Liberators - bravest, most beautiful. Their smiles are shining like the sun. Happy birthday to the defeat of European fascism and may we see it lose again, and again, and again ❤️

Sinking Ships Deserting Rats Before They Are Eaten Away We have all heard the phrase, “like rats deserting a sinking ship”. It signifies that when a cause is failing, the least committed members of it leave very quickly to protect themselves, leaving others behind to face the consequences. We do not often hear that “the sinking ship is deserting the rat.” But that is what we are seeing right now. One ship is the US Republican Party, and the other the UK Conservative Party. It is therefore blindingly obvious who the rats are, which is why their ships are deserting them—and why now! Rats versus Goats Political parties always look for scapegoats. It is always someone else’s fault if things go wrong, not theirs or their supporters. If they have to face the fact that they mucked up themselves, one or two individuals are identified as “rogue operators” and the rest disassociate themselves from these to try and limit damage to the organisation. Think of the vilification still being heaped on Richard Nixon, by those who were happy to profit from his crimes in various ways until he was caught. But this process occurs when the party, the ship, thinks it can remain in power. By throwing out the king rat before the rest jump, it thinks it can save itself. It rarely happens that the ship is happy to scuttle itself and leave the rat in place, in the hope that the rat will drown without the ship and the ship can rise again from the bottom of the ocean. But that is what we are seeing now – wilful sabotage of great political parties, because that is the only way that they can be saved from their rats. Many Republicans and Conservatives are now quite happy to vote against, undermine and destroy their own ships because they are rapidly being left with no other option. They have to get out and build another ship because the rats have taken over the old one so completely that it has become impossible to sail. Throwing the rats out is no longer an option, because the ship cannot get rid of the smell they leave behind. Rats versus Elephants It has always been known that a lot of Republicans, including some senior figures, do not agree with the presidency of Donald J. Trump. Not only do we know this, we should all be grateful that we know this. The US system of primaries means that party divisions are examined in public, in elections, until the candidate most suitable to most party members emerges, at least in theory be held in secret, and then become subject of secret deals, are aired in public in the US, so the US electorate has a much better idea of where politicians actually stand than those of most countries. Nevertheless, the primary system generally results in losing candidates declaring their support for the winner and their platform, or keeping silent. It is unusual to find a leading member of the same party criticising its candidate, whatever their private opinions are, and even more so when the candidate is a sitting president. There is now quite a litany of prominent Republicans who have taken their distaste for Trump so far that they intend to vote for his opponent in November. George W. Bush, the previous Republican president, is widely believed to have voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. John McCain didn’t vote for Trump either, or Jeb Bush, or Mitt Romney, if you believe reports. Since then we have had a stream of lies, stunts, scandals and mishandlings which have further eaten away at Trump’s internal supporter base. It is not so much that Republicans disapprove of what Trump has done, but that they feel targeted by it. Trump won the 2016 Republican nomination, and subsequent presidential election, on an “us and them” platform. But the “swamp” he promised to drain wasn’t simply a Democratic one, but contained the whole political establishment. A prominent part of it has always been occupied by more traditional Republicans, and often are ones who don’t agree with Trump. Initially it was Trump himself who largely made this distinction to garner support from voters who felt disenfranchised. But as time has gone on, “Trumpism” has become a thing, a term of abuse used by members of his own party. A “Reaganism” was either an unintentional reference to the Third World War or a grandfatherly reassurance, such as that heard after the Challenger disaster. A “Bushism” was a mangling of the English language such as “They misunderestimated me”. “Trumpism” is a whole raft of policies and positions which the US State Department defines as “racism” or “fascism” when they are applied in countries the US doesn’t like. He calls Covid-19 either the “Chinese virus” or “foreign virus,” institutes travel bans on black and brown people fleeing the very governments he is objecting to, violates the Constitution daily and wilfully discriminates whenever he can to draw distinctions between “good” and “bad” people, which equate precisely with whether he thinks those people will vote for him or not. Many Republicans feel that Trumpism is alien to them, a disfiguring of what their party and they as individuals stand for. Former General Colin Powell, who is probably more popular than any politician and served as Secretary of State under George W. Bush, has announced he will be voting for Democratic nominee-presumptive Joe Biden in November. Two former House Speakers a former Defense Secretary and a former White House Chief of Staff have also joined an anti-Trump faction. This is now so significant that Biden’s campaign is considering establishing a specific “Republicans for Biden” group nearer to polling day. What will turning on Trump achieve? It is unlikely that these dissident Republicans will regain control of their party. Those who do stay loyal, out of conviction or reluctance, will not welcome traitors, as they would see them, to leadership positions once the dust has settled. Dissident Republicans are not seeking to save their party but to destroy it – by leaving it purely in the hands of the Trumpists and then making it unelectable. Then they will have the basis of a new organisation, perhaps calling itself the Republican Party and perhaps not, which will unashamaedly reject its current President and candidate to reflect the views of those who feel wounded by his appropriations of their values. The US has changed its party system before – though there has always been a binary choice at the highest level, the Federalists of George Washington and Whigs of Abraham Lincoln are long gone. The Federalist colour was black. The Republican ship is now, almost unthinkably, quite happy to desert its rat in order to remove the blackness covering it and reveal its natural red, or red white and blue, again, even if this means building a new ship out of the battered driftwood of its planks. Rats versus Snakes The UK Conservative Party has some claim to being the largest and most successful political party in the democratic world. With Theresa May, who regarded herself as “liberal” as leader, it came fifth in the 2019 European Parliament elections, by far its worst performance ever in a national election. Yet Boris Johnson led it to an unexpected and mould-breaking victory in the parliamentary election a few months later, and led the UK out of the EU, the issue which had hurt Theresa May’s premiership the most. The victory was mould-breaking because the Conservatives actually fell back in their traditional areas of support, the better off suburbs and rural areas. BoJo the Clown owes his large majority to capturing many traditional Labour seats, some of which had never elected a Conservative before, but contain large numbers of Brexiteers spooked by the “intellectual elitist radicalism” of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Johnson makes the same pitch as Trump – people versus politicians. He has also conducted ruthless purges of his own party, whose traditions long predate his own unfortunate arrival in its midst. Soon after taking over as Prime Minister he removed the party whip from 21 of his own MPs, whilst running a minority government, because they would not back him over Brexit. Many of these then left parliament at the subsequent election, enabling BoJo to fill his new Cabinet with what one of his own senior party members calls “the nodding dogs,” who will support him come what may on the most controversial issues. So far BoJo has largely got away with recasting the Conservatives as the anti-political party. But like Trump, he has delivered a blustering and inadequate performance when confronted with the Covid-19 crisis, and indeed many other things. Even then he has retained much support, partly due to opposition weakness. Now however that very majority, obtained by wooing non-Conservatives, is turning into the biggest threat to the Conservative ship. Like Trump, BoJo first tried to make out that Covid-19 wasn’t real, another establishment conspiracy. With death rates mounting, and scientists contradicting his claims that he was being guided by their advice, he belatedly adopted a lockdown strategy, at a time when the British economy was already reeling from Brexit. Nevertheless, people in serious danger of losing their livelihoods and homes, and more danger of losing their lives than in any other country largely did as he told them to. They stayed at home, not able to visit sick relatives or attend weddings and funerals if that meant travelling more than a few miles away. Then they were treated to the sight of Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s unelected spin doctor considered the true architect of these rules, driving over 200 miles with his family to find childcare when he should have been in isolation and then making another trip of 30 miles to “check his eyesight” and see if he was fit to drive back to London. All in direct contravention of the rules imposed on the rest of the population. This was explained away by both BoJo and Cummings himself as “what any father would have done.” Thousands of others would, had they been allowed to, but felt obliged to obey the rules. Naturally and rightly, they expected Cummings, as a government insider, to do the same. Ministers have been ordered to defend Cummings, and either resigned or been forced out if they don’t, even when they are ardent Brexiteers Every current minister owes their job, and their parliamentary seat, to being a Johnson loyalist, and had to agree to support him, rather than the party as a whole or its principles, when they stood for election in 2019. But now BoJo is pushing his own acolytes into the opposite intra-party camp, over an unelected adviser, both he and they have nowhere to go. Traditional Tories have given up on saving their party. Most have either left parliament or resigned altogether. Johnson loyalists owe their seats and survival solely to him. But with Johnson rapidly becoming more toxic than Covid-19 and chlorinated chicken, they will have to find a new ship, unassociated with this rat, to come out of this self-inflicted national tragedy in one piece. UK parties don’t change much either – the same big two have held those positions since 1918. But Johnson has so successfully remade the Conservatives in his own image that most of his own supporters will have to become something else to have any future, and can only do this and retain credibility by scuttling their existing ship, deliberately, and constructing a new, ratless one. Rats versus Humanity There are always those who disagree with the leaders of their chosen political party. Generally they try and win internal arguments. If they can no longer support their leader, they either opt out or vote for, or join, another one. It is very rare that we see a situation where members of a party feel they are better off destroying it and starting a new one. It happened to the United Australia Party, once the main party of the centre right in Australia, and the Progressive Conservatives in Canada in more recent times. But in these instances the whole party had become moribund, too many rats having already left. They were not run by rats, for rats, and left with no other members but rats who were unable to connect with people any more. It was always inevitable that populism would fail when led by billionaires and Old Etonians. The only question is what comes after it. Thanks to Covid-19, the whole world is now being faced with this question. But very few will want to the “new normal”, whatever else it may be, to be run by rats rather than people determined to forget they have ever seen a rat. People need to start smelling a rat too!

Headlines

A third of Americans have experienced high psychological distress during COVID-19 outbreak (Pew Research Center) One-in-three Americans have experienced high levels of psychological distress at some point in recent months. The share rises to 55% among adults who describe their financial situation as poor, and to half among those Americans who report having a disability or handicap that keeps them from fully participating in work, school or other activities.

Soaring joblessness could shake U.S. economy, politics for years (Washington Post) The United States is facing a political and economic challenge like nothing it has seen in nearly 100 years. Mass unemployment on a scale not seen since the Great Depression has erased the economic gains of the past decade and now threatens to linger for years, fueling social discord and shaking an already polarized political system. Not since the government began collecting official data in 1948 has a smaller share of the U.S. population been employed. The unique character of this economic collapse, triggered by an ongoing public health crisis, may lead to an enduring decline in the demand for labor. While the pandemic rages, companies are developing new ways to operate with fewer people, replacing the lost workers with machines that are impervious to illness. Political stability, too, will be tested. In the 1930s, before publicly funded social insurance insulated most workers against the vagaries of the market, the Great Depression’s chronic joblessness helped give rise to fascism in Germany, Spain and Italy. In the U.S., the 2008 global financial crisis spawned fierce political movements on the left and the right.

Feeling your pain? Virus reaches into the lives of Congress (AP) The beat against Congress has always been that its members are out of touch with average Americans. But that’s not true when it comes to the brutality of COVID-19 and its march across boundaries of wealth, education and power. Despite their privilege, at least one senator and seven House members have reported testing positive for the disease. Like so much of the world, lawmakers are experiencing a humbling dose of fear, sorrow, anger and isolation. “Everyone by now knows someone that had it,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., whose husband, John Bessler, recovered from a frightening coronavirus infection that sent him to the hospital. “Even if the person didn’t get really sick, they all know how scary it is. They know how scared they were.” There are signs that the misery sparked acts of kindness between Republicans and Democrats after years of little cross-aisle contact. “We’re texting friends,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., said of “light texts” he and Rep. Ben McAdams, D-Utah, exchanged after both suffered and recovered from the virus. “Several of us check up on each other now. So it’s been nice.”

Stuck on cruise ships during pandemic, crews beg to go home (AP) Tens of thousands of crew members have been trapped for weeks aboard dozens of cruise ships around the world—long after governments and cruise lines negotiated their passengers’ disembarkation. Some have gotten ill and died; others have survived but are no longer getting paid. Both national and local governments have stopped crews from disembarking in order to prevent new cases of COVID-19 in their territories. Some of the ships, including 20 in U.S. waters, have seen infections and deaths among the crew. But most ships have had no confirmed cases. The Coast Guard said Friday that there were still 70,000 crew members in 102 ships either anchored near or at U.S. ports or underway in U.S. waters. The total number of crew members stranded worldwide was not immediately available. But thousands more are trapped on ships outside the U.S., including in Uruguay and the Manila Bay, where 16 cruise ships are waiting to test about 5,000 crew members before they will be allowed to disembark.

Subways, trains and buses are sitting empty around the world. It’s not clear whether riders will return. (Washington Post) All around the world, the coronavirus has stopped people from moving—leaving buses, subways and trains all but empty and passengers apprehensive about any swift return. Ridership has fallen by up to 90 percent on some of the world’s oldest and most storied transit networks—the London Underground, the Paris Metro, Tokyo’s famously packed lines. Steep declines have hit many other transit systems. Experts now fear the lockdowns will leave networks struggling with twin problems: how to recover from a huge revenue hole and persuade riders that it’s safe to come back to one of the cornerstones of city life. And new realities of the outbreak—working from home and staying local—may prompt a fundamental rethinking of the daily mass transit commute and everything it means, from jamming into cars to wondering if the person next to you is sick.

Tijuana coronavirus death rate soars after hospital outbreaks (Reuters) The number of deaths from the coronavirus in Mexico’s best-known border city, Tijuana, has soared and the COVID-19 mortality rate is twice the national average, the health ministry says, after medical staff quickly fell ill as the outbreak rampaged through hospital wards.

Argentina to default again? (NYT) Argentina is hurtling toward default on international loans in two weeks, a prospect that threatens to revive its reputation as a serial deadbeat and global financial pariah that could haunt the Latin American country long after the coronavirus pandemic is over. If Argentina defaults, which as of Friday appeared likely, it would be the third time in two decades that the country has failed to meet loan payments after having amassed billions of dollars in foreign debt in a deepening spiral of economic dysfunction. Argentina would join Lebanon as the first defaulters in the financial tumult caused by the coronavirus.

Britain to quarantine incoming travellers for 14 days (Reuters) Britain is to introduce a 14-day quarantine period for almost everyone arriving into the country to avoid a second peak of the coronavirus pandemic, The Times newspaper reported on Saturday. It said Prime Minister Boris Johnson will say in an address to the nation on Sunday that passengers arriving at airports and ports, including Britons returning from abroad, will have to self-isolate for a fortnight. According to the report, under measures that are likely to come into force in early June, travellers will have to provide the address at which they will self-isolate on arrival.

Kenya’s preexisting condition: Mistrust in the government (Washington Post) Lilian Awino can’t point exactly to where her home once was. The city government bulldozed it along with hundreds of others Monday, and her neighborhood—known as Sewage, for an adjacent treatment plant—is now nothing but an open field littered with corrugated tin and torn-up mattresses. More than 8,000 people lived in Sewage, a warren of shacks amid miles and miles of slums that stretch east from Nairobi’s city center. Kenya’s capital is an obscenely unequal city, where the rich, who are few, lead gilded lives and the poor, who are many, face daily punishment for their poverty: slum demolitions, police brutality, corrupt politics and the diseases that spread because of the city’s failure to provide clean water. With the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic in Kenya, the government has appealed for the public’s trust—that invisible but essential component on which any public health intervention relies. But decades of policies that disadvantage the poor have eroded any chance of gaining that trust in the city’s slums. “If government wants us to believe corona exists, they wouldn’t have destroyed our homes,” said Awino, 26, carrying her 3-month-old baby. Her deduction is logical. If the government says everyone should socially distance and maintain hygiene, but simultaneously forces thousands to sleep outside, huddled together in the cold rain, then this disease must not be as serious as the officials say it is.

So, I was looking at your AU (So well developed I must say) and there's this question in my mind, is Emily... dead?? In your Oc universe I mean, no need to answer if you don't want to

Haha! Anon, be prepared for a rant because you have pressed my Hyperfixation Button.

Warning: this rant shows how bias I am towards a character and certain places in Amulet and contains real world opinions and issues that I am Absolutely Pissed about so I retconned a couple of things in my OC world. It addresses issues that is very much happening and if it makes you uncomfortable, well, it’s never meant to comfortable. This contains a lot of sensitive themes and frankly I am still doing research 

Technically speaking, the entire Council is gone along with Cielis (although the Surface knows it’s still alive they just ceased contact). Vigo died quite some time ago, along with several of theoriginal crew. Emily and Trellis are what remains of the Council but theresponsibilities are split because Trellis stayed on Alledia while Emily assistsin Space as a fighter (she’s not a leader). Elves age differently here, so Emilyis well in her senior years while Trellis is in his early 20s. Emily found Moze(already having a stone) abandoned as an infant in a wreckage after a fight inGhen-7, and brought him back to Alledia to raise him. Here Trellis actuallyserved as Moze’s adoptive father with Emily as his mom (but they’re not in arelationship, more of QPR because Emily is aroace while Trellis is a demi throughand through). 

He’s p reluctant at first and suspiscious where Emily gothim and if she just “stole” him without, I dunno, searching for his parents butultimately agrees because Emily has to be in Space and the safest place sheknows is Alledia and the most trustworthy person she knows is Trellis.Fortunately, he genuinely loved him and raised him as his own despite being differentspecies, even more so as from different planets. The problem is, Emily was kindof… Emotionally neglectful. The only time she ever bothers to visit Moze iswhen she wants to train him and bring him to space so he could join her in herfights but nothing beyond that. Trellis is a bit more affectionate, butconsidering he is recovering trauma from his own abusive childhood, strugglesto communicate properly with Moze and tries to feebly and reluctantlyunderstand and justify Emily’s action.

Unfortunately, this just bred resentment in Moze, as most ofthe time he’s complimented and recognized based on his skill and power, ratherthan his worth as a person. It worsens to the point that he believes that theonly reason Emily adopted him in the first place because he’s a weapon they canuse in their “war” (considering Alledia’s mandatory 500 years of peace is ineffect, Moze interprets that his parents has not yet switched out of their “atwar” mindset. And considering Emily’s actions, it’s quite hard to blame Mozefor drawing up that conclusion). The fact that Trellis is training him as astonekeeper to one day become a Guardian of the Council and didn’t evenconsider if THAT’S what Moze wants…. Moze was in a very claustrophobic anddistressing situation. When he does try to bring it up with Trellis, he’llreceive excuses. When he does try to bring it up with Emily, he gets dismissed.His lack of friends because of prioritizing his training made him deprived of agood support network (which a weakened Ikol took advantage of)

Contrary to what Moze thinks, Trellis DOES notice Moze’sdistress and worries about it, but is torn from defending his best friend ofmany decades to defending his beloved son. After he remembers how he alwaysyearned to be an adult his younger self needed, he goes off to confront Emilyfor her actions. Now I have to tell you, they both loved Moze, but they areindeed terrible parents with flaws they didn’t properly addressed, leading totheir kid suffering for it (considering Trellis has little proper adult guidanceand Emily is also emotionally neglected by Karen… It’s inevitable). That’swhere he realized Moze was just “taken” and Emily never bothered to search forhis parents. Trellis nearly broke down then and there because he realizes theySTOLE Moze. Moze is a Ghensepta (citizen of Ghen-7, it still hasn’t fallen tothe shadows yet), but he was raised Alledian, taught Alledian culture, taughtAlledian history when he already has ONE of his OWN. Moze was forced to take anidentity that wasn’t his and was absolutely isolated from his real culture andheritage. He is horribly sickened by what he and Emily has done and is outragedby it.

(Trellis’s and Emily’s relationship isn’t abusive per se, andit was genuinely a good one from the start but as they spent of the timeseparated from one another and be desensitized and cynical by their traumaticand heavy issues they encounter in their duties in either ruling or fighting…Well, it dissolved to the point that they only bothered to listen to oneanother because of past yearnings and insistence to try to stick of what they wereinstead of accepting the other as now. They still do care one another though,and consider each other family, but the former passion and harmony is long gone.Trellis do ended up going along to what Emily desires instead of protestingback in the good ol days)

Trellis demands that Moze be returned to his home planet butEmily declines, as they are his parents now and Ghen-7 will be safe no longer. Whatkind of parent that endangers their child? Trellis dissents that they are not Moze’sparents and that he doesn’t belong to Alledia and deserved to return to hisreal home and family. The argument heated to point it dissolved to a fightwhere Trellis is nearly crippled from Emily’s attack. Her own actions horrifyher, and in the gist of the moment, Trellis begs to understand, that they didMoze wrong, that he’s sick of always compensating for Emily since the start oftheir friendship, and that she at least don’t do it for him, but for Moze. ThatMoze still loves her, and she undoubtedly loves him, but they need to talk, andshe needs to listen this time. That Moze was hurting and that they failed himlike the adults in their lives failed them. Realizing the truth, Emily breaksdown as well. The thing is, Moze overheard some of their fight, andmisinterprets this as Trellis becoming sick of him, hating him, and desiring todisown him (it doesn’t help that to Moze’s unawareness, that Ikol is amplifyinghis self-hatred)

Utterly heartbroken and crushed, Moze felt sick when Trellisvisited him in his room that night, to tell him that he has to go with hismother for a while. Believing this affirms his worst fears, he promptly acceptsit (Moze prefers Trellis over Emily clearly and loathes spending time with thelatter). Trellis looks like he wants to say something and Moze was about toanticipate it, but he shakes his head, and leaves him alone. The last timeTrellis saw Moze was when he was leaving with his mother

When Emily returns, Trellis is overjoyed to greet her,although surprised they got back early but presumes that they must have quicklyresolved things.

He stops dead when Emily was there alone, with Moze’stattered blue cape.  

His whole world shatters when Emily disappears to get Mozeback when he lost control, never to return. 

Destroyed by his son’s and best friend’s death within ashort span of time, Trellis fell into depression and suicidal tendencies,abandoning his position and duties as both Guardian and King, leaving a powervacuum and a fragile peace and structure his Cabinet and other offices try tofill and stabilize. Ultimately Riva is forced to shoulder his position asGuardian. The entire world goes into a shitshow when he’s gone for 3-4 years,isolating himself in his home village with only Luger keeping him from killinghimself but it’s clear he’s lost the will to live. He only returns when Gulfenis threatened to be overthrown by a tyrant and start another war again, andonce again usurps the throne to his great reluctance and despair (he hatesruling tbh and would rather live a normal life til he dies but duty has brandedhim to the bone), becoming Alledia’s sole ruler as the only remainingstonekeeper alive (the motherstone is actually still intact but no one knowsthat except him, because they are saving the stones for a new Council once the500 years of peace passed and the cycle of discord becomes anew). However,traumatized with rollercoaster of recovery and relapses and mental healtheducation and treatment virtually next to nonexistent yet, he spent most of hisearly reign with and emotional limp. Navin, last of the original group asideTrellis and his first friends, dies. 

Fortunately, he’s REALLY good at ruling and ended upimplementing laws that revolutionizes Alledia, especially Gulfen, but strugglesto implement it in other countries, especially Windsor due to racism and many ofthe country’s authority resisting him, and thus simply left them to their owndevices if they desire to implement it or not. Thus, his power as a Guardian isreduced considerably because of it, meeting resistance and suspicion ineverything that he does, no matter how well-intentioned. Still, believing thefight is not over, Trellis the forms strategies and plans to prepare Allediawhen the shadows return, and that includes warnings of rising fascism and discord.He prioritizes public education, equal rights (be it in gender, sexuality,disability or race), and (mental, physical, and emotional) health oversecurity, intending to help Alledia recover first before preparing for a war.He also tries to unify Gulfen by solving the divide of the East and West after itscivil war, and tries to harmonize and fix the racism that divides the elves andhumans, by allowing elves to reside in more friendly cities, such as Lucien,Ippo, and Frontera. Cielis, hated by the surface due to their actions andabandonment in the war, was dropped as Windsor’s capital and acknowledgesLucien instead. It became Alledia’s first metropolis, boasting as the richestand most diverse city in the world.

With that in mind, he forms the Lufenian Green Cross (acharity volunteer organization that spreads welfare and healthy internationally,its HQ based in Ippo, Lufen’s capital), Frontera Science Prefecture (and whereGulfen’s Space Program members aka the Elvem Resistance operated in secret to assistwith the war in space), and the Alledian Auxiliary, a cohesive paramilitaryorganization that is formed by the remnants of the Elf Army and the HumanResistance (sure enough, early days were bad but over time formed a s trongbond, contributing to the Hamony movement). He’s done a whole lot more but let’smove the fuck on

Eventually, around 23 he started dating Riva (after dating afew people to test the waters. He’s dated only three people before Riva, but he’sdated both men and women, human and elf), and then marrying her after a fewyears. It was a private ceremony, but Alcyone claims it was the only day shenever saw Trellis frown and was happy throughout. Still, he never fullyrecovered from his PTSD and clinical depression and anxiety, often overworkinghimself to compensate. Although as mental health becomes more widespread andrefined, Trellis allows himself to go to therapy, but struggles to recover.Succeses are far and few in between, and healing was hard work on top of hisoverwhelming duties. Nevertheless, he actually manages a happy and healthy marriagewith Riva regardless of his deep rooted mental issues thanks to it. Riva andTrellis never never had any children, as Trellis was far too traumatized and guilt-riddenfrom what happened to Moze, believes himself to be a curse like his father towhoever his child may be. Yet feeling like he owes Riva, they eventually haveRavis when they are around their 40s (in Elf age, so 300 after the events inAmulet).

Trellis didn’t want Ravis to suffer and experience thedangers of Royal life, thus kept the existence of the child secret and keptthem both in Lucien as simple citizens, with him separating personal life and leaderwork, thus he visits from time to time. But he refused to be more active inraising Ravis in his toddler years in fear of hurting him and guilt yet treatedhim genuinely well (he is also scared of loving him, and then losing him). He onceagain experiences a relapse and isolates himself more, leading to a few suicideattempts. When Ravis is around 5, Trellis’s condition worsens, to the point heis frequently hospitalized and isolated to keep him from his self-destructiveand suicidal tendencies (it happened enough times that the staff knows him wellenough, but he’s never hurt Ravis or Riva). Fortunately, after extensivetherapy, Trellis finally chooses recovery and affirms himself that he is worthyof the good life he is trying to cultivate, now tries to be a more active andgood father to Ravis. And sure enough, he did, absolving himself of mistakes hedid with how he raised Moze (but the fact that Ravis and Moze nearly have thesame personality tells that their kind and rather timid nature comes from him)

He does have relapses from time to time, but now he’s relieving himselfof his duties more and more to leave it to his subordinates in order to spend moretime with his family. Besides, it’s just 400 years, they have a century ofpeace. It comes to the point he’s considering to abdicate his throne and dissolvethe monarchy. Unfortunately, the last gadoba (the plant Riva saved in bk 6)warns him that the shadows are returning much earlier to exact their revengeand commit the genocide they intended from the start. Knowing full well theyaren’t ready, Trellis despairs, that why now of all moments, the moment wherehe is now desiring to live did the gadoba ask him to die to sacrifice himselffor Alledia. But Trellis comes to terms to impending death and plans to facethe shadows on the new moon, which is a month later. Father Hope tells him thathis century will only end under the light of the full moon with his son in hisarms.

He does tell Riva all of this, and she despairs as well, buthe tries to reassure her. He then goes on behind the scenes to prepare Allediaonce he’s gone, all the while spending whatever time he has left with hisfamily. Ravis thought their father was feeling sad, and tries to cheer him up, andalthough he does smile, it cant seem to reach his eyes. Thus, when Trellis isaround his 50s, he suddenly disappeared from his chambers in Valcor, the dooropening to his balcony and into the red rocks bellow. They can’t find his body,and the scene was ruled as suicide.

Thus to answer, Emily is dead, and Trellis is “dead”.

OBSERVATIONS ON RECENT CURRENT EVENTS

I haven't been following too much news since the Capitol Building riots last week, as I've been disgusted with what politics has become in present-day America (and I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way). These truly are strange times we're living in.

However, at the end of the day yesterday I did hear that the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Trump, and I also finally had time to read most of Trump's "Save America" speech from that January 6th rally, as I wasn't there to hear it in person that day. (Despite what some of you may think, I'm not an exclusively politically-minded person, and I'm really not into attending political rallies.) As I've touched on before, there are considerable aspects of Trump's behavior that I, and others, find just slightly repulsive. He can be coarse, rude, arrogant, & demeaning. And you'll find some of those same aspects of his persona in that speech he gave that day. It also wasn't helpful that at this late stage of the game he was still claiming he won the election by a landslide. And when he placed so much public pressure on Vice President Pence, urging him to overturn the certification of the election results & send it back to the states - that was very uncool. Yet with all this being said, as I read the speech, I didn't see blatant calls of insurrection from Trump in that speech that many in the media claim existed. At one point he said to the crowd, "I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol Building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard". Yes, Trump used the 3rd person once in a way that could be very easily misconstrued, and he used various figures of speech, such as fight, strength, & weakness, that in retrospect were highly ill-advised. He also referred to Congressional Republicans who were questioning election certification results as "warriors" and he referred to them as "fighting" & then studying, working hard to verify the issues at hand. He claimed that those Republicans in the house who wouldn't "fight" for this cause would be primaried in their forthcoming elections. Again, while this use of figurative language is really not a good idea, especially when there are fringe elements of the political party in the crowd, I didn't find explicit calls for violence against anyone in the parts of the speech that I read.

A brief interlude: I realize that many will read this and consider me an apologist for Trump. Whatever. I know some people will hate me & suspect me of wrongdoing irregardless of what I write or don't write, of what I do or don't do. I'm not excusing Trump's behavior. I still believe he should have moved to publicly calm things down so much earlier than he did. And I was still so disappointed in his behavior in the days leading up to January 6th. Also, rioters & anarchists should be held legally accountable for their crimes. But I'm just writing today to express my observations on what has taken place since the anarchy at the Capitol.

I heard that some Democrats want to conclude the impeachment process of Trump in the Senate well after Trump has already officially left office. While I'm not a constitutional scholar & I can't comment on the legality of that, I do think it would open up an unwelcome can of worms, in terms of impeaching officials who have already left office. I'm sure there are people who would like to impeach former President Bush in this manner for invading Iraq way back when even though there were no weapons of mass destruction to be found there. I gather others would like to impeach former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for failing to provide security for our ambassador & personnel in Benghazi, or others who would move to impeach former President Obama for weaponizing the branches of federal government against his political enemies or for giving an untold fortune in funds to Iran, one of the world's foremost sponsors of terrorism. So perhaps our elected officials should seriously consider the steps they plan to take in this regard, as others may seek to imitate your actions in the future.

Since the rioting that occurred at the Capitol Building, many on the left have attempted to portray Republicans as criminals with "guilt by association" type of accusations. Businesses, social media networks, and elected representatives have all joined in to engage in "canceling" or censoring conservatives. While I'll again repeat myself that I denounce the violence that occurred on January 6th (as I've denounced previous violence from both the right & the left), these blacklisting & censorship efforts are the beginning of the rise of fascism here in America from the left that I warned about in months past. Some are recommending that media now be scrutinied for "misinformation" (and make no mistake about it, that type of scrutiny will only be applied to conservative news outlets). Some have proposed the idea of "deprogramming" Trump supporters or sending them to "re-education" camps, I suppose so they can be taught (or forced) to think & believe the "correct" way, according to the left. When many of America's businesses, media establishment, & elected officials embrace socialism & China's communist methods, it shouldn't be surprising when they attempt to recast our country according to those methods. It's strange. There were none of these types of recommendations when anarchists were looting & destroying businesses, attacking federal courts & federal buildings, and tearing down state property such as statues in 2020. Instead, certain legislators lauded these people & some even stood side by side with them. Many local police departments stood back and let the mayhem continue. City councils & mayors waxed poetic about the so-called "justice" of their cause. And celebrities bailed out several of the criminals who had been imprisoned for their part in that. You don't see this occurring now, however. There truly is not equal justice in America.

When the Christmas bombing occurred in Nashville just a few weeks ago, I had truly intended to comment on that when the holidays & New Year had passed. However political & current events changed, so I put it off. But now I'm still wondering about the FBI's ability to protect the American population. In the Nashville case, the FBI had been warned that the man who committed the crime was in the process of making bombs and yet it seems there wasn't sufficient follow-thru on the FBI's part in order to prevent the detonation. (Yes, the Nashville police were also warned of the suspect's activities, but I'm not familiar with their track record on such incidences. And bravo to the police there who gave warning to citizens when the bomb was about to go off.) And in this case of the Capitol Building anarchy, it appears an FBI office saw a threat of violence on a message board, and yet again, direct warning was not provided to the appropriate corresponding authorities in order to fortify the Capitol Building on January 6th. And lives were lost as a result. I know there are lives that have been saved & crimes that have been averted by the FBI in the past, but I'm extremely concerned that the opposite is becoming a recurring issue with this agency. I'm also concerned that one of the incoming Congress' first acts was to recently pass a bill on gender pronouns, of all things. Perhaps the first act of any incoming Congress in a post 9/11 world is to make a thorough review of security procedures & systems in the Capitol Building. For some time now I've been warning about my concerns regarding those who are in charge of local & national security, and I hope my concerns don't continue to be confirmed. Please focus on the right things & make the necessary changes in your agencies in order to be able to respond immediately and effectively to any potential & legitimate threats.

There are reports of threats of violence in all 50 state capitals for the upcoming inauguration of Biden, and while I've already stated that I don't believe my core audience here consists of fringe elements from the left or the right, I'll state this again: Do not use violence to express your beliefs, political or otherwise. Let there be a peaceful transition of power in the upcoming days and weeks.

Truly, America is no longer a Christian nation. Yes, there are many Christians in this country, but it's clear that as a nation we no longer espouse values of faith, self-control, and love for our neighbors. Our "look-to-God-as-a-last-resort" response to the coronavirus is a classic example of this. Our violent political & rioting behavior in the past year also shows we don't really trust God with our lives & problems anymore. Maybe that's why God pre-ordained the rare celestial sign that occurred in late December 2020, that merging of the planets that takes place only every several hundred years. Maybe God was trying to get our attention in the midst of all our self-absorbed behovior. Or maybe God is about to do all sorts of wonders in our time, wonders unseen in generations. I don't know. I just pray that we find God and turn to Him before we destroy ourselves from within.

Can We Turn It Around?

Hard to believe it’s been four years, isn’t it?

           As I sit down to write this, 5 weeks out from the 2020 election, it’s hard to know where to start. For almost four years now, we’ve been living in an altered (and very shitty) state of reality. Donald Trump’s America. A never-ending dumpster fire. And, to be frank, one of the worst chapters in our country’s history. On top of that, we’ve just crossed the half-year mark of a global pandemic, an ongoing crisis by turns devastating and surreal, one that seems sadly befitting of our dystopian, is-this-really-happening times.

           After 4 agonizing years of hate and stupidity ruling the roost, of nonstop assaults on science and decency and civility, of the obliteration of democratic norms, destruction of the checks and balances that we naively assumed would always be there for us, we’ve almost arrived at another election. And with it, the possibility that we can start to turn this around. That we can rise up and say “NO. We DON’T want a dictatorship. We WON’T go along with this. We will FIGHT for love and decency and our democracy.”

           Personally, I am proceeding under the assumption that Trump will be reelected. I have to do so for my own wellbeing. I don’t want to get my hopes up. The bitter, blindsiding defeat of 2016 is still fresh in my mind. There are many ways that this election could turn into a shitshow. Not the least of which is we have a ruthless dictator as President who is doing everything he can to sabotage the vote. And he has a powerful ally in the Republican party, which has expertly suppressed the vote for decades and is doing so now with as much gusto as ever, determined to hold onto power at all costs. Throw in all of the logistical challenges and obstacles caused by COVID, along with all of the flaws of our antiquated, broken-by-design voting system (courtesy of the democracy-hating GOP), and no one really knows what the hell is going to happen on November 3.

           So I have to assume that Trump will win. Because, awful as that will be, life will go on if he wins. And I need to be able to carry on as well.

           Still, as accustomed as I’ve become to the insanity of the Trump era, it’s sometimes hard to grasp that it’s come to this. That we are perilously close to becoming an authoritarian country with a permanent conservative majority. That it pretty much all hangs on this election.

           It’s not just our country either. It’s our planet that’s on the line. Perhaps you’ve heard of climate change? You know, that little issue that Americans don’t give a shit about, but is an existential threat to human civilization? Well, it’s only getting worse. The Northern Hemisphere just had its hottest summer ever, 2 degrees above normal. You can expect a new record every year for your lifetime.

           Trump, as expected, has been a disaster for the climate – withdrawing from the Paris Accord, gutting environmental regulations left and right, and basically doing as much damage to the earth as possible. Given that experts say we have 10 years to make major cuts in emissions if we have any hope of avoiding irreversible and catastrophic climate disruption, it’s safe to say that a second Trump term would pretty much be game over for the climate, and for life as we know it. It’s the predictable outcome when you elect an idiot climate denier president of the most powerful country in the world.

           Then there’s the fate of democracy itself, which is in a perilous position around the world. Fascism masquerading as “right-wing parties” has been on the march across Europe for years. Trump has gleefully helped that effort, cozying up to ruthless dictators like Kim-Jong Il and giving his buddy Putin the green light to continue to ratfuck elections, sow chaos, and wage cyber warfare on any country he chooses.

Meanwhile, Trump has given the middle finger to our allies constantly since taking office. Again, completely to be expected from a jingoistic simpleton whose entire understanding of foreign policy boils down to “America First.” Remember his shit-eating smirk while refusing to shake Angela Merkel’s hand in the Oval Office? Trump exemplifies the right’s foaming-mouth hatred of Europe, foreigners, and diplomacy. Just one of their many flavors of bigotry, he and his base believe that the rest of the world basically consists of international elitists determined to destroy America. Not exactly a philosophy conducive to preventing trifling matters like, say, global pandemics or world wars.

The more I write, the more I remember when an absolute sleazebag our president is, and the more astonished I am that this man is our president. This is the guy who 60 million people voted for in 2016. This is the guy who is nothing less than a savior to millions and millions of white Americans. Donald fucking Trump? You would be hard-pressed to find a more loathsome person in all of America. And despite knowing full well how polarized and tribalized we have become, it’s still hard to fathom that so many Americans can look at this vile, morally bankrupt con man and see a great leader, a champion of their values, the greatest president of all time. It just doesn’t compute.

           And yes, many of his voters are well aware of his vices, and yes, white working-class voters have legitimate problems, and on and on. For four years, we’ve discussed and dissected these reasons for Trump’s victory. They are admitted and entered into the record. Now can we please get rid of this menace because he destroys our democracy, wiping out the great experiment that has endured for 244 years?

           Because that’s what’s really on the line on November 3. We’re all deciding if we want to go back to being a democracy – a flawed, messy, imperfect democracy to be sure, but still a democracy at heart – or a dictatorship.  That’s not hyperbole. That’s just the situation.

Trump, aided and abetted by the entire Republican apparatus and 40% of the population, has turned us into a dictatorship. He has put his cronies in positions of power. He has fired anyone who refuses to become his unquestioning flunky, smearing public servants who have spent decades working to help people – a concept completely alien to Trump. He has demonized the media (except for the propaganda outlets who run only pro-Trump news), relentlessly undermining one of the pillars of a liberal democracy, turning people against the very journalists who are trying to expose how Trump is screwing them over. He has conspired with our enemies to compromise our own elections. He came to power by colluding with Russia to his political opponent. He tear-gassed peaceful protestors in front of the White House and painted Black Lives Matter as radical terrorists and applauded right-wing vigilantes who pointed guns at BLM protestors. Hell, he gave them a plum speaking slot at the RNC. Because that’s who calls the shots in Donald Trump’s America – racists and white supremacists.

So, yeah…it’s a rubbish time. And as anyone who remembers the train wreck of Election Night 2016 can understand, I don’t want to get my hopes up. We’ve all been burned one too many times.

Still, it is nice – if only for a moment – to think about a President Biden.

A president who acts like a fucking adult, not a tantrum-throwing toddler or a schoolyard bully.

A president who condemns violence, not one who exploits and encourages it for political gain.

A president who speaks carefully and thoughtfully, knowing his words have real-life consequences. Not one who constantly spews venom and lies, not caring if people die as a result because they’re not his base so screw them.

A president who refuses to legitimize dangerous conspiracy theories. Not one who gleefully seizes on every twisted fairy-tale to emerge from alt-right trolls lurking on 4chan.

A president who accepts the simple fact that our world is interconnected and that diplomacy, respect, and civil discourse are our best tools for making life better for everyone. Not one who embraces the right’s phony-ass “patriotism” and thinks Americans – more specifically, his supporters – are the only people on Earth who matter.

A president who does his fucking job, not one who sits on his ass tweeting and watching Fox News to get his daily ass-kissing. When he’s not golfing or holding white supremacist rallies, that is.

Trump’s awfulness is simply unparalleled, probably in human history. It is an expansive mass so vast and blatant and unashamed that it’s almost a work of art, in a sick way. You could go on forever about the cringe, the iconic moments of incompetence, the garish displays of smirking idiocy and unabashed bigotry that have come to define our time. Sharpie-doctored hurricane maps, Kanye in the Oval Office, calling African countries “shitholes,” telling black and Latina Congresswomen to “go back where they came from,” toilet paper on the shoe, shoving a world leader on stage, soundproof phone booths at the EPA, white supremacists as “very fine people,” caravans, paper towels, upside-down Bibles, covfefe…it has just been a constant, dizzying tornado of hate and evil and stupid. It’s why I stopped watching the news. It’s too much. We weren’t wired to ingest this level of crazy and awful every day. Being a human being is hard enough as it is.

It’s hard to stomach the thought of one more day of this shit, let alone 4 years. Should Trump get reelected, it’s hard to see how anything good will survive. And should his victory come once again come via dirty tricks, be it foreign interference or voter suppression or both, it would appear to confirm that our system has been so hopelessly corrupted by the right that it’s impossible for a Democrat to win. It would suggest that it is now impossible to have a fair presidential election and we’re doomed to have permanent tyrannical rule by a racist, reactionary, science-hating, authoritarian minority. Where we go from there is anyone’s guess.

I hope we can turn it around. I hope there are enough decent people out there who are fed up with this asshole. I hope the myriad GOTV efforts we’ve seen in recent months will motivate people who sat out last time, and maybe some people who have never voted. I hope the collective determination of people who are against Trump is enough to overcome the GOP’s perennial cheating and voter-suppression campaigns. I hope, no matter the outcome, that the whole thing doesn’t devolve into an epic shitshow that makes Florida 2000 look like a calm and orderly affair.

So I have hope. Is it well-founded? Is it anything more than wishful thinking? Hard to say. But when all appears lost, that’s what we have. Hope.  

In closing, if you are dismayed by what America has become these past 4 years, if you want to save the democracy that so many people fought and died for throughout our history, please vote for Biden. Your kids, your grandkids, and the entire world will thank you.

It shocks and horrifies the world. America has 120,000 dead and counting of Coronavirus. That number’s going to rise to 200,000 in the blink of an eye. Where will it end? 500,000, a million — these figures are no longer the stuff of nightmares. Just of the grim and dystopian reality called American life.

But what truly startles the world is this: Donald Trump doesn’t appear to care. Not one bit. Mostly, he’s — still — golfing. When he wasn’t golfing, first, he minimized, then he pretended it would all go away, then he told people to drink bleach, then he…reopened the economy before the first wave had even crested. Which means that, of course, this.

While much of the rest of the world is already carefully preparing and planning for how to fight a second wave — America still has no strategy or plan for the first. It never did have anything resembling a national strategy for a lethal pandemic. Hence, in America, there’s just a rising tide of death, still surging ever higher. What the?

The question is this. Why doesn’t Trump care about Coronavirus?

Imagine that you’re Trump. A man with the mind of a wounded child. A narcissist, with nothing inside but the desperate need to be loved, but since you can’t have that, you’ll settle for being feared. What would you be thinking of right about now?

You wouldn’t be thinking of a pandemic. Why would you care about that? Right about now, you’d have one — and only one — priority. How to stay in power, by any means necessary.

You’d be obsessed with that challenge. You’d be brooding over it and ruminating over it every second of every day. Your mind would race and twist itself into a frenzy. You wouldn’t be able to sleep. You’d dream up every scenario under the sun, and then examine them carefully. That, by the way, is why Trump’s sending record tweets: he’s a malignant narcissist, driven into a mania, by the idea of keeping power by any means necessary.

That craving is about to come to a crescendo. An election looms — which you’re likely to lose. But you know, having manipulated both public opinion and official results your whole life long, that “losing” depends very much on perception. That, by the way, is why you call everyone else a “loser” so much — it’s precisely the one thing you can’t stand being. And so the thought of being the biggest loser of all — losing an election? My God! It’s unbearable. That’s why you’ve been driven into a mania by the very thought. It’s the one thing you fear most: being a loser. The mere idea fills you with anxiety, dread, fear, horror.

What would you do in that situation — if you had the mentality of a Donald Trump? If you were about to lose — but being a “loser” — was the one thing that you couldn’t stand, because your entire psyche depending on being superior and supreme? You’d go into a mania, a frenzy, too. You wouldn’t care about a pandemic, either. You’d be utterly consumed by one thing: how to keep power, now that you had it.

You’d probably rationalize the pandemic away, too. Disproportionately, the deaths are happening to minorities — blacks, Latinos, etcetera. Who cares about them? A pandemic is your friend, not your enemy. It’s doing the work the camps and walls won’t. It’s destroying your opponents and enemies, the portion of the population who stands against you. Why bother caring?

The other thing you are is a fascist. Americans might not be able to say it, but…it’s true. Camps, bans, raids, purges, kids in cages…who does such things but fascists? And there’s nothing that a proper fascist loves more than a catastrophe, which sorts the weak and subhuman from the strong. There’s a pandemic? That’s mostly killing the poor, vulnerable, old, frail, and marginalized?

Good! That’s just what should happen. They’re subhumans, after all. And if they can’t survive — well, that’s their lot, their fate. It’s what they deserve.

They are getting their just desserts. Only the strong deserve to survive.

And the strong have to prove their mettle, too. That’s why you encourage pool partying during a literal lethal pandemic. What the? Who wants to jump into a pool of water half naked with strangers when a virus is everywhere that can kill you? What kind of insanity is that? Ah, but to the fascist mind — which is also the mind of Trump’s army of American Idiots — there’s a deep and compelling psychosocial force behind it.

You have to prove your strength — and their weakness. To yourself, and to the rest of the tribe. Prove you’re one of the chosen people. Who can resist exactly the calamities that kill off the weak. How else are they subhuman? How else are you stronger than them? So you jump in the pool. You don’t wear the mask. You’re not weak. You’re one of the strong, the chosen, the pure, the true. You’re an American Idiot.

The world is divided into superhuman and subhumans to the fascist mind. A pandemic isn’t something to be fought — it’s something to be embraced. Because it draws a bright, bright line between these two groups.

That’s why a curious relationship has emerged. In those parts of America where Trumpism reigns…Coronavirus is simply being given up on. It’s Texas, Arizona, Florida, the South, that’s reopening. And, of course, seeing huge, huge spikes, which indicate a tidal wave of death to follow shortly.

That’s not a coincidence. It’s a relationship. The American South is the original fascist heartland. It’s where the ideas that inspired and guided the Nazis were born, from race laws to slavery. Could you really enslave — or even exterminate — a whole race? The Nazis wondered. They trembled when they discovered the American South — because here was a place that had done it.

Fascism began in the American South of the 1700s, not Germany in the 1930s. That is where the processes and systems, the laws and institutions, to systematically genocide, torture, and enslave a whole race, were really born. Americans won’t like to hear it, but increasingly, it’s something that good historians concur on.

That history left behind a poisonous residue: the mentality of the superhuman, and the subhuman. It manifests itself in racism, of course. But look at it even more deeply than that.

Why is it that the American North has taken serious steps — like New York — to defeat the virus, while the American South has given up, laughing in glee, grinning like an idiot?

(Now, if you’re from the South, I don’t mean you personally. But I do mean that there is an obvious and disturbing pattern between Southern states and indifference to a deadly pandemic.)

Not a coincidence — a relationship. A simple way to say it is: Coronavirus kills off more minorities, and so mass death of this kind is a good thing, not a bad thing, to such a poisoned mentality. But a truer way to say it is: a pandemic is a test, an apocalyptic one. It sorts the weak from the strong. The subhuman from the superhuman.

And so if you are a fascist, you welcome a pandemic. You jump in that pool. You share that beer. You dance half-naked in the firelight. Woo-hooo! The Great Testing is here! Now you finally get to prove what you always were: a superhuman, one of the chosen, the pure blooded, the strong.

And you get proof, too, that they — the hated ones, the minorities — are the subhumans. Why else are they dying off fastest and most? They aren’t strong, like you. They aren’t fit. They don’t take care of themselves. They’re lazy and dirty. They have bad genes that are the result of generations of filth and indolence. You can already see this pseudoscience emerging, by the way, to back up exactly this kind of poisonous belief system.

To the fascist, a pandemic isn’t the infection. The infection is the refugee, the immigrant, the impure one, the weak one. Trump has said so much himself, over and over again, when he referred to refugees and immigrants as vermin. Once you understand that, why would Trump or his Trumpists care about coronavirus?

A pandemic is something you want. Maybe not consciously, but unconsciously, for sure. And your actions show it. You’ve long claimed that you were the superior one, and they were the inferior ones. Now you have proof.

So what if some of your own tribe die? Mostly, it’s the poor and the old, even among your own. They are past the point of usefulness, anyways. They are no longer strong, productive, fit. The fascist mind can’t care about them, either. That’s another way that it welcomes a pandemic.

Killing all these people off — it’s good to the fascist mind. Minorities. The old. The poor. The frail. The ones who don’t belong. Even if some of you die — the chosen, the true, the pure — you still get something much more valuable to you: proof. That you really are superior, supreme, superhuman, fit, strong, pure, pious, faithful. Better. You’re not a subhuman — no, they are. You? You’re a superhuman, the walking Zarathustra, the ubermensch of Nietzschean fantasies.

Why else have you been chosen to survive this plague?

There is a very good reason Trump and his army of American Idiots aren’t fighting the pandemic, but embracing it. Are positively gleeful about it. Appear giddy with happiness over it, much more than they should be, partying.

A pandemic is a winnowing to the fascist mind. That mind is what Trump and his American Idiots represent. That is the entirety and totality of their belief systems. Trump is their surrogate father, perfect and pure, ultimately strong, capable of miracles. They are superhuman, superior to the subhumans, meant to rise supreme above them, to rule over them as genetic and moral destiny.

A mind like that doesn’t fight a winnowing. It welcomes it. It does everything it can to help it along.

That mindset still exists in the American South. It’s attitude to the pandemic is one of the most backwards in the world. Even a country like Vietnam has made stunning progress fighting Coronavirus. The American South is one of few places in the world which welcome it. It’s vivid proof that the old slavers’ mentality, which gave way to fascism, that the Nazis studied, as they wondered — is it really possible to enslave or exterminate a whole race — has gone nowhere.

Meanwhile, there’s Trump, in the Oval Office, obsessed with one thing: keeping power. Not being the one kind of figure he hates so: a loser.

That’s exactly the same mindset. The hatred of the weak, the frail, the liability, the despising of vulnerability. Trump doesn’t care about the pandemic because he hates the weak, like any good fascist. To him, they deserve to be winnowed. The nation will be stronger as a result. He can’t bear the merest thought of weakness — “loser!” — even in himself. So why would he care about a nation stricken by a lethal plague?

On some unconscious level, Trump probably knows, too, like all people who are alike do: the pandemic is pleasing his base. It might be frightening them, but it’s a thrilling kind of fear, like in a horror movie. It’s tinged with the promise of rising supreme, in the end. So what if there’s a tidal wave of death? If you can just keep afloat a little while longer — you’ll have proven how strong you are, that you’re a winner, that the lazy, filthy, dirty ones were them, not you.

Trump knows his base is excited by the pandemic. Aroused by it. Giddy over it. They dream of the power and glory that’s to be theirs. A winnowing? An apocalypse? Bring it on! It’ll kill off the subhumans, and prove to everyone else who the superhumans really are. Who cares if a few hundred thousand have to die? Especially if they’re mostly weak? Isn’t the feeling of supremacy worth that — and more?

Why don’t Trump and his army of American Idiots care about Coronavirus? They do, just not in the way you think. They want it. They need it. They crave it. That is why the South, where this mindset is concentrated, where it has flourished, is proudly trumpeting that it’s “reopened”…and doesn’t seem concerned whatsoever by a rising tide of death.

Every fascist movement needs an apocalypse. If it doesn’t get one, it has to make one. Most create their own — from world wars to genocides. America’s fascist movement is luckier. It stumbled into a ready-made apocalypse. Coronavirus already has a death toll on the order of a world war. On the order of a genocide. It is the apocalypse the American fascist craves.

Umair June 2020

Memory

History will be kind to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, certainly far kinder than she deserves.

This time next week, she will no longer be Donald Trump's Press Secretary. Years from now, when we've finished digesting just what was done and by whom in this era, when we've finished writing and rewriting our own complicity in it all, few will place much of a burden on the shoulders of a press secretary.

How many recall Ronald Ziegler, press secretary to Richard Nixon, whose job it seems was to deny and disrespect reporting on the Watergate break in and cover up? His job was not to know, and he did it very well. He was one of the few members of Nixon's inner circle not to go to jail.

How many even now recall the efforts of Ari Fleischer, Daniel Señor, and Dana Perino, all of whom spun the Washington press corps in the months leading up to George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq and in the years of callous devastation that followed.

Other press secretaries have lied. If we're being fair, all of them have. It's part of their job, to spin and to sell, to know only what they need to know so they can answer truthfully that they do not know what they really should know. Few, if any of them, have taken to that part of their job like Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

That we all know that she has repeatedly lied about just about everything and that she and her boss and pretty much all of those in this country still supporting him know that she has and do not care that she has is, itself, deeply troubling and should be. We should mark her passing from the stage with a sense of dread at how thoroughly she and her boss have destroyed the notion that truth matters, because truth exists to serve memory, and memory exists to protect us from harm.

They have not done this alone. If we're being honest, a big ask these days, we know that they are just the end result of decades of erosion, decades of men and women at the highest levels of power undermining the idea that there is anything worth trusting, let alone anything to trust. The country has been on its long pendulum swing to the political right for over half a century. Donald Trump is just what you get at the end of that swing.

The destruction of memory is a hallmark of all right wing states. What they don't erase they change. The shame of their previous defeats becomes a history of noble sacrifice; the contributions of those who would draw attention to that shame are burned, both figuratively and literally. Memory and the hard lessons that create it become the enemy of the state, and so does anyone daring to trying to serve that role.

The obvious examples of this is the Nazis in Germany, but the Jim Crow South set an example long before the rise of fascism, and the right wing regimes of Central and South America, with the aid of the United States, did so long after Americans had died to end the Nazis' reign of terror.

The fascists, of course, weren't the only ones erasing history; the supposedly "communist" regimes of the Soviet Union (in particular under Josef Stalin with his purges), its Eastern European satellites, China, and Cambodia all did this, too.

It's much more comfortable in the short term to forget. For all the success of "truth and reconciliation" in places such as South Africa and Rwanda, it's just so much easier for us to pretend the bad things were never done, that they are not being done right now,  easier to make believe that we had and have no complicity in harming others.

Even in the face of evidence, we still choose to deny it. We choose to forget. We choose. Much as we choose to ignore the symptoms of an illness - or of climate change - we choose to follow men and women who encourage forgetting, men and women who offer us a fantasy, something safe, something in which we are the heroes and not the villains we fear ourselves to be.

At least, we do until we can't anymore. Resist as much as we like, we must finally be accountable to each other. The greater the injustice, the stronger the memory, and strong memories all assert themselves eventually. If we are to survive as a species, lessons must be learned, and the lessons we need to learn in order to survive in the long term are built on those memories. There's no escaping it.

This is an auspicious year for remembering. We like our anniversaries, neatly organized in collections of years ending with fives and zeros. The easy ones are the happy ones, the achievements we can all be proud of, such as the Apollo XI moon landing and Woodstock, both celebrating 50 years in July.

The hard ones, though, are necessary. Rwanda, which has faced many if not all of its demons, this past April remembered the genocide that tore that country and its neighbors apart, 800,000 dead because the ancestors of one group were once given power over another. When the leaders of the second group came to power, they cultivated fantasies of avenging their group's previous humiliation, all in the name of securing their power. It was this they exploited as they saw their power slipping away, this that lead to horrors we should never forget.

Another massacre, just as horrific, also took place 25 years ago; in July, the survivors of Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzigovina will have no choice but to remember what their former countrymen did to 8,000 of their men and boys. The men who committed that atrocity, Bosnian Serbs, did so in the name of religion, killing those unarmed Muslims to honor a defeat the Serbs suffered to the Ottoman Empire 600 years before many of them were even born.

This, like the justifications for the atrocities in Rwanda, was a fraud. This was about power, about control, about the group that had held power in the region losing it and seeking justification for the violence they chose to use in trying to get it back.

Fantasies of avenging past humiliations are a way to hold a culture together, but a culture built on fantasies of avenging humiliations can only ever end in atrocity. That is a memory we all should bear.

That, naturally, leads us back to the Nazis, who only gained power in Germany courtesy of the humiliating conditions of the Treaty of Versailles, signed by all but one of the Allies 100 years ago in 1919. Humiliating a defeated enemy will, of course, drive them into the arms of a demagogue willing to turn that anger on scapegoats and use it to fuel his own drive for wealth and power.

We had to fight a whole other world war because of that. Well, because of that and because no one learned any kind of lesson from the first world war that had anything to do with not ever fighting one like it again.

This month we celebrated one of the most important moments in that Second World War, D-Day. 75 years later, we remain stunned at the bravery and sacrifice of thousands of men fighting to liberate millions they would never know, and we are right to celebrate their place in our history. And yet, one can't help but notice that we choose to ignore much of what came after, the good and the bad.

D-Day was an important start, but as the histories of that war often point out, the days after were counted out, "plus 1", "plus 2", and so on. The work that was started that day had to continue. There was no "Mission Accomplished" banner on an aircraft carrier, just thousands more letters thanking families for their loved ones' sacrifice and continents needing to rebuild in the aftermath of victory.

Did D-Day lead us to success in that? Did it lead us to success in building the world we claim that we want? It will be 30 years in November that the Berlin Wall came down, but much of the Europe that had suffered behind it, figuratively and literally, has slid back towards authoritarian rule, scapegoating minorities, and kleptocracy, and the Russians who felt so humiliated by that defeat are ascendant under the rule of a demagogue promising to return them to their former glory.

China, which will celebrate 70 years of Communist Party rule in October, hasn't been properly communist for over half of it. 30 years ago this June, they killed thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, erasing them along with memory of them from their own history. The primary difference between then and now is that now the country is prosperous and the Chinese people are too distracted by the "opiates" of material wealth to care whether or not they are free.

The freedom we in the West believe they should want, is, after all, a western concept. To the Chinese, good government under authoritarian rule lasted - with a few periods of interruption - for thousands of years. The last interruption, the one that brought about China's only, brief flirtation with democracy and individual freedom, came as the result of western colonialism in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

It didn't stick. How could it? Those Chinese lacked any kind of support from the supposedly free western democracies that had colonized their coastal cities. Democracy for China - true democracy - would have threatened their hold on power in those cities. It took less than a decade for China to fall back under authoritarian rule, and two decades more for Chairman Mao's brand of "communism" to effectively reestablish the old, centralized, fully authoritarian power structure.

Perhaps that is why so many in Hong Kong, until recently a western colony, believe in freedom so strongly. At least, the idea of it. They had over a century living under the British, not free but more free than their Chinese neighbors. They have lived under British laws and have cultivated an identity as independent from Beijing as their Cantonese is from Mandarin, which is still spoken by fewer Hong Kongese than English.

Since the handover to China in 1997, they have seen those few hard earned freedoms they had whittled away one by one. The protests they held in Hong Kong the past two weeks may have started out against a law allowing the mainland to extradite anyone charged with a crime, but they have quickly evolved to protesting the fast impending end of their British colonial way of life and the sense of freedom that comes with it.

If their latest protests seem to echo the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square 30 years ago, it is only because they were still British when the massacre was done. They have had the memory of it, an inoculation against authoritarianism and brutal repression, all this time. They may understand that China will succeed in making Hong Kong fully its own - that much was written into the handover treat - but they will carry that memory with them, wherever they may go.

This ultimately is why we must fight for memory here, in the United States. This is why we must remember the likes of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and her boss, Donald J. Trump, and the leader of the Congressional Republicans, Mitch McConnell. This is why we must call out the likes of Iowa Representative Steve King and Wyoming Representative Liz (daughter of Dick) Cheney, as New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has done. Their assault on truth is an assault on memory. An assault on memory is an assault on that most western, most American of values: freedom.

We fought fascism in the name of freedom. We fought communism, however coldly and by proxy, in the name of freedom. The Taliban and the Islamic State spent most of their reigns of terror destroying history, including architecture, sculptures, and artifacts going back thousands of years. We fought them, too.

In each case, we committed atrocities of our own. With D-Day came Hiroshima; with the fall of the Berlin Wall came Pinochet and death squads; with avenging 9/11 came drone warfare and black site torture.

We have killed innocents, launched arms races, and supported evil men because they took our side, all in the name of freedom, and we must remember all of that if we are to learn the lessons we must learn in order to survive as a species.

We still have the ability to do so. First and foremost, let us remember that.

- Daniel Ward

We talked to nine Portland activists who think violence is necessary to fight fascism.

The nine anarchists who met me one rainy afternoon in Portland, Oregon, told me they almost showed up to talk to me "bloc'd out"—in the black clothes and masks that have become something of an iconic look.

You likely know what "bloc'd out" means because you've seen photos and videos of masked anarchists, or encountered them in person at practically any left-wing protests (or at counter-protests held in response to right-wing rallies). Bandanas, scarves, or helmets are used to guard against the effects of pepper spray and tear gas; they also make it harder for law enforcement to identify them.

That's essential, as the black bloc strategy utilizes militant and often illegal tactics—smashing windows, lighting cars on fire, hurling projectiles at police, and physically challenging the opposition. It was the black bloc who set a limo on fire in DC during Donald Trump's inauguration, it was the black bloc who punched white supremacist Richard Spencer to great acclaim and controversy, it was the black bloc who rioted in Berkeley to protest the presence of far-right gadfly Milo Yiannopoulos.

Black bloc tactics have been in use since the autonomist movement in 1980s Europe, but they first garnered widespread attention in the US after the chaotic World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999. During those demonstrations, anarchists broke windows, and violent clashes between protesters and police culminated in tear gas being deployed—it got so bad that the mayor declared a curfew on the downtown area.

Although the black bloc strategy has been utilized stateside many times since then, it's escalated since Trump's election, and so has the debate over political violence. Demonstrations have turned into brawls between far-right and far-left factions in Seattle and Berkeley; in my hometown of Portland, there have been fights between police and anarchists; in Washington, DC, more than 200 protesters were charged with felonies after the inauguration.

Watch: This armed group is trying to become the new face of left-wing activism

I sought out the anarchists to learn more about what they see as their role in the growing anti-Trump resistance movement, and how they justify their extreme tactics in the face of criticisms from both the left and the right.

The group of nine is multi-racial and comes from varying economic backgrounds and regions of the country, although most claim Pacific Northwestern roots. Most seem to be in the millennial age range, although they tell me the organization has "tons of old heads" working with them. Some came into the anarchist movement after Occupy Wall Street, which one called "protest school." Others were introduced to anarchism at punk shows, or were seeking out something more extreme than "typical American liberalism," which they all reject. They all have jobs, but refuse to describe them for fear of being identified—they've all been involved in various illegal protest-related activities, and only agreed to speak to me on conditions of anonymity. (All names have been changed.)

They see their brand of anarchism as an evolution of an international movement that has been standing up for the disenfranchised for decades. That mission goes beyond the tactics that have caused so much controversy. The group told me about the classes local anarchists provide in first aid, self-defense, and other topics; the left-wing community outreach group Portland Assembly; and the anarchist effort to fill some of Portland's many potholes after the government failed to do so. (That last item represents probably the only good bit of mainstream press the anarchists have gotten as of late).

Portland has been dealing with a homeless crisis for years, and during an abnormally bad storm this January, four homeless adults and a newborn baby died. The local government's approach to the storm was seen by many in Portland as insufficiently urgent, and the anarchists joined with homeless advocates and went out into the streets with blankets, sleeping bags, coffee, and soup for those living without shelter.

Still, when I asked them if it's fair to say they represent the weaponized wing of the resistance movement (literally weaponized in the case of the black bloc), they said it was—but were quick to point out their motivations extend well beyond opposition to the current president.

"The narrative that this fight is pro-Trump against anti-Trump is wrong. This is about ultra nationalism," Victor, a mountain of a man who is clearly wary of saying too much, told me. "We have people working in France; we have people like the Zapatistas… We are all fighting in defense of our communities, but we have the capacity, skills and courage to be offensive. We will not bow down to fascists in the street, to a cop in uniform, or to those in the White House."

Clay, a skinny, intense man whose voice quivers and rises with passion when he speaks, told me anarchist beliefs "are rooted in the desire for a stateless and fascism-free society, and are defending marginalized communities from a long history of white supremacy asserting itself. We want to destroy the status quo and are willing to do so by any means necessary—whether it's teaching communities to be self-reliant or something extreme like blocing up."

They all have stories of mistreatment by police. Blair, who sat quietly, librarian-like, for most of our conversation, told me she was once detained in a West Coast city she doesn't want to name after a confrontation between the black bloc and police. She said she was shown a massive book with files on her and her associates and was told, "We're watching you and your friends." (She told me she wasn't charged with a crime.)

Victor added, "We operate under the assumption that we have already been infiltrated by right-wing groups and undercover cops, and that we're being illegally monitored by law enforcement just as Black Lives Matter and Occupy were by the NYPD."

It sounds, frankly, like an exhausting way to live, but to Victor the struggle with Trump supporters and what he sees as a fascist movement taking hold in America is "quite literally a war… for us, resistance is intuitive and something we have to do."

A protester throws a brick at police during Inauguration Day protests. JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images

These anarchists think the mainstream left has never taken the rise of the alt-right and white nationalism seriously enough. They see their destructive acts in the streets as a wake-up call for the left and a warning to the extreme right—as a call to arms and an example of how to fight what they see as fascism.

Victor laughed when I asked about if they're worried about their more controversial actions turning people off to the movement, telling me that "mainstream liberals cling to institutions like the police and elected officials that time and again have let them down—yet they continue to return to their abuser like a battered spouse."

"We're willing to put ourselves on the line for this. 'By any means necessary' is something we take very seriously."

As for the debate over whether political violence can be justified, to them it's not a debate. "I abhor violence against people for the most part—but these aren't people, they're Nazis," said an anarchist I'll call Sean, to laughter from the group.

A man who goes by Rip described how it felt to be in the bloc, charging into literal battle. "I feel more logical than emotional," he said. "There are so many things going on, from the cops, to making sure your people in the bloc are OK, to staying vigilant for a crazy Trumper with a gun… Adrenaline is definitely running high, but the result isn't so much excitement of exhilaration as it is closely observing and calculating the risks. It's a strange calmness in the chaos that's born out of vigilance and trust in your people."

When I mentioned the bad press black bloc tactics got both the election and recent May Day protests here in Portland (both devolved into violence and destruction and were declared riots by police), Clay snorts and said, "Yeah? Nobody was paying attention to the Portland protests until we made them. Suddenly the whole world's eyes were on Portland. We're willing to put ourselves on the line for this. 'By any means necessary' is something we take very seriously."

I asked the group to respond to criticism that its tactics may turn people away from the causes it endorses, and Clay, speaking with such fervor the tables behind us looked over, noted that other political parties in Germany attempted to reason with Adolf Hitler during his rise. "The neoliberals may not know it yet, but the militant anti-fascists are the ones that history will remember as fighting the rise of fascism in this country—not them."

What about the property damage done by the black bloc? When a business's window is broken, that's not violence against a state but violence against that window's owner, and in Portland odds are good that the owner is anti-Trump.

The group nodded approvingly as Clay drained his beer and coolly told me they feel no pity for "a bougie boutique that has participated in the displacement and 'death by gentrification' of neighborhoods that used to be inhabited by families from already marginalized communities."

Norm Stamper was the Seattle police chief during those famous 1999 WTO protests, which led to his resignation. "It's a mistake to underestimate the anarchists as unthinking people bent only on destruction, they're actually usually some of the most organized protesters," he told me. More than almost anyone else, he understands the difficult position police are in when confronted by violent protests, and the lack of viable options.

Though he has been open about regretting the decision to use tear gas on the protesters, Stamper says that he "was shocked by the inaction the police" in Berkeley in April when anarchists and the alt-right clashed in the street. "If they don't act, then they have abdicated their responsibility. You'll be criticized either way, and it doesn't matter which side is to blame, you must act."

Stamper added that law enforcement's use of militarized tactics often only feeds the chaos the anarchist groups seek. "They'll probably tell you to 'go pound sand' when you try to talk to them. They might say something much worse! But you have to try and engage these folks," is Stamper's advice to cops dealing with anarchists. "Violence is rarely the answer—and tear gas never is. All you've done is prove their point and caused indiscriminate harm to citizens. Move them by force if you must, but don't make the first move and don't gas them."

Stamper is more sympathetic to the anarchists than most police chiefs, and the animosity between the cops and the black bloc cuts both ways. Clay told me that the at recent protests in Vancouver, Washington, anarchist and anti-fascist flagpoles were taken by the cops but the sieg heiling Trump supporters were allowed to keep their firearms.

"As police departments around the country become more and more militarized, and as white nationalist and alt-right groups are further emboldened by the Trump regime, the need for militant tactics is higher than ever," said Sean. "At these protests, the bloc takes up a lot of law enforcement's attention, which in turn allows actions to flourish in ways they couldn't if we weren't there… I bet some of the people we've helped unarrest were glad we were there to interfere." (Sean defined "unarrest" for me as "interfering with law enforcement's attempts to detain someone in the block by using force.")

I asked Portland Police Bureau spokesman Pete Simpson about these criticisms made by the anarchists, and he told me, "It's easy to paint us as for or against a certain group, but that's just not the case. The police don't like working the protests because it's hours of very tense boredom that can suddenly turn into confused violence—violence these anarchists start."

What about the militarized police tactics so despised by protesters?

"We are always reviewing our tactics," Simpson replied. "It's almost impossible because people want us to solve things… and half feel we don't do enough at these protests and half feel we go too far. They (the anarchists) force our hand."

If dealing with the black bloc is complicated for police, it's even more so for left-leaning activists who abhor the use of violence.

A protest organizer I spoke with under the condition of anonymity echoed a refrain I heard time and again when discussing this article with those on the left: "It's an incredibly complex situation with those guys because in theory I agree with them almost completely—but I still think the best way to alter a powerful and corrupt system is from the inside and exercising your rights to free speech… and I worry about something like martial law being imposed if something goes really bad."

"The fascists are organized and collaborating nationally. We have to be as well."

Those engaged in tactics like the black bloc see these sort of concerns as part of the larger problem of bowing to a corrupt system. "In an atmosphere in which the president and his representatives can outright ignore basic truths and freedoms, more and more people are realizing there is no room for the tepid debates of the past," said an anarchist I'll call Lauren.

To understand how this group thinks, it's important to realize that when they see conflicts like the "Battle of Berkeley," they regard them as progress.

"The fascists are organized and collaborating nationally. We have to be as well," Clay said. "They are violent and empowered, and we will continue to meet them with equal aggression. They need to know this. We are ready. We're not the ones the cops are out there protecting. It's the fascists on the right getting the police escort."

The rhetoric isn't likely to cool down anytime soon. Last weekend, two men were fatally stabbed, and a third was critically wounded while defending two teenaged women, one of whom was wearing a hijab, from a man screaming racist insults at them on Portland's light rail system. At his court appearance, suspect Jeremy Joseph Christian shouted "You've got no safe place!" and "Death to the enemies of America!"

In the wake of that stabbing, Portland mayor Ted Wheeler has asked a right-wing group to call off a rally scheduled for Saturday, but they are unlikely to heed him. The anarchists I spoke with would not comment on that rally, but chances are they'll be there with masks on.

But for all the anger in the air, few people seem likely to go full black bloc, even if they believe the cause is just. To belong to the group I spoke with, you need to not just oppose the far-right thugs willing to fight in the street, but also the government and the police. That's a tall order.

Stamper surprised me during our talk when he said he thinks people hitting the streets is the most viable form of protest, and that he understands where the rage comes from. But when I asked what he thought of the black bloc, he replied, "If you think there are nothing but bad apples in the police department, why provoke them? That's a battle the anarchists will never, ever win."

COMMEMORATIVE MESSAGE TO THE HBO WAR FANDOM AND TO ALL TUMBLR IN HONOR OF THE 72ND VICTORY DAY AND THE 106TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BEGINNING OF NAVAL AVIATION IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Ladies and gentlemen, to all the people of the United States of America, to all our remaining living veterans of the Second World War of 1939-1945 and of all conflicts past and present and their families, to our veterans, active servicemen and women, reservists and families of the United States Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard, and of the entire United States Armed Forces, and of all the uniformed military and civil security services of the Allied combatants of this conflict, to all the immediate families, relatives, children and grandchildren of the deceased veterans, fallen service personnel and wounded personnel of our military services and civil uniformed security and civil defense services, to all our workers, farmers and intellectuals, to our youth and personnel serving in youth uniformed and cadet organizations and all our athletes, coaches, judges, sports trainers and sports officials, and to all our sports fans, to all our workers of culture, music, traditional arts and the theatrical arts, radio, television, digital media and social media, cinema, heavy and light industry, agriculture, business, tourism and the press, and to all our people of the free world:

Our greetings of goodwill and peace to all.

Exactly on the early hours of this morning 72 years ago on May 9, 1945, as the documents of surrender were finally signed in Berlin the night before (May 8 CET)  by military representatives of the Axis powers and the victorious Allies, and just as a joint force of Soviets and Czechoslovaks, together with select US Army personnel and local resistance organizations, were finishing the liberation of Prague from German forces after years of occupation, Radio Moscow and all other radio stations in the Soviet Union went on the airwaves with the General Order from the Secretary of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik), People’s Commissar of Defence and Supreme Commander of the Soviet Armed Forces, Marshal of the Soviet Union Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, officially declaring that after 3 years and 11 months since the start of the war in the Eastern Front of the European Theater of Operations on June 22, 1941, the very day the Wehrmacht began its advance on the Soviet Union, and having successfully achieved as a major combatant country of the Allies its important military, civil and economic contribution in the final and definite defeat of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and its allies and the liberation of eastern parts of Europe, now that its objectives have been completed the Great Patriotic War had been officially concluded on the part of the Soviet Union, as a major combatant nation of the Allies, having lost even more than the other Allied nations, and all combat actions in Eastern and Southeastern Europe and the entire Soviet Union by personnel of the  Workers and Peasant’s Red Army, Army Air Forces and Navy, alongside the military formations of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs and the partisan formations under the AUCP and the control of the NKVD were officially terminated on this very day – the day we celebrate the victory won by the Allies against fascist governments and armed forces in Germany and Italy (the Salo Republic in the country’s northern parts). For on that very morning, the whole of Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe and the Soviet Union exploded into great rejoicing, joining millions in the United States of America and Canada, and those in Western Europe in celebration of the official end of the Second World War in much of Europe and parts of Northern Africa, the victorious end to a 5 years, 8 months and 8 days of a war that forever changed a contingent and its destiny and fate. For it was during those years of war, in places like Dunkirk, Leningrad, the Brest Fortress, Moscow, Tula, Borodino, Sevastopol, El Alamein, Tobruk, Stalingrad, Kursk, Normandy, Caretan, Paris, Minsk, Monte Cassino, Eindhoven, Rome, Smolensk, Kiev, Kharkiv, Odessa,  Lyon, Bastogne, Warsaw, Bryansk, Anapa, Smolensk, Lviv, Stavropol, Tunis and other sites great and small where battles were fought one after the other, in the land, air, and sea, from every terrain and in any weather condition, from the mighty Sahara, up to the Normandy beaches, the British skies, the forests of the Low Countries, the mighty Alps and Balkans, the marshes at Pripyat, the Ukrainian steppes to the Arctic and the snowy lands of Scandinavia, where at the cost of millions of military, paramilitary and civil uniformed personnel killed, wounded or taken prisoner, at the cost of ruined economies and agricultural lands, destroyed cultural and historical structures and closed businesses, the sacrifices of so many who have served in the military, paramilitary, public security and civil defense services of the combatant Allied countries and partisan groups in Axis-held territories in Europe, and within Germany and Italy, and the deaths of countless civilian lives in bombing raids and of Jews, members of other religious communities and people who stood against the forces of fascism during the Nazi Holocaust that started in 1941, as well as of Poles and others in Soviet concentration camps and Gulag camps and by exile to  other parts of the USSR of various ethnic communities and minorities, and the home front efforts to support the armed forces in various forms, helping to win this the great victory won by the Allied Powers and their armed services against the Axis governments, armed forces, paramilitary organizations, civil uniformed organizations, and political parties, the victory that we once more remember on this very important day.

Indeed, this official announcement of Moscow meant that today, May 9, the original Victory in Europe Day, marks the official day that after 5 years, 8 months and 8 days of warfare marked by millions of deaths all over much of Europe and parts of Northern Africa, the suffering of even more people than ever before, and the economy and infrastructure scarred all over the countries where the war was fought, with the war now over and the Axis powers finally surrended to the victorious Allies, the people of much of Europe where the war had directly affected their way of life now celebrated with joy, happiness, and with tears in their eyes knowing that their suffering has come to an end and the fascist enemy had finally been defeated. Therefore, on this very day, we remember the victories of the Allied forces in Europe and North Africa that really led up to the victorious end of the conflict on May 8 and 9, 1945, forever remembered as that great victory over the forces of fascism and imperialism in those places in the world where it took root during the 1920s and 1930s, especially during the years of the Great Depression. Even through yesterday, May 8, is earmarked as Victory in Europe Day in much of Europe, the US and Canada, the holiday celebrations marked today in much  of the former Soviet Union except for the Baltic republics of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, and in Israel, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria and Romania, honor the very victory the world achieved against Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and their allies, and the people behind them, the very victory won at a very hard cost of millions of dead and injured, and destroyed infrastructure and industries in much of Europe itself and in parts of Northern Africa, save for neutral Spanish Morroco. It is for us a day in which we remember as always our millions of men and women of the military, paramilitary, civil defense and public security forces of the Allied combatant countries, and the people who worked in the home front – collectively known as the “greatest generation of heroes” who served their fellow men and women and the millions among them who perished for the sake of our freedom and independence in the battlefields and in captivity in the Axis and Soviet concentration camps and prisons,in partisan and guerilla warfare in the Axis occupied territories and as victims of aerial bombardment and attacks on merchant shipping and supply convoys within the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.

For it is today wherein we recall the victories won by the Allies and the defeats they endured all for the sake of the defense of our freedom and independence against the might of the Axis Powers, and the ideologies of fascism, imperialism and racism, and the huge cost paid by our forefathers in attaining this great victory.

Out of respect and gratitude for the liberty they fought so hard and even risked to die for it, even as the rising of neo-fascist and socialist aligned groups have become for us a source of anxiety and concern all over the world in these recent times, today, on this the 72nd year anniversary of this great victory, we once again pay our tribute and remember the millions of our mililtary, paramilitary and civil uniformed personnel of the Allied combatant nations who served during the 5-year long world war, and the hundreds of thousands of war veterans who still remain living, as well as our home front veterans of the conflict, and most of all, we cannot forget to honor the millions of the Allied fallen and civilian fatalities of this long conflict that forever changed not just Europe and Northern Africa, but of all over the world. Their stories of bravery, courage and determination to win the victory are the memories we honor today through books, films, television and other forms of media and art. In this the 72nd year since the victory was won over the forces of fascism in Europe and North Africa, through these forms we remember the great heroes and brave units that distinguished themselves during the course of the conflict, including the servicemen from Easy Company of the 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regt., 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, XVII Airborne Corps, United States Army, dubbed today as the “Band of Brothers” after the book about them by the late Stephen Ambrose, the vanguard unit of the airborne forces of the United States Army in the campaigns in Normandy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Southern Germany, and in the 2014 film “Fury” by director David Ayer recalling the bravery of Allied tank crews in the final months of this war, including those under the 2nd Armored Division, and the recent Canadian TV drama X Company about the important role played by Allied intelligence and counter-espionage units and personnel.  And thus, we also honor in the same way today all who are serving today in the uniformed military, police, public security, forestry, border security, civil defense and emergency services of the Allied combatant countries for their dedication and hard work in the performance of their sacred duty to defend their country and help preserve our freedom and liberty, in the best traditions of all who came before them. May we forever never ever forget the heroes of this war in Europe and North Africa who all through these years of warfare helped make possible the victory we commemorate on this very day!

We indeed are in changing times, wherein the very reasons why this war was fought are breaking out into the surface and into our society of today. As the veterans of the Second World War – including those of the European and Mediterranean Theaters of Operations  - are fading out one after the other, we the people of the free world must do all we can to ensure that this victory and all the Allied actions of the Second World War will be honored and remembered by all of us, especially our future generations, for the memory of this greatest generation who fought this war from the beginning towards its victorious end in May and September 1945 in all its theaters and in the home front for the sake of one goal: to defend not just our liberty and freedom, but also the future of our world and of all of humanity must be renewed, sustained and most of all be given to our future generations and most of all to our children and youth, who must continue celebrating this great holiday with deep respect, reverence, and everlasting gratitude for the efforts made by these men and women for the sake of the freedoms we enjoy today.  We therefore promise to them to honor their sacrifices and their role in building a better world and bring forth the defeat of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. We will never let history be repeated. And we will do our part and our best ability in defending their immortal legacy to the spirit of freedom all over the world, especially to all our generations to come. To our remaining Allied veterans to the veterans of other conflicts and of our civil uniformed services, we today pledge with our hearts to remember your services to your countries and to honor your legacy of having helped achieve this great victory. And most of all, we promise to honor your fallen comrades and friends in the battlefield, who died so that we can live in a world of peace, progress, prosperity, development and a clear vision towards our future.

Today, together with all the people of the United States of America, we continue to celebrate the 106th year anniversary of the beginning of naval aviation in the United States of America, and reflect on the sacrfices made by all our men and women who are a part of this great service. Today’s United States Naval Aviation has indeed grown from its humble origins to become one of the world’s best and elite naval air forces of the world.  As the years have come and gone, naval aviation in the USA has evolved with the times, and will continue to carry on the spirit of the brave naval aviators of the wars they fought and the engagements they took part since their foundation. As we today remember the 106 years after the US Navy accepted its first training planes for its San Diego air field, and honor the men and women who flew for America’s Navy in all the wars and battles it has fought since its beginnings in the early 20th century, United States naval aviation will continue to fly the flag for the nation it will always defend and will always be ready and prepared in defense of the skies and seas not just of the United States of America but of all the free world, ready to fly high towards a better future for humanity. Just like their predecessors and the heroes of this service, the naval air arms of the United States Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard and all naval aviators, flight officers and aircrews who are part of it will always be ready to be always up there, with the best of the best, ready to stand in the defense of the homeland and for the freedom and peace of the world.

And today, we mark together with the peoples of Europe the 67th anniversary since the framing of the 1950 Schurmann Declaration, the very document that prepared the future of Europe in the years to come, and thus laid up the road towards the full integration of the continent ravaged by both World Wars and towards the founding of the European Union we know today. This, without the efforts of those who fought to free the continent from the forces of fascism, would not have been possible, also without the efforts of those involved in that process to unite all of Europe as one united and great continent. Today, this union is in danger, given the rising tide of disunity by groups linked to communist and fascist ideologies aiming for its dissolution, and against the influx of both immigrants and refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. Today, as we honor this historic moment for the European continent and her people let us always be ready to defend it against its opponents and work towards a brighter future for the peoples of this part of the world.

Ladies and gentlemen, to our dear friends and to the people of the free world, our greetings to all of you today as we mark 3 great moments of our history: the seventh-second anniversary of the great victory of the Allied Powers against Nazi Germany, the 106th anniversary of the beginning of United States Naval Aviation and the 67th anniversary of the Schurmann Declaration of 1950, and wish all the peoples of the world our greatest holiday greetings!

On these very important anniversaries, we then greet all of you today - all our Allied war veterans of the war in Europe and North Africa, all the active, reserve and retired servicemen and women of the uniformed military, public security and civil defense services of all the combatant Allied countries, and all active and reserve personnel and veterans of United States naval aviation - as we join with all of you and the rest of the world in celebrating the 72nd year anniversary of the Victory in Europe, the 106th of naval aviation in the United States of America, and the 67th of the 1950 Schurmann Declaration. Today and always, may all we never ever forget that freedom is never truly free, and there are people who through the years have risked their futures protecting it and the world we live in. Today, as we celebrate this triple anniversary, we are proud to honor and to thank all who served in the Second World War as part of the European  and Mediterranean Theaters of Operations and to all naval aviators, flight officers, flight crews and air crews who served and are now serving in the United States Navy, Marines and Coast Guard and thier families, for their determination and courage to win the freedom we enjoy today and for always being prepared at all time to defend the blue clear skies of freedom and most of all, being up there, with the best of the best! May we always stand up to what these heroes fought for and never ever forget to make our part in making sure our future generations will surely see a world truly worth defending for our generations to come!

Today, as we mark these great days in our history, may we never regret to recall the heroic deeds of our predecessors who fought in this war and of all our past naval aviators who flew throughout all these years for the sake of the freedom and independence not just of the United States of America by of all of the free world. May we as one people never tire of honoring the memory of our heroic forebears and always work hard to be worthy of their sacrifices, most of all, for the sake of our present and for the future of our world and of all humanity.

And in conclusion, may we who honor the millions who died during this war and the memory of the millions of Allied soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen who perished for our generation and for our children may have the courage to continue to honor their service and the role they played in the victory in which we honor and celebrate today  and in the 106 years of naval aviation in the United States, and may we who will keep these sacred  and memorable days with respect and reverence especially for those who went before us and always be ready to stand worthy of our great heroes of the past, and to help win a world for our tomorrow that is peaceful, prosperous, clean and with a bright future for our children – a world that is worth defending and worth fighting for!

And as the men of Easy will always say: WE STAND ALONE TOGETHER!

ETERNAL GLORY TO THE FALLEN AND THE HEROES AND VETERANS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN EUROPE FROM 1939-1945!

ETERNAL GLORY TO ALL THOSE WHO GAVE THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE FOR THE FREEDOM AND INDEPENDENCE OF OUR WORLD AGAINST FASCISM, NAZISM AND IMPERIALISM IN THE FIELDS OF BATTLE, THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS, AND IN THE HOME FRONT!

LONG LIVE THE VICTORIOUS ALLIES OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN EUROPEAND NORTHERN AFRICA!

LONG LIVE THE EVER-VICTORIOUS PEOPLE OF THE FREE WORLD AND ALL OUR SERVING ACTIVE AND RESERVE SERVICEMEN AND WOMEN AND VETERANS OF THE ARMED SERVICES OF ALL THE COMBATANT ALLIED COUNTRIES THAT HELPED WIN THIS GREAT WAR AGAINST FASCISM AND NAZISM, AS WELL AS ALL OUR ACTIVE AND RESERVE SERVICE PERSONNEL, CIVILIAN EMPLOYEES AND VETERANS OF THE POLICE, FIREFIGHTING, FORESTRY, BORDER CONTROL, CUSTOMS AND RESCUE SERVICES!

GLORY TO THE HEROES, FALLEN AND VETERANS OF UNITED STATES NAVAL AVIATION AND TO THE GLORIOUS ACHIEVEMENTS IT MADE TO THE NATION IT HAS ALWAYS SWORN TO DEFEND!

LONG LIVE THE ACTIVE AND RESERVE SERVICEMEN AND WOMEN AND VETERANS OF THE NAVAL AVIATION SERVICES OF THE UNITED STATES NAVY, UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS AND THE UNITED STATES COAST GUARD!

LONG LIVE THE GLORIOUS 72ND ANNIVERSARY OF THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN EUROPE AND NORTHERN AFRICA AND THE GREAT VICTORY OVER THE FORCES OF FASCISM!

LONG LIVE THE GLORIOUS 106TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FORMATION OF NAVAL AVIATION IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!

GLORY TO THE VICTORIOUS PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND HER UNIFORMED SERVICES!

GLORY TO THE ARMED FORCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, DEFENDERS OF OUR FREEDOM AND LIBERTY AND GUARANTEE OF A FUTURE WORTHY OF OUR GENERATIONS TO COME!

And to the entire HBO War Fandom, especially the fans of Band of Brothers, who will celebrate for all time this day of victory over Nazi Germany:

LONG LIVE EASY COMPANY, 2ND BATTALION, 506TH PARACHUTE INFANTRY REGIMENT, 4TH BRIGADE COMBAT TEAM AND NOW 3RD BRIGADE COMBAT TEAM, 101ST AIRBORNE DIVISION (AIR ASSAULT), XVIII AIRBORNE CORPS, UNITED STATES ARMY… THE “BAND OF BROTHERS”!

CURRAHEE! AIR ASSAULT! ARMY STRONG!

A HAPPY VICTORY IN EUROPE DAY AND HAPPY 105TH BIRTHDAY TO NAVAL AVIATION IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!

HOOOAH!  HOOYAH!

2345h, May 9, 2017, the 241th year of the United States of America and the 119th of the Philippines, the 242nd year of the United States Army, Navy and Marine Corps, the 123rd of the International Olympic Committee, the 121st of the Olympic Games, the 76th since the beginning of the Second World War in the Eastern Front and in the Pacific Theater, the 72nd since the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa and the victories in Europe and the Pacific, the 5th since the attacks on Benghazi, the 12th of Operation Red Wings, the 42nd of the TV program Battle of the Network Stars,  and the 70th of the United States Armed Forces.

 Semper Fortis

John Emmanuel Ramos

Makati City, Philippines

Grandson of Philippine Navy veteran PO2 Paterno Cueno, PN (Ret.)

  (Requiem for a Soldier)

(Slavsya from Mikhail Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar)

(Victory Day by Lev Leshenko) (Top Gun Anthem)

(Last Post) (Taps) (Rendering Honors)

By Danny Sjursen | (Tomdispatch.com) | – –

The United States has already lost — its war for the Middle East, that is. Having taken my own crack at combat soldiering in both Iraq and Afghanistan, that couldn’t be clearer to me. Unfortunately, it’s evidently still not clear in Washington. Bush’s neo-imperial triumphalism failed. Obama’s quiet shift to drones, Special Forces, and clandestine executive actions didn’t turn the tide either. For all President Trump’s bluster, boasting, and threats, rest assured that, at best, he’ll barely move the needle and, at worst… but why even go there? 

At this point, it’s at least reasonable to look back and ask yet again: Why the failure? Explanations abound, of course. Perhaps Americans were simply never tough enough and still need to take off the kid gloves. Maybe there just weren’t ever enough troops. (Bring back the draft!) Maybe all those hundreds of thousands of bombs and missiles just came up short. (So how about lots more of them, maybe even a nuke?) 

Lead from the front. Lead from behind. Surge yet again… The list goes on — and on and on. 

And by now all of it, including Donald Trump’s recent tough talk, represents such a familiar set of tunes. But what if the problem is far deeper and more fundamental than any of that? 

Here our nation stands, 15-plus years after 9/11, engaged militarily in half a dozen countries across the Greater Middle East, with no end in sight. Perhaps a more critical, factual reading of our recent past would illuminate the futility of America’s tragic, ongoing project to somehow “destroy” terrorism in the Muslim world.

The standard triumphalist version of the last 100 or so years of our history might go something like this: in the twentieth century, the United States repeatedly intervened, just in the nick of time, to save the feeble Old World from militarism, fascism, and then, in the Cold War, communism.  It did indeed save the day in three global wars and might have lived happily ever after as the world’s “sole superpower” if not for the sudden emergence of a new menace.  Seemingly out of nowhere, “Islamo-fascists” shattered American complacence with a sneak attack reminiscent of Pearl Harbor.  Collectively the people asked: Why do they hate us?  Of course, there was no time to really reflect, so the government simply got to work, taking the fight to our new “medieval” enemies on their own turf.  It’s admittedly been a long, hard slog, but what choice did our leaders have?  Better, after all, to fight them in Baghdad than Brooklyn.

What if, however, this foundational narrative is not just flawed but little short of delusional? Alternative accounts lead to wholly divergent conclusions and are more likely to inform prudent policy in the Middle East. 

Let’s reconsider just two key years for the United States in that region: 1979 and 2003.  America’s leadership learned all the wrong “lessons” from those pivotal moments and has intervened there ever since on the basis of some perverse version of them with results that have been little short of disastrous.  A more honest narrative of those moments would lead to a far more modest, minimalist approach to a messy and tragic region.  The problem is that there seems to be something inherently un-American about entertaining such thoughts.

1979 Revisited

Through the first half of the Cold War, the Middle East remained a sideshow.  In 1979, however, all that changed radically.  First, rising protests against the brutal police state of the American-backed Shah of Iran led to regime collapse, the return of dissident ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the declaration of an Islamic Republic. Then Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, holding 52 hostages for more than 400 days.  Of course, by then few Americans remembered the CIA-instigated coup of 1953 that had toppled a democratically elected Iranian prime minister, preserved Western oil interests in that country, and started both lands on this path (though Iranians clearly hadn’t forgotten).  The shock and duration of the hostage crisis undoubtedly ensured that Jimmy Carter would be a one-term president and — to make matters worse — Soviet troops intervened in Afghanistan to shore up a communist government there. It was quite a year.

The alarmist conventional narrative of these events went like this: the radical mullahs running Iran were irrational zealots with an inexplicable loathing for the American way of life.  As if in a preview of 9/11, hearing those chants against “the Great Satan,” Americans promptly began asking with true puzzlement: Why do they hate us?  The hostage crisis challenged world peace.  Carter had to do something. Worse yet, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan represented blatant conquest and spotlighted the possibility of Red Army hordes pushing through to Iran en route to the Persian Gulf’s vast oil reserves.  It might prove the opening act of the long awaited Soviet scheme for world domination or a possible path to World War III.

Misinformed by such a tale that they repeatedly told themselves, Washington officials then made terrible choices in the Middle East.  Let’s start with Iran.  They mistook a nationalist revolution and subsequent civil war within Islam for a singular attack on the U.S.A.  With little consideration of genuine Iranian gripes about the brutal U.S.-backed dynasty of the Shah or the slightest appreciation for the complexity of that country’s internal dynamics, they created a simple-minded but convenient narrative in which the Iranians posed an existential threat to this country.  Little has changed in almost four decades.

Then, though few Americans could locate Afghanistan on a map, most accepted that it was indeed a country of vital strategic interest.  Of course, with the opening of their archives, it’s clear enough now that the Soviets never sought the worldwide empire we imagined for them, especially not by 1979. The Soviet leadership was, in fact, divided over the Afghan affair and intervened in Kabul in a spirit more defensive than aggressive. Their desire or even ability to drive towards the Persian Gulf was, at best, a fanciful American notion.

Nonetheless, the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were combined into a tale of horror that would lead to the permanent militarization of U.S. policy in the Middle East.  Remembered today as a dove-in-chief, in his 1980 State of the Union address President Carter announced a decidedly hawkish new doctrine that would come to bear his name.  From then on, he said, the U.S. would consider any threat to Persian Gulf oil supplies a direct threat to this country and American troops would, if necessary, unilaterally intervene to secure the region.

The results will seem painfully familiar today: almost immediately, Washington policymakers began to seek military solutions to virtually every problem in the Middle East.  Within a year, the administration of President Ronald Reagan would, for instance, support Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s ruthless invasion of Iran, ignoring his more vicious antics and his proclivity for gassing his own people.

Soon after, in 1983, the military created the United States Central Command (headquarters: Tampa, Florida) with specific responsibility for the Greater Middle East. Its early war plans demonstrated just how wildly out of touch with reality American planners already were by then. Operational blueprints, for instance, focused on defeating Soviet armies in Iran before they could reach the Persian Gulf.  Planners imagined U.S. Army divisions crossing Iran, itself in the midst of a major war with Iraq, to face off against a Soviet armored juggernaut (just like the one that was always expected to burst through Europe’s Fulda Gap).  That such an assault was never coming, or that the fiercely proud Iranians might object to the militaries of either superpower crossing their territories, figured little in such early plans that were monuments to American arrogance and naïveté.

From there, it was but a few short steps to the permanent “defensive” basing of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain or later the stationing of U.S. troops near the holy cities of Mecca and Medina to protect Saudi Arabia from Iraqi attack.  Few asked how such forces in the heart of the Middle East would play on the Arab street or corroborate Islamist narratives of “crusader” imperialism.

Worse yet, in those same years the CIA armed and financed a grab bag of Afghan insurgent groups, most of them extreme Islamists. Eager to turn Afghanistan into a Soviet “Vietnam,” no one in Washington bothered to ask whether such guerrilla outfits conformed to our purported principles or what the rebels would do if they won. Of course, the victorious guerrillas contained foreign fighters and various Arab supporters, including one Osama bin Laden.  Eventually, the excesses of the well-armed but morally bankrupt insurgents and warlords in Afghanistan triggered the formation and ascension of the Taliban there, and from one of those guerrilla outfits came a new organization that called itself al-Qaeda. The rest, as they say, is history, and thanks to Chalmers Johnson’s appropriation of a classic CIA term of spy craft, we now know it as blowback.

That was a major turning point for the U.S. military.  Before 1979, few of its troops had served in the region.  In the ensuing decades, America bombed, invaded, raided, sent its drones to kill in, or attacked Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq again (and again), Somalia (again and again), Libya again, Iraq once more, and now Syria as well.  Before 1979, few — if any — American military personnel died in the Greater Middle East.  Few have died anywhere else since.

2003 and After: Fantasies and Reality

Who wouldn’t agree that the 2003 invasion of Iraq signified a major turning point both in the history of the Greater Middle East and in our own?  Nonetheless, its legacy remains highly contested. The standard narrative goes like this: as the sole remaining superpower on the planet after the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, our invincible military organized a swift and convincing defeat of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the first Gulf War.  After 9/11, that same military launched an inventive, swift, and triumphant campaign in Afghanistan.  Osama bin Laden escaped, of course, but his al-Qaeda network was shattered and the Taliban all but destroyed. 

Naturally, the threat of Islamic terror was never limited to the Hindu Kush, so Washington “had” to take its fight against terror global.  Admittedly, the subsequent conquest of Iraq didn’t exactly turn out as planned and perhaps the Arabs weren’t quite ready for American-style democracy anyway.  Still, the U.S. was committed, had shed blood, and had to stay the course, rather than cede momentum to the terrorists.  Anything less would have dishonored the venerated dead.  Luckily, President George W. Bush found an enlightened new commander, General David Petraeus, who, with his famed “surge,” snatched victory, or at least stability, from the jaws of defeat in Iraq.  He had the insurgency all but whipped.  Then, just a few years later, “spineless” Barack Obama prematurely pulled American forces out of that country, an act of weakness that led directly to the rise of ISIS and the current nightmare in the region.  Only a strong, assertive successor to Obama could right such gross errors.

It’s a riveting tale, of course, even if it is misguided in nearly every way imaginable.  At each turn, Washington learned the wrong lessons and drew perilous conclusions.  At least the first Gulf War — to George H.W. Bush’s credit — involved a large multinational coalition and checked actual Iraqi aggression.  Instead of cheering Bush the Elder’s limited, prudent strategy, however, surging neoconservatives demanded to know why he had stopped short of taking the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.  In these years (and for this we can certainly thank Bush, among others), Americans — Republicans and Democrats alike — became enamored with military force and came to believe that it could solve just about any problem in that region, if not the world. 

This would prove a grotesque misunderstanding of what had happened.  The Gulf War had been an anomaly.  Triumphalist conclusions about it rested on the shakiest of foundations.  Only if an enemy fought exactly as the U.S. military preferred it to do, as indeed Saddam’s forces did in 1991 — conventionally, in open desert, with outdated Soviet equipment — could the U.S. expect such success.  Americans drew another conclusion entirely: that their military was unstoppable.

The same faulty assumptions flowed from Afghanistan in 2001.  Information technology, Special Forces, CIA dollars (to Afghan warlords), and smart bombs triggered victory with few conventional foot soldiers needed.  It seemed a forever formula and influenced both the hasty decision to invade Iraq, and the irresponsibly undersized force structure deployed (not to speak of the complete lack of serious preparation for actually occupying that country).  So powerful was the optimism and jingoism of invasion proponents that skeptics were painted as unpatriotic  turncoats. 

Then things turned ugly fast.  This time around, Saddam’s army simply melted away, state institutions broke down, looting was rampant, and the three major communities of Iraq — Sunni, Shia, and Kurd — began to battle for power.  The invaders never received the jubilant welcome predicted for them by Bush administration officials and supportive neocons.  What began as a Sunni-based insurgency to regain power morphed into a nationalist rebellion and then into an Islamist struggle against Westerners. 

Nearly a century earlier, Britain had formed Iraq from three separate Ottoman imperial provinces — Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul.  The 2003 invasion blew up that synthetic state, held together first by British overlords and then by Saddam’s brutal dictatorship.  American policymakers seemed genuinely surprised by all this. 

Those in Washington never adequately understood the essential conundrum of forced regime change in Iraq.  “Democracy” there would inevitably result in Shia majority dominance of an artificial state.  Empowering the Shia drove the Sunni minority — long accustomed to power — into the embrace of armed, motivated Islamists.  When societies fracture as Iraq’s did, often enough the worst among us rise to the occasion.  As the poet William Butler Yeats so famously put it, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed… The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” 

Furthermore, the invasion played directly into Osama bin Laden’s hands, fueling his narrative of an American “war on Islam.”  In the process, the U.S. also destabilized Iraq’s neighbors and the region, spreading extremists to Syria and elsewhere.

That David Petraeus’s surge “worked” is perhaps the greatest myth of all.  It was true that the steps he took resulted in a decrease in violence after 2007, largely because he paid off the Sunni tribes, not because of the modest U.S. troop increase ordered from Washington.  By then, the Shia had already won the sectarian civil war for Baghdad, intensifying Sunni-Shia residential segregation there and so temporarily lessening the capacity for carnage. 

That post-surge “calm” was, however, no more than a tactical pause in an ongoing regional sectarian war.  No fundamental problems had been resolved in post-Saddam Iraq, including the nearly impossible task of integrating Sunni and Kurdish minorities into a coherent national whole.  Instead, Washington had left a highly sectarian Shia strongman, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, in control of the government and internal security forces, while al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI (nonexistent prior to the invasion), never would be eradicated.  Its leadership, further radicalized in U.S. Army prisons, bided its time, waiting for an opportunity to win back Sunni fealty. 

Luckily for AQI, as soon as the U.S. military was pulled out of the country, Maliki promptly cracked down hard on peaceful Sunni protests.  He even had his Sunni vice president sentenced to death in absentia under the most questionable of circumstances.  Maliki’s ineptitude would prove an AQI godsend.

Islamists, including AQI, also took advantage of events in Syria.  Autocrat Bashar al-Assad’s brutal repression of his own protesting Sunni majority gave them just the opening they needed.  Of course, the revolt there might never have occurred had not the invasion of Iraq destabilized the entire region.  In 2014, the former AQI leaders, having absorbed some of Saddam’s cashiered officers into their new forces, triumphantly took a series of Iraqi cities, including Mosul, sending the Iraqi army fleeing. They then declared a caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Many Iraqi Sunnis naturally turned to the newly established “Islamic State” (ISIS) for protection. 

Mission (Un)Accomplished!

It’s hardly controversial these days to point out that the 2003 invasion (aka Operation Iraqi Freedom), far from bringing freedom to that country, sowed chaos.  Toppling Saddam’s brutal regime tore down the edifice of a regional system that had stood for nearly a century.  However inadvertently, the U.S. military lit the fire that burned down the old order. 

As it turned out, no matter the efforts of the globe’s greatest military, no easy foreign solution existed when it came to Iraq.  It rarely does.  Unfortunately, few in Washington were willing to accept such realities.  Think of that as the twenty-first-century American Achilles’ heel: unwarranted optimism about the efficacy of U.S. power.  Policy in these years might best be summarized as: “we” have to do something, and military force is the best — perhaps the only — feasible option. 

Has it worked? Is anybody, including Americans, safer?  Few in power even bother to ask such questions.  But the data is there.  The Department of State counted just 348 terrorist attacks worldwide in 2001 compared with 11,774 attacks in 2015. That’s right: at best, America’s 15-year “war on terror” failed to significantly reduce international terrorism; at worst, its actions helped make matters 30 times worse.

Recall the Hippocratic oath: “First do no harm.”  And remember Osama bin Laden’s stated goal on 9/11: to draw conventional American forces into attritional campaigns in the heart of the Middle East. Mission accomplished!

In today’s world of “alternative facts,” it’s proven remarkably easy to ignore such empirical data and so avoid thorny questions.  Recent events and contemporary political discourse even suggest that the country’s political elites now inhabit a post-factual environment; in terms of the Greater Middle East, this has been true for years.

It couldn’t be more obvious that Washington’s officialdom regularly and repeatedly drew erroneous lessons from the recent past and ignored a hard truth staring them in the face: U.S. military action in the Middle East has solved nothing.  At all.  Only the government cannot seem to accept this.  Meanwhile, an American fixation on one unsuitable term — “isolationism” — masks a more apt description of American dogma in this period: hyper-interventionism. 

As for military leaders, they struggle to admit failure when they — and their troops — have sacrificed so much sweat and blood in the region.  Senior officers display the soldier’s tendency to confuse performance with effectiveness, staying busy with being successful.  Prudent strategy requires differentiating between doing a lot and doing the right things. As Einstein reputedly opined, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

A realistic look at America’s recent past in the Greater Middle East and a humbler perspective on its global role suggest two unsatisfying but vital conclusions.  First, false lessons and misbegotten collective assumptions contributed to and created much of today’s regional mess.  As a result, it’s long past time to reassess recent history and challenge long-held suppositions.  Second, policymakers badly overestimated the efficacy of American power, especially via the military, to shape foreign peoples and cultures to their desires.  In all of this, the agency of locals and the inherent contingency of events were conveniently swept aside.

So what now? It should be obvious (but probably isn’t in Washington) that it’s well past time for the U.S. to bring its incessant urge to respond militarily to the crisis of the moment under some kind of control.  Policymakers should accept realistic limitations on their ability to shape the world to America’s desired image of it. 

Consider the last few decades in Iraq and Syria.  In the 1990s, Washington employed economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein and his regime.  The result: tragedy to the tune of half a million dead children. Then it tried invasion and democracy promotion.  The result: tragedy — including 4,500-plus dead American soldiers, a few trillion dollars down the drain, more than 200,000 dead Iraqis, and millions more displaced in their own country or in flight as refugees. 

In response, in Syria the U.S. tried only limited intervention.  Result: tragedy — upwards of 300,000 dead and close to seven million more turned into refugees. 

So will tough talk and escalated military action finally work this time around as the Trump administration faces off against ISIS?  Consider what happens even if the U.S achieves a significant rollback of ISIS.  Even if, in conjunction with allied Kurdish or Syrian rebel forces, ISIS’s “capital,” Raqqa, is taken and the so-called caliphate destroyed, the ideology isn’t going away.  Many of its fighters are likely to transition back to an insurgency and there will be no end to international terror in ISIS’s name.  In the meantime, none of this will have solved the underlying problems of artificial states now at the edge of collapse or beyond, divided ethno-religious groups, and anti-Western nationalist and religious sentiments.  All of it begs the question: What if Americans are incapable of helping (at least in a military sense)?

A real course correction is undoubtedly impossible without at least a willingness to reconsider and reframe our recent historical experiences.  If the 2016 election is any indication, however, a Trump administration with the present line-up of national security chiefs (who fought in these very wars) won’t meaningfully alter either the outlook or the policies that led us to this moment.  Candidate Trump offered a hollow promise — to “Make America Great Again” — conjuring up a mythical era that never was.  Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton offered only remarkably dated and stale rhetoric about America as the “indispensable nation.”

In the new Trump era, neither major party seems capable of escaping a shared commitment to the legends rather than the facts of America’s recent past in the Greater Middle East.  Both sides remain eerily confident that the answers to contemporary foreign policy woes lie in a mythical version of that past, whether Trump’s imaginary 1950s paradise or Clinton’s fleeting mid-1990s “unipolar moment.” 

Both ages are long gone, if they ever really existed at all.  Needed is some fresh thinking about our militarized version of foreign policy and just maybe an urge, after all these years, to do so much less. Patriotic fables certainly feel good, but they achieve little.  My advice: dare to be discomfited.

Major Danny Sjursen is a U.S. Army strategist and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.  He lives with his wife and four sons near Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. 

[Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author in an unofficial capacity and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Command and General Staff College, Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.]

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Copyright 2017 Danny Sjursen

via Informed Comment

Amos Barshad | An excerpt adapted from No One Man Should Have All That Power: How Rasputins Manipulate the World | Harry N. Abrams | 17 minutes (4,490 words)

  In the lobby of a heavy-stone building in central Moscow, I’m greeted by a friendly young woman in a pantsuit who, she explains, is working “in the field of geopolitics.” She takes me to the security desk, where my passport is carefully, minutely inspected before I’m granted access. As we head upstairs the woman slowly whispers a joke: “This is what will save us from the terrorists.”

We walk down a long, high hallway that looks or bare or unfinished or forgotten, like maybe someone was planning on shutting down this wing of the office but never got around to it. There are linoleum floors, cracking and peeling, and bits of mismatched tile in the style of sixties Americana. Rank-and-file office clerks shuffle through, and no one pays attention to a faint buzzing emanating from somewhere near.

We stop in front of a heavy wooden door. Inside is Aleksandr Dugin.

The man is an ideologue with a convoluted, bizarre, unsettling worldview. He believes the world is divided into two spheres of influence — sea powers, which he calls Eternal Carthage, and land powers, which he calls Eternal Rome. He believes it has always been so. Today, those spheres are represented by America, the Carthage, and Russia, the Rome. He believes that Carthage and Rome are locked in a forever war that will only end with the destruction of one or the other.

In Western media, he’s become a dark character worthy of obsession. He quotes and upholds long-forgotten scholars with anti-Semitic leanings like Julius Evola, who critiqued Mussolini’s Fascism for being too soft. (Evola is a deep-cut favorite of Steve Bannon’s as well.) He’s been linked with ultra-right movements internationally, from supporters of Marine Le Pen in France to supporters of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Some read his writings hoping to suss out some linchpin of Russian domestic and foreign policy.

As the Russian American journalist Masha Gessen wrote in The Future Is History, her celebrated 2017 examination of modern Russia, “Dugin enjoyed a period of international fame of sorts as a Putin whisperer — some believed he was the mastermind behind Putin’s wars.” Others called him “Putin’s brain,” or even “Putin’s Rasputin.”

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He sits at a plain desk, thick texts piled up in the bookcases behind him. His hair is brown and streaked with gray and parted floppily down the middle. He wears a dark-blue suit, no tie, and a lightly pinstriped shirt. There is a mole just to the left of his nose. His lips are buried in a big, bushy gray beard that, as Bloomberg once happily noted, “gives him a passing resemblance to the Siberian mystic who bewitched the last Tsar’s family.”

As the manifesto from one of the many political organizations he’d founded over the years once put it, Dugin’s worldview is “built on the total and radical negation of the individual and his centrality.” As one of his young followers once said, “Obedience and love for one’s leaders are traits of the Russian people.” And as Dugin himself once said, “There is nothing universal about universal human rights.”

From the second I walk in the door, he is locked and ready to engage. “Western Christianity and Western modernity and Western global elites try to oppose artificial intellect over the natural human liberty — that is a kind of a doom of the West that we rejected always.” He speaks in entrancingly accented, rapid English full of strange, unlikely phrasings rooted equally in the language of academia and his own far-flung and oblique obsessions — the occult, black magic, the hidden forces of history. He’s also really hung up on the West’s promotion of artificial intelligence. (Looking back now, I like to imagine that he was trying to tell me, if I’d only listened, that Skynet — the evil sentient world-destroying computer network from the Terminator series — was real.) If I let him, he’ll go on all day.

But I’m not here to get the stump speech, the full spiel. I want to know: How has he spread his message? How has he infected President Vladimir Putin — and Russia at large — with this worldview?

*

Aleksandr Dugin believes his influence is of a divine kind. And so he happily accepts the accusation of influence.

When I first ask him the question on influence he cuts me off, brusquely. I worry at first he’s going to end this conversation prematurely. Instead, he immediately monologues on the topic; it turns out he was cutting me off so that he could get to his turn to speak faster. “I could recognize that I am responsible for imposing my world vision over others,” he tells me. “And what excuse do I have for that? My excuse precisely exists in my own philosophy. I am not creator of the thought. It is a kind of angelic or demonic dialect that I’m involved in. I am but transmitter of some objective knowledge that exists outside of myself — beyond myself.”

The arc of Dugin’s life has been unlikely. In the eighties, he was an obscure, mild anti-Soviet dissident. In 1983, USSR authorities noted the trifling incident of Dugin playing the guitar at a party and singing what were, in his own words, “mystical anti-Communist songs.” He was deemed a real threat by no one. But in the nineties, after the fall of the USSR, he became a national figure.

His writings began to gain currency, primarily his major work, The Foundations of Geopolitics, which became particularly popular with military elites. In 1993, he hosted the television program The Mysticism of the Third Reich, during which, as Gessen writes, he “hinted at a Western conspiracy to conceal the true nature of Hitler’s power.”

In The Future Is History, Gessen charts the rest of Dugin’s rise. How Moscow State University’s sociology department brought Dugin on board, implicitly legitimizing his theories with an elite institution’s stamp of approval. How every one of Russia’s national and international crises seemed to bolster him further.

Dugin believes his influence is of a divine kind. And so he happily accepts the accusation of influence.

In the summer of 2008, Russia invaded neighboring Georgia. Ostensibly, they were supporting South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two Russian-leaning Georgian enclaves with long-held dreams of independence. Effectively, Russia had invaded a sovereign state. For years, government officials had been issuing Russian passports to Abkhazians and South Ossetians; now Russian forces had advanced deep into Georgian territory. This was the real deal, the Dugin-encouraged expansionist destiny. Russia once again had its guns cocked.

Dugin shined. Photos of him in South Ossetia circled. He stood in front of a tank, an AK-47 in his hands. As Gessen writes, that summer also “marked the first time he had seen one of his slogans catch on and go entirely mainstream, repeated on television and reproduced on bumper stickers. The slogan was Tanks to Tbilisi,” the Georgian capital. “Dugin had written ‘those who do not support the slogan are not Russians. Tanks to Tbilisi should be written on every Russian’s forehead.’”

From 2011 to 2013, the “snow revolution” — a series of peaceful protests against Russian election fraud — burbled in Moscow. The Russian government’s position was that the activists were paid agitators being supported by the US State Department. (As Putin declared in the early stages of the protests, “We are all grownups here. We all understand the organisers are acting according to a well-known scenario and in their own mercenary political interests.”) In the winter of 2013, Dugin spoke at a massive government-organized counter-protest in front of a crowd of tens of thousands.

“Dear Russian people! The global American empire strives to bring all countries of the world under its control,” he bellowed. “To resist this most serious threat, we must be united and mobilized! We must remember that we are Russian! That for thousands of years we protected our freedom and independence. We have spilled seas of blood, our own and other peoples, to make Russia great. And Russia will be great! Otherwise it will not exist at all. Russia is everything! All else is nothing!”

Internally, Putin answered the snow revolution with a crackdown. Externally, he answered with a show of force.

In 2014, again ostensibly answering the call of popular will, so-called “little green men” — Russian soldiers with no identifying insignias — took over the Crimean peninsula in the name of the Russian government. Crimea was a quasi-independent entity of Ukraine with a prominent ethnically Russian population. In the eyes of the international community, it was a brazenly illegal act. Once again, Russia was practicing expansionism.

Dugin was overjoyed. He had been pushing for a Crimean takeover since the nineties. He believed that it was just the beginning. Russia should go further and co-opt Eastern Ukraine (the traditionally Russian-speaking half of the country) as well. But for now, it augured great things. He saw it as a bolstering of the Russian sphere of influence. Eternal Rome was again strengthening itself.

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During one major televised interview, Putin explained the Crimean invasion by saying “a Russian person — or to speak more broadly, a person of the Russian World — thinks about the fact that man has a moral purpose. These are the deep roots of our patriotism. This is where mass heroism comes from in war.”

Now even Dugin’s literal phrasings were being echoed back to him. As Gessen writes, “The phrase ‘Russian World’ — the vision of a civilization led by Russia — was Dugin’s.” This was, effectively, the real-life execution of Dugin’s worldview.

Dugin did not talk to Gessen for her book. Possibly, he was familiar with Gessen’s place as an outspoken Putin critic and decided to stay away. I can only assume that Dugin agreed to an interview with me because he’d never heard of me before. I assume that he felt comfortable he would dominate the interaction.

*

“I believe in ideas that could well exist without man,” Dugin tells me. “Angels are ideas without bodies. I’m a believer. I believe in angels. I believe in God. I believe in Revelation. I’m Christian Orthodox. And for me, the existence of angels, as well as the existence of ideas, is the fact of experience — not only narrative.”

As Dugin sees it, he has stayed put, espousing these ideas that were given to him by the Lord. It’s the world that has moved around him. Sometimes it’s drawn to him. Sometimes it’s repulsed. “I put myself in the center of all the society of history. It’s not egocentric. It’s completely opposed to egocentrism. I put myself in the center of the world by precisely liberating myself from the individual. It is some other in myself that is the center.”

Are you following? He is at the center because his truth is the true truth. But he is also opposite the mainstream. He stands, alone, against a great force. “Mass media, education, politics, social relations, class, economy — that is society,” he says. “It is mechanicalized. A kind of social mechanics.”

Dugin, however, is part of something else — the “revolutionary elite that is coming to replace the elite.” He is counter-elite. And not only in Russia, but “on a global scale — I awaken these peoples. I’m awakening these collective consciousnesses. Using the term of Carl Gustav Jung, I transform these peoples from the sleeping mode to the waking mode. From the drunken mode to the sober mode.”

(He really does say the whole name: “Carl Gustav Jung.” In the course of our conversation, he also name-checks Vilfredo Pareto, Louis Dumont, Hegel, Heidegger, and Charles Krauthammer, almost always quoting them directly, almost always prefacing said quote with some variation of the phrase “In the words of . . .”)

He goes on: “That is the operation that I am leading. My influence is very special. I would say, a revolutionary kind. That is why I am called, by some American figures, the most dangerous man in the world. I would gladly accept that as labeled. I hope that it is true.”

His power and influence, he says, are of a slippery kind. “We could not measure for example, who is more popular, Michael Jackson or myself,” he says, chuckling softly.

I begin to believe that if I stay here long enough, he’ll keep inventing ways to emphatically gesticulate forever.

Because Michael Jackson, or pop music as a whole, exists in the mainstream — inside the traditional flow of information. And despite his history of television appearances, Dugin claims that “the traditional ways to promote ideas are completely closed” to him “and were closed from the very beginning.” Therefore, “in order to exercise, to fulfill this influence, I am obliged to seek, to search new ways. So I’m a kind of a, mmmm, metaphysical hacker. I try to find the backdoors of the program of globalization in order to make it explode.” His work, he says proudly, is a “a kind of terrorism.”

And despite this self-perceived singular place in the center of history, he says, “I’m not lonely Russian stranger. I am the most Russian man that we could imagine. I am Russia spirit. I am Russia!”

In conversation, as he makes his points, Dugin’s hands move constantly. Not just one or two swipes; it’s a wild, unceasing symphony of gestures. He swings an open palm, slams fingertips straight down on the tabletop, points an index finger in the air and his other hand’s middle finger straight down. The fingers and palms move in synchronicity and also alone, every single one on a mission. He interlocks and breaks apart and throws out his hands and brings them back together. Some of the moves he repeats. Some come just once. I begin to believe that if I stay here long enough, he’ll keep inventing ways to emphatically gesticulate forever.

His is a kind of intimate, anti-charisma. I realize that it’s the surety of his purpose that compels. As in so many other situations, pure, unadulterated bluster is carrying the day for Dugin.

“People like myself reflect the liberty of mankind. Man is an entity that always can choose. It can say yes to globalization and to this artificial intelligence, to the so-called progress, to the individualization — yes to the global agenda. But the man can say, ‘No, no! It’s not me!’ And that is the salvation of mankind. We need to liberate everybody. We need a global revolution. And I am conscious that I am fulfilling this role.”

*

I ask Dugin about a man he’s friendly with, to whom he’s often been compared: Steve Bannon. Is it correct? Are they some kind of analogs?

“As long as I understand Bannon, I think that the comparison could be legitimate,” he says. “Bannon suggested to Trump how to find the backdoor in the system. Absolutely, to be a kind of revolutionary — not from the right or the left, but a revolutionary against this world.” But “Bannon is a PR specialist dealing in ideology. I am a philosopher, trying to transmit through art, special art, my historical mission in front of Russian people.

“Maybe the difference exists precisely in the different nature of our societies. American society is much more based on public relations. Pragmatism. If something works, it is already accepted. Technical efficacy is much more appreciated than, for example, ideological coherence or truthfulness. In the political public relations, the propaganda is a means to trick people. I am not using ideology. I am used by ideology.”

Dugin is skeptical that Bannon ever had the mandate to be a true, pure ideologue. He recalls Trump once, way back on the campaign trail, skewering Bannon for reading too much. “I think that you cannot read too much. If you understand the weight of ideas, this accusation is a proof of some limited mind.”

Arguing his point, Dugin falls into a minor reverie. “So many beautiful texts!” he says. “So many profound authors and philosophers . . . so many languages! The real richness, the real treasury of human wisdom amassed is infinite. The only blame should be, you are reading not enough. If you always, reading, reading, reading, it’s nothing at all. Everybody of us should read more. More and more! If you think you read enough, you’re wrong! You don’t read nothing!” Before his fall from relevance, Bannon and Dugin did have interesting parallels. Like Bannon’s now-squandered power, Dugin’s lies in his ability to portray all world events as part of a plot he’s already seen. The sheer grandiosity of his speech is calculated to overwhelm. I know it all, he insists again and again, until the listener either accepts him as ridiculous or sublime.

But Bannon never had Dugin’s air of historicity. Intentionally or otherwise, Dugin has been able to cloak himself in dark mystery. Perhaps Dugin would prefer an example closer to home, then — Grigori Rasputin?

He’s not offended. Not in the slightest. Soberly, he analyzes the pairing.

“So. The figure of Rasputin is misunderstood. He had influence over our tsar, personal influence. He was against the modernization and Westernization. He was in favor of Russian people instead of the corrupted Russian elite.” So far, more than a few points of overlap between Aleksandr and Grigori. Certainly, Dugin is Rasputinesque.

But! “Rasputin wasn’t philosopher. He didn’t conceptualize anything. He’s a kind of hypnotizer, a kind of a trickster, something like that. So the comparison is a little bit limited. He built his influence on the personal charm and on his individual influence on the tsar. That was a very special case. This was person-to-person, without some ideology. Some philosophy.”

Who, then, is a closer peer or antecedent? For an answer, Dugin has to go beyond contemporary politics, beyond Russian history — and into the realm of the fantastic. “I compare myself much more to Merlin.” The great wizard Merlin, the mythical one, the son of an incubus. King Arthur’s advisor. “The image of the intellectual that is engaged in supra-human contemplation, in the secrets, that tries to clear the way for the secular ruler to create the great empire. “Merlin. The founder of King Arthur’s empire. That is my archetype, I would say.”

*

I ask Dugin, “What comes next?”

“Some of the ideas that I defended from the ages — they have won. They are accepted by the government and realized in the Eurasian union and Russian foreign policy and military strategy. The anti-modern, anti-Western, anti-liberal shift of Russian politics and ideology has been realized.”

But “the other half is not yet fulfilled. That is the problem. The second part of my ideas, of my projects, of my visions of the Russian future is still waiting. It is suspended, I would say. It waits it’s own time.”

The problem, says Dugin, is that Putin has not institutionalized the bits of Dugin that he’s borrowed. The Dugin worldview has not reached the point of “irreversibility.” Here, Dugin is critical of Putin: “He pretend to be the ruler, pragmatic and not controlled by nothing, including ideology. He pretend to be the absolute sovereign instead of being the sovereign fighting for the mission.

“It is a kind of simulacrum,” he says. “It is a kind of imitation. It seems more and more that it is a kind of very dirty play. A game they try to hijack. The real tradition, the real conservatism — they try to use that as tools and means for their rule.”

Where does the Rasputin end and the Rasputin’s subject begin?

He’s careful not to point fingers too directly. This is modern Russia, after all. “Maybe not Putin himself,” he says, “but the people around Putin.”

Fundamentally, Dugin’s disappointment is that Putin did not go far enough. That he did not push past Crimea and into Ukraine with the Russian Army. That he is not creating a “Russian world” beyond the borders of modern Russia — that he’s not birthing a new Russian empire. In Gessen’s analysis, this revealed the true nature of Dugin’s influence. Putin wasn’t being manipulated by Dugin’s ideology; Putin was borrowing it, for his own ends.

So was Dugin influential? Or was he a stooge? Again, that old question: Where does the Rasputin end and the Rasputin’s subject begin? Where do Putin’s own volitions end and where do Dugin’s prophecies begin?

One neutral observer might observe that Dugin’s dark influence was great once, but has waned now. Yet another might observe that it was always transactional.

But Dugin doesn’t have to control Putin, only and directly, to have influence on the culture. Igor Vinogradov, the editor of the magazine Kontinent, once said of Dugin and his disciples, “They are undertaking a noisy galvanization of a reactionary utopia that failed long ago — for all their ineptitude, they are very dangerous. After all, the temptation of religious fundamentalism . . . is attractive to many desperate people who have lost their way in this chaos.” That was in 1992. Since, Dugin has published endlessly and spread his missives incessantly. Both in English and in Russian, the Internet is rife with his manifestos.

Andreas Umlaund is a Ukrainian political scientist who has studied Dugin at length. Perhaps inevitably, Umlaund’s research into Dugin made Umlaund a target. As he explained to me in an interview from his home in Ukraine, Dugin’s minions write articles that allege that he is “an anti-Russian agent paid by the [US] State Department” and that he’s been “kicked out of universities for [sexual] harassment.” According to these reports, Umlaund says, “German officials were looking for me because I was involved in child pornography. Allegedly, I’m a pedophile!”

Umlaund’s greatest sin, in Dugin’s supporters eyes, was exposing Dugin’s explicit Nazi leanings. “I digged out these old quotes where he praises the SS and Reinhard Heydrich, the original SS officer responsible for the organization of the Holocaust. And they didn’t like that, because by that time Dugin had already become part of the Russian establishment. And these old quotes, from when he was still a lunatic fringe actor, were an embarrassment.”

I ask Umlaund what it’s like, being targeted as the number one nemesis of a man like Dugin. With historically informed equanimity, he shrugs it off. “This is not an unusual campaign,” he says. “Also in Soviet times, they were using pedophilia allegations against dissidents and of political enemies. It’s from the KGB playbook.”

Umlaund has continued his work, writing that the explosion of Dugin content, which begins around 2001, “has become difficult to follow. The number of Dugin’s appearances in the press, television, radio, World Wide Web, and various academic and political conferences has multiplied.” Dugin’s aim, Umlaund argues, is to “radically transform basic criteria of what constitutes science, what scholarly research is about, and to permit bodies of thought such as occultism, mysticism, esotericism, conspirology, etc. into higher education and scholarship that would bring down the borders between science and fiction.”

There’s a classic Simpsons episode that I love, “Homer vs. Lisa and the 8th Commandment.” It’s from 1990, the early golden era of the show. It starts off with Homer spotting Flanders fussily rejecting a cable guy’s illegal, tantalizing offer: fifty dollars for bootleg cable. Sensibly, immediately, Homer drags the cable guy over to his own home and readily accepts. But as the man is finishing up his installation, Homer has a twinge of morality.

“So . . . this is OK, isn’t it?” he asks. “I mean everybody does it, right?” Coolly, the cable man hands him a pamphlet full of justifications for his actions (“Fact: Cable companies are big faceless corporations”). The evocative title: “So You’ve Decided to Steal Cable.”

It’s a wild oversimplification, to be sure, but the danger of someone like Dugin (and Bannon before him) is wrapped up in that pamphlet. You can make someone hate. But it’s easier to find someone who already hates, and to give them justification — historical, epic justification — for their hate. People naturally drift toward doing bad things. But they’d also love a pamphlet explaining why it’s all OK.

*

As Bloomberg has pointed out, in 2014, Dugin lost his place at the Moscow State University “after activists accused him of encouraging genocide. Thousands of people signed a petition calling for his removal after a rant in support of separatists in Ukraine in which he said, ‘kill, kill, kill.’” But he no longer needed an institution like Moscow State to have influence — he’d already become a prominent enough member of the establishment on his own.

During his time in the center of Russian politics, while the vagaries of the real world turned, Dugin tended to the ur-mission. Now, perhaps, he’s back on the outs of his country’s mainstream political thought. But his words have left his mouth and have been received. And he will continue talking and talking because he is playing a long, long game. “Some things are being realized that I have foreseen and foretold thirty years ago,” he tells me. “Now I am foretelling and foreseeing what should come in the future.”

As Dugin sees it, “The most highest point of American influence as universal power is behind us. Because America tries to go beyond the normal and the natural borders and tries to influence Middle East, Africa, Eurasia — and fails everywhere. America export chaos, bloody chaos. Everywhere America is, there is corpses. They have turned into a nihilistic force. The real greatness of America is not in continuation of this exporting of this bloody chaos.”

Dugin suggests that America ask itself some hard questions. Like “What is victory? What is glory? What is real highest position in history?”

Dugin’s vision is clear: America for Americans, Russia for Russians. And while Russia builds itself back up, it stays a closed society. “Being weak, we should stay closed from any influence,” he says. “From the West, from the East, from China or Islam or Europe or America or Africa, we should stay closed” — he bangs a fist on the table — “in order to return to our force.”

Through an open window, gray daylight pours in. Behind us, two women walk back and forth, mugs of coffee in hand, consulting texts and each other. They, presumably, are in the “field of geopolitics” as well. Here, in this room, in this massive building, Dugin quietly plots Russia’s revival and sends out his warnings to Russia’s enemies. The grand project rolls on.

America, declares Dugin, must follow the way of Trump into cynical and callow isolationism and avoid its once-upon-a-time fate as a shining beacon on a hill. Otherwise, Carthage and Rome will do battle. “When the United States tries to be unique, to be universal, a norm for all humanity — that creates the basis for inevitable conflict,” Dugin says. “Then the final war is inevitable.”

* * *

No One Should Have All That Power by Amos Barshad. Copyright © 2019 by Amos Barshad. Used by permission of Abrams Press, an imprint of Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.

Amos Barshad was raised in Israel, the Netherlands, and Massachusetts. He’s a former staff writer at The FADER and Grantland and has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, and Arkansas Times. This is his first book.

Longreads Editor: Dana Snitzky

Hyperallergic: After Charlottesville, an Anti-Fascist US Military Film from 1947 Goes Viral

Still from the US Military film “Don’t Be a Sucker” (1947) (screenshot via Internet Archive)

Ever since the election of Donald Trump (since before it, actually), people in the US have been talking and worrying about the rise of fascism. Comparisons to Nazi Germany have abounded. And for many, the images coming out of Charlottesville this past weekend — white men carrying Nazi flags alongside Confederate ones, marching with torches (albeit tiki torches), and chanting the Nazi slogan “blood and soil” — seemed to crystallize the threat or existence, depending on who you ask, of a white supremacist fascist state.

Ironically, in response, a 1947 propaganda video made by none other than the US Military has gone viral on Twitter. The 17-minute film is called “Don’t Be a Sucker” and features an older Hungarian man — now a US citizen — educating a younger American man named Mike about the dangers of fascism. The older man’s tale is a familiar one now; he talks about Hitler’s rise to power and how the Nazis took over Germany. But the morals of his story are sound and certainly timely. “We must guard everyone’s liberty, or we can lose our own,” he says. “If we allow any minority to lose its freedom by persecution or by prejudice, we are threatening our own freedom.”

The person who first tweeted the video, identified on Twitter as a Canadian anthropologist named Michael, shared only a two-minute clip from it on Saturday before linking to the whole film the next day. The snippet captures the most immediately relevant portion of the film: Mike and the Hungarian man end up standing side by side listening to a street preacher, who stands on a soapbox and spews invective against “negroes,” “alien foreigners,” Catholics, Freemasons, and others. “These are you enemies!” he cries. “These are the people who are trying to take over our country! Now you know them, you know what they stand for, and it’s up to you and me to fight them — fight them and destroy them before they destroy us.” At one point his lines sound even more eerily 21st century, down to his invocation of facts: “I happen to know the facts. Now friends, I’m just an average American. But I’m an American American, and some of the things I see in this country of ours make my blood boil.”

1947 anti-fascist video made by US military to teach citizens how to avoid falling for people like Trump is relevant again. http://pic.twitter.com/vkTDD1Tplh

— Michael (@OmanReagan) August 13, 2017

Naturally, since it’s a propaganda video, “Don’t Be a Sucker” has a lot of blind spots. The older man spends a lot of time talking about how everybody is a minority in America and everybody is free — a pretty rich claim to make in the time before Shelley v. Kraemer, Brown v. Board of Education, Loving v. Virginia, and the bulk of the Civil Rights Movement, not to mention the movements for gay rights and second-wave feminism. Also, as the Internet Archive page for the video points out, 1947 was exactly when the US was falling prey to the Second Red Scare and the rise of McCarthyism — not exactly an era in which everyone was afforded liberty and respect. And finally, in sharing the video now, it’s important to note, as many Black commentators have, that the constant comparisons being made to Nazi Germany right now can serve as deflections away from an honest confrontation with the violence and genocide of the US’ own history — which the Nazis in fact used as a model.

Still, if you can keep all of that in the back of your mind for 17 minutes, you can appreciate the film’s sharper moments. I particularly like when the Hungarian man calls Nazi Germany “a nation of suckers” (petty, I know, but they did kill a lot of my family) and points out that, after they had control of the state, the Nazis went after the “their oldest and most persistent enemy, the truth.” And a reminder of the importance of solidarity is always helpful to hear:

If those people had stood together, if they had protected each other, they could have resisted the Nazi threat. Together, they would have been strong. But once they allowed themselves to be split apart, they were helpless. When that first minority lost out, everybody lost out. They made the mistake of gambling with other people’s freedom.

The post After Charlottesville, an Anti-Fascist US Military Film from 1947 Goes Viral appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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By Don Hazen Kali Holloway AlterNet Staff

July 13, 2017, 12:54 PM GMT   

Things are not looking good out there. Manmade climate change has already led to widespread devastation, with more unimaginable horrors on the way. For half a generation, the United States has been immersed in futile wars that have only made the world more unsafe, and recent saber-rattling suggests more conflict is on the horizon. This country has too many guns, too many prisons and too few people holding nearly all the wealth. On top of it all, a hotheaded bully is charged with deciding when to whip out our great big missiles.

This is no time for Pollyannaish optimism. Things will probably get worse before they get better, and the only way to ensure the latter is to come to terms with the former. Gloom and doom isn’t so bad if it serves a purpose. You have to contend with the darkest looming realities in order to have any hope of staving them off.

To that end, we’ve gathered some of the best—or uh, the worst—apocalyptic thinking out there. There’s plenty of bad news on economic, planetary and political fronts, and all of it is represented below. Consider it inspiration for figuring a way out of this mess. Here are 10 visions of the apocalypse—coming soon!

1. The Uninhabitable Earth [5], by David Wallace-Wells

It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today...Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough. Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.

The present tense of climate change — the destruction we’ve already baked into our future — is horrifying enough. Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving; most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade. Two degrees of warming used to be considered the threshold of catastrophe: tens of millions of climate refugees unleashed upon an unprepared world. Now two degrees is our goal, per the Paris climate accords, and experts give us only slim odds of hitting it. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues serial reports, often called the “gold standard” of climate research; the most recent one projects us to hit four degrees of warming by the beginning of the next century, should we stay the present course. But that’s just a median projection. The upper end of the probability curve runs as high as eight degrees — and the authors still haven’t figured out how to deal with that permafrost melt. The IPCC reports also don’t fully account for the albedo effect (less ice means less reflected and more absorbed sunlight, hence more warming); more cloud cover (which traps heat); or the dieback of forests and other flora (which extract carbon from the atmosphere). Each of these promises to accelerate warming, and the geological record shows that temperature can shift as much as ten degrees or more in a single decade. The last time the planet was even four degrees warmer, Peter Brannen points out in The Ends of the World, his new history of the planet’s major extinction events, the oceans were hundreds of feet higher.

2. How Trump could literally tweet his way into nuclear war with North Korea [6], by Laura Rosenberger

If our allies, partners and adversaries all attach meaning to Trump's words that are in no way what he intended, the problem isn't just one of mere confusion. Deterring North Korea from taking dangerous actions and reassuring our allies of the credibility of our defense are both critical. But both deterrence and reassurance are based on credibility and capability—and credibility requires clear signaling of intentions.

Trump's vague, blustery words, unattached to any strategy and without any plan to back up whatever he did mean, will undermine both our deterrence and our reassurance, which we have spent decades building. This could lead to miscalculation by North Korea or our allies. Such miscalculation could lead to war: Trump could literally tweet us into a nuclear war.

We know that Kim Jong-un is thin-skinned and will probably take Trump's comment about "this guy" as a personal insult. Or Kim may be confused—after all, just a few months ago, Trump said he would be "honored" to meet with Kim under the right circumstances. To be clear, I don't care at all about Kim's feelings. But I do care about whether an offhand, hotheaded remark could provoke Kim to take actions that would have real consequences. Picking a Twitter fight with a nuclear-armed dictator is not wise—this is not reality TV anymore.

3. We Have a Year to Defend American Democracy, Perhaps Less [7], by Matthias Kolb

The temptation in a new situation is to imagine that nothing has changed. That is a choice that has political consequences: self-delusion leads to half-conscious anticipatory obedience and then to regime change...Most Americans are exceptionalists, we think we live outside of history. Americans tend to think: “We have freedom because we love freedom, we love freedom because we are free.” It is a bit circular and doesn’t acknowledge the historical structures that can favor or weaken democratic republics. We don’t realize how similar our predicaments are to those of other people...

I wanted to remind my fellow Americans that intelligent people, not so different from ourselves, have experienced the collapse of a republic before. It is one example among many. Republics, like other forms of government, exist in history and can rise and fall...A quarter century ago, after the collapse of communism, we declared that history was over—and in an amazing way we forgot everything we once knew about communism, fascism and National Socialism...

The constitution is worth saving, the rule of law is worth saving, democracy is worth saving, but these things can and will be lost if everyone waits around for someone else. If we want encouragement out of the Oval Office, we will not get it. We are not getting encouragement thus far from Republicans. They have good reasons to defend the republic but thus far they are not doing so, with a few exceptions...I think things have tightened up very fast, we have at most a year to defend the Republic, perhaps less.

4. Noam Chomsky on the prospects for nuclear war under Trump [8]

George Yancy: Returning to Trump, I take it that you view him as fundamentally unpredictable. I certainly do. Should we fear a nuclear exchange of any sort in our contemporary moment?

Noam Chomsky: I do, and I’m hardly the only person to have such fears. Perhaps the most prominent figure to express such concerns is William Perry, one of the leading contemporary nuclear strategists, with many years of experience at the highest level of war planning. He is reserved and cautious, not given to overstatement. He has come out of semiretirement to declare forcefully and repeatedly that he is terrified both at the extreme and mounting threats and by the failure to be concerned about them. In his words, “Today, the danger of some sort of a nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was during the Cold War, and most people are blissfully unaware of this danger.”

In 1947, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists established its famous Doomsday Clock, estimating how far we are from midnight: termination. In 1947, the analysts set the clock at seven minutes to midnight. In 1953, they moved the hand to two minutes to midnight after the U.S. and U.S.S.R. exploded hydrogen bombs. Since then it has oscillated, never again reaching this danger point. In January, shortly after Trump’s inauguration, the hand was moved to two and a half minutes to midnight, the closest to terminal disaster since 1953. By this time analysts were considering not only the rising threat of nuclear war but also the firm dedication of the Republican organization to accelerate the race to environmental catastrophe.

Perry is right to be terrified. And so should we all be, not least because of the person with his finger on the button and his surreal associates.

5. Is America Past the Point of No Return [9]? by Thom Hartmann

Has corporate/billionaire control of our republic reached such a point that it’s no longer reversible? Have we passed the tipping point where democracy dies? While Republicans are doing the will of their oligarch owners, replacing real scientists with industry lobbyists and shills everywhere from the White House to congressional science committees to the EPA, the media stubbornly refuses to report in depth on it, preferring instead to following the Worldwide Wrestling moves of our tweeter-in-chief.  

While climate change is ravaging the world, the administration of billionaire oligarch Donald Trump has pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate change agreement and is rolling back climate-protecting rules on behalf other oligarchs in the oil, coal and gas business so they can continue to use our atmosphere as a sewer.

From trying to destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which has returned to consumers billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains from our country’s banksters), to gutting environmental laws, to preventing students from even declaring bankruptcy when their efforts to join the middle class by going to college don’t work out, the oligarchs who now largely run America are solidifying their power and their wealth. This is rule by the rich. It’s here. It’s now.

6. The Age of Anger [10], by Chris Hedges

Neoliberalism, in the name of this absurd utopia, stripped away government regulations and laws that once protected the citizen from the worst excesses of predatory capitalism. It created free trade agreements that allowed trillions of corporate dollars to be transferred to offshore accounts to avoid taxation and jobs to flee to sweatshops in China and the global south where workers live in conditions that replicate slavery. Social service programs and public services were slashed or privatized. Mass culture, including schools and the press, indoctrinated an increasingly desperate population to take part in the global reality show of capitalism, a “war of all against all.”

What we were never told was that the game was fixed. We were always condemned to lose. Our cities were deindustrialized and fell into decay. Wages declined. Our working class became impoverished. Endless war became, cynically, a lucrative business. And the world’s wealth was seized by a tiny group of global oligarchs. Kleptocracies, such as the one now installed in Washington, brazenly stole from the people. Democratic idealism became a joke. We are now knit together, as Mishra writes, only “by commerce and technology,” forces that Hannah Arendt called “negative solidarity.”

7. Doomsday Prep for the Super Rich [11], by Evan Osnos

Last spring, as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

8. How the Student Loan Industry Is Helping Trump Destroy American Democracy [12], by Binta Baxter

[T]he untold story of student loan debt in the United States is that it is being used as a form of economic terrorism designed not only to redistribute wealth from everyday Americans to the elite, but to undermine and degrade American democracy as a whole.

Up until her confirmation as Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos had financial ties to a large student loan servicer in contract negotiations with the Department of Education. PRWatch reported in January that one of the firms DeVos divested from, LMF WF Portfolio, helped finance a $147 million loan to a student debt collection agency called Performant, which had more than 346 complaints brought against it with the Better Business Bureau. The student loan industry is said to be worth $1.3 trillion in total debt owed according to Forbes.

9. Stephen Hawking Warns Trump Withdrawal From Climate Deal Could Turn Earth's Temperature to 250 Degrees and Bring Sulphuric Acid Rain [13], by Reynard Loki

"We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible," said Hawking, who is a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. "Trump’s action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees and raining sulphuric acid."

Trump's decision to abandon the landmark agreement, which was signed by nearly 200 nations to limit the global average temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, puts the accord in jeopardy, as the U.S. is the world's second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, after China.

10. A Language Older Than Words [14], by Derrick Jensen

It’s unavoidable: so long as we value money more highly than living beings and more highly than relationships, we will continue to see living beings as resources, and convert them to cash; objectifying, killing, extirpating. This is true whether we’re talking about fish, fur-bearing mammals, Indians, day-laborers, and so on. If monetary value is attached to something it will be exploited until it’s gone.

Also by Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe [15]

Let's be honest. The activities of our economic and social system are killing the planet. Even if we confine ourselves merely to humans, these activities are causing an unprecedented privation, as hundreds of millions of people-and today more than yesterday, with probably more tomorrow-go their entire lives with never enough to eat. Yet curiously, none of this seems to stir us to significant action. And when someone does too stridently point out these obvious injustices, the response by the mass of the people seems so often to be...a figurative if not physical blow to the gut, leading inevitably to a destruction of our common future. Witness the enthusiasm with which those native nations that resisted their conquest by our culture have been subdued, and the eagerness with which this same end is today brought to those-native or not-who continue to resist too strongly. How does this come to happen, in both personal and social ways?

Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet.

Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/aaahhhhhpocalypse-now-10-dark-visions-headed-your-way

AFTERLIFE COMMUNICATION, PSYCHICS, MEDIUMS AND SCEPTICS

There are all kinds of ways in which the dead differ from the living, psychology professor Richard Wiseman told me recently. “And one of them,” he said, “is that dead people tend to be rather particular about who they talk to. The dead,” he added, “prefer chatting to people who are imaginative. Creative. Highly sensitive.” The professor gives a barely perceptible nod in my direction. “You know: the credulous, the gullible and the deluded.”

Wiseman is an unusual academic: a former professional magician, he is now Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, and recognised as Britain’s most eminent psychic sceptic. It was possibly an error of judgment to tell him that communication with the dead is an area in which I have had some personal experience. Or – to use a phrase that tends to recur whenever we discuss this subject – so I believe.

It happened six years ago, during an interview with the British medium Sally Morgan: a psychic who, on the strength of having seen both her televised and theatrical shows, I had concluded was not just a strikingly prolific channeller of spirits, but also the biggest charlatan on the block: a title which, in this area of human endeavour, is not easily gained.

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Since then, Psychic Sally, who was unavailable for interview, has established herself as the most popular medium in Britain, playing to capacity audiences at venues across the country. Earlier this month I saw the former dental nurse perform at Brighton’s Grand Theatre. A peaceful demonstration outside the sold-out 950-seat venue, was led by two men carrying placards which read, “Equal Rights For Gay Ghosts.”

This slogan referred to a contretemps with a critic called Mark Tilbrook, who had been handing out leaflets before a performance by Morgan in London this April. Tilbrook only recently released video footage of the encounter, in which Morgan’s husband John, a former greengrocer whose ample physique means that he strikes as imposing a figure on the terrestrial plane as his wife does in the ether, approached Tilbrook. Standing shoulder to shoulder with his son-in-law, Daren Wiltshear, he asked the sceptic: “Are you on drugs? Or has one of your boyfriends shagged you too much? . . . I’m gonna knock you out sooner or later. So fuck off before I do you.”

Morgan is, according to his wife’s 2008 book, My Psychic Life, “the reason the sun rises.” In a statement released shortly after this grotesque footage appeared on YouTube, and just before the Brighton show, Sally Morgan asserted that she was, “utterly ashamed and devastated at the behaviour of my husband John and my son-in-law, and neither will have anything to do with my work . . . right now I have no idea what is going to happen to my marriage."

Meeting Psychic Sally

My own encounter with Morgan, now 63, was less confrontational and yet equally disturbing. In those days the medium, who now occupies a large property outside London, was living in New Malden. Walking up the path to the suburban house, where there were no visible lights, no open windows and no signs of recent occupation, I recalled what Sergeant Bilko says to Rupert Ritzik, in an episode of The Phil Silvers Show, as they approach the apartment of a psychic who, they hope, might enable them to make their fortunes at roulette. “It’s very quiet,” Silvers says. “The blinds are all closed. Nothing is stirring. She must be in.”

The reading that Morgan gave me, though, was far from comic, even if, in the long-standing debate over mediumship, she hardly represents an obvious choice as a witness for the defence.

In one to one readings, Morgan works – or did at that time – from photographs. I’d taken a few along, including one of my father, who died while I was a ­student. A few weeks earlier, in a conversation with my brother, I had raised the possibility that my dad might have been claustrophobic: he was clearly uneasy in crowds, for instance, at packed football stadiums.

Morgan picked up a photo of my parents taken many years ago. “Your father is showing me something in his left hand,” she says, “A chain. Could be a key-ring.” As I recall thinking at the time, this sort of stuff is the classic material of so-called cold-reading, whereby generalities are dispensed until the sitter blurts out precise information. Then: “Your dad would like you to know that he was claustrophobic but he didn’t realise that at the time. They weren’t sure what that condition was called.”

The evening before I met the ­psychic, who ran a small laundry before experiencing an epiphany in her local Wimpy Bar, I had been whining to friends about how ill-at-ease I felt in the flat landscape of the southeast, having grown up within striking distance of the Peak District. Pretentious and absurd as this may sound, I had been advancing the theory that I somehow found it easier to write fiction in a place with a view of mountains. Morgan took a sheet of paper and drew four or five undulating lines on it.

Morgan describes having a psychic experience when she was nine months old, and claims to have seen her first ghost aged four. As an adult, she turned her talent into a career as a professional medium.CORBIS

“You would be very, very happy living in an area which is hilly,” she said. “Or mountainous. Mountains would inspire you. Your work would flow more easily if you had a vista. This knowledge calls to you. And until you relent and accept that . . . well, if you do, that will change your life for ever.”

Years earlier I’d had a ­conversation with the late Lord Soper, the prominent Methodist minister. He described mediumship as “spiritual fascism. ­People are looking for answers outside their known world,” he’d said, “When what they should be doing is taking responsibility for their own life.”

“You know,” Morgan said, after I mentioned this, “it’s not easy, living with this ability. I am not a bad person. I am not mad. I am not unhinged. I happen to do an extraordinary job as well as I can.”

It was when I handed her a photograph of an ex-girlfriend – again without mentioning whether this person was alive, dead, or a relative – that I felt Morgan really caught fire.

“There is a mental side to this girl.”

“I’ll say.”

“Some people might describe her as a nut. There is a very strong sadness in her, and a sense of having been abandoned. Some people destroy relationships before they have run their course because they think they are going to end anyway. She has that feeling.” Then, informing me that she has my late father at her side, she picks up the family picture again.

“Who is Joan?”

“My mother.”

“And Michael John?”

“My brother.”

“Is your mother in spirit?”

“No, she’s in Manchester.”

“Well,” Morgan says, “your mother’s mother lost a small child.”

“Not so far as I know.”

“You’d have to ask her about that.”

And when I did, as I later tell Wiseman, my mother told me that she had had an older brother who died very shortly after being born.

The Art of Cold-Reading

As I explain to psychic sceptic Professor Wiseman, I had approached Morgan as a sworn unbeliever.

Before her stage shows, two glass orbs are left on display outside the auditorium. Audience members are invited to fill the globes with messages to, and photo­graphs of, loved ones. These vessels appear on stage with her. Does Morgan read them beforehand? She says not, and we trust her. Yet there is famous footage of “Psychic Sally” giving readings on television shows that gave many viewers the definite sense that the spirit of Google was present.

But the internet, both Wiseman and I agreed, was unlikely to have explained any of the observations she made to me. The names she gave were just about retrievable from an obscure site if you knew what they were in advance and had several hours to spare, but even Wiseman said his sense was that Morgan had not accessed the information in that way. She had certainly mentioned details that meant nothing to me, but not with the scattergun approach that is the hallmark of the true fraud.

Professor Richard Wiseman.REX

Before I met Morgan, I had interviewed other mediums, such as the thirsty Liverpudlian motorist Derek Acorah, as a result of which I’d had quite a bit of coaching in avoiding being “cold-read” either by word or by body language.

For a definitive lesson in the ­techniques of cold-reading, watch the first part of the 2010 Channel Four series Derren Brown Investigates entitled, “Talking to the Dead." The episode, posted on Youtube, is an excruciating demolition of the self-professed medium Joe Power.

In the course of the broadcast, Brown’s expert adviser, the same Professor Wiseman, examines in detail the skills involved in cold-reading. The medium begins by persuading the sitter that a dead relative is present: an effect commonly achieved with a statement such as “I have a John . . . Johnny . . . Jack, Jake . . . Jackie, ­Jacqueline . . . could be somebody living in a town that begins with a J.”

At this point many sitters relate detailed information that the psychic relays back to them later in the sitting. Blatant “misses,” such as meaningless names or dates, become the client’s fault. (“Think about it later. It will come to you.”)

Flattery is a big part of the process. A medium will never say: “I have your father here. He’s telling me that you are a feckless little creep with abject personal hygiene. He is saying that he remembers you mainly as having been ‘a waste of food.’ He says he could continue, but since he knows you’ll be dead in six days he’ll carry on this discussion once you join him in hell.”

“The main question about your reading with Sally Morgan,” Wiseman told me when we met again, with a transcript of the session, “relates to how best you can test mediums.”

In controlled experiments, he says, conducted with several sitters facing away from the psychic, subjects have proved to be poor at identifying their own reading. “If you’d had to pick your reading out of six others,” he asks, “would you have been able to?”

“Definitely. Even without the small matter of my brother’s full name.”

“That is interesting,” Wiseman says. “We do, undeniably, have an issue with that. Which is why it would be so interesting if Sally Morgan would agree to be blind tested. As far as I know, she has always refused.”

Bad psychics cheat in two ways: so-called ‘hot reading’ (gathering information on the sitter via friends or, these days, via the internet) and the skill of ‘cold reading’ outlined above.

It is astounding what performers can get away with. Recently I visited a long-established spiritualist church, whose name, out of respect for the other members of the congregation, I will omit. I sat through a 90-minute performance by a psychic, who told me at one point that I had “a close link to the letter P." I was impressed, naturally: but what exact connections from my personal life had he channelled from the spirit world? Peroni? Paula? Prawn dhansak? Pernod? Pamela? Preston North End? Then he entered into the following exchange with a man of about 70, named Harold.

Medium: “I have your mother here.”

Harold: “Good. Thank you.”

Medium: “Yes. She is cooking. A big stew.”

Harold: “My mother never cooked.”

Medium: “It is not your mother. It is your grandmother. She cooked big casseroles. There is a dog here. It’s white.”

Harold: “Black.”

Medium: “And the dog’s name is . . . Stu.”

Harold: “Flossie.”

Medium: “Ah. No. The dog is begging for the stew. That’s why I got the name Stu.”

A Dog Named Stu

And that, I suggest to Sue Farrow, editor and managing director of the journal Psychic News, shows just how very bad things can get. Farrow offers something of a contrast with some who work in this field. She is a highly intelligent, articulate woman, who spent 25 years as a ­professional musician before taking up her current post in 2007. The “dog called Stu” inspires a snort of derision.

How on earth did a former conductor from the English National Ballet come to be involved in this field? “My motivation derived from a sense that most people are interested in whether there is life after death,” she replies. “I feel it is a subject of such importance that it deserves all the scrutiny you can give it. Intellectual curiosity drew me to it.”

“So what do you make of Flossie ­begging for the stew?”

“Of the hundreds of mediums operating in this country,” she replies, “there are only three that I would risk recommending to a bereaved person.”

To set yourself up as a medium, there is no requirement equivalent of a driving instructor’s licence or a football coach’s training badge. Anybody can do it.

I travelled to the Arthur Conan Doyle Centre in Edinburgh. Doyle, famously, was a passionate believer in spiritualism and was ridiculed by many, including the magician Houdini, Doyle’s one-time friend, who mutated into his Moriarty.

I am welcomed in to a room where there are 13 other trainee mediums, nine of them women (all of whose names have been changed). The session, hosted by a woman called Yvonne, begins with a 15-minute meditation after which, somewhat to my horror, I realise that I, like others in the room, am required to perform a reading myself.

Having been on the receiving end of a lot of cold readings, I find I’m actually quite good at it. My sitter, who I will call Ellen, is an older woman who, without the benefit of spiritual assistance, I sense might have been the victim of physical challenges, possibly involving a male partner, and strong drink.

“I feel that you have had to be the rock, while bad things have been going on around you,” I venture, with my first flattering generalisation.

“Yes.”

“Bad things done by a man?”

“Sometimes.”

“I see you in a bar.”

“I don’t like alcohol,” Ellen says. But her first husband, it transpires, drank heavily and was physically violent.

“You have some connection to Ireland.” [Who doesn’t?]

“Yes.”

I get away with it purely thanks to the truth that, as Wiseman testifies, faced with a flagrant charlatan such as myself, it’s the subject, not the “medium”, that does the work.

But the Edinburgh class is interesting to observe and not without its merits. These are vulnerable people who visibly draw comfort from this meeting. Their hospitality to outsiders is generous and touching. With the possible exception of a trainee I’ll call Laura, a woman whose appearance (not unlike a younger Chrissie Hynde) and forthright attitude make me wonder if this amiable circle has inadvertently admitted another journalist.

“Just what is the point of connecting with spirits?” she asks Yvonne. “They connect to us, then we die. Then we talk to the ones who are left. Why?” Yvonne replies that “Spirits, like people, evolve. But, of course, if someone was a miserable person on earth, they’re going to be exactly the same on the other side.”

At this point I notice Sheila, a woman on my immediate left, beginning to look emotional. “My father,” she says, “had Parkinson’s disease for the last 12 years of his life. He was in a terrible state. Are you saying that he’s still like that now?”

“No,” Yvonne says. “Because he is in spirit. Earthly pain is left behind.”

The Psychic Barber

When I asked people – both sceptics and enthusiasts interested in this field – about “good” mediums, the same few names recurred. I chose one, Gordon Smith, the so-called Psychic Barber.

Smith, 52, is an improbable medium. An unpretentious Glaswegian who, as his soubriquet would suggest, began life as a hairdresser, has proved (contrary to the belief apparently harboured by Sting) that it is possible to establish an international reputation without changing your name from Gordon. Smith gives public shows, but does not charge for individual readings. His house – comfortable but not ostentatious – is on the coast near Helensburgh, 30 miles north-west of Glasgow.

Gordon's 'gift' was reawakened when the ghost of his friend's brother, who died in a fire, appeared before him one night.REX

“I think there is only a value to mediumship,” Smith says, “if it can help people heal. If somebody dies horrendously, you cannot undo that. Good mediums can help people to move on, by giving them a vision of those individuals in spirit.”

“When you give somebody a reading,” I ask Smith, who has said he will only do so for me if something, in his words, comes through, “what is going on? What are the mechanics?”

“Something happens between me and that person,” he says. “There is a vibration that means there is somebody here. As soon as you walked in the room,” he adds, “I saw a very bright light behind you. I have only had it once or twice in my life before. To me it felt good. But I can’t really say what it means. It was something, but not to do with my mediumship. I can’t say what.”

“When mediums say, ‘I have your grandfather here’ and so on. Are you really communicating through spirits?”

“Yes. Although I think everything we do is connected to telepathy. As a medium, if you don’t get a message from spirit then you read the person. I would say that all mediums are psychic. But not all psychics are mediums.”

A pause.

“Alright,” Smith says, “let’s take your mother. She is recently dead [not information I have volunteered] but her spirit is very close. As I speak to you, I get this lady and what I felt was a deep tiredness.” Smith switches to the first person, though does not alter his voice.

“‘My body just gave up. It almost became like a prison to me. This is what I feel.’ But she knew she was loved, and that made it easier for her to die. And now she is at peace.”

Smith embarks on what I would say was an accurate character sketch of my mother, which differs from an orthodox medium’s reading in that it is not uniquely bland.

“Her temperament was not always the best. She hated how she was at the end. She had such sadness in her own life. And a lot of that sadness, she didn’t understand. And now she does. And she doesn’t want there to be any anger or guilt.” He then gives the first name of one of her very few close surviving ­relatives.

Smith fell into mediumship, as many seem to, after attending a spiritualist church. He was 24. “I’d never been to that sort of a place. The medium in the church told the person I was with: that guy sat next to you; he’s a medium too. Has he not told you?”

I tell Smith that I am concerned by psychics who are ­trousering vast sums from never-ending tours. Having dismissed one prominent psychic as “cheesy” and “peddling nonsense,” Smith adds: “I don’t see why this shouldn’t be a living. It just was never in me to take money from the bereaved. I’d always worked. Then I got a publishing deal; I did talks. It just ­escalated.”

Some people might argue that were there any real power in spiritualism, Smith should be living on Mulholland Drive in a mansion with a swimming pool in the shape of a racehorse. “You cannot predict the future,” he says. “Neither can you cold-read the character or name of somebody who has died. No matter how hard you stare at the sitter. When that happens, it’s coming from somewhere else . . . I believe there is a part of you that, after death, somehow endures. I have never thought of the spirit world as heaven as such.”

Wasn’t it Jonathan Miller, I ask Smith, who said he was surprised when he looked at the complexities of the human eye that people could become obsessed with what he called “so suburban a miracle as telepathy." Does being a medium help the medium?

“It does, yes. Hugely. Because I don’t have a fear of dying, I don’t have a fear of living. I believe that is very important. So many people are hindered in their lives by a fear of their own death, or the death of their kids. And that’s why that sense of a spiritual connection is so very significant and rather beautiful. And you know why that’s important? Because if you are not afraid to die,” Smith says, “you are not afraid to live.”

Robert Chalmers's ebook, Talking With the Dead: Psychic Journeys to the Other Side, is available now through Newsweek Insights.

How We Got Here

The United States has already lost—its war for the Middle East, that is. Having taken my own crack at combat soldiering in both Iraq and Afghanistan, that couldn’t be clearer to me. Unfortunately, it’s evidently still not clear in Washington. Bush’s neo-imperial triumphalism failed. Obama’s quiet shift to drones, Special Forces, and clandestine executive actions didn’t turn the tide either. For all President Trump’s bluster, boasting, and threats, rest assured that, at best, he’ll barely move the needle and, at worst… but why even go there?

At this point, it’s at least reasonable to look back and ask yet again: Why the failure? Explanations abound, of course. Perhaps Americans were simply never tough enough and still need to take off the kid gloves. Maybe there just weren’t ever enough troops. (Bring back the draft!) Maybe all those hundreds of thousands of bombs and missiles just came up short. (So how about lots more of them, maybe even a nuke?)

Lead from the front. Lead from behind. Surge yet again… The list goes on—and on and on.

And by now all of it, including Donald Trump’s recent tough talk, represents such a familiar set of tunes. But what if the problem is far deeper and more fundamental than any of that?

Here our nation stands, 15-plus years after 9/11, engaged militarily in half a dozen countries across the Greater Middle East, with no end in sight. Perhaps a more critical, factual reading of our recent past would illuminate the futility of America’s tragic, ongoing project to somehow “destroy” terrorism in the Muslim world.

The standard triumphalist version of the last 100 or so years of our history might go something like this: in the twentieth century, the United States repeatedly intervened, just in the nick of time, to save the feeble Old World from militarism, fascism, and then, in the Cold War, communism. It did indeed save the day in three global wars and might have lived happily ever after as the world’s “sole superpower” if not for the sudden emergence of a new menace. Seemingly out of nowhere, “Islamo-fascists” shattered American complacence with a sneak attack reminiscent of Pearl Harbor. Collectively the people asked: Why do they hate us? Of course, there was no time to really reflect, so the government simply got to work, taking the fight to our new “medieval” enemies on their own turf. It’s admittedly been a long, hard slog, but what choice did our leaders have? Better, after all, to fight them in Baghdad than Brooklyn.

What if, however, this foundational narrative is not just flawed but little short of delusional? Alternative accounts lead to wholly divergent conclusions and are more likely to inform prudent policy in the Middle East.

Let’s reconsider just two key years for the United States in that region: 1979 and 2003. America’s leadership learned all the wrong “lessons” from those pivotal moments and has intervened there ever since on the basis of some perverse version of them with results that have been little short of disastrous. A more honest narrative of those moments would lead to a far more modest, minimalist approach to a messy and tragic region. The problem is that there seems to be something inherently un-American about entertaining such thoughts.

1979 Revisited

Through the first half of the Cold War, the Middle East remained a sideshow. In 1979, however, all that changed radically. First, rising protests against the brutal police state of the American-backed Shah of Iran led to regime collapse, the return of dissident ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the declaration of an Islamic Republic. Then Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, holding 52 hostages for more than 400 days. Of course, by then few Americans remembered the CIA-instigated coup of 1953 that had toppled a democratically elected Iranian prime minister, preserved Western oil interests in that country, and started both lands on this path (though Iranians clearly hadn’t forgotten). The shock and duration of the hostage crisis undoubtedly ensured that Jimmy Carter would be a one-term president and—to make matters worse—Soviet troops intervened in Afghanistan to shore up a communist government there. It was quite a year.

The alarmist conventional narrative of these events went like this: the radical mullahs running Iran were irrational zealots with an inexplicable loathing for the American way of life. As if in a preview of 9/11, hearing those chants against “the Great Satan,” Americans promptly began asking with true puzzlement: Why do they hate us? The hostage crisis challenged world peace. Carter had to do something. Worse yet, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan represented blatant conquest and spotlighted the possibility of Red Army hordes pushing through to Iran en route to the Persian Gulf’s vast oil reserves. It might prove the opening act of the long awaited Soviet scheme for world domination or a possible path to World War III.

Misinformed by such a tale that they repeatedly told themselves, Washington officials then made terrible choices in the Middle East. Let’s start with Iran. They mistook a nationalist revolution and subsequent civil war within Islam for a singular attack on the U.S.A. With little consideration of genuine Iranian gripes about the brutal U.S.-backed dynasty of the Shah or the slightest appreciation for the complexity of that country’s internal dynamics, they created a simple-minded but convenient narrative in which the Iranians posed an existential threat to this country. Little has changed in almost four decades.

Then, though few Americans could locate Afghanistan on a map, most accepted that it was indeed a country of vital strategic interest. Of course, with the opening of their archives, it’s clear enough now that the Soviets never sought the worldwide empire we imagined for them, especially not by 1979. The Soviet leadership was, in fact, divided over the Afghan affair and intervened in Kabul in a spirit more defensive than aggressive. Their desire or even ability to drive towards the Persian Gulf was, at best, a fanciful American notion.

Nonetheless, the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were combined into a tale of horror that would lead to the permanent militarization of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Remembered today as a dove-in-chief, in his 1980 State of the Union address President Carter announced a decidedly hawkish new doctrine that would come to bear his name. From then on, he said, the U.S. would consider any threat to Persian Gulf oil supplies a direct threat to this country and American troops would, if necessary, unilaterally intervene to secure the region.

The results will seem painfully familiar today: almost immediately, Washington policymakers began to seek military solutions to virtually every problem in the Middle East. Within a year, the administration of President Ronald Reagan would, for instance, support Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s ruthless invasion of Iran, ignoring his more vicious antics and his proclivity for gassing his own people.

Soon after, in 1983, the military created the United States Central Command (headquarters: Tampa, Florida) with specific responsibility for the Greater Middle East. Its early war plans demonstrated just how wildly out of touch with reality American planners already were by then. Operational blueprints, for instance, focused on defeating Soviet armies in Iran before they could reach the Persian Gulf. Planners imagined U.S. Army divisions crossing Iran, itself in the midst of a major war with Iraq, to face off against a Soviet armored juggernaut (just like the one that was always expected to burst through Europe’s Fulda Gap). That such an assault was never coming, or that the fiercely proud Iranians might object to the militaries of either superpower crossing their territories, figured little in such early plans that were monuments to American arrogance and naïveté.

From there, it was but a few short steps to the permanent “defensive” basing of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain or later the stationing of U.S. troops near the holy cities of Mecca and Medina to protect Saudi Arabia from Iraqi attack. Few asked how such forces in the heart of the Middle East would play on the Arab street or corroborate Islamist narratives of “crusader” imperialism.

Worse yet, in those same years the CIA armed and financed a grab bag of Afghan insurgent groups, most of them extreme Islamists. Eager to turn Afghanistan into a Soviet “Vietnam,” no one in Washington bothered to ask whether such guerrilla outfits conformed to our purported principles or what the rebels would do if they won. Of course, the victorious guerrillas contained foreign fighters and various Arab supporters, including one Osama bin Laden. Eventually, the excesses of the well-armed but morally bankrupt insurgents and warlords in Afghanistan triggered the formation and ascension of the Taliban there, and from one of those guerrilla outfits came a new organization that called itself al-Qaeda. The rest, as they say, is history, and thanks to Chalmers Johnson’s appropriation of a classic CIA term of spy craft, we now know it as blowback.

That was a major turning point for the U.S. military. Before 1979, few of its troops had served in the region. In the ensuing decades, America bombed, invaded, raided, sent its drones to kill in, or attacked Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq again (and again), Somalia (again and again), Libya again, Iraq once more, and now Syria as well. Before 1979, few—if any—American military personnel died in the Greater Middle East. Few have died anywhere else since.

2003 and After: Fantasies and Reality

Who wouldn’t agree that the 2003 invasion of Iraq signified a major turning point both in the history of the Greater Middle East and in our own? Nonetheless, its legacy remains highly contested. The standard narrative goes like this: as the sole remaining superpower on the planet after the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, our invincible military organized a swift and convincing defeat of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the first Gulf War. After 9/11, that same military launched an inventive, swift, and triumphant campaign in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden escaped, of course, but his al-Qaeda network was shattered and the Taliban all but destroyed.

Naturally, the threat of Islamic terror was never limited to the Hindu Kush, so Washington “had” to take its fight against terror global. Admittedly, the subsequent conquest of Iraq didn’t exactly turn out as planned and perhaps the Arabs weren’t quite ready for American-style democracy anyway. Still, the U.S. was committed, had shed blood, and had to stay the course, rather than cede momentum to the terrorists. Anything less would have dishonored the venerated dead. Luckily, President George W. Bush found an enlightened new commander, General David Petraeus, who, with his famed “surge,” snatched victory, or at least stability, from the jaws of defeat in Iraq. He had the insurgency all but whipped. Then, just a few years later, “spineless” Barack Obama prematurely pulled American forces out of that country, an act of weakness that led directly to the rise of ISIS and the current nightmare in the region. Only a strong, assertive successor to Obama could right such gross errors.

It’s a riveting tale, of course, even if it is misguided in nearly every way imaginable. At each turn, Washington learned the wrong lessons and drew perilous conclusions. At least the first Gulf War—to George H.W. Bush’s credit—involved a large multinational coalition and checked actual Iraqi aggression. Instead of cheering Bush the Elder’s limited, prudent strategy, however, surging neoconservatives demanded to know why he had stopped short of taking the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. In these years (and for this we can certainly thank Bush, among others), Americans—Republicans andDemocrats alike—became enamored with military force and came to believe that it could solve just about any problem in that region, if not the world.

This would prove a grotesque misunderstanding of what had happened. The Gulf War had been an anomaly. Triumphalist conclusions about it rested on the shakiest of foundations. Only if an enemy fought exactly as the U.S. military preferred it to do, as indeed Saddam’s forces did in 1991—conventionally, in open desert, with outdated Soviet equipment—could the U.S. expect such success. Americans drew another conclusion entirely: that their military was unstoppable.

The same faulty assumptions flowed from Afghanistan in 2001. Information technology, Special Forces, CIA dollars (to Afghan warlords), and smart bombs triggered victory with few conventional foot soldiers needed. It seemed a forever formula and influenced both the hasty decision to invade Iraq, and the irresponsibly undersized force structure deployed (not to speak of the complete lack of serious preparation for actually occupying that country). So powerful was the optimism and jingoism of invasion proponents that skeptics were painted as unpatriotic turncoats.

Then things turned ugly fast. This time around, Saddam’s army simply melted away, state institutions broke down, looting was rampant, and the three major communities of Iraq—Sunni, Shia, and Kurd—began to battle for power. The invaders never received the jubilant welcome predicted for them by Bush administration officials and supportive neocons. What began as a Sunni-based insurgency to regain power morphed into a nationalist rebellion and then into an Islamist struggle against Westerners.

Nearly a century earlier, Britain had formed Iraq from three separate Ottoman imperial provinces—Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. The 2003 invasion blew up that synthetic state, held together first by British overlords and then by Saddam’s brutal dictatorship. American policymakers seemed genuinely surprised by all this.

Those in Washington never adequately understood the essential conundrum of forced regime change in Iraq. “Democracy” there would inevitably result in Shia majority dominance of an artificial state. Empowering the Shia drove the Sunni minority—long accustomed to power—into the embrace of armed, motivated Islamists. When societies fracture as Iraq’s did, often enough the worst among us rise to the occasion. As the poet William Butler Yeats so famously put it, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed… The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Furthermore, the invasion played directly into Osama bin Laden’s hands, fueling his narrative of an American “war on Islam.” In the process, the U.S. also destabilized Iraq’s neighbors and the region, spreading extremists to Syria and elsewhere.

That David Petraeus’s surge “worked” is perhaps the greatest myth of all. It was true that the steps he took resulted in a decrease in violence after 2007, largely because he paid off the Sunni tribes, not because of the modest U.S. troop increase ordered from Washington. By then, the Shia had already won the sectarian civil war for Baghdad, intensifying Sunni-Shia residential segregation there and so temporarily lessening the capacity for carnage.

That post-surge “calm” was, however, no more than a tactical pause in an ongoing regional sectarian war. No fundamental problems had been resolved in post-Saddam Iraq, including the nearly impossible task of integrating Sunni and Kurdish minorities into a coherent national whole. Instead, Washington had left a highly sectarian Shia strongman, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, in control of the government and internal security forces, while al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI (nonexistent prior to the invasion), never would be eradicated. Its leadership, further radicalized in U.S. Army prisons, bided its time, waiting for an opportunity to win back Sunni fealty.

Luckily for AQI, as soon as the U.S. military was pulled out of the country, Maliki promptly cracked down hard on peaceful Sunni protests. He even had his Sunni vice president sentenced to death in absentia under the most questionable of circumstances. Maliki’s ineptitude would prove an AQI godsend.

Islamists, including AQI, also took advantage of events in Syria. Autocrat Bashar al-Assad’s brutal repression of his own protesting Sunni majority gave them just the opening they needed. Of course, the revolt there might never have occurred had not the invasion of Iraq destabilized the entire region. In 2014, the former AQI leaders, having absorbed some of Saddam’s cashiered officers into their new forces, triumphantly took a series of Iraqi cities, including Mosul, sending the Iraqi army fleeing. They then declared a caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Many Iraqi Sunnis naturally turned to the newly established “Islamic State” (ISIS) for protection.

Mission (Un)Accomplished!

It’s hardly controversial these days to point out that the 2003 invasion (aka Operation Iraqi Freedom), far from bringing freedom to that country, sowed chaos. Toppling Saddam’s brutal regime tore down the edifice of a regional system that had stood for nearly a century. However inadvertently, the U.S. military lit the fire that burned down the old order.

As it turned out, no matter the efforts of the globe’s greatest military, no easy foreign solution existed when it came to Iraq. It rarely does. Unfortunately, few in Washington were willing to accept such realities. Think of that as the twenty-first-century American Achilles’ heel: unwarranted optimism about the efficacy of U.S. power. Policy in these years might best be summarized as: “we” have to do something, and military force is the best—perhaps the only—feasible option.

Has it worked? Is anybody, including Americans, safer? Few in power even bother to ask such questions. But the data is there. The Department of State counted just 348 terrorist attacks worldwide in 2001 compared with 11,774 attacks in 2015. That’s right: at best, America’s 15-year “war on terror” failed to significantly reduce international terrorism; at worst, its actions helped make matters 30 times worse.

Recall the Hippocratic oath: “First do no harm.” And remember Osama bin Laden’s stated goal on 9/11: to draw conventional American forces into attritional campaigns in the heart of the Middle East. Mission accomplished!

In today’s world of “alternative facts,” it’s proven remarkably easy to ignore such empirical data and so avoid thorny questions. Recent events and contemporary political discourse even suggest that the country’s political elites now inhabit a post-factual environment; in terms of the Greater Middle East, this has been true for years.

It couldn’t be more obvious that Washington’s officialdom regularly and repeatedly drew erroneous lessons from the recent past and ignored a hard truth staring them in the face: U.S. military action in the Middle East has solved nothing. At all. Only the government cannot seem to accept this. Meanwhile, an American fixation on one unsuitable term—“isolationism”—masks a more apt description of American dogma in this period: hyper-interventionism.

As for military leaders, they struggle to admit failure when they—and their troops—have sacrificed so much sweat and blood in the region. Senior officers display the soldier’s tendency to confuse performance with effectiveness, staying busy with being successful. Prudent strategy requires differentiating between doing a lot and doing the right things. As Einstein reputedly opined, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

A realistic look at America’s recent past in the Greater Middle East and a humbler perspective on its global role suggest two unsatisfying but vital conclusions. First, false lessons and misbegotten collective assumptions contributed to and created much of today’s regional mess. As a result, it’s long past time to reassess recent history and challenge long-held suppositions. Second, policymakers badly overestimated the efficacy of American power, especially via the military, to shape foreign peoples and cultures to their desires. In all of this, the agency of locals and the inherent contingency of events were conveniently swept aside.

So what now? It should be obvious (but probably isn’t in Washington) that it’s well past time for the U.S. to bring its incessant urge to respond militarily to the crisis of the moment under some kind of control. Policymakers should accept realistic limitations on their ability to shape the world to America’s desired image of it.

Consider the last few decades in Iraq and Syria. In the 1990s, Washington employed economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein and his regime. The result: tragedy to the tune of half a million dead children. Then it tried invasion and democracy promotion. The result: tragedy—including 4,500-plus dead American soldiers, a few trillion dollars down the drain, more than 200,000 dead Iraqis, and millions more displaced in their own country or in flight as refugees.

In response, in Syria the U.S. tried only limited intervention. Result: tragedy—upwards of 300,000 dead and close to seven million more turned into refugees.

So will tough talk and escalated military action finally work this time around as the Trump administration faces off against ISIS? Consider what happens even if the U.S achieves a significant rollback of ISIS. Even if, in conjunction with allied Kurdish or Syrian rebel forces, ISIS’s “capital,” Raqqa, is taken and the so-called caliphate destroyed, the ideology isn’t going away. Many of its fighters are likely to transition back to an insurgency and there will be no end to international terror in ISIS’s name. In the meantime, none of this will have solved the underlying problems of artificial states now at the edge of collapse or beyond, divided ethno-religious groups, and anti-Western nationalist and religious sentiments. All of it begs the question: What if Americans are incapable of helping (at least in a military sense)?

A real course correction is undoubtedly impossible without at least a willingness to reconsider and reframe our recent historical experiences. If the 2016 election is any indication, however, a Trump administration with the present line-up of national security chiefs (who fought in these very wars) won’t meaningfully alter either the outlook or the policies that led us to this moment. Candidate Trump offered a hollow promise—to “Make America Great Again”—conjuring up a mythical era that never was. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton offered only remarkably dated and stale rhetoric about America as the “indispensable nation.”

In the new Trump era, neither major party seems capable of escaping a shared commitment to the legends rather than the facts of America’s recent past in the Greater Middle East. Both sides remain eerily confident that the answers to contemporary foreign policy woes lie in a mythical version of that past, whether Trump’s imaginary 1950s paradise or Clinton’s fleeting mid-1990s “unipolar moment.”

Both ages are long gone, if they ever really existed at all. Needed is some fresh thinking about our militarized version of foreign policy and just maybe an urge, after all these years, to do so much less. Patriotic fables certainly feel good, but they achieve little. My advice: dare to be discomfited.

Major Danny Sjursen is a U.S. Army strategist and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. He lives with his wife and four sons near Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

[Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author in an unofficial capacity and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Command and General Staff College, Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.]

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