Combatting the Taliban, the Nazi, in Ourselves

#6 of On Tyranny: Be wary of paramilitaries – “When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.” – Timothy Snyder

“Men who rape, kill, torture, and mutilate because they don’t like how another person looks or behaves, what he or she believes, or for whom he or she works deserve no mercy from historians, politicians or any other Americans. Yet we all must remember that these angry chants and threats have long been a part of the larger American chorus that, if it were ever to surrender the urge to hate and kill, might also break into song.” - Catherine McNicol Stock, Rural Radicals

#7 of On Tyranny: Be reflective if you must be armed – “If you carry a weapon in public service, may God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no.” – Timothy Snyder

“The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger, and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep.” – Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey

“Stalin...displayed his special form of political genius: interpreting the disastrous consequences of his own policies as a reason to punish his political opponents (real or imagined)...his reasoning now liberated itself from the burden of contact with empirical reality...security organs would find the truth they were ordered to find...In this new world, the past was no guide...No arguments could be advanced against what Stalin chose to call a fact...(He) presided over the death of millions, and greeted human catastrophe as political success.” - Timothy Snyder, “Stalin’s Famine,” Sketches From a Secret War

“No body, no problem.” - attr. to J. Stalin
“No (accurate ) body count, no problem.” – attr. to D. Trump

“You can’t tell it like it is, unless, you, first, tell it like it was.” - Chicago Dog

“Men who did not know that they were slaves do not know that they have been freed.” - Milton Mayer

As Planned Parenthood gears up for an all out assault on the Rights of Women with a clinic for women seeking natal and abortion assistance in southern Illinois, the Midwest’s bluest State, a map marks this location as geographically convenient to women who are despised, in law, by men in States to the South, Southwest and East. That map also marks the jumping off point for General U.S. Grant’s “Army of the Tennessee” that waged war from 1861-1865, against a way of thinking that had a concrete form in the Confederacy, but also, a spiritual racism and male chauvinism that affected all regions of America back then, and, unfortunately, now as well.

Violent words from President Trump, his propaganda machine in the White House, FOX news, Congressional Republicans like Jim Jordan (OH).Matt Gaetz (FL), Lindsay Graham (SC) and Mitch McConnell (KY) have defended a nihilistic, lawless leadership. A refusal by Attorney General William Barr on May 18, 2020 to break the law in pursuit of fictitious “deep state,” conspiracy theories about former President Barack Obama may stymie his Hater-in-Chief, but will not stop hatefulness spawned by Barr’s previous pandering to power. Desperate despots of demagogy incite a civil war of words that evokes the violence of slavery advocates of yesteryear, and today’s would be dictators. As civilized Americans face issues laying bare very uncivilized emotions and actions, I turned, once again, to the wisdom of my KGB animal companions.

High Plains Reader: Hello dear friends! Why does rhetoric of Trump supporters in the White House, Congress, and on Trump (FOX) TV, resemble Taliban tribalism in Afghanistan? We’ve spent much treasure and many lives over there, yet we, like them, have men in power here who hate women, white people in power who fear and loathe people of color, and Christians who do not really love their neighbor, if their neighbor doesn’t suit their brand of belief or appearance?

Lena: Hate viruses, or bacteria of bullsh*t are easier to spread than tolerance antidotes of the Sermon on the Mount and words of Shakespeare’s King Lear (None doth offend). Perhaps you should meet our newest friend: Ms. Recovering Republican Lap Dog. Her parents were bred where Lapland overlaps Norway and Vladimir Putin’s Russia, for export to suburban women all over the United States. However, her breed became estranged from a “country club cocoon” way-of-life, when their mistresses became estranged from the ABC’s of Suburbia (Adultery, Booze and Crabgrass), the Republican Party, and the dogmatic misogyny of their husbands.

Ms. RRLD: Those who wish to dominate others never get their way when folks translate daily “live and let live” behavior into political action and vote such democratic convictions. That is hard to do, however, when propagandists turn ordinary, descriptive, yet debatable terms, like “liberal” and “conservative,” into masks or weapons.

Schickelgruber: Hitler and Goebbels did win the propaganda war in World War II by the way. German soldiers, supposedly invincible, were jacked up on “speed,” while their home folks were jacked up on lies, and the German High Command was given monetary bribes.

Mr. Crying Wolf: To counter the Nazi onslaught of illusions, FDR’s commander, General George Marshall, tapped a top propagandist, Hollywood Producer/Director, Corporal Frank Capra, to produce counter propaganda in the Why We Fight Series. The problem was that Capra ended up repeating the “sauerkraut-is-liberty-cabbage” mistake. He taught Americans to hate all things German rather than just Nazism, despite a quarter of American troops and officers in World War II (Eisenhower [DDay], Nimitz [Midway], Eichelberger [New Guinea], Spaatz [Bomber Command-England], and Wedemeyer [General Staff]) being of German descent.

Kim Dog Un: As for the Japanese Empire, no problem. White Americans already were racist towards Asian peoples. Trump and his alleged “freedom fighters” still are.

Mr. Swamp Fox: Failure to distinguish between Nazism in World War II, as well as the Kaiser’s Imperialism in World War I, and the German heritage of so many Americans, blinded you to the inherent Nazism of lynching black folks, Christianity’s Racism (Anti-Semitism) against Jews, race hatred against all peoples of color, and contempt for women.

Omar Khayyam: Nazi, Taliban, or similar mutations of the intolerance virus have been around much longer than Covid-19. Trump merely exploits them for his own sick power trips, along with a few permanent, willing executioners like Stephen Miller, and other part time schemers and mismanagers. Trump and Miller can dehumanize and kill off the powerless in private (lucrative) prisons and (lucrative) immigrant concentration camps, but they cannot intimidate a former federal prosecutor of Crime Boss John Gotti, about to weigh in on their efforts to free Mike Flynn. With AG Barr blinking over bogus charges against Trump’s predecessor, the White House backwards parade to medieval savagery and lawlessness, has been temporarily halted.

Schickelgruber: The Nazi horror wasn’t just application of technology to genocide, but its clear rejection of humanism and humanitarianism that separated the savage Europe of 16th Century religious wars and 17th Century slave trading and the 20th Century Europe built upon the 18th Century Enlightenment and the 19th Century Industrial Revolution. Angela Merkel’s Germans represent the better angels in human nature, the way that many of their 1930s forbearers did not.

HPR: And Donald Trump’s amoral, AR-15, paranoid, Americans?

Rasputin: The world pities America today; less for Trump’s inept Federal response to Covid- 19, than because you have fallen away from ideals of freedom and equality that the world respected you for, even more than for your military might. The nastier truth is that the same 1% that desperately supports Donald Trump today in their fear that “times they are a-changin,” also stood in the way of those ideals of freedom back then, but at least you had tried. Now you let Trump and his propagandists pump up numerous idiots to politicize a Covid-19 mask. Pathetic!

Ms. RRLD: Trump’s and McConnell’s cramped vision of America has not yet prevailed, but struggle is on in earnest, as Trump’s elderly supporters are dropping like flies to an enemy that has no color or gender, while many others desert him as the enemy of their health and welfare.

Putin: Conservative judges actually conserving rule of law are joined by a host of federal, state, and local law enforcement officials; worried about their families and friends, as well as their duty to “preserve and protect.” Lawlessness of law enforcement in Georgia might be more rare than it was the rule 100 years ago, but it is a reminder of how quickly this country could slip back if you don’t cut off the effectiveness of Trump’s “dog” whistles of hatred from the White House.

HPR: But this is 2020! We are supposed to be more civilized, and yet a woman is killed by local police in Georgia for “sleeping while black.” A young man down there is also gunned down by some stump jumping, KKK wannabes for “jogging while black.” And neo-Nazis with Trump banners are camped out with their AR-15s at the Michigan State Capitol!

Schickelgruber: Michigan’s gutsy Governor, Gretchen Whitmer, has the overwhelming support of her people, unlike Bavarian State Police of 1923 firing into the ranks of Hitler and his Storm Troopers. A single masked nurse, with “I stand with Whitmer” written on her arm, put the lie to a Reality TV, “very fine people,” Trump/Confederacy/Nazi “menace” in Lansing, MI. Besides, it was white privilege that protected these phony “freedom fighters” from being gunned down, not their armament. Murdered, unarmed black folks still require the steady, heroic, stoic activism of Georgia’s Stacy Abrams (Fair Fight), New York’s Reverend Al Sharpton, and their white allies, like Democratic Presidential nominee, former Obama Vice President Joe Biden, who will, if the rest of us show half as much courage, take out these morons with ballots instead of bullets.

Chicago Dog: Things were worse in Chicago on December 4, 1969. Two men were killed in cold blood by Cook County States Attorney Ed Hanrahan’s police for the “crime” of “sleeping while Black Panthers.” A local version of FOX news, WGN news, filmed “many bullet holes” exiting the doorframe entered by Fast Eddie’s “search and destroy” team. This fiction was demolished by NBCTV reporter Len O’Connor, who filmed the actual nail holes outside the West Side apartment that had been reported as bullet holes. States Attorney Hanrahan didn’t indict himself, of course, but was, instead, turned out of office in 1972 by angry black, white progressive and moderate voters, a coalition leading to victories of Chicago’s first black Mayor, Harold Washington, in 1983 and 1987, and the successful candidacy of President Barack Obama.

Ms. RRLD: The spiritual, intellectual, and organizing enema required to exorcize bigotry and oppression in Chicago of yore is being prepared by Recovering Republicans, the Lincoln Project, to hit Trump where it hurts the most, with TV ads that destroy his image with his own base.

Schickelgruber: One of our members doubles as a pet for one of the Lincoln Project members in D.C. While accompanying his “master,” shortly after Trump gave that whiny interview with the Lincoln Memorial as a stage prop, complaining he had been treated worse than our country’s greatest President, they managed to bury this sonnet there, where one of us could find it:

Lock Up Ignorance; Not People!

Mismanagement is such a special skill;
That only fools like Trump can bring to
bear Upon our body politic; to wear Us
out, and break our country’s sagging will.

That’s only if we let Trump do it though; As
he begins to wreck his own, sad base Of
haters; Cynics t’wards the human race. Let’s
end Trump’s mess to let our freedom grow!

The Democrats have plans, a man and more; Recovering Republicans, who know Just how to hurt
Trump; make him feel the pain Above the neck; his addled brain made sore By truth exposing lies he
sought to sow. Make sanity and science great again! - Chicago Dog