Australia, working in the family business. He has particular interests in liberty, global justice, imperialism, history, media analysis and what Western governments really are up to. He runs a blog https://midtifleisen.wordpress.com, mostly in Norwegian, but occasionally in English. He likes to write about general geopolitical matters, and Northern Europe in particular, presenting perspectives that otherwise barely are mentioned in the dominant media (i.e. most things that actually matters).
While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.
Parting shot—a word from the editors The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.—Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
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The Pieties of the Liberal Class
HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.
[dropcap]F[/dropcap]rom the west side of the island, a pedestrian can see, high in the misty gray sky of Manhattan, the carmine lettering of The New Yorker hotel. The art-deco staple of the Jazz Age has graced the skyline of the city since 1930. It has hosted movie stars and starlets, ballplayers and boxers, heroic firefighters and geniuses of science. Barack Obama’s parents were married there. It is a beacon of bourgeois New York life. City dwellers and tourists see it as a kind of marker of pedigree, its neon serifs floating like a semaphore of sophistication above the bustling metropolis below. Fittingly, it is where elitist insider and liberal icon Hillary Clinton conceded the 2016 election to Donald Trump. Pale and proud, she positioned herself as a champion of women, her flour-haired éminence grise clapping in the background.
From that moment until today, the Democratic Party and its acolytes have lived in deep denial. It is still cobbling together its tapestry of thinly stitched storylines supposedly outing Russia for its nefarious plot to “attack our democracy”. In so doing, the tribe refuses to engage in self-reflection, never acknowledging the accommodation of capital that has triggered its demise. It is still launching flaming rhetorical volleys at the president with rare fury, convinced he has compromised America behind the back of the freedom-loving naifs that so innocently trusted our great institutions. It lifts him up as the embodiment of evil against which they nobly rage. It decries his policy actions even as it hides their own like deeds. The piety of the Party is on full display.
Too Righteous for Reality
Sharing the same name and a comparable role, the city’s elitist manual of manners and opinion, The New Yorker, recently published a breathless new report on election media that attributes Russian trolls with the “decisive” content in the world-historical fiasco of Donald Trump’s election. The billion dollars flung into the mediasphere by the actual candidates is shoved aside, fodder for this year’s midterm campaign strategists but of little consequence in 2016. The report is a feverish campaign to keep the fragile egotism of Democratic elites on life-support, to rejuvenate a party that cannot bear to face the fact that its own sellout to corporate donors has wrecked the party. This is but one of dozens of reports fastidiously produced by incalculable hordes of liberal resisters scurrying along the horizon of the web like wildebeest in flight. Subverting elections, the magazine wisely intones, “doesn’t require tampering with voting machines.”
Here the bar is lowered. From a multi-layered high-tech hacking job to a simple “influence campaign,” the criterion for blaming Russia continues to slide toward absurdity. “Russian masterminds” are parenthetically mentioned but never named. At least until our lantern-jawed paladin, Robert Mueller, swaggers into the press room to gravely announce the indictment of a sundry list of Russians currently residing in distant Russian climes and never likely to see the inside of an American court. Yet they shall be indictedin absentia. These faceless trolls are said to have waged “information warfare against the United States of America” (the name of our nation doubtless spelled out in full to underscore the gravity of the event). U.S. intelligence weighs in with “high confidence” on hacking allegations. No evidence is released; national security requires relentless secrecy. We would have to take their word for it, though they never examined the servers in question, though later evidence revealed it was a leak, not a hack. Yet this grave declaration issued from behind the beveled door of the National Director of Intelligence is sufficient for hyperventilating liberals to embrace.
Living in Gore Vidal’s “United States of Amnesia,” Democratic stalwarts have naturally forgotten the litany of lies the intelligence community has shamelessly produced at the behest of their political betters. Forget the Lusitania. Forget the missile gap. Forget the Gulf of Tonkin. Laugh off the incubator babies. Skip those lingering 9/11 questions. Shelve the torture memos. Ditch the WMD threats and trash the yellow cake expose, Libyan Viagra sprees, and Syrian chemical attacks. Surely this time we can trust our government. “Russian saboteurs” amplified Trump’s vile and “divisive” rhetoric, an implicit kind of collusion that perhaps did not require an actual meeting of minds, maybe just a telepathic understanding. Again the evidentiary standards slip. The report, like most of its kind, concludes barking about “likelihood” and probabilities, but concedes that it is “hard to know” if “Russian propaganda and dirty tricks” put The Donald into the Oval Office.
Policy Warriors Man the Barricades
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n a more quotidian level, it is half-amusing, half-nauseating to witness the social media myopia of former government employees as they condemn in the Trump administration what they themselves enabled in their own era.
Sharing the same name and a comparable role, the city’s elitist manual of manners and opinion, The New Yorker, recently published a breathless new report on election media that attributes Russian trolls with the “decisive” content in the world-historical fiasco of Donald Trump’s election. The billion dollars flung into the mediasphere by the actual candidates is shoved aside, fodder for this year’s midterm campaign strategists but of little consequence in 2016. The report is a feverish campaign to keep the fragile egotism of Democratic elites on life-support, to rejuvenate a party that cannot bear to face the fact that its own sellout to corporate donors has wrecked the party.
On federal wages, David Axelrod fulminates that the president’s denial of a federal wage hike because a trillion-dollar tax break created new deficits was “beyond outrageous.” The clever account, “Kamala Harris is a cop” replied, “It’s almost as shitty as bailing out the banks while 10 million people lost their homes.” Even Eric Holder, Obama’s Brooks Brothers AG, weighed in with some sanctimonious cant about Trump and his “fat cat friends”. (By the way, by my count, Holder made four grammatical mistakes in that single tweet.) Sure, Trump’s tax cuts are outrage-worthy public bribes to big capital. But Axelrod either forgets, or neatly hides beneath the blanket of his rectitude, that Obama froze federal workers pay using deficit fears to justify it, and made one-percent tax cuts permanent. But only Trump generates the wild fury of the liberal class at such injustices. Another instance of that most pernicious kind of fidelity: blind loyalty.
On the Middle East, Samantha Power tweets with ecclesiastical fervor about the horror of Trump’s fealty to his Saudi pals at the expense of millions of Yemenis. She forgets–or is the word “compartmentalizes”?–that her boss launched America’s support for the KSA’s criminal war. Sold them guns to kill with, even after the war began. In other words, it’s bipartisan policy. But for Sam, it’s all about the optics. In public relations, perception becomes the highest value, just as in capitalist societies, profit is the singular ethic. How curious it would be to unfurl the Ariadne’s Thread that leads to Power’s justification for such obtuse piety. One can imagine dear Sam on a weekday morning in her tony brownstone, tapping out her tweets while her Darjeeling sleeps quietly on the mahogany desk.
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n war, numerous liberal outletsattacked Trump for not having a strategy on Syria when he bombed an air base last year, viewing his one-off strike related to alleged chemical weapons use with contempt. One must have a “strategy”, the pundits sniffed. Yet Barack Obama began the Syrian war and provided such baffling backdoor guidance that the Pentagon and CIA were actually fighting at cross-purposes, sometimes slaughtering ISIS terrorists and sometimes arming and providing air cover for their comrades. “Well,” says the Democratic foot soldier, “war is a complicated thing. Truth is the first casualty. You’ve seen the Burns’ documentary? Like he said, bad things were done by good men. The fog of war is real.”
On immigration, liberals hyperventilate over Trump’s derisive treatment of immigrants. But where were they when their heroic changemaker Barack Obama did muchthe same? They were silent. Asleep at the switch. Doting giddily over their slim-suited feminist with his supple vocabulary and luminous smile. If there was ever an empirical instance of sheeple, this was it. This is that very loyalty that Democrats angrily demand from independents. “Come on, now!” barks the fed-up liberal, as he slams his neatly folded Timesto the table, “Come back to the real world. Only two parties can win. You want Republicans running this country? You’re being insanely idealistic. Change is slow and incremental. Progress is measured in centuries, not great leaps. Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good!” And on other occasions, as the dinner party pinot loosens the tongue, “You know if you vote third party again, you’re culpable if Trump wins. It’s on you! You and your utopian socialist peers.”
On the Supreme Court, Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, voted with Brett Kavanaugh 93 percent of the time and was described by the National Organization for Women as a “cipher” when it came to his positions of reproductive issues. Garland may have been a more moderate candidate in the end, and surely Kavanaugh’s apish antics and disturbing history tell us plenty about him, but what of the fact that his overt support of torture, the Patriot Act, indefinite detention, and a host of other anti-democratic perspectives were broadly shared and reified by Democrats?
On foreign relations, former CIA mobfather John Brennan tosses off another of his sanctimonious tweets about Trump, America, and Principles. This one about Saudi Arabia’s apparent dismembering of a journalist in their Turkish embassy. Brennan glad-handed KSA royalty for years and said nothing while they slaughtered thousands of Yemenis in a criminal war of aggression that he and his Commander in Chief could have shut down. And yet, like his other former colleagues, Brennan rages on social media that if Jamal Khashoggi “…is found to be dead at the hands of the Saudi government, his demise cannot go unanswered…” and he demands a “full and forceful U.S. response” from the Trump administration and Congress. In the top left-hand corner of the tweet is a bubble bearing Brennan’s stonelike visage, scowling down frightfully at his own words and at “the world community”. The man seems to have been waiting his entire life to assume this role, the outspoken authoritarian defender of the noble world order. Aged, august, awe-inspiring. But today, he comes off more as a decorous crank hoping to earn himself a statue somewhere on the National Mall. One can envision the marble-carved or bronze-cast effigy, jaw squarely set, chest thrust forward, a copy of Augustine in one claw, a CIA field manual in the other.
Then there’s Barack himself, who is busily cleaning up for himself on the speaking circuit. The presidency is always a quid pro quo. Serve our financial aims now, we’ll serve yours later. Obama is just another imitation of Bill Clinton, whose incrementalist path he traced through his Oval Office years. He did pause during one recent monologue to heralda fresh new idea: Medicare for All. Yes, that novel concept heretofore unknown to men, least of all Obama, who believed in universal care until his inauguration, when with a presidential palm he swept even a public option off the table; he and the vultures of capital had already approved a Heritage Foundation scheme, penned by the insurance industry, and which would require federal enforcement to ensure a substantial segment of the populace would subscribe to it.
Capital Crimes
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n his excellent polemic, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Vladimir Lenin wrote that we could only take leaders at their word if they opposed a policy not only when the enemy was implementing it, but when their own side was implementing the same policy. On this score, all the Obama liberals fail the test, as do the equally haughty conservatives. Their fake outrage, their pious contempt, and their theatrical astonishment are forms of political posturing and, as the conservatives themselves say, “virtue signaling”. Power evidently corrupts us so thoroughly that when we gain power, our singular value becomes retaining power. We are often principled until our principles confront the opportunity to increase our power. Then they are deprioritized. How does an electoral system that votes on federal seats just twice a decade militate against this human frailty, a moral infirmity we all share?
As Chris Hedges remarks, we still have the “iconography and language” of democracy, but we are made to “kneel before the dictates of the marketplace” and “structure our society around the primacy of profit.” We are left with an institutional “facade.” Which is why it is so proper to treat with derision the reeling hysteria of politicians who claim, in comical hand-wringing interviews, that “our democracy” is under attack. Why it is so perfectly appropriate to mock the mastheads of our major newspapers, which admonish us that, “Democracy Dies In Darkness,” as though the Washington Post, owned by a CIA contractor and the richest man on earth, is some kind of bulwark against corporate fascism. It is the very vanguard of corporate fascism. It is not a barricade being manned by scruffy journalists firing lead at would-be usurpers. What a farcical notion, yet one embraced by the liberal class, who fail to see the corruption of their party as a summons to revolution.
This human capacity for self-delusion may be the final nail in the coffin of our species. Perhaps even more than the instances cited above, it is most conspicuously seen in the refusal of the politicians to do anything meaningful about climate change. A new IPCC report spells out climate-induced wreckage to occur in our lifetimes (by 2040). But little if anything binding will be done until the corporate mandarins of industrial capitalism are assured of the super-profits they and their shareholders expect on a quarterly basis. Profits they now rake in by externalizing the environmental disasters their industrial production engenders. This piece of public art in Berlin has always struck me as perfectly capturing the futility of human behavior in the face of climate catastrophe: a group of senators gathered in conclave debating some obscure point of contention while the waters of the world rise to engulf them. Engulfed ultimately because they do not recognize the perversity of the system of capitalism in which we are all ensnared and complicit. A sightless species sniffing the air for hints of the skyfall bursting above it.
About the Author
The Sins of Empire: Unmasking American Imperialism. He lives in New York City and can be reached at jasonhirthler@gmail.com.
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.—Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
Gui Rochat on Kavanaugh & Blasey-Ford
HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he senate hearings are a study in hypocrisy. Here are two elite products bemoaning their fate, both indulged in and very immature. She with her soft voice is like an adolescent that feels she is treated badly and he blubbers like a schoolboy found out cheating. It is typical of a class in decline where the assumed privileges do not quite work any longer or are being used against them. They were handled like pawns in a power play. It also indicates the protections in place for the establishment and the constant isolation from real life because like Bush Jr. they bear little responsibility for their actions nor can ever understand what it is that working people go through in order to survive. No wonder that Kavanaugh thinks torture is okay as he has never been or ever will be tortured and Dr. Ford thinks that being roughed up is a terrible fate while she has never been really in the horrid circumstances of the victims of the US empire. —GR
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gui Rochat is an art and cultural critic. He resides in New York and Paris.