Mental Rape and the Disappearance of Justice

"Our tragedy today is not just that millions of people who called themselves communist or socialist were physically liquidated in Vietnam, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, not just that China and Russia, after all that revolution have become capitalist economies, not just that the working class has been ruined in the United States and its unions dismantled, not just that Greece has been brought to its knees, or that Cuba will soon be assimilated into the free market - it is also that the language of the Left, the discourse of the Left, has been marginalized and is sought to be eradicated. The debate - even though the protagonists on both sides betrayed everything they claimed to believe in - used to be about social justice, equality, liberty, and redistribution of wealth. All we seem to be left with now is paranoid gibberish about a War on Terror whose whole purpose is to expand the War, increase the Terror, and obfuscate the fact that the wars of today are not aberrations but systemic, logical exercises to preserve a way of life whose delicate pleasures and exquisite comforts can only be delivered to the chosen few by a continuous, protracted war for hegemony - Lifestyle Wars."

-----Arundhati Roy, Things That Can and Cannot Be Said," p. 37

Is The White Working Class Being Replaced By Immigrants?

The notion that corporate globalization seeks to replace U.S. working class whites with workers from abroad is currently categorized by the corporate media as a paranoid conspiracy theory of white supremacists. Unfortunately for the professional talking heads, the idea has much wider currency than they would like us to believe. For example, Bill Kristol, formerly of the Weekly Standard, has flat-out stated that the poor quality of the stereotypical Trump voter makes such replacement necessary: 

"Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don't you want to get new Americans in? . . . You can make a case that America has been great because every - I think John Adams said this - basically if you are in free society, a capitalist society, after two or three generations of hard work, everyone becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled - whatever."  

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens is of a similar mind, writing following the 2016 elections: 

"So-called real Americans are screwing up America. Maybe they should leave, so that we can replace them with new and better ones: newcomers who are more appreciative of what the United States has to offer, more ambitious for themselves and their children, and more willing to sacrifice for the future. In other words, just the kind of people we used to be - when 'we' had just come off the boat." 

Stephens claimed to be writing ironically, but his conclusion made this difficult to believe: "We're a country of immigrants - by and for them, too. Americans who don't get it should get out."

In other words, if you think immigration rates are currently too high, or don't like the flouting of U.S. immigration law, you should get out. Whether one shares these concerns or not, clearly there are calls in the mainstream to replace working class whites with workers from abroad. So why the surprise, shock, and horror when angry whites march chanting, "You will not replace us"?


(quoted material from Victor David Hanson's, "The Case For Trump" pps. 59-61)

"Always Believe The Woman" Theology

"I had a dream yesterday through Jungian analysis. I dreamt that Hillary Clinton and Rachel Maddow pinned me down and took advantage of me. I don't know where; I don't know how; I don't know when. I don't have any corroborating evidence but I promise you it happened. And you have to believe me because I am a Lebanese Jew who is a war refugee. How could you not believe me? I must be telling the truth."

-----Gad Saad, "My Thoughts on the Brett Kavanaugh Ordeal" (The SAAD Truth_731)

Bulletin For The Comfortable Class: Mass Murder Was Americana Before Trump Was Born!

“The U.S. air war in Japan was one of the most ruthless

and barbaric killings of non-combatants in all history.”

General Bonner Fellers:  MacArthur’s Intelligence Chief

The recent anniversary of the mass murder that took place in Hiroshima, followed three days later by another mass murder in Nagasaki, would have dominated the consciousness of a nation in remorse for past horrors committed under the degenerate belief of justifiable homicide as long as it's warfare. As the comment above helps make clear, these particular acts of dreadful violence were only unique in that one bomb was used for each city, instead of the thousands used to set fire to entire cities in Japan and Germany and immediately burn tens of thousands of their inhabitants to death. American ingenuity made it possible for an early and perverse form of one-stop-shopping as entire populations were slaughtered and cremated in one action, without need of camps, chambers, ovens or any other real or legendary forms of brutality. But hardly a moment was wasted on those past horrors given that America suffered tragedies occupying national consciousness due to what we’re told are Trump inspired outbursts of racist-sexist- madness, as usual having nothing to do with the political economics of blood profit capital but all about evil individuals and special categories of “identity groups” different from all other members of the human race. Somehow, this fanatic fundamentalism still works to keep us shopping, killing and destroying the environment in pursuit of ever greater personal fortunes for some, appalling poverty for far more, and majorities sinking into unpayable debt and facing planetary doom if radical transformation of the prevailing political economics are not performed for humanity’s sake and not just the pleasure of a minority identity group we worship: the rich.

With most of the nation under the control of mass media even more powerful than it was in the days of world war two, corporate mind management has us in a state of mourning over tragedies which cost the lives of 30 innocent Americans over a period of three days. Said to be murders committed by the mentally ill or fascists inspired by the evil trump, or both, the villains have some foaming at the mouth under around the clock bombardments of stories of the innocents, mourning by thousands and worst of all cries for vengeance against alleged fascism and/or white supremacy in a national racist mental ward counting deaths by identity group other than the human race and not noticing that most of the recent American victims were of the racist designated “white” group.

To put tragic deaths in perspective, while these poor souls were being murdered in Gilroy, El Paso and Dayton, some 200 other Americans, equally innocent of anything other than possible driving errors, died in the raging road wars of our overwhelmingly private profit transit system. It kills an average of 100 of us every single day and little if anything beyond a small notice appears in local newspapers with hardly anything said about the national insanity of such suffering inflicted on innocent people no more guilty of wrong than any of the poor souls murdered by affordable gun owning citizens in a nation with more than half a million humans who cannot afford the market force to enable them to find a place to live. That damned Trump! Oh wait…maybe it’s Putin? Or perhaps Oprah, Dracula or Joe Biden?

 Those who think this nation was a Garden of Eden until the dreadful Trump became president need to learn their country’s history and not just that of one or another identity group somehow experiencing history in a vacuum of suffering or wealth while tens of millions of other people simply amount to works of fiction at best and matters of intense disrespect and outright bigotry, at worst. What is going on now isn’t even slightly new and blamed on one or another set of villains it displays a pattern in operation for generations and getting worse by the minute.

Trump is as much an aspect of our system as diversity, war, sex, jazz, TV, shopping, deceit, slander, pets, propaganda and love. All that is good and bad is hidden by some calling every American social disease since our founding as something of his creation. The continued divisions of Americans into racial categories in defiance of all science let alone common sense continues the work of individualism and racism that make us such a unique historic nation able to call itself a democracy while controlled by billionaires while millions of our children live in poverty, hundreds of thousands of our families live on the street and we spend trillions on war and billions on our pet animals. Is this a great country or what? Or at least it was until the vile Trump arrived, according to some who’ve been mentally murdered by the assault on consciousness conducted for generations but never quite as vile and all encompassing as at present, with the empire sinking faster and the danger to humanity growing at an even greater speed.

The American mass murders of the second world war in Japan and Europe were closely followed by mass butchery that killed millions in southeast Asia and our savage behavior towards humanity, under command and ownership of our royal 1%, has slaughtered more in the middle east over the last twenty years than we have sacrificed to profit making transit on our highways. This, while an upper class has expanded slightly, including what racism identifies as “people of color”, and some other groups previously trashed and treated as less worthy of life than what passed for “normal” have become acceptable members of the market hordes consuming more trash with less money. Meanwhile, our poverty and prison populations explode in this material land of over consumption for a minority that would make the originator of the term “conspicuous consumption”, Veblen, apologize for mincing his words in critique of capital.

We are told by legend and there is some material foundation for belief that in biblical times every few years there was a forgiveness of debt and it may have been easier for civilization, or what it was called then at a time long before the savage circus we call a democracy, to clearly see and react to a reality that could not go on without radical change. Of course, those poor souls didn’t have what we now are taught to call “social” media, which makes us so much smarter than those poor fools of the past that we can carry the burden of trillions in debt, the continued slaughter of human beings all over the planet including our own domicile, and rage against the latest white house pinhead in the fashion of the clients and crew of the Titanic screeching about the lousy captain as they were about to drown on a sinking ship that, like everything else then and since, would never have existed without the motive of private profit, and the public good be damned.

We may be able to elect a new CEO of Capital Inc in 2020, if we don’t destroy even more than our electoral façade and sink in our own sea of political, social and environmental excrement before being able to vote. But if we simply choose another chairperson for the system of private capital and do not demand and execute a social revolution that puts all humanity before any single un-chosen figurehead, we will face far more than personal need for therapy visits or social prayers for divine intervention. All of us or none of us was the call much earlier in our history and it has never had more meaning than at present. In closing, the words of a truly great American sadly unknown to  many of us:

“ Democracy can become truly a rule of the people only when it is extended to the economic life of the people”

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

White Supremacy Before Trump: The U.S. Conquest of Hawaii

August 21 marks the sixtieth anniversary of Hawaiian statehood. Many Americans know little more than package tours and “Pearl Harbor” about the fiftieth state, and few realize that when the U.S. naval base was attacked by the Japanese, it was not at the time U.S. territory. Even fewer have any idea how Hawaii came to have an important American naval base capable of triggering a world war. James Baldwin called our perpetual ignorance of vital historical matters American “innocence,” the inability to face or even recognize ugly facts about ourselves. In relation to Hawaii such innocence continues to render us oblivious of the imperial power grab that robbed the islands of their national independence 126 years ago.
 

As long as Great Britain deterred rival powers from colonizing the islands, U.S. leaders championed Hawaiian independence. In 1842, President James Tyler declared that Washington coveted “no peculiar advantages, no exclusive control over the Hawaiian Government, but is content with its independent existence and anxiously wishes for its security and prosperity.” Essentially extending the Monroe Doctrine to Polynesia, the U.S. would oppose any nation’s attempt “to take possession of the islands, colonize them, and subvert the native government.” Hawaiian independence was also recognized by the major European powers, among others, and affirmed by many treaties and proclamations.
 

As the nineteenth century proceeded, however, the balance of power shifted towards the United States, offering new imperial opportunities unlikely to be ignored.  Rear Admiral Samuel Francis DuPont declared that it was “almost impossible to estimate too highly the value and importance of the Hawaiian Islands, whether in a commercial or a military sense.” Militarily, the islands were an important link in the chain of U.S. naval bases that would eventually encircle the world. Economically, they offered important raw materials and primary agricultural products, as well as a market for industrial and processed goods, a familiar imperial pattern. In fact, by the end of the nineteenth century Hawaii was an economic satellite of the mainland:  90% of its foreign trade was with the U.S., the booming sugar industry far and away the most important.

As a result, the U.S. “self-defense” perimeter expanded to include Hawaii, then menaced by what the white planter class called a ninety percent “ignorant majority.” The dilemma for the oligarchs was that their plantations required abundant cheap labor, performed by Asian immigrants and Hawaiians, but the political system had to be in the hands of the white planter minority in order to avoid wealth redistribution via the ballot box. So Washington took up the white man’s burden of guiding and assisting the Hawaiians – so “low in mental culture” – on their journey from grass-hut backwardness to civilized existence.
 

Native Hawaiians, who shrank from about 350,000 when Captain Cook arrived to about 35,000 by 1893, were conspicuously ungrateful for the unsolicited favors. In 1886, Planters Monthly editorialized that the naïve Hawaiian “does not yet realize” the “bounds and limits fixed” and the “moral and personal obligations attending” the gift their imperial benefactors were bestowing on them: “The white man has organized for the native a Government, placed the ballot in his hands, and set him up as a lawmaker and a ruler; but the placing of these powers in his hands before he knows how to use them, is like placing sharp knives, pointed instruments and dangerous tools in the hands of infants.” Naturally, the children had to be put to bed if the “men of best quality” were to get their imperial work done.

In 1873, just thirty years after President Tyler had loudly endorsed Hawaiian independence, the Marines landed to support the colonists. When the plantation oligarchs failed to take power in the elections of 1886, they launched a coup d’état the following year, assisted by their military arm the Hawaiian Rifles. The “Bayonet Constitution” imposed on the king awarded U.S. citizens the vote while banning Asians as aliens and excluding a large part of the native population with property qualifications. The Pearl River estuary became a site for a U.S. naval base.

The increasing numbers of Asians populating the islands inflamed “yellow peril” paranoia. (In 1890, Asians represented 32% of the population; three decades later they were 62%). The Hawaiian Gazette editorialized that “the asiaticizing of the Hawaiian Islands is proceeding at such a rapid rate that those citizens who know what such a course must lead to, may well stand appalled before such a prospect.” The Honolulu Advertiser was more succinct: “It is the white race against the yellow. Nothing but annexation can save these islands.” Maui lawyer Lorrin Thurston outlined the so-called demographic threat to the plantation oligarchs: “Four-fifths of the property of the country is owned by foreigners, while out of an electorate of 15,000 but 4,000 are foreigners – thus placing the natives in overwhelming majority.” So increasing numbers of white plantation owners favored annexation as a way of eliminating the dominant Hawaiian-Asian majority as a political force, while keeping cheap immigrant labor flowing.

In 1891, the U.S.S. Pensacola arrived in Hawaii “to guard American interests,” which included over two-thirds of the investment capital in the dominant sugar industry. The following year an Annexationist League was formed and laid plans for a coup d’etat, quickly supported by Washington. In January 1893, Queen Liliuokalani made a final effort to preserve Hawaiian independence, eliminating wealth qualifications and granting the right to vote exclusively to Hawaiians. On order of U.S. Minister John Stevens, a staunch annexationist known for his “partiality for white folks,” U.S.  troops landed and imposed martial law, in support of “the best citizens and nine-tenths of the property owners of the country,” in the words of the expedition’s commanding officer. Minister Stevens informed the U.S. Secretary of State that “the Hawaiian pear is now fully ripe and this is the golden hour to pluck it.”
 

Speaking for the “overwhelming majority of conservative and responsible members of the community” – at most, a few hundred wealthy men - U.S. planters and their Hawaiian collaborators declared “that independent, constitutional, representative and responsible government, able to protect itself from revolutionary uprisings and royal aggression, is no longer possible in Hawaii under the existing system of government.” Queen Liliuokalani surrendered under protest to the “superior force of the United States of America” and its troops, abdicating in hopes of sparing her followers the death penalty. She herself was fined $5000 and sentenced to five years at hard labor, though the sentence was commuted in 1896.

An annexation treaty presented by President Harrison to the U.S. Congress expired under President Cleveland after an investigation of the coup revealed popular backing for Queen Liliuokalani rather than the provisional government of the planter class. With the continuing rapid influx of Asians to the islands portending a loss of white political control Teddy Roosevelt warned of a "crime against white civilization." Only one remedy stood out: diluting the local Hawaiian-Asian majority by annexing the islands to the white-dominated mainland.

In 1898, President William McKinley confided to his secretary that “We need Hawaii, just as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is Manifest Destiny.” The Missionary Record agreed, explaining that annexation was what Jesus would have wanted. “Has it ever occurred to you that Jesus was the most imperial of the imperialists?” The Reverend Wallace Radcliffe gushed that the ends justified the means, that U.S. imperialism was “enthusiastic, optimistic and beneficial republicanism,” and “not for domination but for civilization, not for absolutism but for self-government.”

McKinley’s anti-imperialist opponents sounded little better, recoiling in horror from the prospect of annexing “a country an overwhelming majority of whose population consists of kanakas, Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese." Nebraska Senator William Allen warned that so-called steak-and-potato Americans had been thrust into “deadly competition with those who live on a bowl of rice and a rat a day.” A California representative fanned the flames of racist hysteria speaking of “the immoralities unmentionable” and the “nameless contagions” created by “Asiatics." He read an article entitled “Shall We Annex Leprosy?” into the Congressional Record.

In the more sedate senior chamber, Massachusetts Senator George Frisbie Hoar dismissed the wishes of Hawaiian natives on grounds of absurdity: “It would be as reasonable to take the vote of children in an orphan asylum or an idiot school.” The sovereign Hawaiian government and its “dusky Queen” he declared, were “things of the past.”

In the grip of white plantation owners and swarming with Christian missionaries, Hawaii was annexed by joint resolution of Congress.

Islanders wept and investors cheered.
 

1898: Honolulu

Queen Liliuokalani’s Lament

“It had not entered into our hearts that these friends and allies from the United States, even with all their foreign affinities, would ever go so far as to absolutely overthrow our form of government, seize our nation by the throat, and pass it over to an alien power...”

“Perhaps there is a kind of right, depending upon the precedents of all ages, and known as the ‘Right of Conquest,’ under which robbers and marauders may establish themselves in possession of whatsoever they are strong enough to ravish from their fellows.... we have known for many years that our Island monarchy has relied upon the protection always extended to us by the policy and the assured friendship of the great American republic. “

“If we have nourished in our bosom those who have sought our ruin, it has been because they were of the people whom we believed to be our dearest friends and allies...”

“The conspirators, having actually gained possession of the machinery of government, and the recognition of foreign ministers, refused to surrender their conquest. So it happens that, overawed by the power of the United States to the extent that they can neither themselves throw off the usurpers, nor obtain assistance from other friendly states, the people of the Islands have no voice in determining their future, but are virtually relegated to the condition of the aborigines of the American continent.”

 
  ^Sources:

<sup>Kent, Noel J., Hawaii: Islands Under The Influence, (Monthly Review, 1983)

Millis, Walter, The Martial Spirit, (Literary Guild of America, 1931)

Zinn, Howard, A People's History of the United States, (Harper, 1995)

Schirmer, Daniel B., Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War, (Schenken Publishing, 1972)

Chomsky, Noam, Year 501 - The Conquest Continues, (South End, 1993)

Gatewood, Willard B., "Smoked Yankees" and the Struggle For Empire, (University of Illinois, 1971)

Miller, Stuart Creighton, Benevolent Assimilation - The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903, (Yale, 1982) 

Landau Saul (with Paul Jacobs and Eve Pell), To Serve The Devil: Colonials and Sojourners, (Vintage, 1971)

Williams, William Appleman, The Roots of the Modern American Empire - A Study of the Growth and Shaping of Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society, (Random House, 1969) 

Takaki, Ronald, Strangers From a Different Shore - A History of Asian Americans, (Penguin 1989)

Loewen, James, Lies Across America - What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong, (New Press, 1999)</sup>

1945: Hiroshima and Nagasaki

                              A Sun Of Fire,

a violent light never before seen in the world, rises slowly, cracks the sky open, and collapses. Three days later a second sun of suns bursts over Japan. Beneath remain the cinders of two cities, a desert of rubble, tens of thousands dead and more thousands condemned to die little by little for years to come. 

The war was nearly over, Hitler and Mussolini gone, when President Harry Truman gave the order to drop atomic bombs on the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the United States it is the culmination of a national clamor for the prompt annihilation of the Yellow Peril. It is high time to finish off once and for all the imperial conceits of this arrogant Asian country, never colonized by anyone. The only good one is a dead one, says the press of these treacherous little monkeys. 

Now all doubt is dispelled. There is one great conqueror among the conquerors. The United States emerges from the war intact and more powerful than ever. It acts as if the whole world were its trophy.

      ------Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire - Century of the Wind, p. 126