A Last
Chance for Resistance
Monday, March 20, 2017
President Trump exits Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base on
Sunday, following a weekend trip to Florida. (Photo: Jose Luis Magana / AP)
The crawl toward despotism within a failed democracy is always
incremental. No regime planning to utterly extinguish civil liberties
advertises its intentions in advance. It pays lip service to liberty and
justice while obliterating the institutions and laws that make them possible.
Its opponents, including those within the establishment, make sporadic attempts
to resist, but week by week, month by month, the despot and his reactionary
allies methodically consolidate power. Those inside the machinery of government
and the courts who assert the rule of law are purged. Critics, including the
press, are attacked, ridiculed and silenced. The state is reconfigured until
the edifice of tyranny is unassailable.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn in “The Gulag
Archipelago” noted that the consolidation of Soviet tyranny “was stretched out
over many years because it was of primary importance that it be stealthy and
unnoticed.” He called the process “a grandiose silent game of solitaire, whose
rules were totally incomprehensible to its contemporaries, and whose outlines
we can appreciate only now.”
Czeslaw Milosz in “The Captive Mind” also
chronicles the incremental expansion of tyranny, noting that it steadily
progresses until intellectuals are not only forced to repeat the regime’s
self-praising slogans but to advance its absurdist dogmas. Few ever see the
tyranny coming. Those who do and speak out are treated by the authorities, and
often the wider society, as alarmists or traitors.
The current administration’s budget proposes to give the war industry,
the domestic policing agencies, the fossil fuel industry, Wall Street,
billionaires and the national security and surveillance agencies more than they
could have imagined possible before the election. These forces, as in all
fascist states, will be the pillars of the Trump regime. They will tolerate
Donald Trump’s idiocy, ineptitude and unbridled narcissism in exchange for
increased profits and power. Despots are often buffoons. Appealing to their
vanity and ego is an effective form of manipulation. Skilled sycophants can
play despots like musical instruments for personal advancement.
Trump, like all despots, has no real ideology. His crusade against Wall Street,
including Goldman Sachs, and the billionaire class during the presidential
election campaign vanished the moment he took office. He has appointed five former Goldman
Sachs employees to high posts in his administration. His budget will bleed the
poor, the working class and the middle class and swell the bank accounts of the
oligarchs. He is calling for abolishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and
the National Endowment for the Arts and the
cutting of programs that provide legal service to low-income people and grants
to libraries and museums. If Trump’s budget is approved by Congress, there will
not even be a pretense of civil society. Trump and his family will profit from
his presidency. Corporations will profit from his presidency. Wall Street will
profit from his presidency. And the people will be made to pay.
Despots demand absolute loyalty. This is why they place family
members in the inner circles. The Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, whose
vanity rivaled that of Trump, and Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein filled their
governments with their children, siblings, nephews, nieces and in-laws and
rounded out their inner courts with racists, opportunists and thugs of the kind
that now populate the White House.
“President Trump’s point man on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations
is a longtime Trump Organization lawyer with no government or diplomatic
experience,” reads the opening paragraph of a New York Times article headlined
“Prerequisite for Key White House Posts: Loyalty, Not Experience.” “His liaison
to African-American leaders is a former reality-TV villain with a penchant for
résumé inflation. And his Oval Office gatekeeper is a bullet-headed former New York City cop best known for
smacking a protester on the head.”
Despots distrust diplomats. Diplomats, often multilingual and
conversant with other cultures and societies, deal in nuances and ambiguities
that are beyond the grasp of the despot. Diplomats understand that other
nations have legitimate national interests that inevitably clash with the
interests of one’s own country. They do not embrace force as the primary
language of communication. They are trained to carry out negotiations, even
with the enemy, and engage in compromise. Despots, however, live in a binary
universe of their own creation. They rapidly dismantle the diplomatic corps
when they take power for the same reason they attack intellectuals and artists.
Trump’s proposed cut of nearly 29 percent to the State Department’s budget, potentially
eliminating thousands of jobs, is part of the shift away from diplomacy to an
exclusive reliance on violence or the threat of violence. The militarization of
the diplomatic corps, with the Central Intelligence Agency and military
intelligence operatives often taking over embassies, especially in conflict
zones, began long before Trump took office. But Trump will deal the coup de
grâce to the diplomatic corps. Despots replace diplomats with sycophants with
no diplomatic experience, such as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who promise
to impose the despot’s will on the rest of the world.
The dismantling of a diplomatic corps has dangerous
consequences. It leaves a country blind and prone to wars and conflicts that
could be avoided. Leon Trotsky called Josef Stalin’s
foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, who negotiated the disastrous 1939
Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact that left the Soviet Union unprepared for German
invasion, “mediocrity personified.” The other signatory of the pact, Joachim
von Ribbentrop, was a former champagne salesman. Ribbentrop, as Molotov did
with Stalin, parroted back to Adolf Hitler the leader’s conspiratorial
worldview. Ribbentrop, again like Molotov with Stalin, knew that Hitler always
favored the most extreme option. Molotov and Ribbentrop unfailingly advocated
radical and violent solutions to any problem, endearing themselves to their
bosses as men of unflinching resolve. This is what makes Steve Bannon so
appealing to Trump—he will always call for Armageddon.
There are three institutions tasked in a functioning democracy
with protecting the truth and keeping national discourse rooted in verifiable
fact—the courts, the press and universities. Despots must control these three
to prevent them from exposing their lies and restricting their power. Trump has
not only attacked the courts but has also begun purges of the judiciary with
his mass firing of U.S. attorneys. The Trump White
House plans to fill 124 judgeships—including 19 vacancies on federal appeals
courts—with corporatist lawyers such as Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch who
are endorsed by the reactionary Federalist Society.
By the time Trump’s four-year term is up, Federalist Society judges could be in
as many as half of the country’s appellate seats.
Trump has continued to attempt to discredit the press. During
his rally in Nashville, Tenn., on Wednesday, he told the crowd, “Some of the
fake news said I don’t think Donald Trump wants to build the wall. Can you
imagine if I said we’re not going to build a wall? Fake news. Fake, fake news.
Fake news, folks. A lot of fake.” He went on to say in an apparent reference to
the reporters covering the rally, “They’re bad people.”
The attacks on universities, which will be accelerated, are on
display in the budget proposal. The Department of Health and Human Services,
the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Department of Education, the
Commerce Department, the National Institutes of Health, the Energy Department
and the Department of Veterans Affairs all give grants and research money to
universities. Colorado State University, for example, gets about 70 percent, or
$232 million, of its research budget from federal sources. In February, Trump
suggested he might attempt to cut federal funding for universities such as UC
Berkeley. His comment was made after a riot at the California school forced the
cancellation of a speech there by the far-right ideologue Milo Yiannopoulos,
who has called Trump “Daddy.” A university
will of course be able to get corporate funding for research if it casts doubt
on the importance of climate change or does research that can be used to swell
corporate profits or promote other business interests. Scientific study into
our ecocide and the dangers from chemicals, toxins and pollutants released by
corporations into the atmosphere will be thwarted. And the withering of
humanities programs, already suffering in many universities, will worsen.
It will be increasingly difficult to carry out mass protests and
civil disobedience. Repression will become steadily more overt and severe.
Dissent will be equated with terrorism. We must use the space before it is
shut. This is a race against time. The forces of despotism seek to keep us
complacent and pacified with the false hope that mechanisms within the system
will moderate Trump or remove him through impeachment, or that the looming
tyranny will never be actualized. There is an emotional incapacity among any
population being herded toward despotism or war to grasp what is happening. The
victims cannot believe that the descent into barbarity is real, that the
relative security and sanity of the past are about to be obliterated. They fail
to see that once rights become privileges, once any segment of a society is
excluded from the law, rights can instantly be revoked for everyone.
There is a hierarchy to oppression. It begins with the most
vulnerable—undocumented workers, Muslims, poor people of color. It works
upward. It is a long row of candles that one by one are extinguished. If we
wait to resist, as the poet C.P. Cavafy wrote, the “dark line gets longer” and
“the snuffed-out candles proliferate.”
© 2017 TruthDig
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to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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