Israel's 77th Birthday: A History of Horror

Zionist efforts to remove the Palestinian Arabs from their land long predated Hitler's rise as a historical figure. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson's King-Crane Commission reported back from the region that, "No British officer consulted by the Commissioners believed that the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms . . . only a greatly reduced Zionist program should be attempted . . . and then only very gradually initiated." The Commissioners called for a serious modification of existing plans for unlimited Jewish immigration culminating in Jewish statehood. Regarding Britain's 1917 Balfour Declaration, which had promised the Jews a home in Palestine, King and Crane wrote: "A national home is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish state nor can the erection of such a Jewish state be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities." At the time, "existing non-Jewish communities" were Christian and Muslim Arabs constituting 93% of Palestine's population.

 

During the course of the King-Crane Commission's inquiry, Jewish representatives had not concealed their ultimate hope of dispossessing the Arab inhabitants of Palestine by various forms of purchase, in spite of the fact that ninety percent of the latter were completely against surrendering their land to the Zionist project. "To subject the people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration and to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land would be a gross violation" of Wilsonian principle, the Commissioners wrote, "and of the people's rights, though it be kept within the forms of law." Leaving aside the dubious equation of Wilsonian principle with self-determination, it is safe to say that overriding a 93% indigenous majority with whatever forms of pressure can hardly be described as an exercise in democracy. 

 

Sadly, the gross violation the Commissioners warned against occurred, and Israel was founded, but commentary in the U.S. has almost completely ignored the peculiar history behind the event. To wit: a largely irreligious people reclaimed land after an absence of two thousand years based on fantastical Biblical texts few of them believed in; Jehovah's carvings on a Tablet in the Bronze Age became the basis of Near East politics in the 20th Century; a "Jews-only" state bent on conquest and expansion was hailed as a model of democratic socialism with unique sensitivity to morality and human rights. Displaying amazing chutzpah, Zionist leaders embarked on an "in-gathering" of the Jewish Diaspora and plotted the exodus of Jews from lands they had lived in for centuries while intoning the words Hitler had used in carrying out the Holocaust: "You are not a German, you are a Jew - you are not a Frenchman, you are a Jew - you are not a Belgian, you are a Jew." 

 

The heart of the problem was and remains a serious and deliberate confusion of nationalism with religion. Organized Jewry, a staunch supporter of separation of Church and State outside the Holy Land, condoned their union in Israel, demanding the loyalty of Jews everywhere, whether or not they identified themselves as such. Diasporan Jews supported Israel out of religious duty, though they may or may not have been aware of what Zionist ideology actually entailed. Jewish identity became the basis of Israeli citizenship, with political debate naturally centering on the vexing question, "What is a Jew?" Since Jews, like most people, have a mixed ancestry, Jewish supremacist myth-makers buttressed weak territorial claims with appeals to historical continuity, blurring distinctions between Hebrew, Israelite, Judean, Jewish, and Judaism, while forestalling recognition that these were different people at different times in history with different ways of life. Neither the Jews nor these varied forebears ever constituted a race or even a distinctive pure ethnic grouping, and since Judaism had been of declining significance for most Jews for some time, it quickly became clear that Jewish identity was to be as arbitrary as it was convenient for Israel to have it. Not surprisingly, only Palestinians can't belong.

 

Inevitably, Israel's birth was traumatic. In November 1947, a Washington-dominated U.N. passed a resolution awarding over 56% of the land of Palestine to 650,000 Jews, who represented just a third of the population and owned some 6% of the land. Britain, its empire near collapse, began withdrawing from its colonies the following Spring when its mandate over Palestine expired. As the British pulled out, Zionist armies attacked Arab villages, driving out roughly three-quarters of a million Palestinians in the process of forging a Jewish state with a sizable Arab minority, the latter forced to choose between exile and perpetual discrimination. 

 

The fundamental injustice in the new state was rooted in the divorce of citizenship from territoriality. Jews around the world had rights in the Jewish state, but there could be nothing like full human rights for non-Jews and only the most limited progress towards a just society. The Jewish National Fund purchased lands on behalf of the Jewish people, from which non-Jews were necessarily excluded. According to official Israeli figures 92% of the state's surface prior to June, 1967 was restricted to Jewish use - in perpetuity. Palestinians had no claim on the land they had lived on for centuries.

 

Israel acted to guarantee a permanent Jewish majority while establishing the exclusivist institutions that statist Zionism called for. A huge effort was made to attract the Jewish Diaspora to Israel, while expelling as many Arabs as possible. Jews were ceaselessly reminded of the dangers of anti-Semitism and the hopelessness of assimilation. At the same time, and long before Menachem Begin and the Likud bloc took power, Israel's Labor Party gradually incorporated a supranationalist "Greater Israel" movement into its program, preaching expulsion to the Arabs, fear to Diasporan Jews, and reflexively accusing anti-Zionist Gentiles of anti-Semitism.

 

The Zionist triumph placed a borderless Jewish island in a sea of angry Arabs. Expansionism and new frontiers were its by-products, and war was quite inevitable.

In the seventy-seven years since Israel came into existence as a Jewish state it has not only taken hold of the land but also the structure of opinion and commentary in the West, in such a way that the Palestinians have been quite literally obliterated as a people with any claim to rights or historical continuity. At the same time, the history of Israel that has produced this appalling result has likewise been obliterated, especially in the United States. It is nearly impossible to find mainstream commentary referring to Israel's assassinating children at will, bulldozing homes, bombing schools and hospitals, uprooting orchards, arresting, deporting, and torturing anyone posing a "threat" to Jewish supremacy, and locking an entire people in a giant, outdoor cage. On the contrary. Everything is carefully filtered through the lens of "little Israel," victim of eternal anti-Semitism, in which Palestinians are congenital terrorists yearning to kill Jews, especially children. The fact that Israel introduced terrorism against civilians to the region, that it originated in conquest, that it has repeatedly invaded and occupied its neighbors, and was instrumental in instigating the blood-drenched disaster in Iraq, never rises to perceptibility in the U.S. media or in American political discourse. In the official optic Israel bears no responsibility for "terrorism" and is, in fact the victim of the peoples it occupies and kills.

 

Every media comment about Hamas or Hizbollah or Iran invokes a cartoon-like fantasy of total despotism, infantile rage, and savage violence, all targeted at "us," the good people who save Jews from gas chambers and otherwise pursue our charmingly harmless lives in a world devoid of illegitimate authority and oppression. Never is there the slightest hint that "extremist Islam" caused us absolutely no harm until Washington backed Jewish supremacy over Arab lands, overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran (1953), planted permanent military bases near the holiest sites of Islam, and murdered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children with economic sanctions. And all this was before the neo-cons engineered the invasion and dismemberment of Iraq.

 

 
Seventy-seven years on it is more than time to recognize that "little Israel" is a permanent disaster fully capable of ringing down the curtain on the entire human race. Racist, nuclear armed, violently delusional, it seeks in the name of "security" to destroy any and all resistance to Jewish domination. Though success on these terms is impossible, the attempt to succeed can only yield ever more unprecedented horrors.

Russia, the Defeat of Nazism, and the Collaborationist West

 On May 9 Russia welcomed twenty-seven heads of state from around the world to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the conclusion of the Great Patriotic War, which ended in victory over the Nazis, one of the greatest achievements in Russian history, and one that would make any nation justly proud.

 

The United States likes to portray the defeat of Nazism as a glorious U.S. achievement, with a nod to British, Canadian, Australian, French and a few others for their supporting roles. This ignores the central fact that the Wehrmacht had been ground nearly to pulp by the time the U.S. invaded Normandy on June 6, 1944, an event that 80 years of Hollywood fantasies have attempted to transform into the key battle of the war. In reality, however, this much-delayed opening of a second front in the European war occurred when Hitler's troops had been reduced to mostly children and old men, the military-aged soldiers having perished in gargantuan numbers on the Eastern front. Tens of millions of Soviet soldiers and civilians were also killed there, a large majority deliberately starved by Hitler, who looked to eliminate Slavic peoples and re-populate their territories with a civilized master race of "Aryans."

 

U.S. mind-managers have dispatched this Russian agony to Orwell's memory hole, along with the suffering of the Chinese, who lost about half as much as the USSR (but still an enormous total) on the battlefield, in horrendous camps, and in "scientific" laboratories that treated them like experimental rats. British, French, and American losses, especially civilian deaths, were but a tiny fraction of these. 

 

The ferocity of the battles fought in Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk defy description, and are well beyond the West's impoverished moral capacity to even begin to apprehend. Three million Nazi soldiers invaded the USSR with the launching of Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941.*  This represented eighty percent of the German Army, almost all of whom were either killed, captured, or wounded over the subsequent three years. Meanwhile, the USSR not only fought the invading Germans, but also ardent Nazi-supporters in Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, along with other European countries that facilitated German military operations and replaced fallen German soldiers in battle.

Both Churchill and FDR accepted that it was the USSR that defeated the Nazis. Western supplies helped, but it was the heart and determination of the Red Army that brought the Nazi beast down.

After the war, the Western powers obscured this story with a fanciful tale of being the most heroic human rights champions in history. But it was actually the Red Army that shot anti-Semites while Western myth-makers re-invented the Jew-haters as anti-Communist freedom fighters worthy of admiration.

Renewing the Cold War it had initiated in 1917 in reaction to the Bolshevik Revolution, Washington imposed a "cordon-sanitaire" in order to erradicate Communism in Western Europe, a broadly-defined demon class that included major elements of the wartime anti-fascist resistance and trade union movements while those who had accommodated Nazism or gone into hiding faced no such exclusion.

Today's inheritors of collaborationist Europe have re-doubled their attacks on Russia with economic sanctions and anti-Russian "human rights" tribunals, all in the name of a "never again" anti-genocide crusade that lacks even the slightest pretense of concern for Israel's ongoing extermination of the Palestinian people. 

 

Our problems go far beyond Donald Trump.

 

 

*Harry Truman stood up on the Senate floor the following day and recommended that the U.S. role in the war should be to help the Russians when Germany was getting the upper hand and Germany when Russia had the advantage, thus helping eliminate both populations to the greatest extent possible. 

Source:

"Victory Day: Rescuing the Truth," La Jornada, May 10, 2025 (Spanish)

For more on the U.S. role in WWII, see:

 

"How The U.S. Really Reacted To Nazism," Legalienate, 8/20/17

"75th Anniverary of the Defeat of Nazism," Legalienate, 5/9/20

"Mythology and Reality in World War II," Legalienate, 8/15/10

"False Savior - FDR," Legalienate, 4/15/09

U.S. Troops In Mexico?

President Donald Trump has offered President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico U.S. troops to help combat organized crime in Mexico. The offer came in a recent phone call between the two heads of state, and the offer was sharply rejected by Sheinbaum, who reminded the U.S. president that "we can share information but we are never going to accept the presence of the U.S. Army on our territory."*

 

Trump is doubling down on militarizing the handling of drug trafficking, assigning all blame for the fentanyl crisis to China and countries south of the U.S. border with Mexico. He has declared the drug cartels "terrorist organizations," and equates drug trafficking and illegal immigration with military invasion, i.e., outright war, which gives him wartime powers, or so he believes. In line with this, he's cutting $163 billion from budget allocations for education and social services, raising military spending $375 billion, and flooding the border with U.S. soldiers, all part of an effort to accelerate his mass deportation campaign. 

 

Attempting to solve the complex problems of drug trafficking and consumption as though they were features of a Hollywood action movie susceptible to easy solution by generous doses of gratuitous violence is beyond ludicrous. As the late Edward Said observed, Hollywood productions are a form of science fiction with relevance to no one's actual life, which is why the Hollywood-like "war on drugs" has had no discernible impact on eliminating the drug trade, though it has contributed substantially to horrifying bloodshed and major human rights violations. Recall that under the U.S. Army's two-decade long occupation of Afghanistan heroin trafficking soared to record levels.

 

In official Washington, political thinking about drugs and almost everything else has yet to reach beyond adolescent fantasy.

*In the war of 1846-8, the United States invaded Mexico on the false pretext of self-defense, robbing half its national territory, which later became California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, half of Texas and Colorado, and bits of Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming.

Sources:

 "U.S. Troops In Mexico: Not Now, Not Ever," La Jornada (Spanish), May 4, 2025

John Gibler, "Mexico Unconquered, - Chronicles of Power and Revolt,"(City Lights, 2009) p. 121

 

 

50th Anniversary of the End of the Vietnam War

 After two decades of savage U.S. efforts to impose imperial control over South Vietnam, the effort collapsed in April 1975.

 

Columns of refugees and routed troops packed the roads twisting out of the hills and rubber plantations toward the marshy flatlands around Saigon. Barefoot villagers, bands of soldiers with their boots rotting off, lost children wailing for their parents, parents screaming for their children, wounded men caked with dried blood and filthy bandages, creeping trucks, buses, and herds of water buffalo, oxcarts lumbering along on wooden wheels, all paraded past the wreckage of burned-out tanks and scattered corpses rotting in the fields by the roadside, fleeing the advancing bombs and shellfire announcing Ho Chi Minh's imminent victory. 

 

At the U.S. Embassy, a desperate crowd of Vietnamese interpreters, army leaders, bartenders, colonial bureaucrats, and stool pigeons, rushed the gates waving letters from American employers, stateside lovers, or distant American acquaintances who used to know someone in their extended family.  

 

Saigon was no more.*

To General Thieu and his henchmen, President Ford offered sanctuary in the United States. To the young Americans who had not been able to bring themselves to kill for such gangsters, he offered the choice of permanent exile from the U.S. or imprisonment. On the Vietnamese people he imposed a trade embargo, a veto on their entry into the United Nations, and a refusal to negotiate the unresolved issues of the war.  

The imperialist credo was thus fulfilled: those who have been arbitrarily punished, are punished anew. 

After two decades of Western terror, retribution deaths were near zero. The much predicted Communist bloodbath did not materialize, and Hanoi created nothing worse than re-education camps for those who collaborated with the U.S. in killing millions of their fellow Vietnamese. 

This remarkable display of restraint passed unnoticed in the U.S. media, which preferred to denounce Communist indoctrination methods. Those who Washington employed to engage in wholesale torture and massacre of their countrymen were portrayed as innocent victims forced to endure the agony of political lectures. 

The hundreds of thousands of orphans, junkies, prostitutes, and maimed survivors the U.S. left in its wake, whom the Vietnamese somehow had to rehabilitate as they struggled to overcome a shattered economy, devastated ecosystem, and demolished social order, were ignored and quickly forgotten.**

 

As for the meaning of it all, the New York Times remained utterly clueless: 

 

"There are those Americans who believe that the war to preserve a non-Communist, independent South Vietnam could have been waged differently. There are other Americans who believe that a viable, non-Communist South Vietnam was always a myth . . . A decade of fierce polemics has failed to resolve the quarrel."

Of course, while the war raged, Americans surged into the streets in record numbers to protest that the U.S. had no business meddling in the internal politics of Vietnam, regardless of the prospects for "success." This position, re-iterated endlessly at rallies, protest marches, and teach-ins, was never heard in official circles, nor was it ever given a hearing on the editorial pages of the New York Times.

U.S. hands off other countries.

To the Times' editors, these words were incomprehensible.***

 

U.S. military and government leaders were no more insightful. A U.S. Air Force general said that the important lesson of the war was that, "We could have won the war if political factors had not entered in," perhaps a reference to the failure to use nuclear weapons, which both the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations had considered doing. Secretary of State Dean Rusk blamed the "loss" of Vietnam on the "impatience" of the American people, adding that a future Vietnam-style war would require censorship. "You can't fight a war on television," he lamented. General Maxwell Taylor contended that success required the banning of dissent, counseling that any president would "be well advised to silence future critics by executive order."

 

With millions killed and Indochina in ruins, President Ford urged Americans to forget. "The lessons of the past," he implausibly advised, "have already been learned . . . and we should have our focus on the future."****

Sources:

*Marvin Gettleman, Jane Franklin, Marilyn Young and H. Bruce Franklin, eds., Vietnam and America: A Documented History, (Grove Weidenfeld, 1985) pps. 266-70; Michael Parenti, The Anti-Communist Impulse, (Random House, 1969) pps. 206-7

 

**Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, (South End, 1979) pps. 28-9 

 

*** Raphael Salkie, The Chomsky Update: Linguistics and Politics, (Unwin Hyman, 1990) pps. 131-2 

 

****Lawrence Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima To Watergate (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978) p. 389 

  

Empire's End: Trump Endorses Sending U.S. Citizens To Banana Republic Gulag

"Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice."

              -----Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

 

President Donald Trump has endorsed sending "the worst of the worst" criminals (i.e., anybody he so labels, regardless of what the facts show) to a foreign gulag for life whenever he sees fit. Trump revealed this view during a meeting with Salvadorean President Nayib Bukele at the White House, where both men agreed nothing should or would be done to retrieve Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who ICE agents kidnapped and mistakenly sent to Bukele's notorious mega-prison CECOT due to what they called an "administrative error" last month. Trump labeled Garcia a MS-13 gang member and Bukele gratuitously proclaimed him a "terrorist," though there is no evidence he was even a criminal, much less a political actor using violence to force changes in government policy. In any event, neither president sees any reason to try to correct the error and return Garcia to his life and family in the United States, so he continues to rot in a Salvadorean prison.

Trump's interpretation of presidential power to justify such outrages is the one U.S. presidents always use:  that we are at war with evildoers and so are obliged to toss aside trivialities like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In the latest iteration of this farce Trump has stripped away the rights of foreign workers, natural residents, and even naturalized citizens, with birth citizens soon to be persecuted for thought crimes, another venerable American tradition. When questioned about the legitimacy of his self-serving views, Trump asked without irony if there were any reason to regard U.S. citizens as a special class deserving of protection, regarding it as self-evident that once he labels U.S. citizens or anybody else "criminal," they deserve to be treated as sub-human. Clearly, the president sees no reason to acknowledge that U.S. law enforcement has the dual purpose of punishing criminal conduct and protecting individual rights, with the latter responsibility being the more important of the two, since without rights the state itself becomes boundlessly criminal, and no one can escape being victimized by its crimes on a constant basis. Indeed, the president may not even understand these responsibilities.

It is easy enough to mock Trump's buffoonish approach to governance, but this only misses the forest for the trees.* All of U.S. history shows that the law has only the most tangential relation to power, and is promptly cast to the flames whenever authority or profit is at stake. The USA really was founded on slavery and mass extermination, with the presumed legitimacy of the first written into the Constitution itself, and official justification of the latter codified (preposterously) in the Declaration of Independence as self-defense against "merciless Indian savages." It took the law centuries to ban slavery while a century-and-a-half later it still hasn't provided even the merest pretense of legal justification for the robbery of Indian lands, upon which the very existence of the United States depends. 

So president Trump should properly be seen as the culmination of a process of contempt for human rights, not an aberration from a tradition of upholding them. He is able to use ICE as his personal kidnapping force only because George W. Bush invented the agency out of thin air as part of his modest ambition to "rid the world of evil." He may get away with dispatching U.S. citizens to a foreign dungeon because Obama already got away with murdering a U.S. citizen on foreign soil. He can attract support for making America "great" again by seizing Greenland or annexing Canada because our schoolbooks and media mouthpieces have long taught us that U.S. conquest and expansion are by definition glorious.

In other words, bringing down Trump, which more and more people want to see done, may require that we repudiate the long tradition of Trumpism that preceded his rise to power, that is, if we really intend to get rid of arbitrary rule. 

 

After all, if George W. Bush could rig intelligence to show that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and then destroy Iraq on that false pretext, why can't Trump rig intelligence to show that Iran has nukes and later bomb Teheran? If McKinley could grab Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines, why can't Trump take Greenland and the Panama Canal? If John F. Kennedy could invade Cuba and Vietnam, why can't Trump invade Mexico?

Trump's rule by executive fiat is the consequence of what the French sociologist Emile Durkheim once identified as "anomie" - literally normlessness - a state of intellectual vertigo owing to a complete lack of coherent expectations regulating conduct. We have arrived at this state of affairs because a long line of U.S. leaders and their media propagandists have obliterated rationality with double-talk and lies, leaving Trump an intellectual black hole that allows him to "govern" by authoritarian impulse.

The only potential plus in all this is that power weakens as legitimacy erodes, and the whims of an ignorant narcissist are provoking massive discontent.

And thus the U.S. empire implodes with gathering momentum.

 

 *The Democratic Party, ever-eager to indulge yet another bout of Trump Derangement Syndrome, does not care about due process in principle any more than President Trump does, as their "always believe the woman" dogma clearly demonstrates. The two parties differ only in how to prioritize the groups treated with official contempt.

A Capitalist Running Capitalism?

 

 

A Capitalist Running Capitalism?    

 

It becomes clearer to more people everyday that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” maneuvering and shaping market forces into being beneficial towards humanity has become a massive force of waste and destruction visibly giving humanity the finger in far more than symbolic ways. One of the materially obvious ones is Donald Trump once again being president of the United States. Some LibCons and ConLibs rejoice but most capitalists are near terrified, along with a general public manipulated but for once almost equal to a ruling class though only in fear.

 

The center of global capitalism has been imperial America since the end of the second world war and that ruling power is nearing its finish which cant come too soon and may mean ultimate destruction if it doesn’t happen soon enough. But this happening is not a matter of fate but of human action taken on behalf of humanity’s survival. Unfortunately, under the near total control of anti-social corporate media, millions of decent citizens are reduced to calling the American minority owned and operated society “our” democracy, totally swallowing the notion that being able to vote defines democracy.

 

When reminded, or just as likely learning for the first time, that the all encompassing boogie man Adolph Hitler came to power under supposed democratic election rules and not by shooting his way into power, as infantile political science teaches from grade school through college, they accept the notion that his evil was so great and powerful nothing could stand in his way. Much as naïve Americans think Trump winning an election for the second time was anti-democratically arranged by fascists who somehow materialize when things are going wrong anywhere and everywhere that capitalism rules. The lesser evil form of capitalism that ran the nation and much of the west after the end of WW2 was known as capitalist social democracy and it made life better for a broad section of the working class so that ruling wealth and their professional class servants would not face the danger of revolutions such as happened in Russia and China and were threatened in growing numbers of nations. That phase ended later in the 20^th century and became a return to alleged free market and austerity politics that saw much freedom for a minority class of capital and growing degradation for the great majority as previous government programs at least partly aimed at people who needed help mostly reverted to help for wealth to become more wealthy and in the inspired capitalist religious faith able to invest and thereby create more jobs and prosperity for the great unwashed, as advertisers and politicians often referred to the public.

 

Screeching about fascism without pointing out that it is the logical extreme of the system when it is in trouble as always neglects the basic point that the only connection between Hitler fascism in Germany and alleged Trump fascism in America is capitalism. In its local and global forms it is sinking into bloody degeneracy that humanity can see more clearly than ever, whether in Israel, Ukraine, Yemen or dozens of other places in Africa and Asia and Europe. Naturally, consciousness control works harder than ever to distract, misinform and lie, still successful among a shrinking number of mortals but failing fast among the majority paying for the wretched outcome of a tinier minority than ever lavishing in wealth while growing millions suffer physically and mentally.

 

 

 

 

Decent, well meaning and sincere Americans who refer to “our” democracy miss that it is a market commodity in which a we get what they pay for minority pays for and a majority suffer as parishioners at the Capitalist Cathedral where prayers are about as useful as belief in the hypocrisy that passes for “our” democracy. Our true belief and acceptance of the faith needs to end soon or all of us – true believers, agnostics, atheists, members of the WGAS minority and others – will pay the ultimate price of dying in a nuclear war, at worst, or suffer a slower death as nature in all its form succumbs to minority rule that reduces humans, earth, air and water to profit making consumables. Trump’s seeming blundering represents marketing at its near extreme with failure looming larger as does hope for humanity.

 

 

 

 

Voting is easier-and as meaningless as ever if not more so - than at any time in our crippled history. All one had to do was fill out a postcard and mail it postage free to have the right to vote for an employee or well-meaning stooge for capital. Black vote white vote testicle vote vagina vote etc. the voter is guaranteed unaffordable housing and healthcare while being allegedly represented by moral disgraces who rush to bury their faces in the crotch of banking, finance, Israel and the military murderers who make our alleged democracy smell like a combination of social vomit and political excrement. 

 

Trump’s assault on business as usual horror has introduced new techniques to do the same thing: create profits for a shrinking minority while increasing losses for the majority, which has reduced the upper professional class to near hysteria and their subjects to worse. Instead of the usual form of society being run for capitalism by its upper servant class it has an actual capitalist acting as CEO of the bloody corporation, this one having an ego beyond measurement accompanied by an intellect almost incapable of magnification. Yet while reducing most to panic he has pleased many by making sounds of peace in Ukraine even while increasing the menace of possibly the most insane, stupid, dumb thing imaginable: war with china.

 

The wider and more populated world is being brought closer by capital’s demise and this while the minority west is facing economic ruin and further social disgrace. Trump is a further sign of the end of empire and the hopeful beginning of a global population united by common interest that all of us should be assured of food, clothing and shelter before anyone can have so much more than is needed for survival as is the current case, with billionaires making more money while mass murder goes on in Palestine/Israel and more American live in the streets while our pets are guaranteed creature comforts and health care while more American humans suffer than during what was called the great depression. Since that time depression has become a moneymaker for the psych business but humanity will cheer up once it/we works together, for a change. Maybe we’ll ultimately thank Trump for helping to bring about the end of capitalism and the beginning of global democracy. Whatever and however, we need to unite as members of the one and only human race and speed up the process.

 

 

Timothy McVeigh: Model Soldier Sickened By Iraq Massacres, Turned on His Own

Growing up in the Reagan years with first-strike nuclear weapons pouring off assembly lines, he became a survivalist. Fresh out of high school, he pooled money with a friend to buy nine wooded acres on the side of a mountain in New York on which to build a bomb shelter. 

Opting for a military career, he became a superb soldier. Of fifty-six gunners at Fort Riley, he out-shot them all. His written evaluations glowed with praise, including the observations that he "displays absolute loyalty to superiors and to the unit . . . and a high degree of honesty, loyalty, and integrity," and that he "inspires soldiers to win."

Decorated for his performance in the Gulf War, he was shocked by the butchery of Iraqis that Pentagon estimates claimed killed 200,000 people in all.* After waiting out weeks of U.S. bombings before he could join the mission, he encountered not the battle-hardened Iraqi army he had been told to expect, but hordes of panicked conscripts, eyes wild, mouths agape, outstretched hands begging for mercy. Bulldozed into mass graves, they were succeeded by starving Iraqi children pleading for food, which the U.S. army forbade soldiers to give out. McVeigh disobeyed orders and dispensed cases of prepackaged meals to the desperate. After he got home, he reflected on the gruesome mission, deeply regretting the injustice of it all. 

 

The 1993 Waco Massacre was the final straw.  Watching on television, McVeigh saw tanks and CS gas used on U.S. citizens, heavy weaponry smashing through the Branch Davidians' defenses, and then the entire compound wrapped in flames. Dozens of men, women and children trapped inside were burned alive.  McVeigh screamed in horror. 

On the second anniversary of Waco, McVeigh loaded a bomb onto a Ryder truck and drove to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. **

The north face of the building buckled when the explosion peeled the roof back on the top floor, slicing the edifice in half.  Dozens of office workers pitched to their deaths as large sections of concrete, mortar, glass and plywood cascaded deafeningly into a huge crater where solid structure had been moments before. 

Beyond the building's collapsing walls, parking meters were ripped from the ground, roofs caved in, and metal doors twisted around themselves. At 9:02 a.m. a red-orange fireball hung over downtown and thick black smoke mushroomed into the morning sky as glass, paper and debris rained down on whole sections of the city. Fifth and Harvey Streets were engulfed in flames. 

With cable and concrete drooling out of the building's carcass onto the plaza below, stunned and bleeding survivors emerged from the smoking ruins, stumbling along in blood-filled shoes or staggering barefoot over the glass-strewn ground. Frantic parents scrambled through the wreckage screaming for the children they had left in the daycare center on the second floor. Rescue workers plunged into the devastation to excavate blackened babies and children with their faces blown off. 

 

Scattered toys and severed limbs lay everywhere. ***

Within hours of the attack talking heads in the U.S. media were glibly announcing that Muslims had to be behind the bombing. A "terrorism expert" on CBS Evening News asserted that, "This was done with the intent to inflict as many casualties as possible. That is a Middle Eastern trait." The New York Times editorialized that, "Whatever we are doing to destroy Middle East terrorism has not been working." In a Newsday column Jeff Kamen recommended that U.S. military commandos "shoot them now before they get us." 

A Palestinian-American on his way to Jordan was strip-searched and paraded in handcuffs through London's crowded Heathrow Airport. Photographed and finger-printed, his name was leaked to the news media and reporters besieged his family's home in Oklahoma City. An angry crowd spit at the house and threw trash on the lawn. 

Elsewhere in town vigilantes shattered the windows of an Iraqi refugee's home with stones. Seven months pregnant, Saher Al-Saidi  began suffering abdominal pains and internal bleeding.

Her baby was born dead. ****

No one could conceive that a decorated U.S. soldier driven over the edge by his required participation in wholesale massacre against people with no effective means to fight back might be moved to launch an attack against his own side.

But that is what happened.

 

Notes: 

 

* Michael Parenti, "Democracy For The Few," 7th Edition, (Thomson/Wadsworth, 2002) p. 89

**Richard A. Serrano, "One of Ours: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing," (Norton, 1998)  pps. 21, 26-30, 32, 36, 44. Mark S. Hamm, "Apocalypse In Oklahoma: Waco and Ruby Ridge Revenged" (Northeastern University, 1997)"  pps. 146-9)

 

***Time Annual, 1995, "A Blow To The Heart," The Year in Review, pps. 40-5

 

****Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen, "The Wizards of Media Oz," (Common Courage, 1997,) pps. 104-6. "Oklahoma Fallout," Z Magazine, July/August 1995)

Eduardo Galeano: Ten Years Gone

Eduardo Galeano, 1940-2015: A Voice, Not An Echo

"We are opinionated, yet we cannot offer our opinions. We have a right to the echo, not to the voice, and those who rule praise our talent to repeat parrot fashion. We refuse to accept this mediocrity as our destiny."

-----Eduardo Galeano, opening speech at "Chile Creates," an international meeting in support of Chilean democracy, July 11, 1988

In him was wedded the wonder of a child with the wisdom of a sage.

In school, he hated history and was a lousy history student. He wanted to be a soccer player, a saint, and a painter. He abandoned the first two ambitions, and achieved the third only by learning to use words in place of paint.

He always took the side of the doomed, despised, and damned. Even at the height of the Cold War, with shrieking anti-Communist hysteria the norm, he was not afraid to befriend those Washington denounced as satanic. He praised Che Guevara as a man "who said what he thought and did what he said he was going to do," a rare example of moral and intellectual coherence in a world of near total hypocrisy, which in his view redounded to Guevara's perpetual glory. Galeano summed up just how rare an achievement this was by stating that, "In this world, when words and deeds run into each other in the street, they don't say hello, because they don't recognize each other."  

He wrote not from duty but from joy, always waiting until "his hand began to itch." Immune to the obsessions of established literary critics, he casually combined literary styles and ignored the (alleged) border between journalism and literature. His most famous work, Open Veins of Latin America, (1971) only won honorable mention in the House of the Americas literary competition because the judges felt that a history book that wasn't boring couldn't be a serious work. Fat, dry tomes dominated the social sciences at the time (they still do), and Galeano's lush and lyrical prose was anything but boring, so he had to settle for a consolation prize. 

The book was going nowhere on sales charts - even Galeano's family wasn't reading it - until Latin America's ubiquitous dictatorships did it the honor of banning it. The Uruguayan dictatorship, relatively unpracticed in the repressive arts, lagged behind its authoritarian brothers, mistakenly classifying the book as an anatomy text at first, before making up for lost time by jailing the author along with the book. Upon his release, Galeano fled to Spain, where almost ten years of intense research led to the publication of his magnificent trilogy on the history of the Americas:  Memory of Fire. In these microhistories he found his permanent style - richly textured vignettes portraying historical characters and events in the present tense - as though glimpsed through a keyhole. Galeano's vividly creative prose was too much for the jealous guardians of literary boundaries, who classified the English translation of Memory of Fire as fiction, albeit with a bibliography and index. 

Serious but never solemn, he wrote with a gentle, leg-pulling humor that forever had a smile playing at the corners of his readers' lips. In his masterpiece, "Upside Down - A Primer For The Looking Glass World," - he opened with a "message to parents" lamenting the loss of "virtue, honor, and truth" in the modern world. The message was from Al Capone. In a vignette about the death of John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil and the richest man in the world at the time, he wrote that, "In the autopsy, no scruples were detected." Commenting on the fact that cigarette ads in magazines were required to carry the warning, "Tobacco smoke contains carbon monoxide," whereas highly polluting automobiles were under no similar obligation, Galeano simply said, "People can't smoke. Cars can."  

Even horrible scenes, all too familiar in history and politics, could not deflate his good humor, or cause him to avert his gaze. He once paid tribute to the "skill" of the torturers who worked for former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza by highlighting the precision of their work: "Armed with pincers and spoons, these lads can tear out fingernails without breaking the roots and eyes without injuring the lids." Simple denunciation would not capture the horror nearly as well as Galeano's detached irony.

Detached though he might sound, uncommitted he was not. With relentless application (he once re-wrote the entire manuscript of a book eleven times) he dedicated himself to revealing the most painful realities, drawing on a deeply thoughtful joy that became his trademark. Nevertheless, he shunned the title "thinker," as though he were merely a disembodied head, pointing out that he wrote with his whole being, not just from his neck up. He delighted in the name a Colombian fisherman once gave his work - "senti-pensante" - feeling-thinking, which was much more in line with how Galeano regarded himself and his writing. He recognized that, dualistic conventions notwithstanding, thought and feeling cannot ultimately be divorced, and was astute enough to avoid the twin dangers of sentimentality and frigidity, as all too many other writers do not.

The enemy of verbosity and inflated speech, Galeano was aghast at the ever increasing torrents of empty words, and rated "word inflation" even more dangerous than monetary inflation. Brevity became his natural style and irony his habitual tone. This preference for the concise he picked up from his mentor and friend, Uruguayan novelist Juan Carlos Onetti, who helped Galeano early in his career. To lend authority to his literary advice, Onetti used to disguise it as proverbial wisdom: "There is a Chinese proverb that says" . . . or, "according to the Persians" . . . But in reality the sayings were all his. One of his favorites, which Galeano took to heart, was: "The only words that deserve to exist, are those that improve upon the silence."

Onetti taught Galeano to boil his writing down to pure "meat and bone." The immense struggle involved in learning to say more with less is nowhere better illustrated than in Galeano's effort to describe the 19th century love affair between a young woman of Buenos Aires high society (Camila O'Gorman) and her priest (Ladislao Gutierrez), a story he related to sociologist and philosopher Aurelio Alonso in a Havana interview some years ago. The young woman and her priest had fallen madly in love and fled the scandalized capital, only to be captured and executed for "the crime of love."  

At the time Galeano was trying to describe the love that had impelled them to their deaths, he had a friend and literary critic living with him, a founder of the Tupamaros who had lost one lung to tuberculosis and most of the second one to the beatings he received after being taken prisoner. The man had a remote rural upbringing and knew nothing of formal literary training, but possessed a fine aesthetic intuition that Galeano greatly appreciated. When he showed him his description of the love affair between the young high society woman and the priest, his friend abruptly dismissed the effort with a gesture of contempt: "There are a lot of pebbles in the lentils. You've got to get those pebbles out of there." So Galeano wrote draft after draft, trying with mounting frustration to capture the scene in words, only to have his friend reject them all: "I still see pebbles in the lentils." Finally, Galeano reached the limit of his patience, and told his friend that the latest version would be the last: "If you don't like this one I won't ask you again, because this is abuse. I wrote six pages and all I've got left is a single sentence." His friend responded, "But what a sentence. You have me to thank for it, because without me you wouldn't have made it." And the sentence that described the love of the young high-society woman and the priest who fled with her to certain death was vintage Galeano:  

"They are two by an error that the night corrects." 

Now we mourn the man that gave voice to those moving words, a superb writer finally indeed reduced to an echo, though not that of a lickspittle parroting official cliches, but of a free man who spent his life telling the truth.  

Let that echo sound long, and loud, and often.

Sources:

Most of the Galeano quotes are from an interview (in Spanish) with Cuban sociologist Aurelio Alonso on "Countercurrent," published on You Tube 1/7/13

On Somoza's torturers, see Galeano's "Memory of Fire" Vol. 3 (Pantheon, 1988) p. 249 

On Galeano's quote regarding the right to a voice instead of an echo, see "We Say No," (Norton, 1992) p. 243

On the love affair between Camila O'Gorman and her priest, see Galeano's "Memory of Fire," Vol. 2, (Pantheon, 1987) pps. 163-4

"Senti-pensante" and "my hand begins to itch," see "Democracy Now," May 19, 2006

 

The Method In the Madness: Trump Tariff Meltdown Is An Echo of the Nixon Shock (pulling the world off the gold standard)

"What they [the Trump administration] want is they want to have their cake and eat it [too] . . . .They want to devalue the dollar without jeopardizing the exorbitant privilege of the dollar, the reserve currency status of the dollar . . . . Is this far-fetched? No, it's not far-fetched. They may succeed in doing [so] . . . .I'm not saying they will succeed in doing it, but, what I'm saying is that they have a rational plan, a fiendish plan, as they would say in cartoons, but it is not unprecedented.* 

 

"You know, this is why I mentioned the 1970s, 1971, [when] Richard Nixon did exactly the same thing. I mean, in one of his autobiographies, I think he's written more than one, Henry Kissinger, in one of the chapters, just from memory, I read it many years ago. He asks a question in one of the chapters, the chapter title is a question: "Who caused the oil crisis?" And the first sentence is, "We did." And he was very clear on this. 

 

"That myth that it was the Arabs and the OPEC Third World countries that imposed the high prices on America, that's all rubbish. Let's not forget who was in OPEC back then. It was the Shah of Iran, who was on the payroll of the CIA, the Suharto regime in Indonesia, utterly driven by the State Department and the CIA, and Saudi Arabia, which can't move one inch without the OK of Washington DC. 

 

"So why did they create this huge oil crisis then, if Kissinger is right? Remember Richard Nixon sent his Treasury Secretary to the Europeans with a message that 'the dollar, mates, is our currency, and from now on it is going to be your problem.'

 

"Nothing more aggressive has ever been sent to the Europeans. I don't think J. D. Vance said anything worse than that. Indeed, Paul Volcker, who, much, much later became the president of the Federal Reserve, he was a member of that team and he reports that it was Connally, the Treasury Secretary, who convinced Nixon on the fifteenth of August of 1971, to blow up the Bretton Woods system with the following expression, and this is verbatim because it is etched in my memory when I read it. He said, 'Mr. President the foreigners are out there to screw us, and we must screw them before they screw us.' And two days later he blew up the Bretton Woods system.  

 

"He did it for a very simple reason. Once you have deficits, either you go German, in other words, you tighten your belt, you go austerity, big time, like the Germans would do, or they made us (the Greeks) do, or, Nixon was not prepared to do that to his own people and to his own ruling class, to his own country, or, you boost your deficits, if you are the dominant, hegemonic power, which is exactly what Nixon did, and you make other people pay for it. Essentially the American deficit becomes the magnet that magnetizes into the United States both the net exports of the Germans, the Japanese, and the Chinese, and their money, which goes between New York through Wall Street to get recycled in the form of government debt, shares, and real estate. 

 

"So everything . . .  the major shock, the plan to devalue the dollar, the plan to enhance the dollar's hegemony, the plan to damage seriously its most important allies, back then it was Europe and Japan, well, it's more or less the same now, that happened, it included to introduce enormous uncertainty, lots of businesses in the United States suffered, including the markets, the working class was damaged beyond redemption in 1971, '72, '73. 

 

"Remember, American hourly real wages have not recovered to the level that they had in 1973 - to this day - they are lower than they were in 1973. So, you talk about uncertainty, damage, carnage, and all that. Well, Nixon did it. That was the whole point of the Nixon shock. But you know what? It was utterly successful from his perspective. 

 

"Why? Because he managed to create, I'm talking about Nixon now, through his shock, something that has never happened before in human history. Every hegemon, every empire, every large force until 1971, the British Empire, the Dutch Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Portuguese Empire, before that the Roman Empire, every such power that went from being a surplus producer to a deficit producer, lost its power. The United States is the only hegemon whose power has been enhanced by its deficits. And that's due to the Nixon shock. 

 

"So when Trump's men, and a small aside here, when people say that Trump is a very poor excuse for human nature, that he's inarticulate, that he's half-crazy, all that applied to Nixon, right? I mean, was there a man more despicable than Richard Nixon? And yet, the Nixon shock worked. You know, what I find astonishingly ironic, is that all these centrists around the world, in Europe, in Britain, in the United States, who are lamenting the great world that was destroyed by Donald Trump. What world are they lamenting really? The one that was created by madman Richard Nixon's shock. Because everything we have been experiencing recently, taking for granted, globalization, neo-liberalism, financialization, those were the results of a very deliberate plan by Richard Nixon."

-----Yanis Varoufakis, "Yanis Varoufakis Analyzes Donald Trump's Tariff War," Politics Joe, April 8, 2025

*The plan will not succeed. The Nixon shock bought the U.S. empire some time, but Trump backpedaled immediately when the bond market told him there would be no similar result this time around.

Anonymous American Thoughts on Survival

 

 

 

 

Anonymous American Proposes SHAME celebration

 

(Unpublished letter sent to major media)

 

I have nothing but shame about the group we all belong to: Americans. Hundreds of thousands of us have no place to live, millions have no health insurance and all of our tax dollars- whether we have testicles vaginas both or neither, are financing slaughters in Israel and Ukraine and we are threatened with nuclear war. Let me know when there is a shame flag and parade. 

 

We understand how they (present plural form when not certain of sex-gender-political party etc.) feel.

 If the society has real democracy instead of the ugly joke we give that name to, all of our individual and identity group "selfs" can exercise their best motivations, as opposed to the ugliness of so much of present reality with various "selfs" blaming all other "selfs" operating in the same dictatorship of the rich and calling it "our democracy"”

 

 

868 billion for defense…from what? Most Americans are in terror at what other Americans can do to them.

Russia’s “brutal” attack on Ukraine, America’s “gentle loving” slaughters in Korea, Viet name, Cambodia, Laos, Libya, Palestine, Yugoslavia. U S military in nations all over the world but China and Russia are a global threat. Yes, and rapists prevent sexual frustration among their victims.

 

Market capitalist religious service is an economic rite of moral wrong.

 

 We need public banks, public ownership of utilities, employee owned and controlled business which will mean higher wages for majority workers and lower prices for majority consumers by removing the minority anti-democratic anti-social private profit investor class.

 

That means the end of anti-democratic capitalism and the beginning of the democratic communism we practiced in order to survive our earliest experiences of life

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anonymous American Proposes SHAME celebration

 

(Unpublished letter sent to major media)

 

I have nothing but shame about the group we all belong to: Americans. Hundreds of thousands of us have no place to live, millions have no health insurance and all of our tax dollars- whether we have testicles vaginas both or neither, are financing slaughters in Israel and Ukraine and we are threatened with nuclear war. Let me know when there is a shame flag and parade. 

 

We understand how they (present plural form when not certain of sex-gender-political party etc.) feel.

 If the society has real democracy instead of the ugly joke we give that name to, all of our individual and identity group "selfs" can exercise their best motivations, as opposed to the ugliness of so much of present reality with various "selfs" blaming all other "selfs" operating in the same dictatorship of the rich and calling it "our democracy"”

 

 

868 billion for defense…from what? Most Americans are in terror at what other Americans can do to them

Russia’s “brutal” attack on Ukraine, America’s “gentle loving” slaughters in Korea, Viet name, Cambodia, Laos, Libya, Palestine, Yugoslavia. U S military in nations all over the world but China and Russia are a global threat. Yes, and rapists prevent sexual frustration among their victims.

 

Market capitalist religious service is an economic rite of moral wrong.

 

 We need public banks, public ownership of utilities, employee owned and controlled business which will mean higher wages for majority workers and lower prices for majority consumers by removing the minority anti-democratic anti-social private profit investor class.

 

That means the end of anti-democratic capitalism and the beginning of the democratic communism we practiced in order to survive our earliest experiences of life

 

 

 

Ripley's Believe It Or Not Says U.S. SignalGate Scandal Defies Belief

Ripley Entertainment's publishing and broadcasting divisions have rejected news of Washington's recent "SignalGate" scandal as a "wildly implausible" Trumpian scam.

 

A spokesperson for the company reacted to news of the scandal with open incredulity: "You want us to believe that Jeffrey Goldberg, former Israeli "Defense" Forces prison guard/Zionist fanatic/paid propagandist, otherwise known as a reporter, was included in an unsecured U.S. national security state GroupChat discussing U.S. war plans with Yemen, specifically a plot to massacre civilians by blowing up an apartment building, which was subsequently carried out, this in revenge for the only effective solidarity with Palestinians visible anywhere on the world scene during what the highest international legal authorities consider an ongoing genocide, and the scandal is that AMERICAN LIVES WERE PUT AT RISK, a great outrage, since Washington's heroic mass murderers are obviously entitled to carry out their civilian massacres in perfect comfort and safety. 

 

"We specialize in the weird and bizarre," said the Ripley spokesperson, but there's got to be a limit.

How a Jewish State Planted In The Heart of the Arab World Came To Be Seen as a Solution To European anti-Semitism

 

"An atmosphere was created in which it was only natural for the American, with his reverence for the underdog, to accept Zionist propaganda as gospel." 

 -----Alfred Lilienthal, The Other Side of the Coin, p. 93 

"About this little Mediterranean country (Israel) more fables have been written than are contained in Scheherazade and Mother Goose together."

 

 -----Alfred Lilienthal, ibid. 

 

 

Trump 2.0 Fears Real Democracy

The Second Coming of Trump has arrived with full force and never a dull moment is the word. Jewish supremacy has re-opened the floodgates of Hell massacring Palestinians and pushing for war with Teheran; the triumphant U.S. president has finally expressed some empathy - for Elon Musk! - ("He's being treated unfairly"); and rising waves of popular revulsion at the billionaire duo's contempt for everybody and everything that doesn't directly enrich them have seized the moment and surged into the political foreground.

 

Meanwhile, DOGE's "efficiency experts" are using nutcase Javier Milei's "chainsaw for bureaucracy" to remove the fraud, waste, and abuse from the federal budget - like pediatric cancer research, aviation safety, and medical care for Veterans - all three perverse funding priorities posing obvious obstacles to "Making America Great Again." 

 

Sadly for Trump, his hoped-for record breaking mass deportations have fallen woefully short, not even equaling Joe Biden's pace, a shameful outcome for MAGA given the president's campaign promises, or at least it would be if he were capable of feeling shame. Unwilling or unable to spend the money required for the mass round-ups he promised, Trump has taken to grabbing the low-hanging fruit - unwary legal immigrants passing through airports - including in one case a woman married to a U.S. citizen who once overstayed a legal visa because flights were canceled and the border shut down due to Covid, making it impossible for her to leave on time. Fortunately, this glaring national security threat has been seized and dispatched to immigration jail, an immense relief to dictatorship-loving Americans everywhere.

 

Speaking of national security threats, legal immigrant Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian raised in a refugee camp in Syria, has been smeared as a terrorist and thrown into jail for condemning wholesale U.S.-Israeli extermination in Gaza, the culmination of "never again" pontificating about the Holocaust and its attendant kosher killing campaigns. 

Nevertheless, we have every right to be indignant about Khalil: the bloody nerve of people driven off their land and tortured and murdered for nearly a century raising a voice against the perpetrators! Have they no shame?

There is no relief coming for any of this from the collaborationist Democratic Party, which has spent years claiming that government can't be used to deliver universal health care or a federal jobs guarantee, and certainly not to negotiate our differences with those who object to having their leaders assassinated and their governments overthrown by Washington, standard methods for dealing with popular movements that take majority rule too literally. Democracy does not mean majority rule; it means minority rule with popular ratification, hence the Trump "mandate" to attack and destroy the interests of the majority.*

 

Democratic Party leaders' denial of any constructive role for government in meeting the needs of the majority has left them with nothing to say to the DOGE brigade's meat-axing of government on the grounds that it's all useless bureaucracy. If everything legitimate (apart from the Pentagon) is delivered by the glorious "free market" why shouldn't we gut government programs? 

 

Interestingly, though the Trump administration is in firm control of all three branches of government, it has chosen not to advance its agenda through the at least formally democratic institutions it controls, but rather, by extra-constitutional gambits like DOGE, which is accountable only to Trump, if even him.

 

There couldn't be clearer evidence that the MAGA masterminds do not trust the people they say have given them a mandate to construct a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires. With Tesla dealerships being torched and Luigi Mangione raised to the status of a folk hero, there is little chance their agenda could be passed in open Congressional session.

 

Their distrust of the people is very well deserved. Stay tuned.

 

*Trump got 49.8% of the vote in an election with 63% turnout, so his "mandate" consists of slightly more than 31% support of the full electorate. In other words, it's fantasy. 

 

 

 

 

Trump Truth Bombs Unleash New Wave of Trump Derangement Syndrome

A tsunami of Trump Derangement Syndrome is washing over us once again in the wake of the White House meeting between Volodmyr Zelensky, President Trump, and Vice-President Vance. Trump and Vance took Zelensky to task for opposing a cease fire, forcing Ukrainian conscripts into an already lost war, throwing good money after bad, and demonizing Vladimir Putin to the point of making peace negotiations impossible. The remarkable confrontation played out like a reality TV episode, one in which Trump did everything but shout in Zelensky's face: "You're fired!", a fate the seriously unfunny comedian more than deserves.

As usual, simplistic characterizations rather than insight dominates the headlines. Zelensky is a "democratic leader" and  Putin is a "dictator," although Trump has - gasp! - called Zelensky himself a dictator. This judgment, our mind managers tell us, is just more evidence of how stupid Trump and his MAGA supporters are. How could Zelensky, champion of the Free World, possibly be a dictator?  Just because he jails his political opponents, bans independent media, and shuts down religious organizations doesn't mean he isn't a democracy-loving freedom-fighter. How could it? 

 

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell is incensed that Trump is "not educable," thus incapable of understanding that U.S. media hacks are infallible in their "value-free" judgments about political reality. Trump "knowingly lies" about key statistics like how much aid the U.S. has sent to Ukraine. Horrors! This he takes to be far more significant than the fact that Trump correctly states that (1) Ukraine cannot defeat Russia on the battlefield (2) that it is therefore pointlessly sacrificing huge numbers of its own people, and (3) that it is "risking WWIII," (especially when it shoots U.S. ATACM missiles deep into Russian territory as it did in the final months of the Biden administration). O'Donnell and his fellow media hacks don't enlighten their audience about any of this, which is the heart of the story vis-a-vis the Ukraine war. Lies of omission, as the late Aldous Huxley noted, are the most effective element of propaganda.*

 

Putin has long objected to NATO expansion, as any Russian head of state necessarily would, and questioned why it still exists after the parallel Warsaw Pact disbanded at the conclusion of the Cold War. The West continually stated that it didn't want any more Berlin Walls, even as it kept expanding the Russia-hating military alliance to the East. NATO liked to claim that it was transforming itself into more of a political organization than a military one, to which Putin sensibly replied, "but if it's a political organization, why did it bomb Yugoslavia?" (in 1999).

 

For Moscow, following through on the Minsk Accords, adopted by Russia, France, Germany, and Ukraine in 2015 and endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council, was the only path to progress in Ukraine, which had essentially become an extension of NATO. The agreement implicitly assumed no formal membership in NATO for Ukraine, an outcome that any Russian leader would have had to insist on. It called explicitly for disarmament of the Donbass and withdrawal of Russian forces while basing the overall settlement on three elements: (1) demilitarization (2) restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty (3) full autonomy for the Donbass.  

The Minsk Accords were never implemented because Ukraine didn't want them to be and Washington didn't insist on them.

 

Putin has long objected to the U.S.-dominated, "democratic" world order, which is built around Washington using force in international affairs without a thought to the consequences, as in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Putin especially disliked the U.S. overthrow of Qaddafi in Libya. The UN resolution authorizing a no-fly zone over that country was "defective and flawed," he said, because, "It allow[ed] them to do what they like, to undertake any manner of actions against a sovereign state." It reminded him, he said of "a medieval crusade." 

 

In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly at the end of September in 2015, Putin blamed the refugee crisis (roughly five million people displaced) stemming from the Syrian civil war squarely on the West, which had induced hundreds of thousands of desperate families to rely on rickety boats to flee to Greece, the nearest European Union state. The U.S., which supported ISIS, was behaving as though there were "good terrorists and bad terrorists," Putin thought, without noticing that there was no easy way to distinguish the two groups. "Is it," asked Putin, "that the so-called moderates behead people more delicately or in more limited numbers?" Touche.

 

For Washington's neo-con crusaders, the "good" terrorists are whichever ones they're cynically using at the moment, which is why no one should be surprised that the head-choppers displaced Bashar al-Assad in Syria with U.S. air support last fall. Eight months from now they will commemorate 911 for the twenty-fourth time, piously renewing their imaginary permanent opposition to jihadi-style terrorism.

By comparison, Putin is a saint.

 

*Overt lies are also important, of course. For example, Zelensky's claim that Putin did not comply with a 2019 cease-fire and prisoner exchange is not correct. There are photos of the prisoner exchange, which was carried out according to the negotiated agreement. See Aaron Mate and Katie Helper on the Useful Idiots podcast, March 3, 2025.

 

Sources:

Lawrence O'Donnell, "Trump Humiliated again on world stage by British PM," The Last Word, MSNBC, February 28, 2025

 

"Putin" by Philip Short (Henry Holt, 2022) p. 369, 522, 588-9, 652

Noam Chomsky with C. J. Polychroniou, ed. "Illegitimate Authority - Facing The Challenges of Our Time," (Haymarket, 2023), p. 160

Malcolm X: Man of Peace

"Malcolm was our manhood, our living black manhood."

------Ossie Davis 

 

"Treat me like a man, or kill me."

-------Malcolm X[1]

 

 

February 21, 2025 marks sixty years since Malcolm X was gunned down in a hail of bullets at the Audobon Ballroom in New York City as he was starting to give a speech. The previous week his house had been firebombed, and days before that the French government had refused to allow him into the country to fulfill a speaking engagement, apparently fearing the assassination might take place on French soil. 

 

Malcolm fully expected these attempts on his life, which grew out of circumstances surrounding his break with the Nation of Islam the previous year. U.S. intelligence had infiltrated his security team, and at the time of his death Malcolm recognized that though the assassination plot originated with the corrupt advisers around Elijah Muhammad in the Nation of Islam, by the end the circle of intrigue had broadened considerably and the U.S. government was certainly involved.

 

Malcolm was undergoing rapid transformation in the final year of his life. He renounced the aberrant strand of Islam favored by Elijah Muhammad, shed his view that white people could do nothing to end racism, and apologized for having repeatedly called civil rights leaders "Toms" and other degrading nicknames. He lectured and traveled widely, met and talked with important leaders of national liberation movements abroad, and embraced a broad, internationalist vision focused on delivering freedom and justice to all peoples regardless of race. But he stuck to his view that black unity in the United States was a pre-requisite to any constructive change in American race relations.

 

Though often portrayed as a violent extremist (he insisted on self-defense against racist attacks), he was actually quite conservative in his habits (he didn't drink, smoke, gamble, or swear), and was never known to have laid a hand on anyone. James Baldwin considered him one of the gentlest men he ever met, and when Baldwin was once called on to referee a debate between Malcolm and a young civil rights activist - on the assumption that Malcolm would overpower the youth - Baldwin discovered that he was not at all needed. Like an oldest son protecting a younger brother, Malcolm treated the youngster with tender solicitude, smiling indulgently and gently correcting his view that being born in the U.S. was all it took to be a full U.S. citizen: "Now, brother, if a cat has kittens in the oven, does that make them biscuits?"[2]

 

The same gentleness was evident in Malcolm's home life. In a 1992 interview his daughter Attalah remembered him as a firm father, a mushily romantic husband, and a gentle and funny presence sparking frequent laughter throughout the house. Though work required he be away for long periods, he managed to be present even when he was absent by hiding little surprises around the house for his daughters. Then when he was on the road, he would send letters home telling them to go into a certain room and look in a special place to find a treat he had left for them.[3] 

 

How did such a man gain a reputation for uncontrolled rage and violence? Easy. He was born in a deeply racist country.

 

He grew up broke and hungry in a family of eight. "We were so hungry we were dizzy," he recalled years later.[4] His father Earl died when Malcolm was six, run over by a rail car, and his mother was slowly driven insane trying to raise eight children alone after her husband's life insurance company refused to honor the $10,000 policy it had issued him.[5]

 

Disciples of Marcus Garvey, Malcolm's parents were proud and rebellious, living isolated from whites but refusing to reside in officially segregated housing. Malcolm's father took his son along on trips to secret, private homes to hear the "Back To Africa" gospel. This early public exposure with its heavy emphasis on black racial pride prepared Malcolm for the speaker's platform and the barricades years later,[6] but he took a very circuitous route before re-connecting with Garvey's ideas and fashioning them into his life's work and legacy after years of evasive wandering.[7]

 

Born in Omaha, raised in Lansing, the flash of Michigan street life claimed Malcolm by age twelve. Strutting into town with a fistful of reefers, he was soon seen as a rising star on the streets. Bold to the point of recklessness, he openly challenged authority, once telling a notoriously abusive police officer who put a gun to his head to, "Go ahead! Pull the trigger, Whitey." [8]Kids who knew Malcolm at the time foresaw a future of jail and an early grave for him.[9]

 

Malcolm’s fascination for the streets deepened at fifteen, when he spent a summer in Boston, where he was exhilarated by the neon lights, fancy cars, and late-night partying.[10] Though he briefly returned to Michigan, he couldn’t help but be impressed by the fact that blacks from New York and Boston always had a hustle going that gave them money or kept them in clothes, a far better fate than being a ditch-digger or a janitor, which was the limit of realistic black aspirations in the Mid-West. Boston soon proved to be his most natural habitat, a place where he could live out his desire to survive by his wits.[11]

 

Living with his half-sister Ella on "Sugar Hill," Malcolm loathed the status-conscious blacks he encountered there, preferring to hang out with "his people" in the "valley" below:  pool sharks, pimps, hustlers, and hard-working blacks pursuing snatches of weekend escapism. They, and the pawnshops, bars, pool halls, cheap restaurants, walk-up flats, barbershops, beauty salons, and storefront churches that surrounded them, were Malcolm's entire world.[12]

 

Blessed with a steely self-confidence taught him by his Garveyite parents, Malcolm thrived in this environment and quickly developed a commanding presence that belied his age. But he rejected his parents' proud work ethic, and cared not a whit about morality or religion. A fast-talking con artist who excelled at finessing himself out of dangerous situations, easy money was all he lived for.[13]

 

Employed as a shoeshine "boy" at a Boston dance hall, Malcolm was thrilled to see the great bands of the day - Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Gene Krupa, Ella Fitzgerald, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, and the Andrews sisters.[14] No small part of his excitement was making piles of cash as the middleman for sexual hookups of white men wanting black women and white women wanting black men, proclivities that were not at all in line with racial pronouncements in the land of the supposedly free.[15] Malcolm’s knowledge of this reality would prove to be a source of great uneasiness in his future debate opponents.

 

Inevitably, Malcolm’s life as a hustler drew him to Harlem, where he attracted broad attention with his wide-brimmed hats, orange shoes, and exuberant, loose-fitting “zoot suits.” A familiar figure at uptown magnets like the Audobon Ballroom, Smalls Paradise, the Theresa Hotel, and the Savoy and Renaissance Ballrooms, Malcolm narrowly escaped death on various occasions working as a quasi-pimp, petty thief, and drug dealer for traveling musicians and curbside junkies. His ambition, he wrote in his autobiography, was “to become one of the most depraved, parasitical hustlers among New York’s eight million people.”[16]

 

After eight years of drug-dealing, burglary, numbers-running, and occasionally armed robbery, Malcolm landed in a Massachusetts federal prison at the age of twenty.[17] There he underwent a religious conversion, gave up drugs, dedicated himself to Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, and became a voracious reader and skilled debater. Paroled in 1952, within a year he was named assistant minister of Temple No. 1 in Detroit, and the year after that minister of Temple No. 7 in Harlem.[18]

 

He soon proved himself an extraordinarily adept disciple, gaining a reputation as the most ascetic young zealot for Allah imaginable.[19]A superb organizer and proselytizer, he was adored by Harlem blacks for his courage and wit, and they called out to him to "make it plain" with his blunt and uncompromising declarations and exquisite sense of drama. He was far and away the Nation’s most effective recruiter, provoking envy and resentment among his peers, which would ultimately form the basis for his assassination. In just a few years, he expanded the flock of the faithful from a few thousand members to many tens of thousands, easily surpassing the efforts even of Elijah Muhammad himself. He was especially good at making converts on streets he formerly prowled as a hoodlum.[20]

 

In short, he found his calling as a minister, though it was not his first choice. In his final year in school his eighth grade English teacher had urged him to “be realistic about being a nigger” and abandon his goal of becoming a lawyer. In a way, though, Malcolm ended up achieving his goal, becoming the most electrifying “lawyer” in U.S. history by relentlessly advancing the most powerful case ever made against American racism.

 

Possessed of a fierce, nationalist critique and a broad international outlook, no one could take Malcolm in debate. A spell-binding speaker with a bitter wit, he spoke in an emotionally charged tone of angry eloquence that blacks considered "good preaching,"[21] always bristling with unimpeachable facts leading directly to heretical conclusions. When unwary adversaries detected what they naively took to be loopholes in his arguments, James Baldwin once observed, they quickly found out they were really hangman's knots that left their cherished rebuttals dangling lifeless in mid-air. 

 

Taught to be humble and submissive, his eyes burned defiance. Told to moderate his politics, he preached revolution "by any means necessary." Advised to imitate "responsible" civil rights leaders, he brought huge black audiences roaring to their feet by detailing the racist brutality of which they were the constant victims.

 

Drug dealer, convict, hustler, thief, Malcolm rose to become the greatest black revolutionary of the 20th century, a prophet telling truths few could comprehend and nobody wanted to hear.[22] Deeply religious, he identified the fight for justice as the central act of faith, which made him that rarest of men who practice what they preach.[23]

 

Flatly refusing to abide the hypocritical pieties of racist Christianity, he angrily denounced the nerve of its God and his preachers for plaguing American blacks in the name of love. He found temporary solace and self-respect under the paternal guidance of Elijah Muhammad, but ultimately could not accept a theology claiming that whites were a genetically impoverished, degenerate race of “blue-eyed Devils,” however compelling the thesis might appear in a white supremacist society dedicated to slavery, lynching, and segregation.[24]

 

Nevertheless, it has to be conceded that the Nation of Islam was a considerable draw in the North, being a religion created by and for blacks, especially those trapped in ghettos and prison, and highly effective at teaching discipline and self-respect as a cure for drug addiction, crime, unemployment, gambling, prostitution, and juvenile delinquency, among other problems routinely found in such environments.[25]

 

Seeing clearly the connection between low self-esteem and such vices, Malcolm indignantly rejected civil rights supporters claiming that blacks should love whites, insisting instead that they love themselves, at least enough to rise in self-defense when violently attacked, as they all too frequently were. He recommended that advocates of the “love your enemies” approach teach it to the Klan before  expecting it of blacks, and insisted in the meantime on "an eye for an eye" as the only language a racist oppressor could reasonably be expected to understand.[26]

 

Appealing to the conscience of the oppressor was simply a fool's errand, Malcolm thought, as the whole point of racism was to allow whites to subjugate blacks on the pretext that they were sub-human and therefore by definition without rights. There was no point in appealing to a conscience that either didn't exist or wasn't allowed to exist, which amounted to the same thing.[27]

 

As sit-ins swept the south in the early sixties Malcolm denounced the hypocrisy of nonviolence at an appearance in Alabama. "If the Negro clergy didn't discourage us from participating in violent action in Germany, Japan, and Korea to defend white America from her enemies,” he announced, “why do these same Negro clergymen become so vocal when our oppressed people want to take the same militant stand against these white brute beasts here in America who are now endangering the lives and welfare of our women and children?"[28]

 

Though a committed Muslim, the most influential holy book Malcolm had to appeal to was the Christian Bible, as he had no path to large black audiences until and unless he successfully engaged with the religious tradition they were most familiar with. Elijah Muhammad taught that whites were simply evil, preaching Christianity to blacks to make them hate themselves, with devastating consequences.[29] With more political sophistication than Muhammad, Malcolm developed the most formidable race critique of Euro-American Christianity of anyone in the modern world, condemning the faith as a "perfect slave religion" that preached salvation in the next life to enslaved, colonized, and segregated blacks while white hypocrites had their heaven in this world.[30]

 

Malcolm blamed the plight of blacks squarely on their acceptance of this white racist Christianity. "Christianity is the white man's religion," he emphasized. "The Holy Bible in the white man's hands and his interpretations of it have been the greatest single ideological weapon for enslaving millions of non-white human beings. Every country that the white man has conquered with his guns, he has always paved the way, and salved his conscience, by carrying the Bible and interpreting it to call people 'heathens' and 'pagans'; then he sends in his guns, then his missionaries behind the guns to mop up."[31]

 

Rejecting focus on the hereafter, Malcolm told his black audiences that their hell was obviously right here on earth. "Hell is when you're dumb. Hell is when you're a slave. Hell is when you don't have freedom and when you don't have justice. And when you don't have equality, that's Hell."[32]

 

One of Malcolm’s greatest strengths was his courage in adopting unpopular stances when conscience and the facts demanded it. Unlike Christian ministers, for example, who reflexively sided with Israel’s Jewish-supremacy in the Middle East, Malcolm's support for the Arab world was so fervent that he was frequently labeled anti-Semitic.[33] He would not have been at all surprised at Israel’s current wholesale massacre and expulsion campaign in Gaza.

 

Unlike civil rights leaders, Malcolm rejected the self-defeating idea that blacks in the United States were a small minority, internationalizing his focus to state that they were in fact part of a world-wide Islamic community of "725 million Muslim brothers and sisters in Africa, Asia and in the brotherhood of Islam," also pointing out that people of color with more than passing familiarity with white racism formed the vast majority of the world's population.[34]

 

Finally, Malcolm’s critical dissection of the March on Washington demonstration in Washington D.C. in August 1963 showed unique insight into the direction black rage was beginning to take due to the persistence of white terrorism after nearly a decade of “non-violent resistance” that was supposedly the cure for it. Acidly dismissing the protest as "the farce on Washington," Malcolm deftly pointed out this appropriate and necessary anger had been deliberately excluded from the day’s agenda:

"The Negroes were out there in the streets . . . .They were talking about how they were going to march on Washington . . .That they were going to march on Washington, march on the Senate, march on the White House, march on the Congress, and tie it up, bring it to a halt, not let the government proceed. They even said they were going out to the airport and lay down on the runway and not let any airplanes land. I'm telling you what they said. That was revolution. That was revolution. That was the black revolution."

No leader had any chance of stopping it: 

 

"It was the grass roots out there in the street. It scared the white man to death, scared the white power structure in Washington D.C. to death; I was there. When they found out that this black steamroller was going to come down on the capital, they called in . . . . these national Negro leaders that you respect and told them, 'Call it off.' Kennedy said, 'Look, you all are letting this thing go too far.' And Old Tom said, 'Boss, I can't stop it because I didn't start it.' I'm telling you what they said. They said, 'I'm not even in it, much less at the head of it.' They said, 'These Negroes are doing things on their own. They're running ahead of us.' And that old shrewd fox, he said, 'If you all aren't in it, I'll put you in it. I'll put you at the head of it. I'll endorse it. I'll welcome it. I'll help it. I'll join it.'"

And this co-optation worked like a charm: 

 

"This is what they did with the march on Washington. They joined it . . . became part of it, took it over. And as they took it over it lost its militancy. It ceased to be angry, it ceased to be hot, it ceased to be uncompromising. Why it even ceased to be a march. It became a picnic, a circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all. . . ."

No dictator could have achieved more thorough control: 

 

"No, it was a sellout, a takeover. They controlled it so tight, they told those Negroes what time to hit town, where to stop, what signs to carry, what to sing, what speech they could make, and what speech they couldn't make, and then told them to get out of town by sundown."[35] 

 

So James Baldwin flew all the way from Paris, but was not allowed to speak. John Lewis’s speech wondering why the government could indict civil rights activists for civil disobedience but couldn’t bring white terrorists to justice or even stop appointing racist judges to the bench was censored by John and Robert Kennedy, a decision with which Dr. King went along. Lewis read a watered-down speech absent his pointed inquiry – “I want to know – which side is the federal government on?” - while two JFK aides stood by ready to pull the plug on his microphone should he fail to follow the script.[36]

 

Eighteen days later four black girls attending Sunday School in Birmingham were blasted into eternity at the 16th Street Baptist Church.

 

Though Malcolm spent the last thirteen years of his life trying to prevent America’s racial powder keg from exploding into irreparable disaster, the capitalist media never ceased to portray him as a violent madman. After his brutal assassination the New York Times heaped scorn on what the editors took to be Malcolm’s “pitifully wasted” life marked by “ruthless and fanatical belief in violence.” The Washington Post bid good riddance to him as “the spokesman of bitter racism.” Newsweek mocked Malcolm for “blazing racist attacks on the ‘white devils’ and his calls for an American Mau Mau.” Walter Winchell dismissed him as a “petty punk,” and the Nation magazine back-handedly complimented him for being the “courageous leader of one segment of the Negro lunatic fringe.”[37]

 

One of Martin Luther King's associates, Alfred Duckett, provided a far more accurate view, calling Malcolm "our sage and our saint," a prophet who inspired his black brothers and sisters to fight back against racism and persecution. Even Dr. King had to concede that Malcolm's portrayal of the plight of American blacks was accurate and his rage authentic, once reportedly telling a friend that "I just saw Malcolm on television. I can't deny it. When he starts talking about all that's been done to us, I get a twinge of hate, of identification with him."[38]

 

But it may have been Malcolm himself who was the most reliable source on what his work was about, saying in his autobiography that, “sometimes I have dared to dream . . . that one day, history may even say that my voice – which disturbed the white man’s smugness, and his arrogance, and his complacency – that my voice helped to save America from a grave, possibly even fatal catastrophe.”[39]

 

 

Sources:

 

James H. Cone, "Martin & Malcolm & America - A Dream or a Nightmare," (Orbis, 1991)

 

Les and Tamara Payne, "The Dead Are Arising - The Life of Malcolm X" - (Norton, 2020)

 

Alex Haley ed., "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," (Grove, 1964)

 

Howard Zinn, “A People’s History of the United States,” (Vintage, 2003)

 

Taylor Branch, “At Caanan’s Edge – America in the King Years, 1965-68, (Simon & Schuster, 2006)

 

Barbara Rogers interview with Attalah Shabazz, "Bay Sunday," November 15, 1992

 

Michael K. Smith, “Portraits of Empire,” (Common Courage, 2003)

 

 

---

[1]Cone, p. 251

[2] Smith, p. 110

[3] Barbara Rogers, “Bay Sunday,” November 15, 1992

[4] Payne, p. 94

[5] Payne, p. 89. Malcolm thought his father had been murdered by the Klan, but this appears not to have been the case.

[6] Payne, p. 86

[7] Payne, p. 75

[8] Payne, p. 122

[9] Payne, p. 122, 145

[10] Payne, p. 141

[11] Payne, p. 146

[12] Payne, p. 152

[13] Payne, p. 115

[14] Payne, p. 152-3

[15] Payne, p. 155-6

[16] Payne, p.  168, 170, 174

[17] Cone, p. 154

[18] Payne, p. 272, 274

[19] Payne, p. 278

[20] Payne, p. 285

[21] Cone, p. 172

[22] Cone, p. 152

[23] Cone, p. 164

[24]Cone, p. 170. The worst effects and limitations of Elijah Muhammad’s views were altered or eliminated in Malcolm by his frequent interactions with white university students.

[25] Cone, p. 162

[26] Cone, p. 160

[27] Cone, p. 166

[28] Cone, p. 176

[29] Cone, p. 162

[30] Cone, p. 166

[31] Cone, p. 166, 170

[32] Cone, p. 174

[33] Cone, p. 163

[34] Cone, p. 164

[35] Zinn, p. 457-8

[36] Quoted in Cone, p. 181

[37] Branch, p. 11, 373

[38] Cone, p. 251, 256

[39] Cone, p. 181