02-01-2020, 11:14 AM
(02-01-2020, 09:43 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 01-Feb-2020 World View: Civil war
Trevor Wrote:> Seeing all this is beginning to convince me that our crisis war is
> going to be a civil war. I know it's been dismissed many
> times. Even two years ago, I would have laughed at the very idea
> of things getting to that point. Now. . . I'm not so sure
> anymore. There are people I know who are willing to justify
> Antifa's actions, because, after all, their targets are white
> supremacists. I've had people throw me out of their lives because
> I'm not on the "impeach Trump" bandwagon. Not liking him isn't
> enough. I've read article after article and blog post where people
> proudly proclaim they have cut all ties with their former
> Republican friends and family.
> I haven't watched the entire thing the way John has, but I've seen
> enough to where these people scare me. Trump might have thrown
> gasoline onto the fire, but I don't think the response would be
> very different if Rubio or Cruz had gotten elected. The media
> ignores or justifies Antifa's actions in Portland and other
> cities. Far as they're concerned, all Trump supporters deserve the
> same treatment.
> They've already declared the 2020 election illegitimate even
> though it's 10 months away. Trump's likely to win in a landslide,
> though the Democrats will do their best to cheat. Sometimes I
> wonder if the GOP will vote to remove him just to try and appease
> their anger, even if it wouldn't work.
> Things got real crazy after the 2008 recession and we've still got
> one coming. I don't think it's been this terrible since
> immediately before the Civil War. You wear a Trump hat in the
> cities, you're likely to be beaten or at least harassed. I've been
> watching events in Virginia, and they were begging for a violent
> incident so they could spin it. Governor Northam was all but
> provoking one, but nothing happened, much to their
> disappointment. They want to disarm their political opponents,
> which sends chills up my spine.
> When it comes to confiscation, Virginia is the canary in the coal
> mine. I don't think they understand just how important gun rights
> are to conservative, else you wouldn't hear calls to send in the
> National Guard to disarm them. No, the Governor hasn't actually
> ordered this, but some lawmakers have suggested it. Some will do
> anything for total submission, and I don't think they realize what
> they could unleash.
> It wouldn't be red state versus blue state. It'd be rural versus
> urban, with numerous factions fighting for control of the
> country. I'm still not convinced we're really going to have a
> civil war, but the trend line is going in that
> direction. Everything is considered justified, so long as the Tea
> Partiers are crushed.
Could you give me some links to the articles and blog posts that
you're referencing?
I still reject the concept of a "civil war" in any meaningful sense.
As I've mentioned in the past, my father, a Greek immigrant, once told
me that the violence in America in the 1930s was so bad that he
thought America would not survive. Furthermore, FDR was just as hated
and divisive then as Trump is today. Nonetheless, nobody describes
the 1930s as a time of civil war, as far as I know.
If you are talking about gangland activity in America's giant cities, nomadic marauders such as John Dillinger and the Barrow-Parker gang, and racist violence in "Kukluxistan"... America solved those. The Klan disintegrated outside of the post-Confederate cesspool even before the Great Depression started (not a moment too soon). Such police technologies as police radio made it easier to catch criminals on the move; criminals could outrun police rumors, but they could not outrun radio signals. The FBI had much of its focus on criminals crossing state lines to commit crimes or evade prosecution, making prey of nomadic marauders. Dillinger, like many others, were mowed down by law enforcement. The FBI developed one of the finest scientific laboratories in the world dedicated to connecting criminals to their crimes and a technique of interrogation that winnows out the innocent from the culpable. It hired accountants to follow the money behind criminal syndicates flush with cash. By 1940, crusading prosecutors such as Thomas E. Dewey were using FBI techniques against gangsters who had been riding high -- but those high-level criminals and their hitmen in Murder, Incorporated ended up riding the lightning in an electric chair. To be sure, the FBI didn't need to beat confessions out of offenders as did the Gestapo and the OGPU... but when the criminal lied about innocence but evidence and the credible self-exculpation and accusations by victims proved more valid than a criminal's lies, the FBI had a criminal in much the same position as a victim of a Stalinist troika.
Comparing FDR to Trump is a sick joke. Trump is for the Master Class of asset owners and executives at the expense of everyone else; he has taken the baby steps of Reagan toward pure plutocracy as far as may be possible. FDR recognized that saving the political and economic order depended upon relieving Americans then poor through no fault of their own of distress that they did nothing to create. By 1939 Americans other than the pre-Crash elite were on the whole better off materially -- more likely to own cars, furniture, refrigerators, stoves, and radios or phonographs (those two then high-ticket items). Old people finally were collecting Social Security instead of being pressed to work until they die in industrial plants (and elderly workers were especially prone to industrial accidents that killed and crippled others with them). It makes more sense to compare Obama, who intended to bring about major reforms of the political order to the first two terms of the FDR Presidency. The difference: FDR jump-started the economic recovery after three years of an economic meltdown that ensured that Big Business would be concerned more with survival than with buying the political process, and the Obama recovery began about halfway into an economic meltdown that after a year and a half, after which the economic elites from before the meltdown were still flush with cash and were able to spend lavishly on buying the political process. The favored politicians of those plutocrats were those who firmly believed that no human suffering could ever be in excess so long as it creates, protects, enhances, or enforces a profit. As a consequence we ended up with the most reactionary politics since those of those slave-owning planters who expected people other than them to believe that slavery was the best thing possible for "their" (in a literal sense of formal possession as property) people.
We have a cold civil war. It is easy to attach an ugly stereotype to the leadership of one side, people who believe their class privilege the definitive good. Such is so with narcissistic types (the economic elite among Boomers) who wield or seek to wield absolute power (even if such power is effectively collective). That elite appealed to mass superstition and stupidity, as shown with Donald Trump proudly saying "I love low-information voters!" You tell me -- what good has ignorance ever achieved for Humanity? Has ignorance brought about technical innovations and medical advances? Has it ever made a coherent argument for reform? Has it ever offered imaginative culture? Has it ever brought about moral improvement? Has it fostered academic discovery or even competent teaching at the elementary level? About all that I see is that it has made people suitable objects for exploitation, whether as cannon fodder in destructive war, as passive consumers of cultural schlock as on low-brow fare on the Idiot Screen, and as the people who respond to the advertising for material trash even to the extent of buying food that will put them into early graves.
I will need to import this to this thread, but the Skowronek cycle (which partly fits the Howe-Strauss theory of generational change as a mechanism involving two Skowronek cycles), suggests that Donald Trump is a dead end for an Individualist era that began with Ronald Reagan at the end of the Boom Awakening era and is now spent. Think of Jimmy Carter as the last gasp of the most collectivist era of American history (beginning with FDR)... even if Carter was an upright and intelligent person clean of scandal as an ideological antithesis of Donald Trump.
Quote:It's true that I am afraid of what the Democrats will unleash if Trump
wins again in November and the Democrats are facing the unbearable
horror of four more years of Trump supporters, but I expect the
violence to be sporadic.
In my best hope, I see Donald Trump being defeated in the 2020 election and serving as an example of how not to lead a nation except into fear, rancor, and despair. I expect the next President and Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress to initiate major reforms of economic life, replacing economic fear in an absolute plutocracy with (best choice) a social-market economy. The politicians that Corporate America bought will have disgraced themselves in whitewashing Trump. Given a choice between prosecuting Trump and ignoring him we might be wiser to ignore him. Trump acts more like a typical once-competent person now incarcerated in a nursing home due to his senility, someone who has lost all inhibitions against bigoted expressions and vindictive statements. I saw that in my father, and from that I may have never fully recovered in four years.
But what if Trump wins? I see a mirror image of a tyranny as appeared in central and Balkan Europe behind the Iron Curtain and which came close to happening in your beloved Greece. But this will be plutocratic instead of 'socialist' in the Marxist sense. Trump's ideology is mirror-image Marxism, an ideology that accepts the Marxist depiction of capitalism as an inhuman plutocracy but differs solely in endorsing the cruelty of capitalism at its worst. I can imagine a world in which people are helplessly in debt through their lives as terms of survival. I can imagine an economic order that demands more of the common man yet offers less.
That is the sort of society in which liberal reform becomes impossible, and in which such types as Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro become the last (and of course, severely-flawed) hope for the common man. If you love capitalism, then at least attach some humanistic virtues to it.
Quote:The bitterness and fury of the Democrats is plainly visible on tv
among the politicians and mainstream media "reporters." And there's
no doubt that this is reflected in the Democrats in the general
public, as you said: "I've read article after article and blog post
where people proudly proclaim they have cut all ties with their former
Republican friends and family."
People who have split with family members over a transitory reality over politics have gone too far -- not that they haven't had such splits over property (inheritances that make life easy for recipients) or religion/ethnicity. I would be troubled if I had to share a family inheritance with someone who would certainly put it up his nose (cocaine) or inject it into his veins (heroin). Wouldn't you?
Quote:However, here's where the civil war concept breaks down. Crisis civil
wars are along fault lines based on things like ethnicity, skin color,
religion, and so forth. But I assume that the articles and blog posts
you're reading don't go farther and say something like, "I've cut all
ties with my former Republican friends and family, and now I'm making
plans to go back and kill them."
The rancor already exists, and some of the tendencies existed in Spain in the 1930's and Yugoslavia in the early 1990's, when societies started to democratize. But can democracy die in America? I used to think that it would take a David DuKKKe... but now we have Donald Trump, who as President has violated norms extant over more than 200 years. Our Constitution was designed to establish norms that preclude a despotic President. Such norms may have thwarted the vision of Obama, but Trump does not let those stand in his way.
Quote:If you start reading articles and blog posts of that sort, beyond
sporadic stuff from Antifa nutjobs, then we can re-assess the
possibility of civil war.
Antifa "nutjobs" are about as relevant to American politics as the beer-drunk, pool-playing, tobacco-spitting members of a Klavern. All democrats are anti-fascist. Donald Trump fits the warning signs of fascism whether the list of Lawrence Britt or Umberto Eco very well. To be sure, those largely fit Commies and Ba'athists as well, but all of those warning signs are pathology.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
