#like obviously it’s not the most radical anti government message in the world it’s still like

[dashiellqvverty]

everything the marvel industrial complex does makes it harder to believe the winter soldier ever got made

#like obviously it’s not the most radical anti government message in the world it’s still like #the guy with the flag on his chest is Good and Right and the government was only bad bc they got infiltrated by hydra #but they still pretty firmly said government bad and wrong #like the Good Guys backed project insight too #and were Wrong to do it #and it’s just so at odds with most of what the mcu does lmao #and the russo’s made it!!! marvel money rots your brain i guess #like in that movie they had an understanding of those characters that NO other mcu movie has had #and honestly there is a lot i like about civil war. i definitely like it more than most even tho there is also a lot i don’t like #but i think it sympathizes with steve’s side to the point that he is sort of largely portrayed as In The Right. which i appreciate #ANYWAY #i can’t believe catws exists it IS my favorite movie ever #r.txt

[bryonysimcox]

Spring has Sprung and Life Continues: Week 11, Spain

Another week spent in the Catalunyan countryside as coronavirus lockdown continues. Here are my reflections on the arrival of spring, broad beans, ecological economics and the launch of ‘The Hundred Miler’.

This last week has seen the welcome face of April - signalling that spring is certainly here along with the arrival of Easter. It’s a time associated with new life, new starts, sunny days and longer nights. Even though we remain in full lockdown here in Spain, it feels as though we can draw upon the changing season as a source of assurance.

The week started with something rather special. I finally got to drive Suzi!

When we first bought the van in Summer 2019, I was still only 24, and it was really expensive to get me insured on it. There seems to be a transition point for insurers at age 25, so George and I had always agreed that after my birthday at Christmas, we’d get me on the insurance. But we never got around to it, partly because of the additional expense, and partly because it wasn’t a huge priority, until the start of March. And then of course, we were in Valencia and the lockdown hit, so we had nowhere to drive to even once I was insured!

My first drive here in Catalunya was pretty fun, even though it was just a trip to the supermarket. Because we’re in lockdown, the roads are super quiet which has been great, and the roads around the cottage aren’t tarmaced, so I could do some offroading as well. I’ve since driven a couple more times to and from the supermarket, and it’s so nice to be behind the wheel again. I haven’t driven since we owned our last van, Casper, back in Sydney!

(Images, left to right) My first time driving Suzi the HiAce, and a throwback to driving our last van Casper.

On the topic of Sydney, I have been doing some serious reminiscing. It’s almost coming to exactly a year since George and I flew back to the UK from Australia, and anniversaries always tend to bring on waves of nostalgia. It’s mad to think that a year ago, we didn’t own a van, not least have a clue about where we’d be living in the van! And of course, there’s no way I’d have imagined that we would be stuck amid a pandemic-induced global lockdown. Oh, to have the gift of foresight... 

The year that ensued after we left our friends, jobs, and security blanket of Sydney was an absolute rollercoaster. We naively aimed to have the van built and prepped in a matter of months, and when the van-build rolled over towards Christmas 2019, I felt like an absolute failure for not having finished it sooner. And yet now, upon reflection, I guess it’s not such a bad achievement to have managed to buy and build Suzi the HiAce, both of us get jobs in Manchester and move into a flat there, launch our documentary channel ‘Broaden’ and set off for Europe all in a year.

We can all benefit from a bit of self-reflection to put progress into perspective.

(video) Broaden’s latest video; an overview of who we are and what we’re about. It’s helped me to reframe some of the successes of this last year.

I feel like a stuck record, but food is a wonderful experience which punctuates the repetitive days of lockdown. Last week I wrote about calçots, a deliciously sweet spring onion special to this region and eaten with Romesco sauce. This week, it’s all about broad beans. The garden here is full of them, so I’ve been tasked with picking and podding. Most of them are fat enough to be podded, and are even better if you go the extra mile by blanching them and removing their skins. The smaller ones can be eaten as they are, and make for a lovely crunchy stir-fry ingredient too.

Preparing broad beans can be time-consuming, but also a wonderfully cathartic activity. My granny in Scotland used to have plenty of these beans in her garden, and I remember summer days spent picking and podding with my mum. We’ve stored plenty here in the freezer but have also kept some fresh and I am continually finding ways to incorporate them into our meals. A quick call to my well-resourced mum also resulted in her sending pages and pages photographed from Jane Grigson’s vegetable book: not only with plenty of recipes but incredibly detailed descriptions of the vegetable’s history and qualities too.

(images) Beautiful fresh veggies from the market were a highlight of the week, as well as picking these broad beans straight from the garden. The bowl on the right is what was distilled from podding four huge bags’ worth.

The resurgence in cooking and baking whilst in lockdown is inspiring, but I’ve been thinking about how it affects our supply chains as well.

Just this morning on BBC News I saw an article about dairy farmers having to throw away vast amounts of milk as cafes, hotels and restaurants remain shut, and another article about how there’s been an insane increase in demand for flour, as everyone takes to home baking. Many mills are now working around the clock to meet the demand in the UK and I was especially interested to read that even if there’s enough flour that there’s a shortage of packaging, because usually only 4% of flour produced goes into the smaller bags that we see on supermarket shelves.

Coronavirus has triggered so many changes in how we live and how we behave, that it's wreaking havoc on supply chains like this, and of course, the economy. That said, whilst the negative effects are hard to deny, scientists, economists and ecologists alike are suggesting that we should leverage the situation as an opportunity to reflect on how we all live, and how we might return to ‘normal’ life without just returning to business as usual. I agree: this is a unique opportunity to reassess production and consumption, how we assign value to things, and the economic and political models that we use to govern our world.

The connection between global lockdown, coronavirus, climate change and our economy has really got me thinking.

I recently read an incredible article by ecological economist Simon Mair in Singularity Hub which looked at this relationship. The article pulled together disparate strands that have been on my mind for a while, each related to various books which I’ve been reading, and which I can now see are interconnected. Simon suggests that the Covid-19 crisis could be a chance to “expand our economic imagination”. He explains that coronavirus, like climate change, demands a type of downscaling, counter to the ‘wartime economy’ mentality and massive upscaling of production. 

“If we want to be more resilient to pandemics in the future (and to avoid the worst of climate change) we need a system capable of scaling back production in a way that doesn’t mean loss of livelihood”, says Simon.

The article is full of gems, and Simon explores things such as our current addition to economic growth and productivity, the transfer of healthcare and labour goods out of the market and into the hands of the state, and the social forms that could come from an ethic that values care, life, and democracy. It answers some of the questions posed by George Monbiot in ‘How Did We Get Into This Mess?’, echoes some of the radical economic theories proposed by Kate Raworth in ‘Doughnut Economics’, and parallels ideas of democratic market socialism put forward by ‘How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century’ by Erik Olin Wright which I’m currently reading. Simon’s article has really got me so fired up, in fact, that I’m working on an idea for a new video which explores the topic, so watch this space.

(images) Three fantastic books which I highly recommend.

On the subject of videos, Broaden has been one of the only things keeping us sane! I am eternally grateful to have a creative outlet in times like these, and one which involves a collaborative partnership with George too. Whilst we aren’t able to explore places in the van, or capture footage for new films as we’d love to be doing right now, we are at least able to edit from the cottage and work on promoting the content that we are already releasing.

It feels so tricky to get the right tone when releasing videos during a global pandemic.

We are both conscious of remaining sensitive to the severity of the health crisis, whilst balancing that with the reality that life goes on, and that people still want to see pictures, watch videos and read articles that engage with other topics too. As Broaden, George and I obviously made the decision to launch our documentary ‘The Hundred Miler’ during this time, and I hope that people see it as a celebration of running, the natural world, and human resilience, and perhaps even an escape from the daily news of the virus, rather than something insensitive or badly-timed.

(video) Trailer for ‘The Hundred Miler’

‘The Hundred Miler’ comes out this Saturday 11th April, and we have been overwhelmed by the response already. People have really got behind the project, helping to share it on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube and widen its potential reach. George has been making this film for well over three years, so it feels like an immense milestone to finally have it shown to the world. I don’t think I know many people who hold themselves to such high standards as George, and so to have so many positive messages and people planning to tune in for the live premier on Saturday is the best affirmation of all his hard work that I could wish for. It has been a pleasure to see him create this documentary, and also to have been involved in the production and final stages of its creation.

The Hundred Miler is a film about three Australian guys, taking on the biggest race of their lives; UTMB.

‘Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc’ is renowned in the trail-running world, as one of the most challenging and scenic ultra marathons. The Hundred Miler is an attempt to bring this story to the masses, and we hope that it appeals to non-runners and runners alike, for its underlying themes of companionship, commitment and strength. It premiers live on YouTube at 10am in the UK, which is 7pm in Australia on 11.4.20, and after that the video will be available to watch as a normal video. You can find BTS footage and more information about the film on our Instagram here, details of the launch on the Facebook event here, and the link for the video itself here. You can also subscribe to Broaden’s YouTube channel and set a reminder for when the film goes live.

(video) ‘The Hundred Miler’ which goes live on Sat 11th April.

 It goes without saying: I am really missing the open road and living in a van. And I’m not immune to fear of the future either. But as the days and weeks pass, we learn to adapt to changing circumstances and continue to find hope among them. In a way, it helps to know we are all in the same boat, facing a topsy-turvy life full of roadblocks and revelations. Thanks for tuning in to read my weekly ramblings and I hope you’re all keeping as well as you can be. Until next week!

#thehundredmiler #traveldiaries #SuziTheVan #toyotahiace #hiacevan #overlandadventures #BryonyandGeorge #digitalnomads #vanliving #vanlife

[dylanjonferguson-blog]

S01E07: “Target For Terror”: Dichromatism

Our misty, videotaped dreams of the un-human Hobo as an actor of radical freedom may have been premature, if not delusional. The dog's narrow focus on interpersonal justice leaves no room for ideology, politics, or other forest-over-trees considerations. “Target For Terror,” the seventh episode of TLH, is a mix of menace, moral clarity, and naiveté that mimics a dog’s worldview, but draws uneasy parallels with our own.  

The fairly fantastic characters of “Target For Terror” literally leap from the headlines. The first thing we see is the bold, 72-point pronouncement at the top of a broadsheet, filling the screen: "TERRORISTS MAKE MORE DEMANDS." The unidentified newspaper reader then folds down the page, which, like an upside-down opera curtain, has the effect of revealing our human hero. Paul Hamilton – young man, snub-nose, Lego-hair, jacket-collar popped, flared pants swishing – is striding confidently into a train station. Following closely behind are two sketchy characters, who we immediately surmise are the terrorists. It is as if the dramatic headline conjured these players, or as if we have passed through the headline, into the world of ALL-CAPS anxiety, entering the fear-soaked deathscape of broadsheet news.

Briefly now, let’s jump ahead to an almost unaccountably strange moment that occurs halfway through the episode. One terrorist walks in on the other, who is perusing a thick paperback, and tells him to “Stop reading that junk!" Why were we invited to this moment? The title of the book, unfortunately can't be glimpsed. The only part of the cover we can see in an element in the lower left-hand corner: a swastika! Is it a book about Nazism? Are we being told that the terrorists are Nazis? Or that they're anti-fascists who consider Nazism "junk"? Perhaps it's a red herring to focus on that graphic detail. But surely there's a reason the one terrorist is chastised for reading a book.

I think it has to do with the newspaper headline at the start, which introduced our setting as a reductive and fearful world. Being in the world of a panicked newspaper means rejecting the world of books, which would include depths of context and greater stores of information, reasoning, empathy. Even the terrorists reject any intrusion from that world, which is foreign to the territory of the tale.

A dog must naturally see the world as tense and simple, but we are coached that way by broadsheet profiteers. And those who manipulate their message.

Paul Hamilton is a kind and rich fellow. The terrorists want to kill or capture him as part of an obscure plot to get at the boy's grandfather, Chief Justice Hamilton, played by John Carradine. Carradine, very old at this point, sometimes struggles with his delivery, but still has a large, theatrical presence, and beautifully gnarled, expressive hands that cling to fine lapels in his opulent office, which is replete with mahogany furnishings and a deep, patterned carpet that no doubt hides expensive Cuban ash. The camera films that office with a certain staid reverence: we’re not to scoff at this man, we’re to see his perspective as right and proper. The terrorists, in comparison, have weird, strained faces, natty clothes, and awkwardly-carved facial hair (one is played by the great Cronenberg regular Geva Kovacs).   The dog – named Nick, this time around – saves Paul in the train station, but Chief Justice Hamilton warns his grandson that the rugged schemers are still out there. Now that the terrorists have spooked their prey, they take another line of attack. By successfully kidnapping Paul’s fiancée, Pam, they force the groom-to-be to come out to a remote hotel in the country, where he too is kidnapped.  

“We have a cause,” the terrorist tells Paul, warning him not to try any funny stuff. “We live for it, and we’re willing to die for it.” But what this cause might be is, glaringly, never even hinted at.

In the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, US intelligence officials initially concluded that Syria was behind the attack, as retaliation for America’s downing of an Iranian passenger jet earlier that year. President Reagan, however, shifted the blame to Libya’s President Gaddafi, who was a more convenient villain (and happy to play along, to boost his anti-American cred). The U.S. president-cum-actor even participated in the creation of a neo-conservative conspiracy theory that had Gaddafi and Carlos the Jackal heading a deranged hit-squad hellbent on assassinating Reagan. A similar form of narrative alchemy happened in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, when the Bush administration shifted the story to point blame at the unconnected Saddam Hussein, even though almost all the attackers were Saudis. The point is that American government ideologues seem to kind of like terrorists because, unlike a state army, their origins and motives often seem unclear, and so can be manipulated in the public mind. Obviously, anyone willing to kill and die for a cause has strong beliefs, but American governments would rather obscure the meaning, or even existence, of a cause. We can all remember George W. Bush nonsensically asserting that the terrorists simply “hate our freedoms.”  

This matters, because our films tend to reflect, intentionally or not, the false storylines being peddled. At the height of the Bush-era terrorism panic, The Dark Knight was released, starring a Bush/Blair-style Batman battling an anti-ideology lunatic who just wanted to “watch the world burn.” Why? Oh, no reason. Terrorists, we’ve been counterintuitively led to believe by state propaganda, don’t really need a reason. Apparently they just want to fuck shit up (or “maximize chaos” to use the ridiculous description of Nazi motives peddled by Jordan Peterson). It’s clear why we’re fed this lie. Obfuscating the position and ultimate aims of the terrorists makes their actions seem mad, and any opposing actions seem justified.

With both Pam and Paul captive to the villains, it’s up to the dog Nick to save them. And here we’re introduced to the episode’s most sympathetic character: Osborne, the meek, bespectacled man who runs the dilapidated country inn where the criminal action is happening. Unlike Paul, Osborne is not aligned with state ideology; he’s motivated by narrow, everyday concerns, like ensuring no dogs loiter on his property. We’re clearly meant to identify with Osborne: when Nick sprays the hotelier with a water hose, to get his attention, the water is first sprayed directly on the camera lens, at us.

Nick rouses the non-ideologic self-interested character to the defense of one political side. However, he does this not by appealing to ideology, but by threatening the comfort of the passive actor. This is reminiscent of how the newspaper is always declaring our comfort to be under threat. The sleight is possible, since the terrorists’ positions have been strategically re-written so that it appears that threatening stability is a goal unto itself, rather than a means to an end.

The Hobo is of course not actually acting in defense of state ideology, but his narrow focus on context-free morality (and waking up the non-ideological actor with his moral concerns) can be exploited to that end.  

The dog comes from a third world, not of power or of resistance, but the world of the woods. Among the trees, living as an animal, there are only immediate concerns, so of course he can’t see the greater context of his actions. But at times, this can also be an advantage, for him. When the terrorists chase Nick, he leads them off into the trees, and there they become hopelessly lost. In the woods, among individual trunks, their ideology can't follow, so they're easily duped.  

Osborne has a “No Dogs Allowed” sign on his property. By forbidding dogs, Osborne wishes to keep the wildness of apolitical moral action at bay (the forest, after all, is cut down a safe distance from his beloved lawn). And yet, even though he appears unaligned, Osborne’s cherished obsession with self-concern is policed by the channels and apparatuses of the state (which are nourished by a particular ideology, though he doesn't see it).

The wildness of the dog's morality runs outside of these channels. And yet, it is the dog, the apparently-radical actor, that draws Osborne's actions to a political side, for it is a roused Osborne who eventually unties and frees the kidnapped couple.  

Here we see the dangers of radical actions being co-opted to state ends, if the actions don't have their own, competing ideological compass.

This is why Osborne changes his sign at the end, crossing out the “No,” so it says simply “Dogs Allowed.” Since the moral-ideological motivation of the terrorists has been successfully hidden from him, and his own morality has been manipulated to be indistinguishable from self-interest, he is now able to see morality, state ideology, and his own comfort as compatible, and indeed mutually-reinforcing.  

The freed Paul Hamilton says he wants to make the dog his “best man.” Nick has been granted humanity because he is perceived to have collaborated with the correct (state) ideology.

The Hobo naturally flees this.

2 stars

#dogs #thelittlesthobo #littlesthobo #canadiantv #terrorism #vintagetv #politics

[joemuggs]

Occupy the Dancefloor 2012

Been talking about politics in dance music a lot lately. Obviously the Bassiani protests in Tbilisi and Berlin have thrown it into relief, but there’s a lot of other vigorous discourse going on, both to do with the current age and in looking back 30 years to the “Summer of Love”. In thinking about it, I dug out this piece I wrote for Mixmag at the end of 2011, published in Jan 2012. I present it now without comment, except to say it’s pretty fascinating how much has changed in some ways and how little in others.

“The atmosphere was electric! I'd never felt such a concentrated positive energy before. People from every walk of life and background were united...”

It's the sort of quote you've probably seen in interviews with DJs a hundred times before, but this time we're not talking about the summer of '89 or any other hoary acid house reminiscence. This is Optimo's JD Twitch recounting his visit to the Occupy Wall Street encampment last summer.

2011 was a hell of a year by any standards, with conspiracies, scandals and crises at every turn. The Arab Spring and war in Libya, riots across the UK, Greece and Spain, Europe edging ever closer to economic collapse, the hackgate scandals, public services being cut to ribbons by a government of comically posh pantomime villains... it seemed sometimes we've had a decade's worth of news all in one go, and it shows no sign that things are going to calm down any time soon. Quite the opposite, in fact – by the time this issue hits the shops, we're fully ready for a couple of small nuclear wars to have broken out and the Euro to have been replaced as currency by peanut M&Ms.

But what's all this got to do with Mixmag? Ravers generally go their own merry way, right? Switch the news off, pull the curtains tighter to blank out the dawn, turn up the music and crack on – leave the politics to Bono? Well, yes and no. The Occupy movement, which sprung up in cities across the western world to demand accountability from institutions in response to the banking crisis that underpins much of the chaos in the world today, has not had much vocal support from the clubbing world – until more recently.

In December Massive Attack's 3D curated a show with Thom Yorke and Tim Goldsworthy (ex LCD Soundsystem), and has been putting up online a series of mix sets by the likes of Horsemeat disco, all in support of the Occupy movement. And a glance at occupymusicians.com shows a small but steadily increasing number of dance DJs and producers among the indie bands and experimentalists standing up and being counted. So is clubland developing a social conscience?

Maybe it's just that we're remembering that dance is not a bubble separated off from the world after all. Professor John Street, author of the new book Music and Politics, points out that “from the 1920s when US sheriffs would issue decrees about how couples could dance together, to rock'n'roll and the scandal of how teenagers reacted tot he music, and on through rave, the powers that be have been as exercised by the performance of dance in crowds as they ever have by the lyrics of songs.” That is to say, the simple self expression of dancing can be as much of a political act as any protest song, and indeed can have more effect.

Trance deity Paul Van Dyk, himself no stranger to political activity, is clear too that losing it on the dancefloor doesn't mean losing touch with wider realities; perhaps unsurprisingly for someone who grew up in oppressive Communist East Germany, he believes the freedoms we enjoy should be trumpeted from the rooftops. “People, artists, movements can be hedonistic and free spirited,” he says, “but also speak out and make a statement of the fact that this is a more tolerant and respectful group than many others in society.”

The author Tim Lawrence, who has closely studied the roots of modern dance culture going back to the start of the disco era, concurs. “I just don't accept that going out clubbing is self-absorbed,” he insists. “Sitting at home and looking in the mirror is self-absorbed. Going out with friends and engagement in a physical activity that only works if everyone participates and contributes is an act of socialising and community. If we stay at home and watch TV all the time we're saying one thing about the kind of society we want to be part of. If we go out dancing, we're saying another thing. Dancing is political.”

Matt Black of Ninja Tune founders Coldcut goes further, but sounds a note of caution. “Yes, people commune and collaborate through dance events,” he agrees, “and often they share an interest in making the world better, in social justice – but as with everything that gives people pleasure that culture is very easily hijacked by those who want to make a quick buck. Cocaine becomes involved, egos become involved, and very quickly you lose touch with the constructive spirit that was so inspiring in the first place.”

“But,” he continues, “that's maybe part of the natural cycle of things. The punk of today becomes the suit of tomorrow, the spirit of rebellion wears off somewhat. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though: I think there are probably a lot of people in ordinary jobs now who still carry the inspiration of acid house and rave with them, and when they see something like the Occupy movement, they think 'yes, that's something I understand and can get behind' because they know that feeling of being part of something bigger.”

It's not just old ravers carrying the inspiration of the past forward though. Many in the dubstep generation are aware of the power of dance music's communality, its deep roots, and the potential this has for social action. Loefah, as co-founder of Brixton's DMZ night is one of the most important figures in the growth of dubstep and all that's followed. His diverse Swamp 81 label is named after the police operation that sparked the original Brixton riots 30 years ago – but he stops short of making direct political statements, instead preferring to use the networks of art and music to deliver coded messages, not preaching but drawing people in and allowing them to make their own conclusions.

“When I was a teenager,” says Loefah, “pirate radio and white labels were everything, and as you got more and more into it, you began to understand the culture. Then when I went to the jungle raves, you'd become a part of this community, meeting the people you'd heard shout outs to on the radio, and you get something from it that's impossible to explain unless you're there but it's powerful and it's not controlled by any authorities. It might sound elitist, but it's not: anyone could be a part of it, but you have to make the effort to find out and understand it.”

Ben UFO, DJ and founder of the Hessle Audio label, is emphatic that the communities created in this way post jungle, garage, dubstep and grime are politically important. “Dance music in London especially,” he says, “has always provided a space for people from all sorts of different class backgrounds, different races, genders and identities to come together for a common purpose and communicate with each other - this is quite radical in itself, and I think it's easy to forget that. A good example of this is the multitude of conversations facilitated by music in the aftermath of the riots this summer, with my whole Twitter timeline dominated by the riots as they were happening and afterwards. Likewise a radio station like Rinse FM preserving and archiving a record of music made, presented and distributed by young, predominantly working class kids is a hugely significant thing in its own right.”

So club music IS political, even when it's not trying to be. But are we on the verge of it becoming more so, of ravers voicing resistance to entrenched power alongside the Occupy protesters? Don't count on it – after all, the instinct to close the curtains and chop out another line is still strong. US journalist, music business expert and Occupy LA campaigner Giovanna Trimble sadly points out that dance acts who may pay lip-service to anti-establishment views are slower when it comes to turning out for protests or organising benefits. “I have not seen any support from electronic dance music acts,” she says, “especially the ones who identify themselves as political beings.”

The opportunities are there, though. Trimble still holds out hope: “I feel that of all genres, EDM has the most space for activism as the demographic is far more open-minded and less 'corrupted' by corporations.” And veteran German house singer Billie Ray Martin sums up exactly why getting bodies out on the street is powerful just as “the mass feeling of possibility and power that the height of house in '88 and onwards” had produced for her. “We've lived in a time of virtual socialising,” she says, “and it's all very fake. it's easy to click 'like' on a post that says 'do you want to personally go out and change the world?' and then move on the latest video on there and not even ever think about why you clicked 'like'. I wish we would go out on the streets and shout it out – and that's where Occupy comes in. I hope it gains the kind of power it deserves. I'm there all the way. 'Like'!”

#politics #rave #acid house #techno #protest #lgbtq #georgia #bassiani #occupy

[justsomeantifas]

Thus far, Donald Trump has governed as a typical Republican president, with the usual suite of tax cuts, deregulation, and conservative nominees for the federal bench. The difference is that unlike his predecessors, Trump isn’t rooted in the tenets of conservatism. Indeed, as a man of id and impulse, it’s hard to say he’s rooted in anything. To the extent that he does have an ideology, it’s a white American chauvinism and its attendant nativism and racism. It was the core of his “birther” crusade against Barack Obama—the claim that for reasons of blood and heritage, Obama couldn’t be legitimate—and the pitch behind his campaign for president. Trump would restore American greatness by erasing the racial legacy of Obama’s presidency: the Hispanic immigration, the Muslim refugees, the black protesters.

This is the reason Trump’s campaign attracted, and his administration employs, men like Jeff Sessions, Stephen Bannon, and Stephen Miller. Sessions, a staunch opponent of federal civil rights enforcement and proponent of radical immigration restriction. Miller, his protégé, whose young career is marked by the same contempt for racial pluralism. Bannon, an entrepreneur with intellectual pretensions whose literary touchstones include virulently racist propaganda, and who brought that sensibility to Breitbart, a news website where “black crime” was a vertical and writers churn out stories on dangerous Muslims. Each shares a vision of a (white) America under siege from Hispanic immigration to the South and Islam to the East. All three are influential in the Trump White House as strategists and propagandists, taking the president’s impulses and molding them into a coherent perspective.

That is the key context for President Trump’s recent remarks in Warsaw, Poland, where he made a defense of “Western civilization.” He praised Poland’s resilience in the face of Nazi aggression and Soviet domination (and stayed quiet on Nazi collaboration within Poland), and celebrated the nation as a beacon of Western values. “A strong Poland is a blessing to the nations of Europe, and they know that. A strong Europe is a blessing to the West and to the world.” (It should be said that U.S. allies in Western Europe are less enthusiastic about the current right-wing Polish government.) From here, Trump presented the West as an empire under siege: “We have to say there are dire threats to our security and to our way of life. You see what’s happening out there. They are threats. We will confront them. We will win.”

Although marked by Trump’s characteristic bombast, much of this was in line with past presidential rhetoric, especially during the Cold War when American presidents routinely engaged in this kind of clash of civilizations rhetoric. (It is unclear, though, if previous presidents would have endorsed a narrative that erases victims of Polish anti-Semitism.)

But this isn’t the Cold War. The Soviet Union no longer exists. For Trump then, what are these “dire threats”? The chief one is “radical Islamic terrorism” exported by groups like ISIS. But he doesn’t end there. For Trump, these threats are broader than particular groups or organizations; they are internal as well as external.

“We must work together to confront forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the South or the East, that threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith, and tradition that make us who we are,” said Trump. “If left unchecked, these forces will undermine our courage, sap our spirit, and weaken our will to defend ourselves and our societies.”

Not content to leave his message understated, Trump hammered home this idea in a subsequent line. “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive,” said the president, before posing a series of questions: “Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?”

In the context of terrorism specifically, a deadly threat but not an existential one, this is overheated. But it’s clear Trump has something else in mind: immigration. He’s analogizing Muslim migration to a superpower-directed struggle for ideological conquest. It’s why he mentions “borders,” why he speaks of threats from “the South”—the origin point of Hispanic immigrants to the United States and Muslim refugees to Europe—and why he warns of internal danger.

This isn’t a casual turn. In these lines, you hear the influence of Bannon and Miller. The repeated references to Western civilization, defined in cultural and religious terms, recall Bannon’s 2014 presentation to a Vatican conference, in which he praised the “forefathers” of the West for keeping “Islam out of the world.” Likewise, the prosaic warning that unnamed “forces” will sap the West of its will to defend itself recalls Bannon’s frequent references to the Camp of the Saints, an obscure French novel from 1973 that depicts a weak and tolerant Europe unable to defend itself from a flotilla of impoverished Indians depicted as grotesque savages and led by a man who eats human feces.

For as much as parts of Trump’s speech fit comfortably in a larger tradition of presidential rhetoric, these passages are clear allusions to ideas and ideologies with wide currency on the white nationalist right.

Defenders of the Warsaw speech call this reading “hysterical,” denying any ties between Trump’s rhetoric in Poland and white nationalism. But to deny this interpretation of the speech, one has to ignore the substance of Trump’s campaign, the beliefs of his key advisers, and the context of Poland itself and its anti-immigrant, ultranationalist leadership. One has to ignore the ties between Bannon, Miller, and actual white nationalists, and disregard the active circulation of those ideas within the administration. And one has to pretend that there isn’t a larger intellectual heritage that stretches back to the early 20thcentury, the peak of American nativism, when white supremacist thinkers like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard penned works with language that wouldn’t feel out of place in Trump’s address.

“Unless we set our house in order, the doom will sooner or later overtake us all. And that would mean that the race obviously endowed with he greatest creative ability, the race which had achieved most in the past and which gave the richer promise for the future, had passed away, carrying with it to the grave those potencies upon which the realization of man’s highest hopes depends,” wrote Stoddard in his 1920 book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. Compare this to the crest of Trump’s remarks in Warsaw, which follows his warning of internal threat and his praise of Western civilization:

What we have, what we inherited from our—and you know this better than anybody, and you see it today with this incredible group of people—what we’ve inherited from our ancestors has never existed to this extent before. And if we fail to preserve it, it will never, ever exist again.

Those lines fit comfortably into a long history of white nationalist rhetoric. They in no way resemble Ronald Reagan’s words in Berlin or John Kennedy’s speeches in defense of the “free world.”

To read those previous presidential speeches is to see what makes Trump distinctive. Kennedy and Reagan defined “the West” in ideological terms—a world of free elections and free markets. It’s an inclusive view; presumably, any country that adopts these institutions enters that community of nations. For Trump, “the West” is defined by ties of culture and religion. It’s why a government that disdains democratic institutions, like Poland’s, can still stand as a vanguard of Western civilization, and why Muslim immigration is a chief threat to the integrity of Europe. What makes this racial is its relationship to Trump’s other rhetoric. If Western civilization is defined by religion and culture, then Mexico—with its Catholic heritage and historic ties to European monarchies—is unquestionably an outpost of “the West.” But for Trump and his advisers, it too is a threat to the Western order.

Donald Trump went to Europe and, in keeping with his campaign and influences, gave a speech with clear links to white nationalist thought. To pretend otherwise, to ignore the context of this address—to place Trump in a vacuum of history and politics, divorced from his own persona—is, at best, to cross the line into willful ignorance.

#long post #donald trump #white nationalism #What the Fuck Is Going On news #anti-semitism #holocaust mention #Islamophobia #xenophobia #racism #feces mention #unsanitary

[theconservativebrief]

Mikhail Fishman is the editor-in-chief of the Moscow Times, an English-language weekly newspaper published in Moscow. The paper is well-known for its criticisms of Russian President Vladimir Putin; indeed, it was targeted twice in 2015 by Russian hackers and has been attacked repeatedly by pro-Kremlin pundits.

A Russian citizen and an outspoken critic of Putin, Fishman has covered Russian politics for more than 15 years. For the last couple of years, he has monitored the increasingly bizarre relationship between Putin and Trump, with a particular focus on Putin’s strategic aims.

In this interview, originally conducted in February, I ask Fishman how Trump is perceived in Russia, why Putin is actively undermining global democracy, and what Russia hopes to gain from the political disorder in America.

Sean Illing

From your perch in Moscow, how do you see this strange relationship between Putin and Trump?

Mikhail Fishman

It is strange. It looks a bit irrational on Trump’s part to be sure. Why does he have this strange passion for Putin and Russia? I have to say, I don’t believe in the conspiracy theories about “golden showers” and blackmailing. I don’t believe it exists and I don’t believe it’s a factor. But this, admittedly, makes the whole thing that much stranger.

Sean Illing

You’re obviously referencing the explosive Trump dossier published by Buzzfeed in January. What makes you so skeptical of the claims in that dossier?

Mikhail Fishman

Two things. One, I’ve been a political journalist for 15 years working and dealing with sources in Russia and elsewhere. And frankly, a lot of this appears shallow to me. I’m sure Russia has plenty of dirt on Trump, but I can’t accept without hard evidence much of the what I’ve heard or read.

Second, this still has the ring of a conspiracy theory, this idea that the Kremlin has blackmailed Trump into submission. I’m generally opposed, on principle, to conspiracy theorizing. So I’m just skeptical until there’s concrete evidence.

Sean Illing

Let’s talk about Trump and Putin as individuals. How are they different? How are they similar?

Mikhail Fishman

I would prefer to talk about how they’re different, because those differences are so obvious and extreme. They come from very different worlds. Putin is an ex-Soviet intelligence officer with all that that implies. Trump is a colorful American businessman and showman.

In their habits, they’re radically different. Trump is a posturing performer, full of idiotic narcissism. He appears to be a disorganized fool, to be honest. Putin, on the other hand, is calculating, organized, and he plans everything. He also hides much of his personal life in a way that Trump does not.

Then there’s also the fact that Putin is so much more experienced than Trump. He has more than 15 years of global political experience. He knows how to do things, how to work the system. He makes plenty of mistakes, but he knows how to think and act. Trump is a total neophyte. He has no experience and doesn’t understand how global politics operates. He displays his ignorance every single day.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting to discuss the Ukrainian peace process at the German federal Chancellery on October 19, 2016, in Berlin, Germany. Photo by Adam Berry/Getty Images

Sean Illing

What is the perception of Trump in Russia? Is he seen as an ally, a foe, a stooge?

Mikhail Fishman

The vision of Trump is basically shaped by the Kremlin and their propaganda machine — that’s what they do. During the election campaign, Trump was depicted not as an underdog but as an honest representative of the American people who was being mistreated by the establishment elites and other evil forces in Washington.

Sean Illing

The Kremlin knew that to be bullshit, right? This was pure propaganda, not sincere reporting, and it was aimed at damaging Hillary Clinton.

Mikhail Fishman

Of course. All of it was aimed at damaging Hillary Clinton. Putin expected Trump to lose, but the prospect of a Clinton victory terrified him, and he did everything possible to undermine her.

Sean Illing

Why was he so afraid of a Clinton victory?

Mikhail Fishman

Because he knew that would mean an extension of Obama’s harsh orientation to Russia, perhaps even more aggressive than Obama. Putin has experienced some difficult years since his 2014 invasion of Crimea, but he didn’t expect this level of isolation. He saw — and sees — Trump as an opportunity to change the dynamic.

Sean Illing

A lot of commentators here believe the most generous interpretation of Trump’s fawning orientation to Putin and Russia is that he’s hopelessly naïve. Do you buy that?

Mikhail Fishman

That’s a good question. Why does he like Putin so much? I think Trump sees Putin as a kind of soulmate. Let’s be honest: Trump is not a reflective person. He’s quite simple in his thinking, and he’s sort of attracted to Putin’s brutal forcefulness. If anything, this is what Trump and Putin have in common.

Sean Illing

Has Putin made a puppet of Trump?

Mikhail Fishman

Of course. This is certainly what the Kremlin believes, and they’re acting accordingly. They’re quite obviously playing Trump. They consider him a stupid, unstrategic politician. Putin is confident that he can manipulate Trump to his advantage, and he should be.

Sean Illing

In other words, Trump’s a useful idiot to them?

Mikhail Fishman

Exactly. The Kremlin is limited in their knowledge about what’s going on in Washington, but they see the chaos and the confusion in Trump’s administration. They see the clumsiness, the inexperience. Naturally, they’re working to exploit that.

President Donald Trump tours the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture on February 21, 2017, in Washington, DC. Photo by Kevin Dietsch – Pool/Getty Images

Sean Illing

What’s the long geopolitical play for Putin? What does he hope to gain from the disorder in America?

Mikhail Fishman

The first thing he wants and needs is the symbolic legitimization of himself and Russia as a major superpower and world player that America has to do deal with as an equal. He wants to escape the isolation of Russia on the world stage, which was what the campaign in Syria was all about. Putin has grand ambitions for himself and for Russia, and nearly every move he makes is animated by this.

Sean Illing

How much of this, from Putin’s perspective, is about discrediting democracy as such?

Mikhail Fishman

He didn’t believe Trump would win, so he was preparing to sell Clinton’s victory as a fraud. And this is part of his broader message across the board, which is that democracy itself is flawed, broken, unjust. Putin actually believes this. He doesn’t believe in democracy, and this is the worldview that he basically shares with Trump: that the establishment is corrupt and that the liberal world order is unjust.

Sean Illing

But Putin’s interest in undermining democracies across the globe is about much more than his personal disdain for this form of government. He wants to point to the chaos in these countries and say to his domestic audience, “You see, democracy is a sham, and it doesn’t work anywhere.” That serves as a justification for his own anti-democratic policies. In the end, it’s about reinforcing his own power.

Mikhail Fishman

That’s true. But again, this what Putin really believes. He does not believe a true and just democracy exists anywhere. This is the worldview they’ve been spinning for years and they’ve really internalized it.

For Putin, this is very much a zero-sum game. The West is the enemy. America is the enemy. Whatever you can do to damage the enemy, you do it. The more unrest there is in America, the better positioned Russia is to work its will on the world stage. He wants to divide democratic and European nations in order to then play those divisions to his advantage.

Sean Illing

A pervasive concern in this country is that Trump admires Putin’s strongman authoritarianism, and seeks to replicate it in America. Do you think this concern is well-founded?

Mikhail Fishman

I think it is. Again, it comes to back what Trump and Putin have in common. They’re both male chauvinists. Trump probably admires the fact that Putin is the kind of guy who feels the need to ride horses shirtless; it appeals to his authoritarian instincts. But this is about much more than imagery.

They are both illiterate people in a way. They’re not widely educated. They do not believe in institutions. They see democratic institutions as burdens, impediments to their will. They don’t believe that social and political life should be sophisticated; they think it should be simple.

And this sort of thinking naturally concludes in one-man rule. I think Trump will fail, but there’s no doubt that he shares these authoritarian impulses with Putin.

Original Source -> A Russian newspaper editor explains how Putin made Trump his puppet

via The Conservative Brief

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[topmixtrends]

MODERN AMERICAN CINEMA began with a series of lies. D. W. Griffith turned Thomas Dixon Jr.’s 1905 novel The Clansman into 1915’s The Birth of a Nation, a masterpiece of technical achievement and racist propaganda. Together, the novel and film popularized lies about the aims of Reconstruction (if only the federal government had seized the land of former slave-owners at the conclusion of the Civil War) and the “nature” of the formerly enslaved. In Dixon and Griffith’s imaginations, American slaves are freed to overthrow the government of white Southerners and rape white women, and the Ku Klux Klan emerge as heroes. Such is the power of film that every black filmmaker since, starting with Oscar Micheaux and his 1920 film Within Our Gates, has been charged with combating these lies.

We don’t normally refer to these images, outright, as lies. Narrative filmmaking isn’t meant to be beholden to a strict accounting of history. But what film does, at its best, is tell the truth through the creation of myth. That is, it starts from an honest accounting of an event/idea/emotion, and no matter what world it goes on to build, it keeps that truth at its core. Griffith’s film shows the failure of tying an emotional honesty to historical inaccuracy. For all of its pioneering editing techniques and use of music, the narrative doesn’t hold because nothing he depicts, save Lincoln’s assassination, has even a bit of truth to it, no matter how much Griffith felt that it did.

But he wasn’t alone. The Birth of a Nation was a massive commercial success. White Americans bought into the myth because it confirmed their racist notions of black people. Black Americans were put in the position of attempting to defend themselves against these myths, on the screen and off.

On the screen, black actors chose, when they could, to portray characters that defied the myth. Throughout the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, black performers like Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Earle Hyman, and Isabel Sanford made names for themselves by refusing the minstrel-made roles available to their predecessors and opting for films they felt offered more complexity, humanity, and dignity to black characters. While it constitutes a noble cause, this often meant the roles could feel sanitized; instead of reaching for an honest humanity, black actors needed to embody their most upstanding selves, lest they lend any credence to the growing body of racist lies that kept the myth of black inferiority humming.

A new generation of filmmakers emerged in reaction to these sanitized images, choosing to create larger-than-life myths that grew out of the worlds their dignified contemporaries dared not touch. The blaxploitation era of filmmakers rooted their stories in the dark realities of black life. It’s not to suggest that the stories of the previous era were untrue, but their unwillingness to stray too far from respectable depictions of black life meant they were put at a distance to the truth of most black Americans. Shaft, Super Fly, Foxy Brown, The Mack, Black Caesar, Trouble Man, Cleopatra Jones, and a host of other films of the 1970s, typically helmed by black writers and directors, created black superheroes out of controversial figures. Were we meant to celebrate pimps, drug dealers, outlaws, and killers because their ultimate objective was defeating The Man? It’s a question still not totally settled, though it must be said that an even greater flaw of these films, with very few exceptions, is that they center around an idea of reclaiming masculinity from racist myth-making by trafficking in sexist myth-making. Combating one lie with another only compounds the lie.

It speaks to the general unfairness of racism that black filmmakers are even put in this position. “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction,” Toni Morrison said in an address from 1975, “It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being.” Art should help to explain our reason for being. Where black art is concerned, the distraction of racism has meant that stories about black people are only ever allowed to contend with the struggle to undo racist lies. There has never emerged a consensus on the best approach.

In the early 1990s, a generation of filmmakers, inspired by hip-hop, and more specifically gangsta rap (itself inspired by the blaxploitation era of film and music), created a subgenre of “hood films,” a term deployed derisively and descriptively depending on your feeling toward them. Beginning with John Singleton’s 1991 classic Boyz n the Hood, “hood films” became a place for depictions of black male life in the post–Civil Rights era of Reaganomics and the crack epidemic. Their major themes were gangbanging, drug-related violence, police brutality, poverty, and survival.

Boyz is the most celebrated of these films; writer/director John Singleton earned Academy Award nominations for Best Director (he was the first African-American director to be nominated in this category, and remains one of only four) and Best Original Screenplay, and in 2002 it was selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

But it isn’t the best “hood film” from that period. That honor belongs to Menace II Society, the 1993 directorial debut of Allen and Albert Hughes. The two films are, fairly or not, forever linked and will be endlessly compared (and I’m obviously part of the problem). But Menace, even as the superior of the two, will always lose out.

It’s not surprising, given that the overall message of Boyz fits right alongside the kind of liberal politics that emerged during the 1980s and ’90s. The film opens with title cards with statistics about black men killing black men, and then none too subtly zeroes in on bright red “STOP” sign. Its chief concern is “black-on-black” violence (narrowly understood here as black male gun violence committed against other black males), reflecting similar concerns from the Civil Rights establishment and politicians that would soon be validating the fear of “superpredators.” This alone isn’t condemnable, but Boyz hammers home a non-solution to the problem of intraracial violence with an earnestness that often has the look and feel of a sophisticated after-school special. (Eazy-E may have largely meant this as a diss to his former N.W.A. groupmate, Ice Cube, who starred as the drug-dealing/gangbanging Doughboy, but he wasn’t wrong.) Nearly a dozen times, Singleton gets close-up on a character’s face while they deliver lectures instead of dialogue, and an overly sentimental jazz saxophone plays in the background. The worst offense is when Furious Styles, played by Laurence Fishburne, says to his son Tre, “Your friends, they don’t have anybody looking after them. You gonna see how they turn out.” It’s not so much foreshadowing as it is major spoiler: Tre’s friends will not survive South Central Los Angeles because they are young black men who do not have fathers.

There are some more radical moments sprinkled in (a 10-year-old boy flips off a “Reagan/Bush ’84” campaign poster; an older Tre, played by Cuba Gooding Jr., rails against black men joining the army), but it is suffused with the conservative notion of the return of the vaunted patriarch with the ability to fix what ails black communities.

Menace doesn’t have this problem. It opens on Caine and O-Dog, played by Tyrin Turner and Larenz Tate respectively, entering a Korean-owned convenience store to purchase malt liquor. They’re followed by one of the store owners, which leads to a profanity-laced back and forth about whether or not they intend to pay for their 40 ounces. They do, but just as they’re exiting, the man who rang them up mutters under his breath, “I feel sorry for your mother,” at which point O-Dog, the more volatile of the two, approaches him with his gun out and shoots him as if the ability to pull the trigger were second nature. While Caine panics, O-Dog takes the other owner in the back to retrieve the security camera footage of shooting, and then shoots her as well. Tape in hand, he goes back behind the register and takes whatever money he can find. Caine and O-Dog run away before any police arrive.

From the jump, Menace puts us into a world of anti-blackness and asks us to consider the consequences. This first scene plays out almost as a revenge fantasy for the real-life killing of Latasha Harlins, the 15-year-old black girl killed by Soon Ja Du, then a 51-year-old convenience store owner, after it was assumed that Harlins was stealing an orange juice.

What follows is the story of how a gangster is created. The Hughes Brothers crib heavily from Martin Scorsese’s 1990 classic Goodfellas, from the use of voice-over to the sweeping camera movements, but they also share narrative DNA: each tells the story of the rise, and fall, of a gangster. But unlike Henry Hill, who reflects early on that “as far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster,” Caine has no such desire. For him, an 18-year-old black boy growing up in 1980s–’90s Watts, the choice to become a gangster is not a choice at all. It’s the only reality available to him.

Before we get into Caine’s life, we see footage of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, the aftermath of which, we’re told, is when the drugs started flowing into the black community, and with the drugs increased violence. We’re transported to the late 1970s, where we witness Caine witnessing his father kill a man for the first time. This is followed by footage of Los Angeles erupting in a rebellion unlike any they had seen since Watts, in the wake of the verdict that allowed four LAPD officers to walk free after their vicious beating of Rodney King. And then there’s Caine, listless in a high school classroom, more interested in the beeper that connects him to the world of drugs he inherited from his father and everyone else around him.

In an essay for Artforum from 1993, Arthur Jafa recalls telling a friend, “[Menace II Society] makes Boyz in the Hood seem like The Cosby Show.” The level of violence alone is enough to make that distinction. The Hughes Brothers’ camera repeatedly takes us right up to where we don’t want to be. When Caine is shot for the first time and goes into shock, we are on the ground with him, as though we’re coughing up the same blood. Bullets have consequences.

But what Jafa was also getting at is the preciousness of Boyz in comparison to Menace. Boyz n the Hood’s sense of tragedy is meant as a cautionary tale to black men making poor choices. We grieve because those choices mean the wrong people sometimes get shot and killed, or because good people get mixed up in bad situations created by bad people.

In Menace, tragedy is ubiquitous to the point of meaninglessness. Contrary to Roger Ebert’s assessment at the time, the message of Menace is not that “[m]any victims of street violence are a great loss to society, their potential destroyed by a bankrupt value system”; nor does it avoid blaming “the easy target of white racism” for the level of violence depicted. It’s possible that the esteemed film critic drew these conclusions because it is only recently that black filmmakers have been (somewhat) freed of the expectation that their work explicitly state its own purpose. But by creating a world in which violence and death are constant occurrences, where murder is undertaken without much thought, and everyone, no matter their level of goodness and respectability, can be subject to it, Menace pushes us to consider how the environment became rotten, rather than the individuals.

When Caine’s grandfather asks him, “Do you care if you live or die?” he pauses for an awkward amount of time before finally answering, limply, “I don’t know.” He is attempting to figure out how his life could have any meaning given the circumstances under which he’s been reared.

In Boyz, Tre is the only one of his friends to survive because he had a father to teach him how to be a man and make good decisions, the ultimate message of the movie. In Menace, Caine dies, but he dies alongside his friend Sharif, a Muslim convert with a strong father figure. No one is protected by their individual choices. Tre, we are told at the end of Boyz, leaves South Central to attend Morehouse College in Atlanta, escaping the horrors he has witnessed. In Menace, Caine’s love interest, Ronnie, played by Jada Pinkett, suggests he come with her to Atlanta where she’s found a new job. He responds: “You act like Atlanta ain’t in America.”

There is a hopelessness to Menace that could be a turn-off, but that hopelessness is precisely its strength. It’s an honest emotion, but unlike with The Birth of a Nation, it is not born of a false reality. It does, however, suffer from the great flaw of its blaxpoitation-era progenitors, where it allows the stories of black women to recede into the background as it narrows in on black men, rendering every black woman character flat and uninteresting. But Menace II Society’s greatest contribution is that it unburdens itself from struggling against the racist lies of cinematic history. Caine is not dignified. He is not respectable. But he isn’t a heroic gangster, either. He is no more than a black boy trying to survive in the United States, and that becomes reason enough to tell his story. Of course, Menace is subject to its own bits of hokey sermonizing, the worst offender being Charles S. Dutton’s admonishment, “The hunt is on! And you’re the prey.” But the sermons are not saviors, because Menace doesn’t believe any of those exist. Twenty-five years ago it was bold to be so bleak. It was a different kind of black filmmaking, to neither offer solutions for defeating racist lies, nor for the film to position itself as one of those solutions. And black artists are better off for it.

¤

Mychal Denzel Smith is the New York Times best-selling author of Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching and a fellow at The Nation Institute.

The post Lies, Camera, Action appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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By Andrew Levine / Counterpunch.

Photo by Marc Nozell | CC BY 2.0

Donald Trump’s slogan “America First” is vile; it smacks of nativism and appeals to the insularity and anti-intellectualism of an appallingly large segment of the public.  It has always been clear too that Trump’s eagerness to get along with Russia stems from more than common sense; that it involves some sort of cover up of something.

Nevertheless, these were the only straws to grasp for people who desperately wanted to believe that a Trump presidency, awful as it was bound to be, not just for Muslims and Hispanics but for anyone — black, white, and brown –who is not filthy rich, would at least come with a few redeeming features.

By last November, it wouldn’t have taken a whole lot along those lines to put the seemingly obvious truth, that the Democratic Party was the lesser evil of our two semi-established political parties, in doubt.  Despite some encouraging movement at state and local levels around the country, it would take even less now.  At the national level, the party remains a disgrace.

Democrats are social liberals whose support for the “identity” concerns of everyone who is not heterosexual and white is firm, perhaps even excessive.  For the most part, their positions on reproductive rights and gender equality issues are progressive too.  But, like Republicans, they are bought and paid for neoliberals who serve Wall Street and corporate America, while dutifully toadying up to a host of nefarious “special interests.”

For that alone, if there were a God in heaven, they would be looking forward now to an eternity in hell.   Even so, on the domestic front, their right to the lesser evil title was secure in 2016.  It still is; more than ever.

Not so, however, on matters of empire, and war and peace.  With Hillary Clinton and her minions leading the way, the party of Scoop Jackson was reverting back to form.  Under Obama and Clinton, it has been a refuge for “humanitarian” interveners and other liberal imperialists.  They are still very much there, but now, it seems, neoconservatives are setting the tone and calling the shots.

Even the later-day version of pre-World War II isolationism that Trump seemed to favor is better than that.

As the election season wore on, Democrats became even more odious.  Searching for ways to exonerate Clinton for her failings as a candidate and, in due course, for her loss to a buffoon, they and the media flacks who serve them took to reviving long dormant Cold War demons.

The Democratic Party establishment failed miserably at getting Hillary elected, but it has been doing a fine job setting America on a course that could lead to nuclear annihilation.

It had always been clear that Trump was emotionally unstable and intellectually and morally deficient.  Putting the nuclear codes in his hands was therefore blatantly unwise — even if, unlike Clinton, he seemed to favor good relations with Russia.

Putting them in Clinton’s hands was unwise too; perhaps even more so.   She would not be nearly as likely to act out erratically, but, as a warmongering Russophobe and unreconstructed Cold Warrior, she might well be the more dangerous of the two.

Or so it seemed six months ago.  By now, it is plain that no good at all can come from putting the empire’s affairs, much less control of America’s nuclear arsenal, in Trump’s hands.

This is becoming patently clear as the crisis brought on by North Korea’s advances in nuclear weapons design and missile technology unfolds.

It has long been clear that a showdown with North Korea would have catastrophic consequences.  However, until now, this was more of a theoretical possibility, at least in the short run, than a palpable concern.  There are, after all, so many other reasons to worry about Trump that Korea barely registered.

This is no longer the case.  From his over-the-top golfing redoubt in deepest New Jersey, President Tweety Bird has been churning out threats of a nuclear Holocaust with a degree of recklessness that is both alarming and historically unprecedented.

And there is no obvious way to stop him.  This lamentable state of affairs concentrates the mind, putting the feebleness of American democracy in focus.

Half a century ago, with opposition to the Vietnam War intensifying and black liberation struggles raging, it was not uncommon for demonstrators to chant: “the only solution, revolution.”

The sentiment behind the slogan was understandable, and the point well taken; but, even in those heady days, talk of revolution was an expression more of self-indulgent romanticism than hardheaded realism.  The times were not even remotely pre-revolutionary.  Nowadays, that old slogan seems not only inapt, but ridiculously quaint.

Nevertheless, with the White House in the hands of an out-of-control male adolescent, locked in the body of a hapless septuagenarian, the idea behind the slogan seems more pertinent than ever.  A radical democratic restructuring of basic societal and political institutions – a democratic, if not also a full-fledged social, revolution – is precisely what we urgently need.

And, in a political universe shaped by Democrats and Republicans, it just might be, as the slogan says, that this is the only solution there can be.

The Trump phenomenon has catalyzed this sensibility by making painfully apparent the extent to which, in theory if not in practice, our always feeble democracy has devolved into a minority rule regime, at odds with the fundamental philosophical and valuational commitments that underlie our form of civilization.

This is not by any means the only reason why the world has seemed out of joint since Trump became President, but it surely is part of the story.

***

Trump’s approval ratings are appallingly low for a President barely six months into his term, and they are in decline.  According to reliable “fake news” reports, roughly two-thirds of the electorate despises him intensely; and, with each passing day, it becomes increasingly clear how unfit he is for the office to which he was elected.

Even so, credible, though obviously fallible, commentators say that if a recall election were held today, he would probably still win.

They give two reasons: his supporters are ardent and therefore highly motivated to vote, and the Democrats have no one to run against him.

That a third or so of the electorate likes Trump a lot seems true enough; that the Democrats have no one to run against him is less clear.  They had Bernie Sanders last year; had the fix not been in, he would have stood a decent chance of beating Hillary Clinton for the nomination, and had he, not Hillary, run against Trump, he might have won.

Then, unless he governed in more or less the way that Clinton would have, he would have had an impossibly difficult time being President, but that is another story.

Unfortunately, we have no way to know what would happen if Sanders or someone with similar political views were to run now; thank the authors of our Constitution for that.  We can be sure, however, that the forces that kept Sanders out last time would do all they could to keep him out again, notwithstanding the fact that his socialism is pallid, and that the self-described socialist is just an old-school liberal Democrat at heart.

They also say that Trump would probably win again because Democrats haven’t gotten their “message” across.  Occasionally, someone will also point out that they have no message to get across because it isn’t clear to anyone, Democrats least of all, what their party stands for.

Therefore, why bother to vote for them?  The sheer odiousness of Republicans, and of their party’s standard-bearer, is a good enough reason for many, but for many others, it is hardly reason enough.

That Democrats are emphatically not a genuinely progressive opposition party also helps Republicans.

The other side of the story is that Trump’s support, though declining, may, for the time being, have bottomed out.  This is hard for people who loathe him, and who have good and compelling reasons for doing so, to understand.

But, as much or more than the Democrats’ shortcomings, this is why those who think that Trump, supported by only a third of the electorate, would win if the election were held again now do have a point.

Where does the pro-Trump ardor come from?  This is a good question inasmuch as there is reason to think that, even within his hardcore base, it is widely understood that the man is a bully and an ignoramus who, in his seventy plus years, never quite emotionally matured.

The fact is, though, that Trump’s personality defects have not so far put his most ardent supporters off.  Quite to the contrary, it almost seems as if what others despise about the man is precisely what they like. They like his vulgarity and political incorrectness, and even his cluelessness about how to govern.

More remarkable still, these “populists” seem to like the fact that he is obscenely rich – not by dint of hard and constructive effort, but thanks to the generosity of his father and other politically connected cronies, and by stiffing workers, contractors, and small investors.

Ever since Clinton introduced her “basket of deplorables” remark into the conversation, it has become unfashionable in repentant liberal circles even to suggest the possibility, but the explanation for Trump’s remaining popularity could just be that his supporters really are deplorably stupid.  Having followed the news these past few weeks, I could go along with that, but I would nevertheless venture, even so, that the fact that they despise what Trump disparages matters more.

Trump’s supporters hate mainstream media and Hillary Clinton and people who think that she is God’s gift to humankind.  The reasons for their animosities are way off, but their hatreds are well directed.    Where they go wrong is in seeing Trump as an ally of theirs.

For many of the people who voted for him last November, and for a significant part of his remaining base, that perception, being too preposterous to survive contact with reality for long, has always been precarious.

There is therefore still hope for people who continue to think that Trump’s presidency will somehow make their lives go better.  Once they catch on fully to the fact that all Trump cares about are his (and maybe also his family’s) bottom lines, and about the esteem in which Trump is held, the scales will fall from their eyes and they will finally realize that, like other rightwing “populists,” Trump sides with their class enemies, not with them.

There is less hope, though, for those of his supporters whose political passions are driven by misogyny, racism, or “Dominionist” or other retrograde theologies. Their beliefs are immunized against change by their sheer irrationality.

But even in the more rational parts of the Trump base, clarity comes slowly.  Anti-Trump forces may hope for a decisive and sudden change in the consciousness of the deplorable third, but, whether they like it or not, they are engaged in a war of attrition that could go on for quite a while.

Indeed, for many Trump supporters, Trump cannot upset right thinking people too much; he cannot go too far.  We can be sure of this because he has gone too far, many times, and his hardcore supporters are still with him.

What if he shot somebody in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue, as he once claimed he could without losing support?  They would probably stick with him even then.

This, I suspect, is because all but his most irrational supporters already have a sense of the measure of the man, but remain loyal because their enemy’s enemy is their friend.   Trump is a bastard, but he is their bastard – or so they believe.  They are very wrong about this, but it could take a long time for them to come to this out, and some of them never will.

***

Except for people genuinely foolish enough to take his “fake news” blather seriously, everybody knows that Trump lost the popular vote last November and that, while he might win again in the Electoral College if the election were held today, only a third of the electorate actually backs him.

Everybody knows, in other words, that minority rule made Trump president, and that the conditions that made this possible remain in force.

What is less well understood is why this is objectionable.  The problem is not just that, as in this case, minority rule can produce disastrous outcomes; majority rule can do that too.  The deeper problem is that minority rule voting offends some of the normative foundations of modern civilization.

Getting clear on this can help delegitimize Trump and also, should we be lucky enough to see the back of him soon, the miscreants and know-nothings he empowered who will carry on after he is gone.

What, then, is minority rule, and why is it objectionable?

These questions can be complicated because the term has several, fairly distinct senses.

The clearest of these is procedural; the idea would be that, when votes are taken and candidates or measures are compared pairwise, the winner is the option with the fewest votes.  Nobody favors a decision procedure like that.

But almost everybody favors something very like it when, for example, they subscribe to rules that require super-majorities to pass enactments, or when they otherwise bias decision making in ways that favor the status quo.  Procedures that accord veto power to fewer than fifty percent plus one of the voting public are forms of minority rule.  The U.S. Constitution countenances and even prescribes collective choice rules that do precisely that.

The word “conservative” is used in American politics to denote a wide range of unseemly and downright idiotic policies – on gun control, reproductive rights, environmental policies, and countless other issues – that have scant connection to any of the main themes of the great conservative political philosophies of the past.  The word is also used to denote the right wing of our rightward skewed political spectrum.

These uses of “conservative” are, to say the least, problematic.  However, voting procedures that bias outcomes in favor of the status quo are conservative in an unproblematic way.  They work to conserve what is already in place by institutionalizing caution, a cardinal virtue for genuine conservatives, by impeding, without entirely blocking, change.

Thus a kind of minority rule can indeed be justified for conservative reasons.

But apart from the fact that people who call themselves “conservatives” – but who are actually later-day nineteenth century liberals and/or theocrats, and/or proponents of any of a variety of retrograde causes — played an important role in getting Trump elected, and play an important role still in keeping him in power, there is nothing inherently conservative about the kind of minority rule they sustain.

They are not favoring the status quo over change; they want to change the status quo, radically if need be, to accord with the ideologies they support.  To that end, thanks to the inherently undemocratic institutions that our Constitution prescribes, and the debility of Democratic Party liberals, they have brought about a dictatorship of the few over the many.

Before the dawn of the modern era, dictatorship was the norm throughout human history everywhere in the world.  This only began to change, four centuries ago, with the rise of bourgeois society in Britain and Western Europe.

The class struggles that unfolded in those regions at that time ushered in a form of civilization in which the demos, the people as opposed to social, religious and economic elites, were political actors in their own right – not just a populace for elites to placate, pacify or plunder.

It was within bourgeois society that notions of popular sovereignty and democratic governance arose.  Not long thereafter, all distinctively modern normative political theories took those understandings on board.  They underlie the core intuitions that Trump-era minority rule offend.

Democratic norms can be defended in ways that appeal to fairness, and in ways that appeal to truth.

Both derive from theological traditions that maintain that persons are, in some pertinent sense, equal with respect to what matters fundamentally – equal “in the mind of God” – regardless of their non-essential properties or their stations in life.

The theology is ancient but, before the modern era, no one took it to imply that persons ought to be treated equally by basic political or societal institutions.  That is a distinctively modern idea.

With modernity came secularism, which, in turn, detached the core notion the theology expressed from its theological articulations, leaving behind the idea that, from a moral point of view, persons matter equally and in the same ways.  From that point on, the idea has had far-reaching social and political implications.

It follows, accordingly, insofar as democracy requires that collective choices be functions of individuals’ choices for alternatives in contention, that the votes through which these choices are expressed must be counted equally; one person, one – and only one – vote.

Majority rule voting could therefore be justified on the grounds that the outcomes it produces reflect the distribution of choices within the voting population  more fairly than any other collective decision rule.

Minority-rule voting – voting that empowers minorities to make, not just block, collective decisions – would accord an unfair advantage to those who want to keep things the way they are.

Arguments for majority rule voting that appeal to truth are less intuitive because we are generally unaccustomed to the idea that there are right and wrong outcomes in electoral contests.  Choosing Trump over one or another opponent might be objectionable for any number of reasons, but the idea that it is a mistake about a matter of fact in the way that, for example, “two plus two equals five” is, seems wrong-headed.

But is it?  As long ago as the late eighteenth century, there were defenders of the jury system who argued that, under specifiable conditions, majorities, the larger the better, are more likely to discover right answers than individuals are on their own.  This was even shown to be a demonstrable consequence of the way probabilities work.  Juries, of course, vote to decide matters of fact; in principle, they deal with questions that have right and wrong answers that are independent of what anybody wants those answers to be.

Some of our greatest political thinkers – Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778), for example — produced profound and subtle political philosophies that effectively apply rationales for jury voting to collective decision making in democratic polities.

These ways of thinking have entered into the political common sense of the age.  This is why we feel intuitively that, in light of how his supporters and detractors regard him, that there is something profoundly wrong with elections that Trump could win and perhaps even win again, after providing six months worth of incontrovertible evidence of monumental incompetence and unsuitability.

For anyone who holds even pallid democratic convictions, the Trump presidency and the system that made it possible stand indicted.

The task, therefore, before more irreversible harm is done, is to bring the former to justice and to transform the latter in ways that make it truer to the values that underlie it, and that (small-d) democrats everywhere have long upheld.

ANDREW LEVINE is the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park.  He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

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Expert: Andre Vltchek with military leaders in Marawi, Philippines.  Covering the recent battle for the city of Marawi on Mindanao Island in the Southern Philippines, the Western media has been grossly exaggerating unconfirmed reports and rumors. It has been spreading twisted information and ‘facts’. At the beginning of July, I visited Mindanao as one of only a few foreigners allowed inside the besieged city of Marawi and to its surrounding area. General Rey, head of Joint-Task-Force, Ranao (Photo: Andre Vltchek) I spoke to local people, to the IDPs – those who managed to escape the city taken over by the jihadists. I also managed to discuss the situation with the highest commanders of the military in charge of the combat, including General Ramiro Rey and Lt. Colonel Jo-Ar Herrera. I encountered many soldiers, civil servants, and relief workers. My contacts in the capital informed me via text messages that I had been “red-flagged,” clearly, by the pro-US faction in the Philippine military. So before my presence was finally cleared from Manila, I was detained and held in a provisional military base in the city of Saguiaran. Here I was “softly” interrogated by military intelligence. A few steps away, a howitzer was firing artillery toward ISIS positions in Marawi, some 10 kilometers distant. Marawi ground-zero. (Photo: Andre Vltchek) “So you believe the United States is responsible for spreading terrorism all over the world,” I was asked late at night by one of the officers, point blank, while local starlet was imitating old Chuck Berry’s hit “Johnny B. Goode” on TV, sound blasted all over the barracks. It was clear that someone ‘behind the scenes’ was busy studying my published work. The Western establishment media and various servile NGOs (including those which are “defending human rights” in several rebellious and independent-minded countries) consistently demonize President Duterte, an anti-imperialist, progressive leader who enjoys well over 80 percent approval rating. It is no secret in the Philippines there are two distinct factions inside the military – one supports the president and his drive for independence from the West. The other, which is trained and often corrupted by Washington and other Western capitals, would love to see him go. The pro-Western fraction obviously wanted me out, detained, perhaps even disappeared. The other one that stands by its president wanted me to see the truth, even to be allowed into Marawi. A final decision was made late at night in Manila. I was released and granted permission to work in the besieged city. But even when the top commanders personally called the camp, there was, at least for a while, apparent reluctance to let me go. My first reaction after visiting the Marawi front was one of shock and outrage. What I witnessed was fundamentally different from what has repeatedly been said by most of the Western mass media outlets, as well as pro-Western local news channels broadcasting from Manila. It is evident, right from the start, that Marawi is not “totally destroyed,” as has been reported. Most of it is standing and standing firm. I would estimate that only between 20 and 30 percent of the houses and buildings, (most of them in the wealthy core center of the city) have sustained heavy damage.   Driving through Marawi (Photo: Andre Vltchek) It was explained to me during the presentation by top army commanders that the ISIS-related jihadists began their offensive on May 23rd 2017 and their plan was to take full control of the town by the time Ramadan was to begin (May 26th). The military spoiled their plans; it counter-attacked and managed to contain the terrorists in just one neighborhood, retaining or regaining control of all the other ‘barangays.’ Marawi City and its people (Photo: Andre Vltchek) Undoubtedly there were heavy losses, and, because of the palpable sense of fear after tremendous brutality unleashed by the terrorists, a substantial movement of IDPs (Internally Displaced  Persons). But it was never 400,000 people escaping the area, as reported in the West, but approximately 200,000 (the number once peaked at about 300,000 for a short time). There has been no “indiscriminate bombing” of the civilians. I witnessed both incoming and outgoing howitzer fire and also very limited bombing from the air; it was all targeted and mostly precise, aiming at the position of the terrorists. As in all other war zones where I have been working, I refused any protection, including helmets and bulletproof vests. That allowed me to remain more mobile. I did manage to come ‘very close’ to the front. It was clear the fighting and bombing were strictly contained to one area, no more than one-kilometer square. Even there, the mosques and almost all other buildings and houses were still standing, as is demonstrated on my photographs. Anti-Duterte NGOs and many Western governments claim that they ‘worry’ about the martial law imposed on Mindanao Island. I was told that in and around Marawi (or anywhere else on the Island), the martial law carried no brutal consequences. Even the curfew (9PM-5AM) is laxly implemented. Brigadier General Ramiro Rey (head of the Joint Task Force Group, Ranao) explained to me in Marawi City: The difference between this martial law and those that were imposed during the reign of Ferdinand Marcos is that now the military is mainly doing real fighting while providing assistance to the civilians. I absolutely don’t interfere with the work of local elected government officials. I’m actually encouraging them to do their job as before, asking them to contact me only when my assistance is needed. I never took, and I don’t intend to take, control of the area. Local government officials and volunteers working for various relief agencies and NGO’s operating in the area have confirmed what General Rey said. Old lady in Marawi City. (Photo: Andre Vltchek)  During my work in the conflict zone, I detected no fear among the residents. The relationship between the army and civilians was clearly friendly and cordial. As the military convoys were moving between the cities of Illigan and Marawi, both children and adults were smiling, waving, some cheering the soldiers. In the camps housing the IDPs, there was almost unanimous consensus: while many citizens of Mindanao Island in general and the Marawi area in particular would most likely welcome more autonomy from Manila, during this ongoing and brutal conflict almost all local people have been supportive of the military and government efforts. “We hope that both Filipino and foreign jihadi cadres would soon be crushed,” was an almost unanimous statement coming from the local people. The Military Perspective Soldiers preparing to head to the front. (Photo: Andre Vltchek) In the cities of Illigan and Marawi I was shown detailed maps clearly indicating positions of the ISIS and the military. Both Lt. Colonel Jun Abad from Ranao Camp and the commanding officer, General Rey, gave me a clear and detailed briefing. As of July 3rd, the Agus River represented the ‘borderline’ between the ISIS-held area and the zone liberated and controlled by the army. General Rey explained during our meeting in the Municipality of Marawi City (now the complex is also serving as the headquarters of the war theatre): The ISIS wants to establish their state on the island of Mindanao – an Islamic caliphate – right here in the Province of Lanao del Sur. General Rey updating. ( Photo: Andre Vltchek) But that’s not what the majority of local people want. Before President Duterte came to power little over one year ago, social situation in many parts of Mindanao was desperate and therefore there was at least some support for radical ‘solutions’. Since then, however, things changed dramatically. Healthcare, education and public housing are improving. Indiscriminate mining by multi-national companies has been deterred. People here, as well as in almost all other parts of the Philippines, finally feel hopeful and optimistic about their future. This converts into great support for both the government and the military. There is no doubt the entire city will be freed, soon, most likely in July or August. The only reason why it did not happen yet is that the terrorists are using hostages, both Christians and Muslims, as human shields. President Duterte, General Rey, and other civilian and military officials are trying to avoid unnecessary human losses. Cultural topography’ of the area is also very complex. Near the front line I was told by one of the top commanding army officers: We could take the city in just one day, but there would be great civilian casualties. The houses in this area are very sturdy; they are 2-3 stories high and fortified, as there are constant and brutal family feuds, called’ rido’, raging here, and have been for centuries. But to delay the liberation of Marawi is also very dangerous. Major Malvin Ligutan. (Photo: Andre Vltchek) “The terrorists began using captured women as sex slaves,” explained Major Malvin Ligutan, standing in front of a temporary military base in Saguiaran. Despite all the horrors of the Marawi war, the army refused to use brutal tactics, even after it found out that various local citizens clearly miscalculated and before the conflict began, offered substantial support to the ISIS-related terrorists. Captain John Mark Silva Onipig clarified: These people belonging to the ISIS are not only terrorists, but they are also criminals. They were dealing in drugs… And some local people knew that… Actually, locals knew quite a lot; they knew about the presence of the terrorists in the area long before all this started, but they never reported it to the authorities. “How did the terrorists get hold of so many weapons?” I wanted to know. In the Philippines, those who have money can buy as many weapons as they want on the black market. The situation is extremely sensitive as there is clearly the involvement of foreign fighters. On June 30th, in Saguiaran, Major Malvin Ligutan admitted, hesitantly: In one of the safe houses, we found passports issued in Indonesia, Malaysia and several Arab countries. A month ago I wrote an essay exposing the complex network of Western-sponsored terrorism in Asia (“Washington Jihad Express: Indonesia, Afghanistan, Syria and Philippines”). I argued that in the 1980’s, Indonesian and Malaysian jihadists, indoctrinated by the Southeast Asian brand of extreme anti-Communism, went to fight in Afghanistan against the socialist governments of Karmal, and then Mohammad Najibullah, with the ultimate goal of destroying the Soviet Union. Hardened and further brainwashed, they returned home to Southeast Asia, participated in several ethnic strives and pogroms (including those in Ambon and Poso), and then, in order to ‘bridge the generational gap’, embarked on the coaching of a young generation of terrorists, who eventually ended up fighting in Syria and recently in the Philippines. My essay was full of facts, and I put into it various testimonies of Southeast Asian academics, thinkers, and even of one active and prominent ‘jihadi cadre’ who is now living in Jakarta. Prof. Iman Soleh (Photo: Andre Vltchek) In the Indonesian city of Bandung, Prof. Iman Soleh, a professor at the Faculty of Social and Political Science (University of Padjadjaran- UNPAD) offered his take on why the West is now so obsessed with destabilizing and smearing the Philippines and its current rebellious administration: Since World War Two, the U.S. was afraid of so-called ‘domino effects’. Among other things that are now happening in the Philippines under president Duterte, the government is curbing activities of the multi-national mining conglomerates, and the West cannot accept that. Philippines are putting its environmental concerns above the short-term profits! For the millions of left-wing activists here in Indonesia and all over Southeast Asia, President Duterte is a role model. It is no secret that the West punishes such ‘bad paradigms’ brutally and decisively. Prof. Soleh continued: I think all that is happening is not just to ‘destabilize’ the Philippines, but also because the country has conflict areas that could be ‘nurtured’. The best example is the predominantly Muslim island of Mindanao vs. the rest of the Philippines, which is predominantly a Catholic country… The West is regularly using ‘jihad,’ directly and indirectly, to destabilize socialist, anti-imperialist, and just patriotic countries and governments. In the past, it managed to ruin countries like Afghanistan, Indonesia (1965) and Syria. Many believe that the Philippines is the latest addition to the ‘hit-list.’ The China and Russia Connection As Drei Toledo, a prominent Philippine journalist, educator and pro-Duterte activist, originally from Mindanao, explained: The reason why the West is hostile toward President Duterte is simple: he is working hard to reach a peace agreement with China, a country that is seen by Washington as its arch-enemy. Another ‘adversary of the West,’ Russia, is admired by Duterte and increasingly by his people. Recently, Russia and the Philippines signed a defense agreement. The president is also forging close ties with Cuba, particularly in the area of health… Before Duterte became our President, poverty by design in Philippines was restored and perpetuated by the U.S. and Malaysia-controlled Cojuangco-Aquino clan. Foreign and local entities that have long benefited financially from Philippines being a weak state are now threatened overwhelmingly by President Duterte’s unifying agenda to create a socialist system in the Philippines. Ms. Toledo pointed her accusative finger at Malaysia: Malaysia benefits from Mindanao being in a perpetual state of chaos and conflict because this means we can never reclaim oil-rich Sabah. She also doesn’t spare Indonesia and its sinister political (anti-socialist and anti-Communist) as well as economic interests: As exposed by Rigoberto D. Tiglao, a Filipino diplomat and writer, Indonesian magnate Anthoni Salim, not only does have total control or substantial stakes in local mainstream media papers and networks, his conglomerate in Philippines is also based on telecoms, power, water distribution, and other public utilities. Or more precisely: it is based on making sure that ‘public utilities’ will never become truly ‘public’, remaining in private hands. Salim’s ‘empire’ already brought great damage to India, particularly to West Bengal where, some argue, because of allowing it to operate and to implement its brutal feudal-capitalist practices, the CPI (M) (Communist Party of India – Marxist) managed to thoroughly disgust local voters and to lose power. The Human Cost Marawi (Photo: Andre Vltchek) Nobody could deny the gravity of the situation. I witnessed exhausted glances of the people from Marawi, now living in a rescue center built on the land of the town hall of Saguiaran. “Yesterday two infants died,” I’m told by Amer Hassan, a student volunteer from Mindanao State University (MSU). The reason was “different water, malnutrition, exhaustion…” I wanted to know more, and Amer continues: People are still in shock… They can’t believe what is happening. Especially those whose houses were destroyed; those who lost their relatives, everything… While the West is constantly criticizing, does it provide help? Amer just shrugs his shoulders: There is no foreign help coming… Almost all that we have here comes from Manila, either from the government or local agencies. Duterte is working very hard, helping our people. She escaped with her two babies. (Photo: Andre Vltchek) A family of three, Camal Mimbalawag, his wife Ima and one-month-old baby Mohammad, is squeezed into a tiny space at the center. Their memories are bleak. Ima gives her account almost mechanically: We were in Marawi during the first stage of the attack. I was pregnant, ready to give birth. We were in the city hall when ISIS attacked… They erected checkpoints; divided people into groups… they pointed guns at us… They asked: ‘Muslim or not?’…and ‘If Muslim, then recite ‘Shahadat.’ If cannot, you get killed or taken as a hostage… We saw corpses of those killed, eaten by dogs under the burning sun… The battle for the city of Marawi is raging. I face it from the highest floor of the building, destroyed by ISIS snipers, a place where an Australian reporter was hit just two days earlier. It is not Aleppo, but it could have been, if not for the heroic counter-attack of the army. Marawi is just one new chapter in the already long book of horrors of brutal religious terrorist acts, most of them directly or indirectly triggered by Western imperialism. In the first wave of its fight against the secular socialist Muslim governments, the West destabilized Iran, Egypt and Indonesia. Then came the Afghanistan ‘gambit’, followed by the arch-brutal destruction of Iraq and Libya. Then it was Syria’s turn. ‘Jihad’ is consistently used against Russia, China as well as the former Central Asian Soviet republics. All this I described in my 840-page book: Exposing Lies Of The Empire, but one can never write fast enough and fully catch up with the crimes committed by the West.  It is often easy to pinpoint Western involvement in the religious conflicts, particularly in such places as Afghanistan and Syria. In the Philippines, the link is still indirect, well concealed, but it certainly exists. To rebel against the Western Empire is always a costly and bloody affair. It often leads to coups sponsored by Washington, London or Paris, and even to direct military conflicts, interventions and full-scale wars. But by now, the people of the Philippines have had it ‘up to here’. They had enough of being submissive; enough of being plundered while remaining silent. They are assembling behind their president. Duterte’s popularity is still around 75%. The army is clearly winning the war against the hardened local and foreign jihadists. Relief operations are effective and well organized. Things are just fine. In only one year, the country has diametrically changed. To break the spirit of the liberated masses, to force people back onto their knees would be difficult, perhaps almost impossible, even if jihadi terror is unleashed brutally. Almost 100 soldiers already lost their lives. Just one day before I encounter General Rey, six of his men were injured. It is said that 800 or more civilians died. Nobody knows exactly how many terrorists were killed. It is real war: tough and merciless as all wars are, but in this case, the ‘newly independent’ country is clearly winning. Fillipino soldier wearing second-hand US helmet (Photo: Andre Vltchek) It is an incredible sight: some soldiers, patriotic and determined, are still wearing those helmets with the US flags engraved into them, or some old Israeli bulletproof vests. But have no doubts: this is real, new country! Totally different Philippines and Marawi is one of the first and toughest tests it will have to endure. The war united people and the army. No matter what the West and local corporate media are saying, most Filipinos know: this is their struggle; this is their president and their military fighting against something extremely foreign, violent and dreadful. • First published in 21st Century Wire http://clubof.info/

[ralphmorgan-blog1]

Speaking on Islam, will Trump hit reset with Muslims?

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (CNN)A month after Donald Trump called for a "total and complete shutdown" of Muslims entering the US, a hijab-wearing American named Rose Hamid stood up in the grandstands a few rows behind the presidential candidate.

It was January 2016, a few weeks before Republican primary voters began to cast their votes. As Hamid stood up in silent protest, the supporters around her began to jeer and chant for her to "get out," until Trump campaign officials and police officers interceded to eject her from the arena. One person accused her of having a bomb.

"There is hatred against us that is unbelievable," Trump said as Hamid was ejected. "It's their hatred, it's not our hatred."

Muslim woman ejected from Trump rally speaks out

Now, as Trump lands here in Saudi Arabia on Saturday, he appears to be looking to reset relations with the Muslim world.

He is making his first stop abroad as President in the country that is home to the two holiest Muslim sites, in what his top aides have described as an overtly symbolic gesture. On Sunday, he will deliver a speech to leaders of 50 Muslim countries to outline his vision for US-Muslim relations.

But beneath the pageantry and symbolism remains the sting that billions of Muslims around the world felt after American voters elected Trump -- a candidate who called for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims" entering the United States, floated the idea of surveilling US mosques and warned that Muslim refugees represented a national security threat.

Travel ban author writes Trump speech on Islam

Change the image

Senior administration officials have offered no indication that Trump intends to apologize for or walk back the campaign rhetoric and proposals that experts say have fueled anti-Muslim sentiment in the US.

Trump and his aides do, however, want to change that image as Trump looks to make headway on the true goal of his trip to Saudi Arabia: eradicating the threat that ISIS and other Islamist terrorist groups pose to the United States.

"We thought that was very important (to start the trip in Saudi Arabia) because obviously people have tried to portray the President in a certain way," a senior White House official said. "We thought that was a good place to start. And, look, I mean, one of the biggest problems that we face in the world today is radical extremism, and we have to combat that."

H.R. McMaster, the President's national security adviser, said the speech will be "inspiring, yet direct speech on the need to confront radical ideology and his hopes for a peaceful vision of Islam to dominate across the world."

A US official said the words "radical Islamic terror" aren't included in the current draft of Trump's speech set to be delivered in Saudi Arabia on Sunday. The speech, however, is not in its final form and could change before Trump delivers his remarks.

The US official confirmed to CNN the speech will urge Muslim leaders to "drive out the terrorists from your places of worship" and cast the fight against radicalism as a battle of "good and evil."

Trump has looked to ramp up the US' fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, but has done so while stressing the need for Muslim allies in the region to increase their efforts as well, emphasizing that point in White House meetings with leaders of 50 countries in the region. Trump has called on Arab countries in the region to accept more Syrian refugees and sought their help to create safe zones in Syria, among other appeals.

Attorney: Ban an Establishment Clause problem

But his speech on Sunday will amount to his first public pitch on the issue and his first public appeal for Muslims around the world to view him as a partner -- and not an enemy.

"The one thing he absolutely needs to say is the United States is not anti-Muslim and is not pursuing a war against Islam," said Robert Ford, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and former US ambassador to Syria.

To do so, he will need to make a clean break with the rhetoric of his campaign that too often blurred the lines between Islam at large and "radical Islam" -- like when he said he believed "Islam hates us" in a CNN interview in March 2016.

Beyond his Muslim ban proposal and call to surveil US mosques, Trump also said he was open to creating a database of Muslims in the US -- none of which he has disavowed.

But Trump's outreach to the Muslim world comes as he is pursuing a policy that many have labeled as inherently anti-Muslim. As Trump speaks in Saudi Arabia, his administration is continuing to fight in court to reinstate the travel ban targeting seven Muslim-majority countries that Trump hoisted as a key component of his counterterrorism efforts.

"You cannot reconcile it. Period," said Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations who stood beside President George W. Bush after the attacks of 9/11. "The Muslim world is watching what this administration is doing and so far, it is not very reassuring."

Awad said it is still possible for Trump to succeed in his outreach, but stressed that his campaign rhetoric will "not easily be erased" by one speech.

"Actual genuine policy shifts may do it. Other than that, it would be a futile effort," Awad said. "If using this anti-Muslim, anti-minority rhetoric has given him support to win the White House, to win the world he will need a different message and a different mindset."

Obama's 2009 Cairo speech: A look back

Comparisons to Obama

Trump will be the second consecutive US president to address US-Muslim relations from a Muslim country in his first speech abroad.

Quoting the Koran and calling attention to Islam's contributions to the world, President Barack Obama in 2009 addressed thousands of young students at Cairo University in Egypt in an attempt to turn the page on the policies of his predecessor that saw tens of thousands of US troops deployed to Muslim countries.

"I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world -- one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition," Obama said in Cairo.

But Obama's presidency did not herald a sea change in US policy in the Middle East and the sharp increase in drone strikes that he oversaw also exacerbated antagonism toward the US in the region in some respects.

Trump will not stand before students and young activists as he takes his turn at improving US-Muslim relations. Instead, Trump will speak with the mostly autocratic cohort of leaders who represent billions of Muslims -- some of whom do so with hefty opposition and protest.

Those leaders are likely more willing -- even eager -- to accept Trump and forget his caustic campaign rhetoric.

Kerry's former chief of staff: Trump's trip 'high risk'

Saudi officials told reporters ahead of the trip that they have been heartily encourage by the Trump administration's like-minded anti-Iran posture -- a break from the Obama administration efforts of outreach to Iran. It's a sentiment shared by Sunni-majority countries in the Gulf and throughout the Middle East.

And many of those countries are also welcoming Trump's lack of public statements condemning rampant human rights violations in their countries, with Trump officials saying that Trump instead prefers to raise those issues privately.

"We're not going to lecture anyone," a senior White House official said ahead of Trump's visit to Saudi Arabia.

But Trump will need to remember that his audience is not just the two dozen leaders who will hear his words and congratulate him on his speech so long as his policies in the region continue along the same track. The millions of Muslims who live in those countries -- some of whom have been rocked by the wave of protests that began with the Arab spring -- will be listening too.

"While we need these Arab governments and Muslim governments as our allies, we also need to send a message to the people in these Muslim countries that we support their rights," said Radwan Masmoudi, president of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy. "Values of human rights, equality and freedom of choice ... these are universal values. They're not American or Muslim values."

Muslim-Americans will be listening, too -- a community that has seen little to no outreach on Trump's part since he took office amid a slew of concerns in that community.

Awad, the CAIR director, recalled how President George W. Bush took to the Islamic Center in Washington after the 9/11 attacks to declare that the US was not at war with Islam. Awad was at his side.

"I wish that President Trump would take a page from that legacy, the legacy of President Bush reaching out in critical and tough times to the most vulnerable community," Awad said.

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[chrisgis4680-blog]

Black Power

Malcolm X. I feel like he was taught badly in my school as a kid. I mean to be fair I grew up in Virginia in a predominantly white lower middle class neighborhood, so really I shouldn’t be surprised. But as I grow older and take classes in college that talk about people like Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, I realize that the pictures painted in my mind of them are not pretty. They were always just talked about as the violent part of the Civil Rights movement, and I have come to realize how not so true this is. Okay obviously they were more violent than Martin Luther King Jr, but really I think they were described to us in not so positive of a way as I think they should have been. Also I was never taught that the Black Panthers worked with poor whites who had similar problems they were having with poverty and how this collaboration helped bridge the gap just a little between the lower class whites and the AAs at the time. In Malcolm X’s Bite the Bullet (actually it may have been an article talking about the speech, I honestly cannot remember) it is mentioned that a lot of people think Malcolm is racist against whites. And though it was mentioned in class that it is impossible, I have to agree that he really is not. In the speech he mentions specifically something to the effect of, “if white people want us to not be anti white then they need to stop doing being anti segregation, pro exploitation and pro oppression”. I think that makes a really great point. People often say that they do not hate a person, they just hate what they do, and I think this is what Malcolm is going for here. Honestly I think if I was AA I wouldn’t be so pro white either. Hell I am not actually all that pro white anyway. We suck, let's just put that out there. He goes on to talk about how AAs are not actually Americans, and they feel like they are not Americans because of they way they are not only treated but depicted in the media. I have to say I can really see where he is coming from. America is kind of mostly white, and even though it’s getting to the point where non whites outnumber the whites, whites still have all the power. So even now you have pictures of white people everywhere, in TV, on the internet, billboards, everywhere. I remember reaching a book once, Bud Not Buddy I think it was, about a young AA kid trying to find his parents and how he talked about a billboard with a perfect looking happy white family on it, and how he felt like it was fake because he never saw black families on those billboards. There is really just so much to talk about here, I know I am all over the place with it, but there is too much to cover really. I just understand how a race can feel like they are not American when it seems like most of that country hates them for being that race. This being especially the case when that race is target by the police and segregated by the government.

Dubois asks a pretty interesting question at the beginning of his writing, “How does it feel to be a problem?” A pretty heavy question in fact. It made me think a lot about how lucky I am. Don’t get me wrong, I am pretty aware of my white privilege, and I like to think I know at least a little about discrimination because I am not a male. But I think the patriarchy does not really compare to the problems of racial issues. Yeah women are often put on the back burner, ignored and forgotten about, but with the whole police brutality part, being dark skinned right now must just be scary. I do not know what it is like to feel like the problem, but I think that this question really does help to put things into perspective about how things were and still mostly are in America when it comes to race.

He moves on to talk about the difference between being “Negro and American”, which is similar to what Malcolm X brought up about not being an American. I know I have really only read two points of view so far, but this theme seems to be coming up a lot so it probably does hold some truth to it’s points. I often think that this is what immigrants, Mexicans, and Muslims feel right now and especially during the election.

I was actually first introduced to Basquiat’s art this semester actually in my Contemporary Art class, so I was pretty excited to talk about him. Basquiat’s art was looked down on because of it’s distinct “tribal” look and street art vibe, as well as probably the plain fact that he was not white. He explored issues such as race and identity consistently and these paintings are no different. I love his use of colors to grab your attention. They seem to be placed in such a way on purpose to grab the viewer’s attention, like “look here, this is important and what I am telling you”. His use of a black background really enhances that feeling. I also like that he challenges the typical art style by simplifying the figure. His art is not technically abstract because you can tell that he is drawing figures, but at the same time they are simplified. He really obviously wants to portray the message more so than show off his technical talents, which was not usually the case of the high class art world. I especially liked that in “Untitled History of Black People” he included history elements from all over the world.

Though I was excited about Basquiat, I must admit I was really impressed with Douglas’ work. The first thing I thought about when looking at his work was actually Kara Walker. I wonder if she had been inspired by his work when she first started, because she is a silhouette artist as well. Though her work is more so about slavery specifically rather than race, and is um quite a bit more graphic than Douglas. But I love his colors and the layering of the light and colors, its just so beautiful and his work is easy to read. Not to mention, the visual symbols with the combination of the titles pretty much spell out the message he is going for. I find the silhouettes to be powerful because on one hand you can tell they are humans, but on the other hand they are kind of dehumanized. They are no longer people they are just shapes, which is the way slave owners saw them as well as whites in general. I am not sure if that was why he picked to paint in this style, but in the very least it accidentally added to the story line.

I must admit I was a bit surprised by the music. I tend to enjoy instrumental music anyway so obviously I liked the instrumental pieces a lot. I especially liked Mingus Big Band and just found it to be smooth and relaxing. Plus the more so dramatic ending was interesting. I think I see the political aspect of the instrumental music a lot. When most people think about politics, and radical politics at that, they think of hard violent, in your face kind of stuff. I even thought about that really. I kind of expected everything to be like “Fuk da Police” but the mix was more than that. There were more calming and just simply soulful pieces that celebrated the AA culture. Protests and politics can be about celebrating culture, though I think the lack of a governmental reaction is what leads to music like “Fuk da Police” and “Cop Killer”. It is the desperation of the face that nothing has really changed and they are just so freaking tired of being swept under the rug as if there is not a racial problem that leads to more forceful kinds of music and protests. Though I didn’t particularly like the newer rap and hip hop music, I do see where it is coming from.

I realized that due to my taste in music I also really enjoyed some of the older artists, such as Nina Simone and Sam Cooke. Though I wouldn’t put them on my every day play list, I just love the passionate way they sing. It is so full of emotion and at the same time just beautiful. I think when listening to Nina Simone I realized that her song seemed a bit angry for her time, which may be why it stands out a lot. It is angry in a still entertaining and not in your face kind of way like the language in “Fuk da Police”

[chrisgis4680-blog]

Fascism

M from 1931 is a particularly interesting film that seems to be about a Child Murderer who lure and kidnaps children when he sees then alone in the streets. There are a lot of interesting points to this film. First I found it really odd for the time that they would cover such a heavy idea such as a child murderer. Plus it brings in the whole pefafile undertones and its just uncomfortable honestly. Though when I saw who the murdered was I instantly became biased because I love that actor. Anyways the citizens, criminals and the police suddenly become obsessed with catching the murderer. This is not surprising because well, this is a pretty awful situation. But throughout the movie the way it is handled is almost like a case study for watching how people react against one common enemy. When they all have this common enemy the citizens start turning on each other and suddenly they and the police begin to profile every male walking with a kid down the street, even if is the kid’s father. Police start searching everybody’s houses in the name of safety and even the criminals get on the case. Which poses the question of who is even running the town, the police or the criminals? One can’t help but draw in the similarities of Hitler bringing in the Jews as the common enemy in Germany and then again Trump, as well as others, bringing up immigrants who are obviously terrorists as the common in the U.S. today.

From Caligari to Hitler was a little difficult to watch I must say. I think the hardest part was just keeping up, while reading subtitles is really not a difficult feat, it was hard to swap my brain from tuning out German while reading English to suddenly having to listen to English again while the one Director was being interviewed throughout the film. It did bring up a lot of interesting points though, I found it the most interesting that films seemed to predict the future, well kind of. The films would explore ideas that would wind up happening in real life. For example, M explores the government declaring a common enemy and then citizens and criminals trying to take matters into their own hands at times to catch and prosecute that enemy. This later happened and still happens at times to this day. The narrator asks, “what do films know what we do not?” And a lot of me wonders if the films are what influences people to make these things happen, rather than the films “knowing” what society is going to wind up doing in the future. Flms do not always have an insanely clear message like Nosferatu is supposed to represent our souls but who really gets that the first time they walk into a theatre to watch a movie for leisure. Not everybody thinks so deeply about movies all the time, but that does not mean the subliminal messages are not there. I just wonder if films had more of an influence than people think on the minds of the people who watched them when it came to guiding desires and opinions of the general public, or Hitler.

Cabaret was actually more of an okay movie as a general. I was glad to have watched it because I hear a lot about it being a musical lover myself, but I think it was kind of more interesting to watch from a “looking for political undertones” point of view. Side note though, one complains is absolutely that there were not enough songs, I thought this was supposed to be more of a musical than that. Anyways I found it really interesting the way the Nazis basically snuck into the film, and how they were mostly looked at as harmless in the beginning and even throughout the middle. The beginning starts with a “Welcome to the Cabaret” number that has a similar beat and instrumental chorus as the number that ends the show, and in both cases you see the audience. In the beginning the audience is just a simple batch of people having fun at the show and eating dinner, and then by the end the audience is about 90% Nazis sitting there quietly, kind of like the audience in real life would be while looking at a room completely full of Nazis. Though the film did not revolve around the whole Nazis coming to power in Germany, I think it also kind of was. This is how these things happen, people downplay the party and think they are just bullies who will never be able to take over because they are too radical and too political, the problem will just take care of itself. Then by the middle the Cabaret is even sympathizing with them by playing anti-Semitic songs “for fun”. And by the end of the whole movie the main characters who go their separate ways do not even notice that their whole country is now basically overrun by the Nazis. Honestly the whole thing is kind of scary, how if you do not pay attention and think that the problem is not a problem and will just go away, then it is more likely to actually happen. But even if you do pay attention, who is to say that paying attention is enough, if you are the only one paying attention and nobody else cares, then it will still probably happen anyway.

I found the Hitler and Mussolini writings to be a lot more interesting that some of the things we have read in the past. Hitler talks a lot about how Jews are actually a race and not a religion. Though I have heard that is true now, I wonder if it is really true or if we are just taking that from Hitler. Obviously Judaism is a religion, and yes a lot of people who practice it have a lot of the same characteristics, but isn't that because they just tend to marry each other so those traits get passed on? What makes up a race anyway? Are humans really like breeds of dogs? ANyways Hitler goes on to say how there is hardly a race in the world to which almost all its members belong to a single religion. I mean has he ever heard of Christianity? That is basically all white people right there, or at the very least at one time it was. Now a days there are a lot more whites who do not identify with any religion, or at least that particular religion. Also technically aren't Jews white? It makes you wonder how people even started to believe Hitler, and then you see the crisis mentality that happens today and realize it's not so hard to believe. Even if it is sad and scary.

The Inequality of the Human Race made some points that though seemed good on paper, don’t make a lot of sense. At one point he says that “if all countries became one they will see differences as useful then inequality will die”. But I do not really see how this could be true. There is inequality inside nations, which are technically one in the sense of the word he means. If a nation cannot have equality inside itself, even if you take out the idea of “foreigners” then how can this happen if all nations become one? The U.S. for example, is supposed to be a melting pot, yet the black and white struggle continues, not to mention the whole gender issue. If anything should be equal by now it should be gender for goodness sake. Just because people live together does not mean that they will always find “differences” useful.