June 2 2024 Anniversary of Trump’s Call to Putin to Send a Russian Army to Occupy America and Save His Regime, As Trump Threatens Civil War
In the wake of the seizure of St. John's Church for a photo op and ordering police to assault the protestors who had in reply laid siege to the White House, and the refusal of the Pentagon and Joint Chiefs to obey his orders w…
In the wake of the seizure of St. John's Church for a photo op and ordering police to assault the protestors who had in reply laid siege to the White House, and the refusal of the Pentagon and Joint Chiefs to obey his orders which invoke the Insurrection Act to send military forces against the Black Lives Matter protests, Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, made a desperate and final direct call to Putin, after several throughout the previous two months as his regime began to crumble, in which he asked Putin to send the Russian Army to occupy America's cities.
This was both the final act of madness and the moment of the Fourth Reich's fall in our nation, as tyranny discovered its limits in a democracy wherein the faith and loyalty of the people to its institutions and ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice remain unbroken despite massive infiltration and subversion of our government from the Presidency through every level and branch by agents of fascism and the influence of foreign tyrants.
Sadly we have yet to purge our destroyers from among us; that great work remains for the future, though many of the principal traitors have been exposed or revealed themselves in refusal to denounce the January 6 Insurrection or to convict Trump and all his minions as treasonous and disloyal foreign spies.
America as a free society of equals and a guarantor of global democracy and our universal human rights, as with democracy throughout the world, remains under existential threat by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil; but we may also say with William Ernest Henley; "my head is bloodied, but unbowed."
Unconquered; the only title worth having, an idea which has continued to inform, motivate, and shape me since I first discovered it in a poem by William Ernest Henley, Invictus, as a high school Freshman.
At the first assembly of the new school year members of the incoming class were asked to recite a poem we liked to our new peers to introduce ourselves. Ours was a town divided by church affiliation of which my family and I were members of neither and rare new arrivals, my father having been hired as a teacher by the high school; the quiet and unsmiling black garbed Dutch and their Reformed Church, affiliated with that of South Africa's Apartheid regime, grim giants with snow white hair like Harry Potter villains who thought music and dancing were sinful and whose mouths were full of thee's and thou's, and the loud and laughing, earthy, polka dancing, sawdust pit wrestling Swiss and their Calvinist Church, who served beer to anyone over the age of twelve.
Among my earliest memories was when a Dutch man married a Swiss girl, and the town called it a mixed marriage and burned a cross on their lawn.
I asked a neighbor boy among the mob laughing and running about with torches why they were setting fires and he said "We're punishing the bad people".
Then I asked my mom, "Are they bad people?"
She said no, and pointed at the crowd with torches, "These are the bad people. And they are always our enemies, yours and mine."
My next question was, "Why are they bad?"
And she forever simplified a complex set of issues for me with her answer; "Because they want to make everyone the same."
Here I was notorious, an outsider having arrived as a first grader who attended no church at all and the student for whom prayer in school had been discontinued at the ferocious insistence of my mother, lifelong member of the Peace and Freedom Party because of their platform which included taking the anticommunist propaganda slogan In God We Trust off our money. I had adopted Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra as a counter-narrative to the Bible the previous year and often quoted it in refutation to my fellow students attempts to cite Biblical authority in the repression of dissent.
My parents were formidable figures who were also misfits; my mother, whose speech was full of Yiddish vocabulary and phrases from my maternal great grandmother; mom's dual home languages were English and the family German, actually Wienerisch or the Viennese dialect of Austro-Bavarian blended with Schönbrunner Deutsch, a sociolect of the Hapsburg imperial court from my grandfather; grandpa knew Latin, taught himself English from reading newspapers, and to various degrees knew other languages of the Austrian Empire including Hungarian, Romanian, Ukrainian, Croatian, the Romance language Venetian, and could speak Russian and Polish well enough to do business in their communities here in America.
My mother was a radical atheist, feminist, and peace activist who was also a biologist, psychologist, author, with my father an international class fencer, and scholar of Coleridge and medieval religious art.
My father, who described himself as Cajun and was a nonwhite Louisiana Creole with mostly European but also African and Shawnee ancestry. I am a direct patrilineal descendent of the ally of Scipio Africanus of whom Cicero wrote his treatise on friendship, Laelius de Amicitia, in 44 B.C. We briefly ruled what is called the Gallic Empire in the mid second century A.D., what is now France, Spain, and the British Iles; my ancestors include a deified Roman general and shapechanger, for whom the Bear Dance is still performed in Romania.
Between the fall of the Gallic Dynasty of Rome in 276 AD and coming to America my family were driven out of the Black Forest in 1586 at the start of decades of a witch hunting hysteria. Drachensbrute, Brides of the Dragon, my ancestors were called by Martin Luther, whose fame for grand defiance of Church law eclipsed his infamy as a witch hunter and brutal torturer of women. By modern constructions of race this makes me Bavarian, though we only lived a thousand years or so in Germany and my ancestry in the patriarchal line is equally Shawnee, from the marriage of Henry Lale and Me Shekin Ta Withe or White Painted Dove during the American Revolution.
There is more; the grandmother of Henry claimed to be a Mughal courtier who escaped with Henry's grandfather from the pirate kingdom of Madagascar after capture from the Ganj-i-Sawai in 1695, Henry being named for the pirate king Henry Every with whom his grandfather sailed; but that is a different story.
To return to my father, the ambiguously ethnic looking high school English, Drama, Forensics, and Fencing Club teacher who was also a counterculture theater director who held court in the San Francisco-Berkeley arts scene and collected intellectuals, including Edward Albee whose plays he directed and William S. Burroughs with whom he practiced magic and whose novel of anarchist werewolves The Wild Boys he may have influenced, both of whom were important personal influences of my childhood.
I figured that I was going to get into a lot of fights, and had chosen to recite Invictus as the terms of struggle. Here was my prefacing speech to my peers and to the world; I ask nothing of anyone, nor any quarter; neither will I offer any to those who stand against me. But I will never abandon anyone who stands with me, nor will you ever stand alone.
Last summer I went to Brazil to train as a fencer for the Pan American Games, and stayed to defend abandoned street children from the bounty hunters whom the rich had set on them, and this is how we survived against police death squads with only our hands and whatever we could steal; by standing together regardless of our differences.
This is what I ask now, of all of you. I'm hoping we can be friends.
The poem I've chosen to recite is Invictus, which means Unconquered in Latin, by William Ernest Henley.
"Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul. "
After a long and terrible silence, the auditorium erupted in cheers.
None who are human are beyond redemption. Sometimes all we need do to conjure the redemptive power of love is offer others entrance into our world, to reveal our pain and our fear, our loneliness and hope of love, the wounds and flaws of our humanity which open us to the pain of others.
This is my advice to anyone who would reach out across the interfaces of our differences to win allies and transform enemies into friends, to all who write, speak, teach, and organize as a fulcrum of action with which to change the balance of power in the world; be unguarded, genuine, raw even, and speak your truth with vision and passion. We must speak directly to the pain we share as fellow human beings to call forth the truth of others.
We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle to seize ownership of ourselves.
As I wrote in my post of June 3 2020, No Velvet Glove, Just the Iron Fist: Trump Attempts to Use Nationwide Protests For Racial Justice Not to Redress Historic Inequalities But to Impose Tyranny; Cowering in his bunker in the darkness, cries of thousands of voices of the marginalized, the dispossessed, and the masses of those re-enslaved through divisions of exclusionary otherness as racist terror thundering through the warrens of his underworld kingdom of lies, Trump made a frantic call to his master in the Kremlin, Putin, former Colonel of the KGB and long his patron and handler.
"Boss? Boss, you gotta get me outta this. Its not going down like we planned. They got the palace surrounded. What do I do?"
"Listen Donald, there's nothing you can't solve with greater force. You like Napoleon, right? Conquered Europe, they gave him a princess to marry as tribute. You just do what he did to seize the throne of France; give 'em a whiff of grapeshot."
"Can you send the Russian Army to restore order? The Pentagon refused to send in the army to occupy the cities under siege by protestors. Our deal was I keep America out of it when you conquer Ukraine and you send the Russian Army to occupy America for me when we kicked off the boogaloo.…"
Putin laughs. Click.
"Hey, that's not funny. Pick up the phone." He smashes things, howling and blubbering in fear and rage. "I'm the joke? I'm never the joke. I'll make America pay for making a monkey outta me. I'll make everybody pay."
And like the petulant child and bully that he is, Trump goes forth to avenge himself on the world that does not love him, visions of a red button in a briefcase dancing in his head, muttering, "Behold, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
In case you thought the danger of civil war was over, the fascists mobilize now for civil war.
As written by Rachel Leingang in The Guardian, in an article entitled 'No way out without bloodshed': the right believe the US is under threat and are mobilizing: In 'mirror world', Trump is martyr and Biden is autocrat, as calls for violence erupt on internet after ex-president's conviction; "The posts are ominous.
"Pick a side, or YOU are next," wrote conservative talkshow host Dan Bongino on the Truth Social media platform in the aftermath of former president Donald Trump's 34 felony convictions.
The replies were even more so.
"Dan, seriously now," one user wrote in response to Bongino. "I see no way out of all this mess without bloodshed. When you can rig an election, then weaponize the government and the courts against a former President, what other alternative is there? I'm almost 70 and would rather die than live in tyranny."
That's a common version of how many people on the US right reacted to the Trump verdict, drawing on a "mirror world" where Trump is seen as the selfless martyr to powerful state forces and Joe Biden is the dangerous autocrat wielding the justice system as his own personal plaything and a threat to American democracy.
Calls for revenge, retribution and violence littered the rightwing internet as soon as Trump's guilty verdict came down, all predicated on the idea that the trial had been a sham designed to interfere with the 2024 election. Some posted online explicitly saying it was time for hangings, executions and civil wars.
In this case, Trump was charged with falsifying documents related to a hush-money payment made to an adult film actor to keep an alleged affair out of the spotlight during the 2016 election – a form of election interference from a man whose platform lately consists largely of blaming others for election interference. The verdict has been followed by a backlash from his followers, those who for years chanted to lock up Trump's political opponents, like Hillary Clinton.
On the left, the mood was downright celebratory, a brief interlude of joy that Trump might finally be held accountable for his actions. But there was an undercurrent of worry among some liberals, who saw the way these felonies could galvanize support for the former president.
On the right, in the alternate reality created by and for Trump and his supporters, the convictions are a sign of both doom and dogma – evidence that a corrupt faction runs the Joe Biden government, but that it can be driven out by the Trump faithful like themselves.
Trump's allies in Congress want to use the federal government's coffers to send a message to Biden that the verdict crosses a line, saying the jury's decision "turned our judicial system into a political cudgel". Some Senate Republicans vowed not to cooperate with Democratic priorities or nominees – effectively politicizing the government as recompense for what they claim is a politicization of the courts.
They echoed a claim Trump himself has repeatedly driven home to his followers: that his political opponents, namely Biden, are a threat to democracy, a rebrand of how Biden and Democrats often cast Trump. For his most ardent followers, the stakes of the 2024 election are existential, the idea that he might lose a cause for intense rhetoric and threats.
And, for some, the convictions provide another reason to take matters into their own hands during a time when support for using violence to achieve political goals is on the rise. Indictments against Trump fueled this support, surveys have shown.
Some rightwing media and commentators, like Bongino and the Gateway Pundit, displayed upside-down flags on social media, a sign of distress and a symbol among Trump supporters that recently made the news because one flew at US supreme court justice Samuel Alito's home after the insurrection.
The terms "banana republic" and "kangaroo court" flew around, as did memes comparing Biden to Nazi or fascist leaders. Telegram channels lit up with posts about how the end of America was solidified – unless Trump wins again in November.
"If we jail Trump, get rid of Maga, end the electoral college, ban voter ID, censor free speech, we'll save democracy," says one meme in a QAnon channel on Telegram that depicts Biden in a Nazi uniform with a Hitler mustache.
Tucker Carlson, the rightwing media heavyweight, waxed apocalyptic: "Import the third world, become the third world. That's what we just saw. This won't stop Trump. He'll win the election if he's not killed first. But it does mark the end of the fairest justice system in the world. Anyone who defends this verdict is a danger to you and your family."
The former president's supporters also opened their wallets, sending a "record-shattering" $34.8m in small-dollar donations to Trump's campaign on Thursday, the Trump campaign claimed.
The massive haul came after Trump declared himself a "political prisoner" (he is not in prison) and declared justice "dead" in the US in a dire fundraising pitch.
"Their sick & twisted goal is simple: Pervert the justice system against me so much, that proud supporters like YOU will SPIT when you hear my name," Trump's campaign wrote. "BUT THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN! NOW IT'S TIME FOR ME & YOU TO SHOVE IT BACK IN THEIR CORRUPT FACES!"
The real verdict, Trump wrote on Truth Social, would come on 5 November. Posts calling 5 November a new "independence day" and comparing 2024 to 1776 – but a revolution not against the British, but among Americans for the control of the country – spread widely.
Misinformation and rumors spread as well, with the potential that these rumors could lead to further action by Republicans to avenge Trump.
In one viral claim, people say it's not clear what crimes Trump even committed (the charges for falsifying documents are listed in detail in the indictment, and have been broken down piece by piece by the media). In another, posts claim the judge gave incorrect instructions to the jury before deliberations, which an Associated Press fact check deemed false.
Suggestions that the conviction was an "op" or a "psyop" – meaning a planned manipulation, a common refrain on the far right whenever something big happens – spread as well.
Talk quickly went to what Maga should do to stand up for Trump, and about how the verdict's fans, and Democrats in general, would come to regret seeking accountability in the courts.
"This is going to be the biggest political backfire in US history," the conservative account Catturd posted on Truth Social. "I'm feeling a tremendous seismic shift in the air."
Kash Patel, a former Trump administration staffer and ally, suggested one way forward: Congress should subpoena the bank records of Merchan's daughter, he said. The daughter became a frequent target throughout the trial – she worked as a Democratic consultant and has fundraised for Democratic politicians. Ohio senator JD Vance called for a criminal investigation into Merchan, and potentially his daughter, whom Vance said was an "obvious beneficiary of Merchan's biased rulings".
Patel also said prosecutor Alvin Bragg should be subpoenaed for any documents related to meetings with the Biden administration. "In case you need a jurisdictional hook- Bragg's office receives federal funds from DOJ to 'administer justice'- GET ON IT," he wrote.
Megyn Kelly said Bragg should be disbarred, without offering a reason for what would justify it.
Some Trump allies sought to project calm amid the vitriol, saying they had known the verdict would come down as it did because the process had been rigged, and that people needed to keep focused on winning in November.
Steve Bannon, who himself is awaiting some time in prison for criminal contempt, said immediately after the verdict was released that it was "not going to damage President Trump at all".
"It's time to collect yourself and say, yes, we've seen what's happened. We've seen how they run the tables in this crooked process. But you've got to say, hey, I'm more determined than ever to set things right."
Dr. Strangelove trailer
Oppenheimer Quotes the Bhagavad Gita 11.32.; I am become Death
Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? With Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton
In case you thought the danger of civil war was over
'No way out without bloodshed': the right believe the US is under threat and are mobilizing: In 'mirror world', Trump is martyr and Biden is autocrat, as calls for violence erupt on internet after ex-president's conviction
No comments:
Post a Comment