I am part of the American antiwar, world-survivalist movement. One of my colleagues in the movement, David Sladky, makes it his mission to be a clearing house of information that may be helpful to American resisters of the incipient fascism we Americans face. This is one of the articles he has passed along to us.
Well, everybody has a right to state their opinions in the USA. The First Amendment to the US Constitution says so. This author with a book to sell (Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and the Politics of Appeasement, Counterpunch Books, 2000), Paul Street, an award-winning history professor, author and journalist based in Iowa City and Chicago, cuts Obama and Biden every way but loose, and even blames them and other Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, for allowing Trump to be elected:
"In fact, deeply uninspired by Hillary Clinton's tepid, elitist, and dismissive campaign, non-voting on the part of traditionally Democratic segments of the electorate was more critical to Trump's victory than any imagined big wave of white working-class Trump votes.
True, no U.S. president has ever lied as voluminously and pathologically as the fascist Trump. A brazen practitioner of the totalitarian "permanent lie" (which Hannah Arendt defined as "the consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth"), Trump is off the historical charts when it comes to barefaced falsification. Still, the totalitarian would not have gotten into office without the more sophisticated establishmentarian disingenuousness of the party Wolin aptly called the "Inauthentic Opposition"-the dismal, demobilizing, depressing, and dollar-drenched Democrats."
Okay, what do you want to do about it, Paul Street? You have absolved Trump and his cronies from primary blame; you have despaired in any possible redress by The People by the standard Democratic processes. What is left?
You know we can't pick up the gun, the armed forces of the right, military, police, and other paramilitary governmental entities (ICE, DHS, Border Patrol, DEA, etc.) with an unlimited supply of tanks and artillery and Cobra attack helicopters-- with warplanes carrying CBR weapons ready to bomb us, for all we know-- would mow us down.
Our only hope would be a rebellion in the military, with thousands of US Army combat troops sitting down and saying, "we will not fire on our fellow citizens. They are not the enemies, foreign and domestic, we stepped forward and took the oath to fight." (I am quite sure that US Marines would not toss their honor in the toilet by following an order to kill other Americans).
You didn't serve, Mr. Street, but, naive 19-year-old though I was when I stepped forward in the recruiting office, I took-- and take-- that oath very seriously.
Are there ways for private citizens to unite and engage in some nature of People's War against the oligarchic far-Right power that Street so voluminously documents, and says its rise is mostly Barack Obama's fault? Can the most cyber-capable of ordinary US citizens of good will, and a desire that the Earth should survive, use computers to disable the oligarchy's ability to command and control us?
Street notes the criticism of the American people by Ms. Monique Judge for thinking Obama owed them anything more than the 8 years he occupied the Presidency. She says, with an obscenity, that Obama owes the American People nothing. Street's point seems to be that Obama owes us, and them, more than that, instead of being an enabler, a willing part of, the American oligarchy.
Maybe so. Of course, in the history of the United States, there are very few ex-Presidents who have ever played any important role in the government or social life of the nation. I cannot name more than three: John Quincy Adams and William Howard Taft, who both served on the Supreme Court, and Jimmy Carter, the only ex-President in American history who has truly dedicated his post-presidential life to doing GOOD for people.
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