#oppressive kleptocrats

[faultfalha]

The wise man knows that knowledge is power, and through knowledge one can achieve things that some might deem impossible. Eric Adams is a man of great ambition, determined to unlock the hidden secrets to gaining financial freedom. His approach is novel and his cause is noble, but only time will tell if his path leads to success. With his ideas, he stirs up both hope and concern amongst his peers. He has been seen as both a leader and a threat, but one thing is clear - he is transforming the game, and no one knows what the outcome will be.

[mariacallous]

In February 1994, in the grand ballroom of the town hall in Hamburg, Germany, the president of Estonia gave a remarkable speech. Standing before an audience in evening dress, Lennart Meri praised the values of the democratic world that Estonia then aspired to join. “The freedom of every individual, the freedom of the economy and trade, as well as the freedom of the mind, of culture and science, are inseparably interconnected,” he told the burghers of Hamburg. “They form the prerequisite of a viable democracy.” His country, having regained its independence from the Soviet Union three years earlier, believed in these values: “The Estonian people never abandoned their faith in this freedom during the decades of totalitarian oppression.”

But Meri had also come to deliver a warning: Freedom in Estonia, and in Europe, could soon be under threat. Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the circles around him were returning to the language of imperialism, speaking of Russia as primus inter pares—the first among equals—in the former Soviet empire. In 1994, Moscow was already seething with the language of resentment, aggression, and imperial nostalgia; the Russian state was developing an illiberal vision of the world, and even then was preparing to enforce it. Meri called on the democratic world to push back: The West should “make it emphatically clear to the Russian leadership that another imperialist expansion will not stand a chance.”

At that, the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin, got up and walked out of the hall.

Meri’s fears were at that time shared in all of the formerly captive nations of Central and Eastern Europe, and they were strong enough to persuade governments in Estonia, Poland, and elsewhere to campaign for admission to NATO. They succeeded because nobody in Washington, London, or Berlin believed that the new members mattered. The Soviet Union was gone, the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg was not an important person, and Estonia would never need to be defended. That was why neither Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush made much attempt to arm or reinforce the new NATO members. Only in 2014 did the Obama administration finally place a small number of American troops in the region, largely in an effort to reassure allies after the first Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Nobody else anywhere in the Western world felt any threat at all. For 30 years, Western oil and gas companies piled into Russia, partnering with Russian oligarchs who had openly stolen the assets they controlled. Western financial institutions did lucrative business in Russia too, setting up systems to allow those same Russian kleptocrats to export their stolen money and keep it parked, anonymously, in Western property and banks. We convinced ourselves that there was no harm in enriching dictators and their cronies. Trade, we imagined, would transform our trading partners. Wealth would bring liberalism. Capitalism would bring democracy—and democracy would bring peace.

After all, it had happened before. Following the cataclysm of 1939–45, Europeans had indeed collectively abandoned wars of imperial, territorial conquest. They stopped dreaming of eliminating one another. Instead, the continent that had been the source of the two worst wars the world had ever known created the European Union, an organization designed to find negotiated solutions to conflicts and promote cooperation, commerce, and trade. Because of Europe’s metamorphosis—and especially because of the extraordinary transformation of Germany from a Nazi dictatorship into the engine of the continent’s integration and prosperity—Europeans and Americans alike believed that they had created a set of rules that would preserve peace not only on their own continents, but eventually in the whole world.

This liberal world order relied on the mantra of “Never again.” Never again would there be genocide. Never again would large nations erase smaller nations from the map. Never again would we be taken in by dictators who used the language of mass murder. At least in Europe, we would know how to react when we heard it.

But while we were happily living under the illusion that “Never again” meant something real, the leaders of Russia, owners of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, were reconstructing an army and a propaganda machine designed to facilitate mass murder, as well as a mafia state controlled by a tiny number of men and bearing no resemblance to Western capitalism. For a long time—too long—the custodians of the liberal world order refused to understand these changes. They looked away when Russia “pacified” Chechnya by murdering tens of thousands of people. When Russia bombed schools and hospitals in Syria, Western leaders decided that that wasn’t their problem. When Russia invaded Ukraine the first time, they found reasons not to worry. Surely Putin would be satisfied by the annexation of Crimea. When Russia invaded Ukraine the second time, occupying part of the Donbas, they were sure he would be sensible enough to stop.

Even when the Russians, having grown rich on the kleptocracy we facilitated, bought Western politicians, funded far-right extremist movements, and ran disinformation campaigns during American and European democratic elections, the leaders of America and Europe still refused to take them seriously. It was just some posts on Facebook; so what? We didn’t believe that we were at war with Russia. We believed, instead, that we were safe and free, protected by treaties, by border guarantees, and by the norms and rules of the liberal world order.

With the third, more brutal invasion of Ukraine, the vacuity of those beliefs was revealed. The Russian president openly denied the existence of a legitimate Ukrainian state: “Russians and Ukrainians,” he said, “were one people—a single whole.” His army targeted civilians, hospitals, and schools. His policies aimed to create refugees so as to destabilize Western Europe. “Never again” was exposed as an empty slogan while a genocidal plan took shape in front of our eyes, right along the European Union’s eastern border. Other autocracies watched to see what we would do about it, for Russia is not the only nation in the world that covets its neighbors’ territory, that seeks to destroy entire populations, that has no qualms about the use of mass violence. North Korea can attack South Korea at any time, and has nuclear weapons that can hit Japan. China seeks to eliminate the Uyghurs as a distinct ethnic group, and has imperial designs on Taiwan.

We can’t turn the clock back to 1994, to see what would have happened had we heeded Lennart Meri’s warning. But we can face the future with honesty. We can name the challenges and prepare to meet them.

There is no natural liberal world order, and there are no rules without someone to enforce them. Unless democracies defend themselves together, the forces of autocracy will destroy them. I am using the word forces, in the plural, deliberately. Many American politicians would understandably prefer to focus on the long-term competition with China. But as long as Russia is ruled by Putin, then Russia is at war with us too. So are Belarus, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, Hungary, and potentially many others. We might not want to compete with them, or even care very much about them. But they care about us. They understand that the language of democracy, anti-corruption, and justice is dangerous to their form of autocratic power—and they know that that language originates in the democratic world, our world.

This fight is not theoretical. It requires armies, strategies, weapons, and long-term plans. It requires much closer allied cooperation, not only in Europe but in the Pacific, Africa, and Latin America. NATO can no longer operate as if it might someday be required to defend itself; it needs to start operating as it did during the Cold War, on the assumption that an invasion could happen at any time. Germany’s decision to raise defense spending by 100 billion euros is a good start; so is Denmark’s declaration that it too will boost defense spending. But deeper military and intelligence coordination might require new institutions—perhaps a voluntary European Legion, connected to the European Union, or a Baltic alliance that includes Sweden and Finland—and different thinking about where and how we invest in European and Pacific defense.

If we don’t have any means to deliver our messages to the autocratic world, then no one will hear them. Much as we assembled the Department of Homeland Security out of disparate agencies after 9/11, we now need to pull together the disparate parts of the U.S. government that think about communication, not to do propaganda but to reach more people around the world with better information and to stop autocracies from distorting that knowledge. Why haven’t we built a Russian-language television station to compete with Putin’s propaganda? Why can’t we produce more programming in Mandarin—or Uyghur? Our foreign-language broadcasters—Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio Martí in Cuba—need not only money for programming but a major investment in research. We know very little about Russian audiences—what they read, what they might be eager to learn.

Funding for education and culture needs rethinking too. Shouldn’t there be a Russian-language university, in Vilnius or Warsaw, to house all the intellectuals and thinkers who have just left Moscow? Don’t we need to spend more on education in Arabic, Hindi, Persian? So much of what passes for cultural diplomacy runs on autopilot. Programs should be recast for a different era, one in which, though the world is more knowable than ever before, dictatorships seek to hide that knowledge from their citizens.

Trading with autocrats promotes autocracy, not democracy. Congress has made some progress in recent months in the fight against global kleptocracy, and the Biden administration was right to put the fight against corruption at the heart of its political strategy. But we can go much further, because there is no reason for any company, property, or trust ever to be held anonymously. Every U.S. state, and every democratic country, should immediately make all ownership transparent. Tax havens should be illegal. The only people who need to keep their houses, businesses, and income secret are crooks and tax cheats.

We need a dramatic and profound shift in our energy consumption, and not only because of climate change. The billions of dollars we have sent to Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia have promoted some of the worst and most corrupt dictators in the world. The transition from oil and gas to other energy sources needs to happen with far greater speed and decisiveness. Every dollar spent on Russian oil helps fund the artillery that fires on Ukrainian civilians.

Take democracy seriously. Teach it, debate it, improve it, defend it. Maybe there is no natural liberal world order, but there are liberal societies, open and free countries that offer a better chance for people to live useful lives than closed dictatorships do. They are hardly perfect; our own has deep flaws, profound divisions, terrible historical scars. But that’s all the more reason to defend and protect them. Few of them have existed across human history; many have existed for a time and then failed. They can be destroyed from the outside, but from the inside, too, by divisions and demagogues.

Perhaps, in the aftermath of this crisis, we can learn something from the Ukrainians. For decades now, we’ve been fighting a culture war between liberal values on the one hand and muscular forms of patriotism on the other. The Ukrainians are showing us a way to have both. As soon as the attacks began, they overcame their many political divisions, which are no less bitter than ours, and they picked up weapons to fight for their sovereignty and their democracy. They demonstrated that it is possible to be a patriot and a believer in an open society, that a democracy can be stronger and fiercer than its opponents. Precisely because there is no liberal world order, no norms and no rules, we must fight ferociously for the values and the hopes of liberalism if we want our open societies to continue to exist.

[maximumphilosopheranchor]

"In the 2010s, Ilyin’s ideas served post-Soviet billionaires, and post-Soviet billionaires served them. Putin and his friends and allies accumulated vast wealth beyond the law, and then remade the state to preserve their own gains. Having achieved this, Russian leaders had to define politics as being rather than doing. An ideology such as Ilyin’s purports to explain why certain men have wealth and power in terms other than greed and ambition. What robber would not prefer to be called a redeemer?

To men raised in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, Ilyin’s ideas were comfortable for a second reason. To the Russian kleptocrats of that generation, the men in power in the 2010s, his entire style of thinking was familiar. Although Ilyin opposed Soviet power, the shape of his argument was eerily similar to that of the Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism in which all Soviet citizens were educated. Although Russian kleptocrats are by no means philosophers, the instruction of their youth led them surprisingly close to the justifications they would need in their maturity. Ilyin and the Marxism he opposed shared a philosophical origin and language: that of Hegelianism.

G. W. F. Hegel’s ambition was to resolve the difference between what is and what should be. His claim was that something called Spirit, a unity of all thoughts and minds, was emerging over time, through the conflicts that defined epochs. Hegel’s was an appealing way of seeing our fractious world, since it suggested that catastrophe was an indication of progress. History was a “slaughter bench”, but the bloodshed had a purpose. This idea allowed philosophers to pose as prophets, seers of hidden patterns that would resolve themselves into a better world, judges of who had to suffer now so that all would benefit later. If Spirit was the only good, than any means that History chose for its realization was also good.

Karl Marx was critical of Hegel’s idea of Spirit. He and other Left Hegelians claimed that Hegel had smuggled God into his system under the heading of Spirit. The absolute good, suggested Marx, was not God but humanity’s lost essence. History was a struggle, but its sense was man’s overcoming of circumstance to regain his own nature. The emergence of technology, argued Marx, allowed some men to dominate others, forming social classes. Under capitalism, the bourgeoisie controlled the means of production, oppressing the mass of workers. This very oppression instructed workers about the character of history and made them revolutionaries. The proletariat would overthrow the bourgeoisie, seize the means of production, and thereby restore man to himself. Once there was no property, thought Marx, human beings would live in happy cooperation.

Ilyin was a Right Hegelian. In a typically sharp phrase, he wrote that Marx never got out of the “waiting room” of Hegelian philosophy. Ilyin nevertheless agreed that by “Spirit” Hegel meant God. Like Marx, Ilyin thought that history had begun with an original sin that doomed humanity to suffering. It was perpetrated not by man upon man through property, as the Marxists thought, but by God upon man through the creation of the world. Rather than killing God, as the Left Hegelians had done, Ilyin left him wounded and lonely. Life was poor and chaotic, as the Marxists thought, but not because of technology and class conflict. People suffered because God’s creation was irresolvably conflictual. Facts and passions could not be aligned through revolution, only through redemption. The only totality was God’s, which a chosen nation would restore thanks to a miracle performed by a redeemer.

Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) was the most important Marxist, since he led a revolution in the name of philosophy. As an activist of a small and illegal party in the Russian Empire, Lenin believed that a disciplined elite had the right to push history forward. If the only good in the world was the restoration of man to his essence, then it was reasonable for those who understood the process to hasten it. This reasoning enabled the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The Soviet Union was ruled by a small group of people who claimed legitimacy from this specific politics of inevitability. Lenin and Ilyin did not know each other, but were uncannily close: Lenin’s patronymic was “Ilyich” and he used “Ilyin” as a pen name; the real Ilyin read and reviewed some of that work. When Ilyin was arrested by the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, Lenin intervened on his behalf in order to express his admiration of Ilyin’s philosophy.

Ilyin despised Lenin’s revolution, but endorsed its violence and its voluntarism. Like Lenin, he thought that Russia needed a philosophical elite (himself) to define ends and means. Like the Marxist socialist utopia, Ilyin’s “divine totality” required violent revolution – or rather violent counterrevolution. Other Russian philosophers saw the resemblance. Nikolai Berdyaev found in Ilyin’s work “the nightmare of evil good”. Reviewing a book that Ilyin published in 1925, Berdyaev wrote that “a Cheka in the name of God is more horrifying than a Cheka in the name of the devil”. His judgment was prophetic: “The Bolsheviks would have no fundamental problem accepting Ivan Ilyin’s book. They consider themselves the bearers of absolute good and oppose those whom they regard as evil with force.”

As Ilyin aged in Germany and Switzerland, his positions tracked those of Lenin’s successors. After Lenin died in 1924, Joseph Stalin consolidated power. Ilyin shared Stalinist judgments about the contagious perversity of Western culture down to the smallest detail. He believed, for instance, that jazz was a deliberate plot to reduce European listeners to mindless dancers incapable of normal sexual intercourse. The communist party newspaper Pravda offered a strikingly similar description of the experience of listening to African American music: “some centaur must be conducting with his gigantic phallus.” Though Ilyin wrote books chronicling terror under Stalin, his attitude to the law was essentially similar to that of its perpetrators. Andrei Vyshynskii, the notorious prosecutor at the show trials, believed that “formal law is subordinate to the law of the revolution.” This was precisely Ilyin’s attitude to his planned counterrevolution."

Timothy Snyder, The Road To Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

[agape-philo-sophia]

Self-serving leaders throughout the world increasingly assume power with the goal of becoming rich at the expense of the majority of their population, and of the commonweal.

Dictators and oligarchs, presidents and prime ministers, bankers and corporate CEOs, intellectuals and technocrats, and assorted enablers and sycophants, are stealing their nations’ wealth, and laughing all the way to their off-shore tax havens.

The endgame of this plunder will be obscene riches for the plutocratic minority and immiseration and oppression of the majority.

Now more than ever, it is critical to understand the nature of the global neoliberal economic system and the kleptocrats who thrive on it, and to give serious thought to survival options in a world increasingly controlled by and run for the benefit of thieves.

Over the millennia, as communities began to organize into societies and ultimately into nations, elites occupied positions of power. Today, economic globalization and advances in transportation and communication permit an exclusive club of plutocrats to rule the earth. They have developed global networks and institutions that allow them to control the wealth and resources of their nations, for their own benefit. This revolutionary change represents a new historical paradigm – a global corporate and financial super-elite, transcending nations and governments, whose allegiance is only to themselves and to the members of their wealthy class. These are the kleptocrats who rule the world.

“The Global Mafiocracy: the banks, corporations, asset management firms, sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies and holding companies that collectively own each other and the wider network of global corporate and financial institutions, manifesting as a relatively small cartel of roughly 150 large financial institutions that wield unparalleled financial power in the modern world. Behind the major corporate and financial institutions are individuals and families, smaller units of concentrated power who own the largest shares and steer the operations of the global cartel. These individual oligarchs and family dynasties – from the Rockefellers in the US, to the Wallenbergs in Sweden, Agnellis in Italy, Desmarais’ in Canada, to the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia, Oppenheimer in South Africa, among others – control and/or influence large percentages of wealth within their respective nations and in the world of globalized financial and corporate networks.” — Andrew Gavin Marshall

“Big government is the necessary ally of monopoly, and world government is the goal of the cartelists who are the quiet, seemingly philanthropic sponsors of the U.N…Everything the cartels and multi-national companies do is in furtherance of one or both of their two objectives: the creation of greater wealth for those who control them; and the coalescing of political power into a true world government – with themselves in control from behind the scenes.” — G. Edward Griffin

https://thegreatwork208716197.wordpress.com/2023/04/28/6121/ 👉 https://t.me/break_the_spell_group

[bicolchillingchili]

STATE OF UNMASKED PARANOIA Part 3

STATE OF UNMASKED PARANOIA Part 3

Photos taken from the blogger’s portfolio, The Streets of Mania, in this same blog site. THE PLOT – (Continuation of the two previous episodes of this personal and experimental narrative in the realm of investigative fiction.) Despite seemingly indestructible alliance, a few among the upright elected lawmakers continue to resist and pursue relentless fights for the basic rights of the citizens.…

[whentheynameyoujoy]

Y’know what, fuck it, I’m angry, let’s talk about this.

I’ve been and remain of the firm opinion that anyone who’s not a Ukrainian yet expresses indignation at Russians for not going out en masse to protest the war is at best an uninformed idiot and at worst a larper with an over-inflated stock of their own willingness to stick by their stated values when facing the barrel of a gun. And I stand by that—the average Western and CEE experience with opposing their government is laughable compared to what a Russian faces. Sure, I like to soothe my ego by thinking that I’d be able to stand up to a Russia-level of suppression if the situation called for it but the honest truth is I have serious doubts. I’ve lived a life of relative comfort in a free democracy (flawed, but still), and the idea of having a government known to disappear and torture and murder its own citizens is so alien to me as to be unfathomable. In my heart of hearts, I know there’s an extremely real possibility that if you transplanted me to the modern-day Russia I’d turn out to be a coward.

But motherfucker…

If you didn’t know and thought the list of Russian atrocities needed beefing up, Russian soldiers are now opening fire at protesters in the occupied parts of Ukraine. And disgustingly, what I’ve seen pop up more and more is people targeting Ukrainians with the condescending “Ha, so now you know what Russians protesters deal with? Isn’t this a bit of a revelation for you? Don’t you feel silly for wanting Russians to stand up to their government? Are you ready to grow up now that Russian soldiers showed you how the real world works?”

To which I have only one thing to say.

Get fucking bent you revolting fucking cunts.

Equating Russian and Ukrainian civilians as though they’re both equally affected by the war has been an unfortunate trend since the war started but this is just fucking inexcusable. And what do you know, it’s fully in the line with the tendency of viewing Ukraine as a helpless pawn without any agency, as a toy of empires that never does anything on its own besides twiddling its thumbs. As though Ukrainians were handed their country on a silver platter, as though they couldn’t possibly know the risks of going up against an authoritarian government, as though their only experience with resisting tyranny is waving a banner for twenty minutes and then going to a McDonalds, risking no consequences whatsoever.

As though risking your life for freedom is a concept they haven’t encountered up until now.

Guess this shit doesn’t exist unless it can be called a CIA coup.

And this infantilisation and denial of agency, of actual accomplishment goes for Eastern Europe as a whole, btw, something I see people getting very confused about. So to relieve you of that confusion, let me make this very simple.

Soviet Union was a colonial empire run for the primary benefit of Russia, consisting of violently suppressed republics and violently maintained vassal states—who took every opportunity, time and time again, to wrest themselves free, paying for it with blood and further oppression until they finally succeeded. And yeah, you’re absolutely right—if I now go oppose the bunch of kleptocratic conservatards that make up my government, it’s extremely unlikely I’ll face any consequences for it. But that’s not because my country was somehow coincidently handed democracy as some kind of a new imperialistic exercise of the benevolent West. It’s because the generation of my parents and grandparents wanted freedom and democracy, took substantial risks to overthrow the totalitarian government, built the institutions safeguarding the democratic order, and then every single generation after that gave enough of a fuck to make sure that “I can’t go protest, I might get beaten or killed” wouldn’t be a valid concern again.

No matter how flawed, Eastern European democracies are democracies because the people there did the work to build and protect those democracies.

Meanwhile, post-Soviet Russia faced the usual problem a broken empire faces, that of what it is after the countries it exploited and suppressed in order to prop itself up gave it the finger. Russian Federation was created because the USSR outstretched itself too much to keep control over its subjects, not because ordinary Russians staged a massive popular uprising demanding a different political arrangement—unlike Eastern European countries. Russia wasn’t interested in democracy, it didn’t choose democracy, it didn’t protect democracy, and so now Russians find themselves dealing with the slight issue of having no democratic institutions to fall on during the country’s breakneck run towards fascism.

The Poles weren’t handed shit. The Estonians weren’t handed shit. The Ukrainians sure as fuck aren’t being handed shit. And I’d really fucking appreciate it people stopped turning a very simple acknowledgement of the realities facing ordinary people in current Russia into this woobification where the only thing that differentiates Russia from Eastern Europe is a stroke of luck poor Russians weren’t fortunate enough to be blessed with.

Eastern Europe and Russia are not the fucking same. Pretending like they are erases the entire history of the Eastern European struggle for freedom and plays directly into the imperialistic line of thinking both Russia and the West are so fond of. Stahp

[rametarin]

I do not hold Russians responsible.

What’s happening in Ukraine is not the fault of Russian people, nor even really the society. It’s a matter of the oligarchs and the mad men with brutal dictatorial powers that through a kleptocracy have terrorized and oppressed the Russians, in one form or another, since.. just about inception.

I hold Putin and the Russian mafia responsible for the current mess in Russia. Merging the state with the criminal network. The kleptocrats use the people like human shields and meat for the grinder, and what else can they do?

Fuck Putin. And fuck the Russian mafia. Loyalist citizens may keep them in power, but it’s all they know. And given the absolutely brutally repressive history there, it’s as much survival as anything else.

One only needs to look at how Putin is playing war like it’s Baby’s First Game of Command&Conquer, Red Alert, to see the only thing missing from the situation with Stalin’s last days is a stroke. He’s trying to play war as if it’s 1980 again.

With absolutely disastrous results. Just, hilarious mismatching. 1980s armor and planes are flying into a blender made of javelins, manpads and whatever the name of that British rocket launcher whose name I forget. By my estimations, Ukraine would need less than 150,000 individual rockets to eliminate the entire Russian military’s vehicles, from helicopters, to planes, to tanks and armored personnel carriers. And if it came to that, they’d get them.

Putin is trying to fight a 1980s war against 2020 intelligence and arms and it just isn’t fucking working. And then we have THIS fucking guy over here swooping in like something out of a Police Academy Goes to the Soviet Union movie.

This stupid bootleg Dr. Phil motherfucker, this Slav flavored Kim Jong Un, posted the whole god damned invasion plan map right up there to his horrified cabinet. Basically snitching on himself and Putin and telling us everything we suspected from the getgo. That this isn’t going to stop with Ukraine.

They had plans up there for Moldova, surprising no one, and a hint that the separatists in that.. tri.. something region would also make a move.

Every single move Putin could take or will take has been accounted for and countered with counter-offensive that cannot be matched with what today’s Russian military currently has. And their ability to manufacture more has been frozen. The only move Putin can make now is A.) continue to futily try and march against Ukraine, knowing full well his supply lines are fucked and he’ll just deplete his country’s armed defense B.) Surrender and leave, save face, capitulate and face consequences C.) Go nuclear.

None of these options in any way are affected by what the Russians themselves think or desire. Putin’s regime is an illegitimate cancer and modern Russia cannot be blamed for it. The only question is if Putin will doubledown or try to maintain his rule and command structure, after this. But we need to remember this whole stupid bit of theater was the work of wealthy madmen, not a nation.

[whileiamdying]

“A Man of Integrity,” Reviewed: A Dire Diagnosis for Iranian Society

Mohammad Rasoulof finds a furious style for his bravely confrontational drama of pervasive corruption.

By Richard Brody June 14, 2022

Reza Akhlaghirad in a scene from “A Man of Integrity,” directed by Mohammad Rasoulof.Photograph from Lifestyle Pictures / Alamy 

In the middle of the Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s drama “A Man of Integrity” (completed in 2017, opening here this Friday), the title character meets a friend in Tehran, a woman whose work as a translator faces severe government restrictions. Her husband, a teacher and writer, is a political prisoner who’s at risk of a six-year sentence for his writings. The couple is oppressed in ways that evoke Rasoulof’s situation: since 2010, he has repeatedly been arrested, and endures the ongoing threat of prison sentences for his work and an official ban on making films. Denunciation of an oppressive regime is a virtue but not an intrinsically artistic one; Rasoulof creates a form—nearly an anti-style—of stark confrontation that gives an aesthetic identity to his righteous and dangerous candor.

Rasoulof’s 2020 film “There Is No Evil” exposed the horror of capital punishment in Iran as a moral crisis at the personal level. “A Man of Integrity” is a drama of kleptocratic corruption, and it depicts Iran as a virtual gangster state in which the impunity that starts at the top pervades the entire establishment of business, religion, and government. This corruption damages personal relationships and distorts the world view and the inner identities of the country’s citizens. The palm grease and petty trafficking of daily life in Iran is thrust into the foreground, as if in an X-ray of the innards of society—a cold, curt, and clinical manner in which Rasoulof contains and conveys his rage.

This protagonist, Reza (Reza Akhlaghirad), is about thirty. He had been expelled from college, then imprisoned for a comedically minor and private workplace protest; then he fled to a small town, where he now owns a fish farm. His wife, Hadis (Soudabeh Beizaee), is the principal of a girls’ school, and they have a young son, Sahand, who’s bright and spunky. The farm is heavily mortgaged, and the business is unsteady. A friend at the local bank suggests himself as the middleman for a scheme in which Reza could bribe the management to get his late-payment penalties reduced. Reza wants nothing to do with such sleazy business, although he is no dogmatic law-abider but simply follows his conscience; he secretly produces homemade liqueur, alcohol being illegal in Iran. When two officers of the so-called religious police enter and scour his home for alcohol, their presence strikes a paranoid tone in which the intrusive norms of law enforcement overlap with the menaces of surveillance, denunciation, and harassment.

The town is dominated by a tentacular organization, ominously called only the Company, that wants to take over Reza’s land. To do so, one of its agents shuts off the water, threatening Reza’s fish. When Reza turns the water back on, he’s beaten by an agent named Abbas. When Reza fights back, he’s arrested on false charges of breaking Abbas’s arm—a police doctor is bribed to corroborate the injury. For Reza to get his case heard requires a bribe, too; then, his water is poisoned and his fish are killed, but the insurance company dictates a scheme of bribes for Reza to file a claim. When he tries to file a complaint with the local government, it refuses to challenge the Company. A lawyer won’t file a suit on his behalf. Even Reza’s efforts to sell his land to the Company in order to pay his debts collapse in the face of official corruption. Meanwhile, the family suffers grievously. Sahand confronts false accusations at school. Reza is threatened with violence from the Company’s henchmen. Hadis attempts to take matters into her own hands, with disastrous results, as she uncovers monstrous secrets. The couple’s relationship begins to fray. Facing a Kafkaesque nightmare of closed doors, dead ends, and looming menace, Reza commits himself to a ruthless plan that launches the movie into the hectic extremes of a thriller.

The plot of “A Man of Integrity” reflects elements of “Chinatown” and Heinrich von Kleist’s 1810 novella “Michael Kohlhaas”: the former’s private and public manipulation of water resources for corrupt ends, both works’ view of grotesque patriarchal crimes committed by the protected class of oppressors, and of crime itself as the sole recourse in a hermetic system of self-dealing rule. Rasoulof is a blankly diagnostic realist whose furious vision coaxes natural symbols from the action, as in the existential blankness of the fat white envelopes slid across tabletops as the markers of power, or in the ubiquity of water itself, as a source of life and a livelihood, as a desperate aspiration to cleanse body and soul of filthy civic dealings—or as a fetid swamp of death and decay. Even a hot spring in a cave, Reza’s nearly metaphysical hideaway for consolation and contemplation, must become a hideout for concocting cold-blooded machinations. (Akhlaghirad’s performance catches Reza’s deepening despair as the actor’s gaze freezes and his dark eyes seem to sink into their sockets.)

In Rasoulof’s film, the mercenary corruption that despoils intimate life and social relations finds its core in religious authority, in which a student can be expelled from school or a corpse expelled from a cemetery for not being of the right religion, and political rule cloaks itself in an indisputable higher law. Rasoulof’s realism is radical in the literal sense: he exposes the root of Iranian society and reveals its founding premise to be the all-pervasive source of injustice and corruption. “A Man of Integrity” is both a work of political defiance and of artistic audacity. The movie’s extreme contrast between the bland surfaces of daily life and the maddening pressures of ambient power looming beneath them turns its starkly realistic images into calmly furious denunciations, journalistic revelations, and even wildly disorienting hallucinations. ♦

[collapsedsquid]

If we acquiesce , everything good our country has ever built will be sold off piecemeal and perverted into tools of oppression by a transnational league of grifters and racists. Look under the rug of every corporation and think tank for dirty money and shady foreign ties. Ram campaign finance laws through Congress in the name of national security and if it looks like Supreme Court stands in the way, start rummaging through the justices’ dirty laundry too. It probably won’t be that hard to find something. Have painful but necessary conversations with close allies, and make it clear to them that the American alliance system is not sustainable if kleptocrats continue to expand their influence unchecked. Strongarm the British into squeezing every last ruble from London. Force the Germans to look under every last rock Deutsche Bank has ever touched. Tell the Arab states and Israel to back off American domestic politics or get kicked off the gravy train.

In short, the great paradox of liberal foreign policy is that globalization can only be saved through a reassertion of national sovereignty. So long as the kleptocratic elite and the global reactionary movement are allowed to infiltrate, corrupt, and plunder US and international institutions, any attempt to mount a meaningful defense of them is doomed to failure; but they are indeed worth defending. Some on the left see traditional American foreign policy as a morally bankrupt imperialist debacle, and there is some truth to this. No one can tell the ghosts of Cambodia or Yemen that the Pax Americana is entirely benevolent, or even peaceful. The fall of the liberal order, however imperfect, hypocritical, and at times outright barbaric it is, will not automatically yield socialist utopia. If that were so, the transnational kleptocratic-racist alliance would not be trying so hard to tear it down. This does not mean that the Democrats should not reign in American excesses once in power. They should, for example, end their support for Saudi war crimes in Yemen. However, it does mean that existing traditional instruments of liberal foreign policy are the only practical way for progressives to achieve their foreign policy goals. A Democratic presidency will need the State Department as it is now (or at least as it was pre-Tillerson) to make positive changes to American foreign policy. It is impossible to take the fight to the international forces of illiberalism and kleptocracy without instruments of global power and influence, and thus any serious left foreign policy must use the tools that are available instead of throwing them away.

How much global ordinary business is underwritten by dirty money though?

[newstfionline]

Iraqi Protests: “Bad Government, Bad Roads, Bad Weather, Bad People”

By Patrick Cockburn, Counterpunch, July 20, 2018

“The people want an end to the parties,” chanted protesters, adapting a famous slogan of the Arab Spring, as they stormed the governor’s office and the international airport in the Shia holy city of Najaf.

Part of the wave of demonstrations sweeping across central and southern Iraq, they demanded jobs, electricity, water and an end to the mass theft of Iraq’s oil wealth by the political parties.

Beginning on 8 July, the protests are the biggest and most prolonged in a country where anti-government action has usually taken the form of armed insurgency.

The demonstrations are taking place in the heartlands of the Shia majority, reflecting their outrage at living on top of some of the world’s largest oilfields, but seeing their families barely survive in squalor and poverty.

The protests began in Basra, Iraq’s third largest city which is at the centre of 70 per cent of its oil production. A hand-written placard held up by one demonstrator neatly expresses popular frustration. It read:

“2,500,000 barrels daily Price of each barrel = $70 2,500,000 x $70 = zero !! Sorry Pythagoras, we are in Basra”

The protests quickly spread to eight other provinces, including Najaf, Kerbala, Nasariya and Amara.

In several places, the offices of the Dawa Party, to which the Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi belongs, were burned or attacked, along with those of parties whom people blame for looting oil revenues worth hundreds of billions of dollars in the 15 years since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

As the situation deteriorated, Mr Abadi flew to Basra on 13 July, promising to make $3bn available to improve services and provide more jobs. After he left, his hotel was invaded by protesters.

The credibility of almost all Iraqi politicians is at a low ebb, the acute feeling of disillusionment illustrated by the low 44.5 per cent turnout in the parliamentary election on 12 May that produced no outright winner.

The poll was unexpectedly topped by the Sairoun movement of the populist nationalist cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, who has encouraged his followers to start protests against government corruption and lack of services since 2015.

The Sadrists, who emphasised their socially and economically progressive programme by allying themselves with the Iraqi Communist Party in the election, are playing a role in the current protests.

The demonstrations are also backed by the prestigious Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. At ground level, political activists and tribal leaders have set up a joint committee called “the Coordination Board for Peaceful Protests and Demonstrations in Basra”, its purpose being to produce a list of demands, unite the protest movement, and keep their actions non-violent.

“The ends don’t justify the means,” says the committee in a statement. “Let us, being oppressed, not lead to the oppression of others.”

A list of 17 demands is headed by one asking for a government timetable for supplying water and electricity, both of which are short at a time of year when the temperature sometime exceeds 50C, making it one of the hottest places on earth.

Local people claim that the last time that the port city of Basra, once called the Venice of the Gulf, had an adequate supply of drinking water was in 1982. Iran had been supplying some extra electricity, but has cut this back because of its own needs and failure of Iraq to pay on time.

The second demand of the protesters is for jobs. Lack of jobs is a source of continuing complaint all over Iraq. Much of its oil income already goes on paying 4.5 million state employees, but between 400,000 and 420,000 young people enter the workforce every year with little prospects of employment.

Anger towards the entire political class is intense because it is seen as a kleptocratic group which syphoned off money in return for contracts that existed only on paper and produced no new power plants, bridges or roads.

Political parties are at the centre of this corruption because they choose ministries, according to their share of the vote in elections or their sectarian affiliation, which they then treat as cash cows and sources of patronage and contracts.

Plundering like this and handing out of jobs to unqualified people means that many government institutions have become incapable of performing any useful function.

Radical reform is difficult because the whole system is saturated by corruption and incompetence. Technocrats without party backing who are parachuted into ministries become isolated and ineffective.

The defeat of Isis in 2017 with the recapture of Mosul means that Iraqis are no longer absorbed in keeping their families safe so they have they have more time to consider “corruption”--a word they use not just to mean bribery but the parasitic nature of the government system as a whole.

There is a general mood of cynicism and dissatisfaction with the way things are run.

“Bad government, bad roads, bad weather, bad people,” exclaimed one Iraqi friend driving on an ill-maintained road.

Corrupt motives are ascribed to everything that happens: a series of unexplained fires in Baghdad in June were being ascribed to government employees stealing from state depots and then concealing their crime by setting fire to the building and destroying it.

Given that the Iraqi security forces are primarily recruited from the areas in which the protests are taking place, the government will need to be careful about the degree of repression it can use safely.

The armed forces have been placed on high alert. Three regiments of the elite Counter-Terrorism Service, which led the attack on Mosul and is highly regarded and well disciplined, has been ordered south to cope with protests and away from places where there is still residual activity by Isis.

Iraq’s corrupt and dysfunctional governing system may be too set in its profitable ways to be reformed, but, if the ruling elite wants to survive, it must give ordinary Iraqis a larger share of the oil revenue cake.

[aninfinitepaperscraps]

White Terror (Taiwan) and martial law in the Philippines.

Now for the serious thingies here! Well both of these happened as a response to the growing threat of communism. With Chiang Kai Shek imposing martial law as a way to combat communist sympathizers, spies/bandits of the communists, erm pretty much anyone who is against him and the government. Even his son, Chiang Ching Kuo continued these autocratic policies, but then he lifted it on 1987. Martial law then lasted from 1949 up to 1987 so that’s 38 years. Correct me if I’m wrong but back then this was the longest period of martial law, then it is surpassed by the martial law in Syria and in Israel.

Martial law also happened in my country which is the Philippines with kleptocratic dictator named Ferdinand Marcos enacted martial law that happened in 1972 up to 1981. It was a response to the growing threat of the reds and oh the CPP or Communist Party of the Philippines was formed in December 26, 1968. So the formation of this communist organization, as well as the massive anti-Marcos rallies, student activists participating in these rallies, etc. led to Marcos declaring martial law. During my liberal phase in my life, I thought that the “People’s Power Revolution” was the reason why we’re living in a democracy now but corrupt politicians kept my country from becoming an economic powerhouse. Like the whole: “Get money out of politics!”, “Jail the corrupt!”, etc.

But no, the Aquinos and Cojuangcos weren’t just. Yes a dictator is ousted in which he, his family and cronies fled to Hawaii after the “Yellow Revolution” that took place in 1986. But if you look at what we are right now in the Philippines, like put on those “They Live” sunglasses and you’ll see the root cause of the decay of my country and the world to be honest. Okay back to what took place in 1986 with that yellow revolution. It is like we got Trump out, then Hillary got in power. That’s pretty much what happened for me. America has the Republicans and the Democrats. While in the Philippines we have multiple parties but none of them so far...have attacked the root cause that projects multiple problems for us. It is only the reds here that wanted true changes in our country, but they are called terrorists by those in power.

Like many years after the oppressive rule of both Chiang Kai Shek and Ferdinand Marcos. Yes we live better compared to their martial law regimes, but are we really free? Looks to me like they just changed their plans but we still live in slavery. Not just in Taiwan, not just in the Philippines but I’m talking about the whole world here. These “democracies” we see in the mainstream news. We don’t even know that we have chains all over our bodies. We’ll only see and feel them if you dig deep for the truth.

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” - Rosa Luxemburg

[faultfalha]

Eric Adams has a plan that no other has ever dared to attempt. He seeks to unlock the secret to financial independence from oppressive kleptocrats. His methods are impossible to replicate, and only time will tell if they will succeed. His unique take on the issue has already turned heads, inspiring hope and caution in equal measure. He is a modern-day folk hero, labeled both a revolutionary and a danger. All agree he is changing the game, but no one knows if the outcome will be beneficial or disastrous.

[ara-la]

What's Wrong with Chris Hedges view that ‘Antifa’ Mirrors the ‘Alt-Right’

What's Wrong with Hedges view that ‘Antifa’ Mirrors the ‘Alt-Right’

I am quoting here most of the recent essay by Hedges on truthdig, interspersed with my own comments in italics explaining why his ideas and definitions are false, incorrect and misguided–MN

‘Antifa’ Mirrors the ‘Alt-Right’ 

 Chris Hedges

Behind the rhetoric of the “alt-right” about white nativism and protecting American traditions, history and Christian values is the lust for violence. Behind the rhetoric of antifa, the Black Bloc and the so-called “alt-left” about capitalism, racism, state repression and corporate power is the same lust for violence.

FALSE. First, nobody calls the antifa the "alt-left" except Trump and the white nationalists, and people who buy into their rhetoric. "Alt-right," not modified by Hedges as "so-called," is a propagandistic self-moniker adopted by the neo-nazis to disguise and sanitize their racism and white nationalism.

Second, the antifa are not motivated by a "lust for violence," but by a desire to defend themselves and others who are targets of racist, sexist violence by fascists, and to disrupt the strategic, intimidating use of violence by fascists.

Third, as Hedges well-knows and has written himself, fascist talk of "white nativism and ...American ...history" is not mere rhetoric, but is in fact directly related to their roots in the use of violence to establish white 'nativism' (an oxymoron) through settler-colonial 'American' history.

  The two opposing groups, largely made up of people who have been cast aside by the cruelty of corporate capitalism, have embraced holy war.

FALSE: The bulk of the fascist forces marching in Charlottesville and elsewhere have been, not people thrust aside by capitalism, but quite privileged white males, many collegians or petty bourgeois intent on proving they are not just Internet trolls but IRL fascists. The antifa have in no way embraced 'holy war' but thoughtfully adopted security culture and physical disruption of fascists among many other perfectly non-violent tactics, based on their proven efficacy on other occasions and in other countries in disorienting and defeating fascists.

No antifa caused Dylann Roof to get a gun, go to a Black church in South Carolina, and cold-bloodedly execute 9 unarmed women and men he had just attended a prayer and bible study session with.

Conversely, I defy Hedges to name a single white racist killed or maimed by any antifa or other resisters, even in self-defense, let alone an ambush, assassination or execution.

  Their lives, battered by economic misery and social marginalization, have suddenly been filled with meaning. They hold themselves up as the vanguard of the oppressed. They arrogate to themselves the right to use force to silence those they define as the enemy. They sanctify anger. They are infected with the dark, adrenaline-driven urge for confrontation that arises among the disenfranchised when a democracy ceases to function.

They are separated, as Sigmund Freud wrote of those who engage in fratricide, by the “narcissism of minor differences.”

FALSE: For Hedges to say the differences between fascists and antifa are 'minor,' is to equate resistance with oppression. Fascists glorify violence as proof of white supremacy, and uphold genocide, ethnic cleansing and a white ethno-nationalist state. Antifa, whose ranks include people of color, women, Jews, queer and trans people and others targeted by the Nazis, are anti-racist and mostly anti-capitalist. Equating the two is being an apologist for racism, fascism and genocide, and must be denounced. Also, antifa do not see themselves as a “vanguard,” and most oppose vanguardism. Antifa see themselves as practitioners of one strategic or tactical approach to dealing with fascism in public spaces, cyber space and elsewhere, and hope that others whom they defend and whose backs they have, will treat and welcome them as such. They are willing to and capable of working with others who have a non-violent approach (but not “peace police” types who in the name of non-violence turn antifa over to the cops).

  They mirror each other, not only ideologically but also physically—armed and dressed in black, the color of fascism and the color of death.

FALSE: Black is beautiful.

  It was inevitable that we would reach this point.

FALSE:  This is Hedges's constant litany of despair and defeatism, a refusal to examine the political choices, complacency and complicity that have empowered the neo-Nazis

  The corporate state has seized and corrupted all democratic institutions, including the two main political parties, to serve the interests of corporate power and maximize global corporate profits. There is no justice in the courts. There is no possibility for reform in the legislative bodies. The executive branch is a dysfunctional mess headed by a narcissistic kleptocrat, con artist and pathological liar. Money has replaced the vote. The consent of the governed is a joke. Our most basic constitutional rights, including the rights to privacy and due process, have been taken from us by judicial fiat. The economically marginalized, now a majority of the country, have been rendered invisible by a corporate media dominated by highly paid courtiers spewing out meaningless political and celebrity gossip and trivia as if it were news. The corporate state, unimpeded, is pillaging and looting the carcass of the country and government, along with the natural world, for the personal gain of the 1 percent. It daily locks away in cages the poor, especially poor people of color, discarding the vulnerable as human refuse.

A government that is paralyzed and unable and unwilling to address the rudimentary needs of its citizens, as I saw in the former Yugoslavia and as history has shown with the Weimar Republic and czarist Russia, eventually empowers violent extremists.

FALSE: The US government is not weak or paralyzed but is in fact, throughout the federal system, an active agent of oppression and repression, and enforcer of exploitation; and this fundamental reality has not changed since the establishment of the European settler colonies here, or their consolidation into a federal empire state.

Also, posing the problem as "extremism," is part of the false equivalence of the left and right and presumes an answer will arise from some mythological center or from restoration of "Constitutional" government.

  Economic and social marginalization is the lifeblood of extremist groups. Without it they wither and die. Extremism, as the social critic Christopher Lasch wrote, is “a refuge from the terrors of inner life.”

Germany’s Nazi stormtroopers had their counterparts in that nation’s communist Alliance of Red Front Fighters. The far-right anti-communist death squad Alliance of Argentina had its counterpart in the guerrilla group the People’s Revolutionary Army during the “Dirty War.” The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) rebels during the war I covered in El Salvador had their counterparts in the right-wing death squads, whose eventual demise seriously impeded the FMLN’s ability to recruit. The Serbian nationalists, or Chetniks, in Yugoslavia had their counterparts in the Croatian nationalists, or Ustaše. The killing by one side justifies the killing by the other. And the killing is always sanctified in the name of each side’s martyrs.

FALSE: The unutterable mendacity of Hedges is unconscionable, equating as he does the Nazi storm-troopers with working-class resistance fighters in Germany, or FMLN guerrillas with the Salvadoran death squads trained and financed by the US. What children of military officers orphaned by having their parents killed and dropped into the sea by helicopters were adopted and raised by Argentine leftists? What genocide or terrorist attacks on unarmed Jewish, Roma, or trade-unionist civilians were ever carried out by Germany's Red Front Fighters? What mass executions of peasants or workers, or assassinations of priests and nuns, were ever carried out by the FMLN? None.

  The violence by antifa—short for anti-fascist or anti-fascist action—in Charlottesville, Va., saw a surge in interest and support for the movement, especially after the murder of Heather Heyer. The Black Bloc was applauded by some of the counterprotesters in Boston during an alt-right rally there Aug. 19. In Charlottesville, antifa activists filled the vacuum left by a passive police force, holding off neo-Nazi thugs who threatened Cornel West and clergy who were protesting against the white nationalist event.

FALSE: The state, embodied in law enforcement, is not and has never been passive in these situations. Their refusal to protect anti-fascists, their protective cordons for fascists, and their use of brutality, militarized weaponry and criminalization of protest against the left is long-standing and routine.

  This was a propaganda coup for antifa, which seeks to portray its use of violence as legitimate self-defense. Protecting West and the clergy members from physical assault was admirable. But this single act no more legitimizes antifa violence than the turkeys, Christmas gifts and Fourth of July fireworks that John Gotti gave to his neighbors legitimized the violence of the Gambino crime family. Antifa, like the alt-right, is the product of a diseased society.

FALSE: Hedges's use of 'disease' as a descriptor of 'society' is another give-away of the fascistic bent of his own thinking. Antifa are neither diseased nor a product of a 'disease' in society. It is the fascists and the US ruling class who are like the Mafia, not antifa.

  The white racists and neo-Nazis may be unsavory, but they too are victims. They too lost jobs and often live in poverty in deindustrialized wastelands. They too often are plagued by debt, foreclosures, bank repossessions and inability to repay student loans. They too often suffer from evictions, opioid addictions, domestic violence and despair. They too sometimes face bankruptcy because of medical bills. They too have seen social services gutted, public education degraded and privatized and the infrastructure around them decay. They too often suffer from police abuse and mass incarceration. They too are often in despair and suffer from hopelessness. And they too have the right to free speech, however repugnant their views.

FALSE: White racists and neo-Nazis are not just 'unsavory,' and it's not a question of taste. This sympathetic treatment of a litany of alleged woes they face reinforces their attempt to cast themselves as injured victims. None of their concerns or demands speak to any of these issues that he alleges they face. They perceive themselves as victims of feminism and race-mixing, a so-called and non-existent 'white genocide.' And their 'speech' is designed to threaten and incite violence against Black people, Mexican@s and other migrants, Jews, Muslims, Asians, women, LGBTQ and disabled people (and Hedges).

  Street clashes do not distress the ruling elites. These clashes divide the underclass. They divert activists from threatening the actual structures of power. They give the corporate state the ammunition to impose harsher forms of control and expand the powers of internal security. When antifa assumes the right to curtail free speech it becomes a weapon in the hands of its enemies to take that freedom away from everyone, especially the anti-capitalists.

FALSE: The state needs no excuses to expand the powers of 'internal security.' And such an argument could and has been as easily made, including by the state, against the non-violent disruptive civil disobedience tactics of Black Lives Matter (or for that matter, Martin Luther King, Jr.). In fact, Martin Luther King Sr. (father of the civil rights icon), was the target of surveillance by federal law enforcement and military intelligence operatives before World War II.

  The focus on street violence diverts activists from the far less glamorous building of relationships and alternative institutions and community organizing that alone will make effective resistance possible. We will defeat the corporate state only when we take back and empower our communities, as is happening with Cooperation Jackson, a grass-roots cooperative movement in Jackson, Miss. As long as acts of resistance are forms of personal catharsis, the corporate state is secure. Indeed, the corporate state welcomes this violence because violence is a language it can speak with a proficiency and ruthlessness that none of these groups can match.

FALSE: I support Cooperation Jackson. I have been in solidarity with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement that helped initiate it for decades. They, as I, have always expressly supported armed self-defense against white supremacist violence in the South and elsewhere. They, as I, have long supported the political prisoners of US imperialism, including the freedom-fighters of the Black Liberation Army. They called a demonstration here in Los Angeles in 1992 to protest and shut down a forum called by a Black pseudo-nationalist fronting for a group of neo-Nazis and Hitler apologists.  (That Black-led community demonstration was attacked by the LAPD in an incident that helped set the stage for the rebellion later that year, after the acquittal of the cops who beat Rodney King and slap on the wrist for a grocer who killed Black teenager Latasha Harlins.)

Also, antifa are A) not engaged in street fighting because it is any way 'glamorous;' and B) also engaged in the equally unglamorous programs of community gardening, political education and study, community defense, cop-watching, self-defense classes, tenant organizing, etc. etc. (just like Cooperation Jackson and the MXGM).

  “Politics isn’t made of individuals,” Sophia Burns writes in “Catharsis Is Counter-Revolutionary.” “It’s made of classes. Political change doesn’t come from feeling individually validated. It comes from collective action and organization within the working class. That means creating new institutions that meet our needs and defend against oppression.”

TRUE, BUT IRRELEVANT: Antifa are not aiming at individual catharsis or self-validation; they are building exactly that sort of class-struggle organization and network.

  The protests by the radical left now sweeping America, as Aviva Chomsky points out, are too often little more than self-advertisements for moral purity.

FALSE: Hedges, one of the most sanctimonious and self-righteous of all commentators in what passes for a 'left' in the US, is here simply projecting his own need for self-advertisement and moral purity, conveniently doing so by quoting a woman.

  They are products of a social media culture in which each of us is the star of his or her own life movie. They are infected with the American belief in regeneration through violence and the cult of the gun. They represent a clash between the bankruptcy of identity politics, which produced, as Dr. West has said, a president who was “a black mascot for Wall Street,” and the bankruptcy of a white, Christianized fascism that produced Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions.

FALSE:  Before I call it a day on Hedges and his tedious, tendentious obfuscations that serve to echo right-wing self-justifications and propaganda against resistance, let me point out that 'Identity politics' and 'political correctness' were both slogans that originated within sectors of the (mostly academic) left resistant to self-criticism and to the self-determined liberation struggles of colonized and other oppressed people. The slogans were then taken up by and popularized by George H. W. Bush and a host of right-wing talk radio commentators and then FOX News, while still being persisted in by reactionaries in left clothing like Todd Gitlin and apparently by Hedges, Aviva Chomsky and Noam Chomsky, among others. Corporate liberalism and neo-liberalism are responsible for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (and therefore, to a great extent, for DJ Chump). Antifa or other radicals are not to blame.

  The corporate state seeks to discredit and shut down the anti-capitalist left. Its natural allies are the neo-Nazis and the Christian fascists. The alt-right is bankrolled, after all, by the most retrograde forces in American capitalism. It has huge media platforms. It has placed its ideologues and sympathizers in positions of power, including in law enforcement and the military. And it has carried out acts of domestic terrorism that dwarf anything carried out by the left. White supremacists were responsible for 49 homicides in 26 attacks in the United States from 2006 to 2016, far more than those committed by members of any other extremist group, according to a report issued in May by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. There is no moral equivalency between antifa and the alt-right. 

TRUE, BUT TOO LITTLE TOO LATE: After spending most of his essay equating antifa and fascists, Hedges gets around to acknowledging that there is no  "moral equivalency" between the two. But he undercuts his argument by saying the Nazis' terrorism " dwarf[s] anything carried out by the left," without citing any terrorism carried out by the left; (he can't because there is none).

But by brawling in the streets antifa allows the corporate state, which is terrified of a popular anti-capitalist uprising, to use the false argument of moral equivalency to criminalize the work of all anti-capitalists.

FALSE: Hedges is just using the state as a stalking horse for his own argument for the ‘moral equivalency’ of antifa and fascists. The state has always criminalized any effective resistance, and to the degree that any anti-capitalist work actually threatens the empire, it will be criminalized and/or attacked by fascists. 

As the Southern Poverty Law Center states categorically in its pamphlet “Ten Ways to Fight Hate,” “Do not attend a hate rally.”

“Find another outlet for anger and frustration and for people’s desire to do something,” it recommends. “Hold a unity rally or parade to draw media attention away from hate. Hate has a First Amendment right. Courts have routinely upheld the constitutional right of the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups to hold rallies and say whatever they want. Communities can restrict group movements to avoid conflicts with other citizens, but hate rallies will continue. Your efforts should focus on channeling people away from hate rallies.”

FALSE: The "let them eat sheet-cake" argument satirized by Tina Fey. Ignoring the racist right and giving it unopposed freedom to claim to speak for white people, or to augment their ranks through IRL recruiting as they have been doing in cyber-space is the worst possible response. Also, the SPLC works closely with federal and local law enforcement, who are also sources and practitioners of racialized violence, and, under Hedges's same rubric of "extremism," they lump together Black radicals of various political persuasions with KKK and neo-nazi hate groups, while ignoring terrorist activities that have been carried out by groups like the so-called Jewish Defense League.

  The Nazis were as unsavory to the German political and economic elites as Donald Trump is to most Americans who hold power or influence. But the German elites chose to work with the fascists, whom they naively thought they could control, rather than risk a destruction of capitalism. Street brawls, actively sought out by the Nazis, always furthered the interests of the fascists, who promised to restore law and order and protect traditional values. The violence contributed to their mystique and the yearning among the public for a strongman who would impose stability.

FALSE:  Fascism in Germany, as here, was built from above and below. Fascism on its path to power was facilitated by big German (and US/UK) capital, and had sympathizers in US, Britain and elsewhere. The Nazis distinguished themselves from others on the right by their willingness to use extra-legal violence to pursue their goals, with an acceptance of this by the existing German state, and inadequate resistance by left and labor forces, who were divided among themselves, and especially demobilized by social-democratic elements willing to participate in parliamentary farces. The precedent for Nazi attacks on the left was set by the earlier use of demobilized World War I veterans against the revolutionary left by the social democrats.

  The conflict will not end until the followers of the alt-right and the anti-capitalist left are given a living wage and a voice in how we are governed. Take away a person’s dignity, agency and self-esteem and this is what you get. As political power devolves into a more naked form of corporate totalitarianism, as unemployment and underemployment expand, so will extremist groups. They will attract more sympathy and support as the wider population realizes, correctly, that Americans have been stripped of all ability to influence the decisions that affect their lives, lives that are getting steadily worse.

FALSE: The conflict is not caused by the lack of a living wage. The conflict arises out of the irreconcilable contradictions of capitalism itself, and the implacable enmity that the exploiters and oppressors have for the people they exploit and oppress. Nor will we be "given a voice in how we are governed."

  The ecocide by the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries alone makes revolt a moral imperative. The question is how to make it succeed. Taking to the street to fight fascists ensures our defeat. Antifa violence, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, is a “major gift to the right, including the militant right.” It fuels the right wing’s paranoid rants about the white race being persecuted and under attack. And it strips anti-capitalists of their moral capital.

FALSE: Revolt is indeed a moral imperative, not least because of ecocide (and genocide) but Hedges here, as everywhere, offers no strategy or even hint as to how revolt, let along revolution, is to begin, be pursued or to triumph. That is because Hedges, blinded by his own privileges, his liberalism and moralistic approach to politics, is incapable of seeing or appreciating the capacities and agency of the exploited and oppressed, from whom the power and wealth of the state and the rulers in fact derive.

  Many in the feckless and bankrupt liberal class, deeply complicit in the corporate assault on the country and embracing the dead end of identity politics, will seek to regain credibility by defending the violence by groups such as antifa.

FALSE: The predominant liberal response to antifa efforts has been identical to the pap that Hedges is peddling here -- condemning the antifa while defending the Nazis' supposed "free speech." Also, there is no "liberal class" -- classes are defined by the relationship of sectors of society to ownership or control of land, productive resources, etc., not by (perhaps fleeting) ideologies. This has always been a key part of the obscurantism Hedges promotes, disguising actual class relationships and complicity with imperialism, capitalism and settler colonialism within the US, or how to uproot and overturn it.

  Natasha Lennard, for example, in The Nation calls the “video of neo-Nazi Richard Spencer getting punched in the face” an act of “kinetic beauty.” She writes “if we recognize fascism in Trump’s ascendance, our response must be anti-fascist in nature. The history of anti-fascist action is not one of polite protest, nor failed appeals to reasoned debate with racists, but direct, aggressive confrontation.”

This violence-as-beauty rhetoric is at the core of these movements. It saturates the vocabulary of the right-wing corporate oligarchs, including Donald Trump. Talk like this poisons national discourse. It dehumanizes whole segments of the population. It shuts out those who speak with nuance and compassion, especially when they attempt to explain the motives and conditions of opponents. It thrusts the society into a binary and demented universe of them and us.

FALSE: Society is turned into a "binary ... of them and us" by colonialism and capitalism, oppression and exploitation. We can recognize the humanity of exploiters, oppressors, and even fascists, and even seek to rescue individual members of such groups, but we cannot afford to deny that there is an irreconcilable contradiction between the exploiter and the exploited, the oppressor and the oppressed, and that the way to end that contradiction is by ending exploitation and oppression, which will eliminate the exploiters and oppressors AS SUCH. Committing class suicide is the best way for members of the exploiting and oppressing class to save themselves as individuals, because exploitation and oppression are parasitic and necrotic, spreading death to others and to the natural world to maintain the few. Exploiters cannot live without those they exploit and oppress. People being exploited and oppressed, on the other hand can do just fine. thank you, without exploiters or oppressors.

  It elevates violence to the highest aesthetic. It eschews self-criticism and self-reflection. It is the prelude to widespread suffering and death. And that, I fear, is where we are headed.

FALSE: Widespread suffering and death is already with us, and has been for at least the half-millennium since Europeans invaded the Western Hemisphere and Oceania. It is caused, not by the 'aesthetic of violence,' but by colonialism and capitalism, land theft, slavery and genocide, all on-going. Despite Hedges and his fears and pessimism, it will be ended by revolutionary, ant-fascist, anti-capitalist, anti-colonial solidarity, resistance and liberation struggle.

If you want an authentic Christian pacifist response to the antifa in Charlottesville, consider this, from one who went to there: “I never felt safer than when I was near antifa. They came to defend people, to put their bodies between these armed white supremacists and those of us who could not or would not fight. They protected a lot of people that day, including groups of clergy. My safety (and safety is relative in these situations) was dependent upon their willingness to commit violence. In effect, I outsourced the sin of my violence to them. I asked them to get their hands dirty so I could keep mine clean. Do you understand? They took that up for me, for the clergy they shielded, for those of us in danger. We cannot claim to be pacifists or nonviolent when our safety requires another to commit violence, and we ask for that safety.”  Whole thing here: https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2017/08/23/my-nonviolent-stance-was-met-with-heavily-armed-men/

Different version of this, with a lot less Hedges to wade through, is posted here: http://change-links.org/which-side-are-you-on-why-chris-hedges-is-wrong-to-equate-antifa-with-fascists/

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How is this being tolerated? Trying to claim the entire South China Sea through aggressive military expansionism. Brutally oppressing Hong Kong. The decades long subjugation of Tibet. Running literal concentration camps. Bloody engagements on the Indian border. Attempting to isolate Taiwan in every dealing. Endless militarized digital warfare. Cutting kleptocratic deals with corrupt governments to steal natural resources. Systematic theft of trillions of dollars worth of critical technology and intellectual property as an official government policy. Total disregard for any rule of law internally. Coercing weaker countries around the world through Belt and Road. Relentless expansionism through illegal subsidies at home while pushing protectionism policies against any import. The CCP is a pariah state.

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[ericallixrogers]

I've never felt less like a part of anything united than I do now. If I could decamp to a deserted planet full of beautiful places to photograph, I would. But here I stand: in a deeply unequal city trapped between gritty past and chimeric future; in a failing nation where the advancing fascist fifth column smashes so the kleptocrats can loot; on a planet destined to boil us alive. Whatever my quibbles and concerns, I have to support those who bear the greatest weight of oppression. Today, that means: MinnesotaFreedomFund.org/donate https://www.instagram.com/p/CAv6ac-jfr8/?igshid=b1rtn02vm94b

[watchingmedia]

The Daily Kos, which these days seems to spend most of its energy stumping for the new cold war and promoting blog pieces with titles like “Putin crony Jill Stein”, has got some fantastic news for black activists all over America. You know how you guys have been laboring under the impression that you live in a country built upon slavery and kleptocratic Jim Crow laws, resulting in institutional racism and oppressive generational poverty which plague you to this day?

Well, it turns out you imagined the whole thing: you were actually tricked into thinking those thoughts by Vladimir Putin in order to influence the 2016 election. Turns out your activism hasn’t been needed after all! Yay!

Don’t worry though: the Daily Kos hastens to inform us that it wasn’t your fault. You organized events protesting police brutality and systemic racism on behalf of the Kremlin “unknowingly”.