The road to fascism, as Ece Temelkuran writes in “Nation of Strangers,” was constructed over the last six decades of neoliberal assault. We have arrived at the terminus.
Larry and I left the United States mentally in 2024,after the re-election of the younger Bush. Our gut-felt estrangement took physical form in February, 2006, when we moved to Mexico. We could no longer identify with a citizenry that would re-elect an administration who had knowingly lied to bring us into a war, a callous exercise of once again sending American youth into carnage. Twenty years now of being strangers in what is no longer a strange land, but home. We are so grateful.
I too left the country for Ecuador some 13 and so years ago. I did not heed Trotsky's warning that there can be no revolution in one country: Ecuador is now fascist.
Mexico is certainly lucky to have Claudia Sheinbaum. Alas, she too will find that fighting US imperialism cannot be successful in one country. This is why the fight for an organized Bolivarian Revolution is necessary.
8 pink tide countries were successfully overthrown by the US in the last nine years.
It will be a long haul but until these efforts reemerge as an international challenge to fascism, the fate of individual countries remains doubtful.
No country or even some united together can undo US hegemony. What is one to hope for? Irony says, “ Maybe I can!”
So a strong charismatic personality inserts himself and seemingly with help from his friends dismantles the power structure. The economy collapses, the military neutered etc. The population divided either angry,in despair, or apathetic. Learned helplessness reigns.
Who is this dude? Well, we are witnessing the destruction now. That charismatic character is DJT. No other entity could accomplish such a task. And that is the ultimate irony. US hegemony must end.
It does amaze me that such a person who is obviously out of control can as of now rule the world.
What most amazes and disturbs me about Trump is how elementary his language is....as a retired English teacher, I hear the nonsensical repetitions in his speech and am dismayed that anyone with a high school education can't hear the utter simplicity of most of his messages.
The man doesn't elaborate anything.....he repeats himself and you can almost gauge the size of the lie, by how many times he reinforces it...starts with his conclusions and then hammers them home by saying them over and over and over again....
What it says about the American intellect that so many fall for such stripped down rhetoric, is for me the scary thing. Dumb and dumber.....on steroids.
Totally agree. I laugh at my characterization of Trump as charismatic given the nature of his speech. Yes it takes an English teacher and a neurologist to understand the individual attraction and a psychiatrist-sociologist to understand the population.
Speaking about those experts, I refer to the book edited by a former prominent Yale faculty forensic psychiatrist “ The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” 2017. Each chapter by leaders in their field.
And ignored. It should be resurrected. It won’t happen.
But I digress. Education has been shattered. It is undervalued and taken over by social media (no book readers) AI that’s who will write the essays and a book that clarifies “ The Anxious Generation”
Public education in USA has been dissolved by design. Long term project not serving us. Serving oligarchy and power elite.
One thing i notice is that some younger people are interested in learning. Witness their interest in finding bin Laden's letter to America when they discovered it published in The Guardian (where it was promptly removed). I do see some hopeful trends for them.
When we were growing up, political assassinations of prominent people were sadly, common. Having been raised by an authoritarian fascist to obey any authoritarian, I had no idea that this violence wasn't 'normal.'
Today's young people don't remember 9/11 or even a time before current regime and all its insanity wasn't our centerpiece. So they believe this is 'normal.' They seem to have very different takes on life based on this radically-changed world they have only known and will soon run.
They also have fingertip access to so much info that we simply did not. They're exploring ideas and bringing their creativity to the world in ways we could not imagine. So where things are actually going is unclear to me. Short term looks very tough. Long term may be shockingly better... tho we won't be around by then. Encouraging them to bring their best originality to the future. Grateful they're not saddled with 20th century approaches...
Agreed. Social media and AI are great resources that we didn't have when we were growing. The hope is that younger generations of good natured people will effectively use them. I'm hopefull.
It's looking bad on almost every front. I see it daily.....the inability of people to craft an argument or present an idea with any development at all. trump starts from his conclusions.....many ordinary Americans do the same. Rince and repeat.......or hell.........forget the rinse, just repeat. Boring as well as scary.
Various sources, both popular and scholarly, attribute the following passage to Joseph Goebbels on the big lie: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
The greatest enemy of the fascistic state.......or the Christian nationalist one, which is almost the same thing. We should be careful of conflating good governance with bad, and perhaps consider supporting some of those democratic socialists rising in your country......INSPITE OF ALL THE NONSENSICAL GUFF YOUR COUNTRY SPOUTS ABOUT SOCIALISM...it was our Tommy Douglas got universal medical care started in Canada.
He was voted the most famous Canadian a few years ago....a bonefide socialist (and Baptist minister).
His use of elementary language is purposeful, no doubt counseled by Bannon, Gorka or Miller. They understand the loss of reason and the appeal of the Enlightenment and thus appeal to people on the same level as sit coms.
And it worked. The baby boomers went from hippiedom to silver cocaine spoons around their neck running off to not Woodstock but to the horizon of Milton Freedom's false hope: neo liberalism which is now neo serfdom.
They became the petty bourgeoise.
All this as the civil rights movement was peeled back, its leaders murdered.
Now, we live in what Peter Thiel correctly calls The Straussian Moment
"The big lie is the name of a propaganda technique, originally coined by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, who says “The great masses of the people… will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one,” and denotes where a known falsehood is stated and repeated and treated as if it is self-evidently true, in hopes of swaying the course of an argument in a direction that takes the big lie for granted rather than critically questioning it or ignoring it."
All well and good, with this caveat: Trump doesn't talk simple talk as a strategy, it's an accurate indication of his thought processes.
His lies may be big....but they are also laughable, if you follow the news.
Like those school kids were killed by Iranians who managed to steal a few Tomahawk missiles!!! Iran broke the MOU, not the brainiac who tried to cheat by running ships through the Oman channel in direct violation of item 5 of the agreement!!! Iranians are begging to resume talks after they've actually said talks are off because Americans can't be trusted.
He lies all the time, confident that he bullshits the world into being.
But I don't think he's any Goebbels....
We are in a bit of a mess though, since as you say, we went down the neoliberal highway, deluded by the expensive suits on the fascists from the Chicago School of Economics.
In Canada we had Tommy Douglas and the CCF/NDP........so weren't so quickly or easily fooled....though by now of course, we're all in the leaky boat western elites have crafted to help them suck up all the wealth our extractivist lifestyles have created. Europe is sinking under its own arrogance and false assumptions as well...........and the only good news we have is that China is rapidly transitioning off fossil fuels.
US hegemony, like Rome, will gradually disperse over time due to changes in international relations or, perhaps climate change, nuclear war or AI.
I have no illusions that this hegemony, which took two world wars and the majority of the post WWII regime, will be dispersed or overcome soon.
I think of dirty fingers fumbling to open a lock. Eventually you get in but the fumbling can take years.
Gradually we were groomed to accept Empire.
Bush two, another stolen election much like elections here in S. America, whereby Bush was hoisted into office by the white shirt revolution brought to us by Roger Stone, who one never hears of anymore.
Homeland Security, the National Defense Authorization Act, belts and shoes off at the airport and the war on 'terror'; all landscape for a new fascism.
Changes in language paralleled changes in material and subjective reality as the chess board was moved, the pieces moved without anyone knowing.
The Fourth Reich started with Bush or before.
Trump is merely the extension of the monstruous reality.
Neoliberalism, and Regan and our Canadian look alike Mulroney singing "When Irish Eyes are Smiling" on our national tv sent a chill into my heart that hasn't evaporated much since.
Nostalgia, sentimentality, and a neoliberal capitalist ideology that told us government was the problem and capitalist privateers the answer.....privatize, deregulate and lower taxes (for the rich primarily).
It’s all been spelled out in the Powell Manifesto. Written in August 1971. It is the foundation of Project 2025. No campaign in any political sense can reverse what has happened to America in the last 50 years.
The Confederacy has taken hold. It’s a battle that has never ended.
The only answer is worldwide revolution of the working classes. Trotsky was right!
Sure it will. You just haven't given them enough time yet. Living in a culture that depends on the exploitation of others, doesn't make it easy to forgive yourself your sins............easier to keep justifying them.
"But what truly severs your ties to a country is to see so many people, ordinary people, supporting the regime even after witnessing its evil — to see so many choosing to be evil." Precisely as obtains in the irreparably failed former United States -- now fulfilling the [true] intent of its slavemaster founders by becoming the new (and this time omnipotent) Thousand Year Reich.
With its ideological thrust provided by the legions of its Original Nazi war criminals it adopted as advisors and comrades-at-arms, and its irresistible technology subsequently shaped by their ideological clones, its Nazification is literally unstoppable. It is therefore effectively eternal, doomed to prevail until ChristoNazism fulfills its ultimate patriarchal purpose by exterminating our species and poisoning our Mother Earth to literally everlasting lifelessness.
Totally agree w Lars. As DC native living down south now for more than 3 decades... southern culture is here to stay. It was here long before the empire and it'll be here long afterwards.
My wife and I effectively left the United States in 1973 and never go back, despite some of our loveliest friends being there, now too old to travel to us, and at that time, some of our parents. I was then 30 and my wife only 21. We thought that the U.S. was fascist enough under Nixon. I thought then that I'd never say it, but Nixon, though a horrid war criminal and a common criminal to boot, was a pussycat compared to what's there now. People talk endlessly about Trump. Yes, he's really, really bad, but he's not worse than Obama (just read Glen Ford), who is conceived as saintly. A vicious fake. Trump is just more disgusting, but in the end, that's just meaningless "optics". Then there was Ronald Reagan, not to mention Bill Clinton. These are the sort of people that the American electorate votes for. People were recently singing the praises of Joe Biden. They forgot his 53-year record. You can sell Americans anything. Trump is thoroughly worthless, but at least he saved the world from Hillary, who might have set a new record for viciousness, despite the competition. But what has changed more significantly than the presidents, without it's being taken seriously enough, is the U.S. Congress (I refer to both houses). At one time, there were congresspeople in both parties who had enough integrity to exercise a degree of "Congressional Oversight". They even sent some (but only some) of the worst people to jail for the right reasons. Now the Congress is literally bought and paid for. I count only about 5 or 6 members (and a very few ex-members) of Congress that I would trust with anything at all. The Congress has always been heavily corrupt, but the level of corruption has long ago gone to well over the critical mass, and it seems that that fact means that the game is lost for good. That's much more significant than an out-of-control presidential zoo. Another saintly figure, Abraham Lincoln, supposedly said that "You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time", and whether he said that or not, he really ought to have known, because he spent most of his time doing both. In other words, "What goes around comes around" or, in the French version, "Plus ça change plus c’est la même". Mon bon Dieu . . .
I just finished reading Nation of Strangers for the California Review of Books. Temelkuran speaks clearly, brooks no false hope, and yet the book isn't entirely hopeless. More than 20 years ago, Chris Hedges became a guide to what "cutthroat" capitalism would ultimately do to this country and the world. I've lived through it, watching it unfold, year after year. Very few seemed hip to the destruction, from the Patriot Act, the Iraq War, the Roberts Supreme Court, and of course, the Trump Regime. I have no illusions now. Stranger in my own country? Absolutely.
"Home for “the abyss of the unhomed self” is no longer a place. It is not “a thing of the past or a destination to be arrived at in the future.” It is found in “these moments of being fully in myself, an intermittent sense of wholeness, a rare but precious feeling of normal people, and it will only be in the here and now.”
And this is why I'm in my home here at USA but enjoying my inner life through meaningful books and fine arts and keeping an eye to choose the correct politicians that will return our democracy. I'm hopeful.
Despite the "like" I gave you, I must quibble with your statement that, "very few seemed hip to the destruction." That is not how it happened; the damning truth is, just as H.L. Mencken observed, the U.S. was designed by its founders as the planet's one and only Moron Nation, thus to forever hide the truth of slavery and its socioeconomic descendants with the lies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Thus it has [always] been ruled by its Moronic Majority which -- pridefully ignorant moral imbeciles, misogynists and Aryan supremacists one and all -- either ignored the carnage or, as in the associated murder and torture, gleefully applauded it. Such is the [real] US, our species' ultimate vector of doom, its truly Evil nature hidden by the world's most diabolically effective propagandists until the remainder of the world was deemed weak enough to conquer.
We moved permanently to Canada in 2006. I recognize much of my own experience in what Ece relates, but I do not share her cynicism or negativity. Human beings do not need to be defined by their national identity or by their governments, or even by previously cherished communities when those communities no longer support or share values. One of our great human virtues is our ability to create new connections and new ways of being in service to one another. Not all of us recognize this, and many cling to previous associations and identity markers just as they do to false hope. But as individuals we always have choice of how we relate to others, what our attitude will be as we face adversity, and whether we decide to help or to simply watch as things happen around us.
For those of us who escaped the US and fled to other countries, we will find that the stench of fascism is like coffee brewing. There is no escape from global fascism and although nationalism is certainly not the answer we would be fools to think we have escaped something by fleeing.
Welcome to Canada, but please. Don't imagine "all of us have choice". Poverty is a real limit, and for increasing numbers of human beings, grinding poverty is the reality. Children born into marginalized communities do not have the same choices as white middle and upper middle class people.
The irony is that too often, those of us who can exercise real choice choose not to do so.....opting instead for a good lifestyle, regular vacate ons, and material blessings.
We only need look around. Fires are raging across Canada's north......we are largely helpless against them. People are losing what equity they may have built up over the years.......while our PM and the Alberta Premier plan more dilbit pipelines to Canada's coastline. Lying to the people all the while, that this unrefined tar is going to make us more independent from the fascists who largely own it, and have the upgraders and refineries to turn it into the gasoline or ICE cars keep guzzling.
Imagine your choices if you live along those pipeline routes. Or in our northern boreal.
Until those of us with wherewithall make better choices, its going to get much worse.
And I fear, quickly too. And I haven't even mentioned the Canadian government's support of the Israel military, or our decision to spend more on American made weapons of mass destruction. The F-35???
How many of us have 'chosen' to bone up on that expensive waste of money???
Mother Nature will correct itself. I’ve learned to respect nature. Not in a sense of helping it clean the water, land and air. I mean I get a rush of sanity knowing that anything humankind has done to nature will be reversed in a heartbeat.
I visit my imagination to see a planet turn back the hands of time. To reclaim what is rightfully its own.
I watched a u-tube doc about Chernobyl.....and the land abandoned after the melt down. That is exactly what is happening...with even the appearance of a black type of fungus that is eating radiation. When it comes to clean up, and long term survival, the fungus' have it all over us.
They even do their own chemistry....in ENTANGLED LIFE I read there is one that stops moving when it comes up against something poisonous to it.....stops perhaps for a week, or a century.......and then, when it has figured out the antidote, it starts moving again......and devours what had at one time been poisonous but was now somehow nuetralized by what the fungus figured out.
There are lots of us who use the word genocide about Israel and there are lots of us who stand up for Ukraine and for Gaza. Her mistake, or delusion, is that she thinks she is the only enlightened one. I am 91, I have seen a lot and a lot of changes. She thinks that only what is happening to her is the only thing that will ever happen. Have hope. Keep hope alive.
I disagree. She is right when she writes that fascism is moving like a dangerous skin rash and promises to be more dangerous as time and dislocation continue. And as to hope, she is also right: hope is an emotional response to decaying reality . What is needed is steadfast determination, a recognition of the enemy and a strategy to fight.
You will not find this in the US or actually in much of the world.
What is happening to her is what is happening throughout the world.
Not to mention, work and support alternatives that promise what that dread socialism often promises: Equality, Living Wages, Good Schools, Public Education and Health care.
All totally possible, once we stop wanting to kill each other and instead start working together, sharing the wealth and moving toward a sustainable energy system that isn't designed to bring us Hot House Earth.
When we were promised "Fire Next Time".........war and fossil fuel burning was likely what the Almighty saw in our futures. Only real resistance and real alternatives can save us now. Progressive virtue signalling has to be jettisoned for actual IDEAS AND REAL ALTERNATIVES.
I didn't get that impression, but then, I've read HOW TO LOSE A COUNTRY. It didn't happen overnight, and Ece was involved in resisting that slide into fascism.
I'm reminded of people I know....who as far as I can tell, did nothing when the genocide in Gaza started.........but who now seem to want to claim they 1. saw it as a genocide from the beginning, and 2. still want me to shut up about it, because hey!!! Their silence didn't mean 'they didn't know"....and who am I to be bringing it up in polite conversation!!!
Conflating Gaza and Ukraine is part of the problem. To really know what is happening, you have to dig into the details. Only then do you see the west's complicity in both killing fields. Only then grasp the role of the war machine in taking us all to authoritarian types of fascism.
And of course, come to suspect that both killing fields are eroding democracy and putting strong men with guns in its place. Poverty is a consequence of military spending....money has to come from somewhere. And as the people lose hope, they fall victim to lying fascists...who promise what they don't intend to deliver.
"The void left by the lost word “will soon be filled with harmless words kindly suggested by the power-approved words, such as war, even though the other side is primarily civilians. ‘Let’s not call it a genocide but ‘atrocities.’ Eventually, it will become impossible to join the public conversation without uttering only those approved words. They will operate as signal flares to show that you are not using the criminalized word. This is how fascism works. It not only silences people but also forces them to speak in a certain way.”
In a brilliant book published in 1947, called The Language of the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer puts forth the conviction that the language of the Third Reich helped to create its culture. As Klemperer writes: "It isn't only Nazi actions that have to vanish, but also the Nazi cast of mind, the typical Nazi way of thinking, and its breeding ground: the language of Nazism."
Every word under fascism was tied to the party line. The use of language was unconsciously absorbed as the language of the 'times'.
Under the development of the Fourth Reich we face the same problem: the mis-characterization and the distortion of language for the sake of hiding the reality we live under: for language can be used to reveal or disguise reality in the interest of power, to conceal as well as reveal.
An excellent point........it elaborates on the silences I have experienced in social and intimate settings, if anyone should be so clueless as to mention Gaza, genocide, or our national complicity in same. And I'm speaking from western Canada.
The most galling is the quick ways I can be dismissed....as if "everyone knows about all that, so why re-hash it now"? Figuring that to know, and be on side is sufficient, and the rest is silence........is one big red flag that should tell us fascism is winning.
Silences or more candidly, the use of a language of denial. I was talking to a Canadian the other day about our situation here in EC and she said, "Well, to change the subject...." Change the subject as if dialing subjectivity makes it so. No, unfortunately, we need to pay attention to our world. Then, the suggestion dropped about TV night and I understand, but TV night will not change the trajectory of the US or anywhere else. The language of denial is unconscious, seeks to shift the conversation, uses argument stoppers to derail dialogue or as you said, silence.
Exactly. And the most infuriating part of the diversion game, is the impression they seek to give, at the same time as stopping the conversation........that they know all this already, are on side, but its old news so let's move on to more interesting topics.
That the topic of more interest is often 'them' is the final kicker in the game of silence they play......while managing to chatter on endlessly about very little.
And yes.......it is mostly unconscious....but often there's also a tinge of 'wanting to be right, without having to take any verbal risks'.
The superiority of the silencers is what's most off putting about them.
For Americans, where life is that of a gunslinger, being right is everything. for well reasoned people, finding the right answer or result is more important than being right. Alas, the narccism Trump is using appeals to many who wish to be right.
American culture is deeply enmeshed in judging, blaming and finding fault to dismiss ourselves and deflect responsibility. We absolve ourselves, stop there and move on. Seems to be part of being so dedicated to 'individualism.'
This practice is embedded in our social, political, legal institutions and every day life and language. Like breathing air, we don't even notice it.
It prevents us from looking inward first for self-awareness and self-reflection - the tools that might help us communicate recognition, caring, compassion and love with and for one another.
Long as we all wanna be 'right' by judging and blaming, (reinforced by each other) we excuse ourselves from productive and constructive changes. And the beat goes on...
I blame the school system. Teaching for memorization, instead of for thinking....creates people who honestly believe there are 'answers' and the smart people are the ones who know what those 'answers' are.
We hear it on our national broadcaster too often. Phrases like 'People want answers'........never mind we still haven't asked the right questions.
But then, for fascists, the erosion of critical thinking skills is de rigour.
The part that cuts deepest is the lost word. Fascism does not only silence people. It trains them to speak in permitted phrases until truth sounds impolite and cruelty sounds administrative. Gaza becomes “war.” Exile becomes “processing.” Homelessness becomes “policy failure.” The stranger is created one euphemism at a time. And eventually home is not the country that claims you, but the people who refuse to let language be housebroken by power.
"The final blow...comes from those whom you think of as your people, your side." Yes. The U.S. Dem party (Labour, Liberals elsewhere) dumped the New Deal and Keynesian economics to go neolib, supporting corporate (neoclassical) economics allegedly because enabling the top means trickle down benefits everyone else. In 40 years, it hasn't. Rather than acknowledge their responsibility for a deeply inequitable econ system, absolutely visible in the Rust Belt and the well-documented deaths of despair, the Ds and their PMC loyalists blamed the last election on stupid voters. Never mind it was deliberate govt policy to outsource manufacturing.
Oh, but "No Kings" rallies--as if were Trump gone, the Ds will fix everything. Why isn't the slogan No Oligarchs and No Plutocrats? Because we nobodies are to meekly accept a choice between an oligarchy of Ds and their 20%er PMC supporters or a plutocracy of Rs and their 1%er and corporate allies. Both sides fine with an economics that considers devastation of humans and ecosystems as externalities; they don't count. What does is profit. Furthermore, this econ philosophy believes the only real motivation is the utility function, individual personal gain. Thus anyone saying differently must be naive or a demagogue. The chief source of this, Milton Friedman, advised Pinochet because "democracy interferes with Market efficiency."
It gets worse. The econ dogmatists have come up with their own stats about climate change, based on more of their faulty assumptions. For one, they confuse weather with climate, extrapolating from skewed info to come up with an arithmetic small rise when the data of real scientists already is showing a logarithmic sharp curve rise. One at a conservative econ institute said "the disruption to economic production would be severe, the costs too great; it would be better to do nothing." Therefore when desperate brown hordes of the global South pour north, we'll be told either they die or we will. Gaza is a dress rehearsal.
Thank you for the introduction to Ece Temelkuran. I find the idea of 'loss of home' is critical to understanding where find ourselves today. Have humans been searching for a lost home since agriculture? With 'no direction home' all we have is endless, Sisyphean invention.
I believe it was the Biblical John who said "I was a stranger and you welcomed me" along with clothing and feeding. It is very good advice. Land claimed by two peoples, Israel and Palestine, Pakistan and India, leads to conflict. The land can't be expanded but, if we consider our mothers, it can be shared. Every family does it. That's the way to go...the choice to make.
Both Hedges and Temelkuran must know about, but neither mentioned, "A Nation of Strangers" by Vance Packard. How did this brilliant sociologist –author of best-sellers in the 1950s and '60s– slide into obscurity? Why, back in the day, did the lefty intellectuals not ballyhoo him like they ballyhooed C. Wright Mills?
Even David Halberstam, in his great book The Fifties, devotes a chapter to Mills and gives Vance Packard only a passing mention in reference to Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique: "She went to New York to attend a speech by Vance Packard, the writer. He had just finished his book The Hidden Persuaders, about subliminal tactics in advertising. His efforts to write about this phenomenon in magazines have been completely unsuccessful, he said, so he turned into a book, which had become a major bestseller. The parallels between his problems and hers were obvious."
Maybe the left intellectuals figured Packard didn't need any more recognition, he was reaching the masses, whereas Mills, with White Collar and The Power Elite, was reaching the academics.
Packard's book "The Pyramid Climbers" covers the same ground as "White Collar." Packard also published studies of planned obsolescence ("The Waste Makers"); threats to privacy posed by computers and surveillance technology ("The Naked Society"); impact on children of constant financial striving ("Our Endangered Children"); and US multimllionaires ("The Ultra Rich: How Much is too Much")
Although Halberstam overlooks Vance Packard, "The Fifties" contains multitudes of interesting info. Especially to geezers who vaguely remember the first few Holiday Inns and great bargains at Corvette's.
Ece Temelkuran is an extremely perceptive and courageous human. The current fascist misleaders of her native Turkey may not possess the capacity appreciate these attributes but she is welcome in my country (USA) at any time.
Where I suggest the Chris needs to be careful, is that our Overlords have no loyalty to any ideology, culture or place. They are only loyal to their status as Overlords and will tell any lie, and betray anyone.
Why do I say this? Because Chris accepts the Climate Change Narrative which mixes truths and lies. The truth is complex and nuanced. It is a narrative that is accepted by the Academic, Media, Managerial Classes, but not by the people closest to the land. The climate of the earth is always changing, and CO2 is a gas necessary for life. In our geological past, there were periods of time when the CO2 in the atmosphere was much higher than now. A healthy ecosystem sequesters massive amounts of CO2. In fact plants like an atmosphere with higher CO2. An unhealthy ecosystem gives off CO2, and in far greater amounts than our use of petroleum. This is the lie of the Climate Change movement because it focuses the attention to the Oil industry, without addressing big agriculture, Urban planning, the mining industry and its never ending quest for minerals, etc.
In short, the Climate Change Narrative pits us against each other, while failing to improve our natural world. In short, the Climate Narrative makes us Strangers to each other.
"This is the lie of the Climate Change movement because it focuses the attention to the Oil industry, without addressing big agriculture, Urban planning, the mining industry and its never ending quest for minerals, etc."
Good point. All extractionist models must be confronted. We see this in Latin America where the fight for minerals and extraction is confronted by a large indigenous movement.
This must be the agenda of any correct political movement: to stope the extractionist policies of the mining industry, the urban planning industry that fails to see the environmental costs and big agriculture, like Soy Beans that have destroyed agriculture in Brazil.
Yes. But then you're standing against those data centres, which are the solution a beleagured right is presenting to a planet awash in war, poverty and neoliberal casino capitalism.
There isn't much about our current $$$$$$$$$$way of life that is sustainable. International tourism?? Jet travel??? ICE cars??? Space travel???
And let's not forget, transitioning off our love of gadgets and BIG, BIGGER, BIGGEST machinery is going to take a few rare earth metals.......unless of course, their monopolized by artificial stupidity centres.
Dissing a climate movement because it isn't taking on every big stupid idea coming out of dead ass Amerikkka serves who???
Good heavens John....you're inventing a lie out of whole cloth and then projecting it onto the side that is trying to tell us where our excessive burning of every damn thing is taking us.
I think you are doing exactly the same dance fascists do when they justify the Zionists in Israel.........relativize everything. Argue that 'war isn't bad, it's necessary, we just have to employ it wisely and everything will unfold as it should do'
The truth is, war is the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases..........and those gases aren't just CO2 John. Water vapour is also a greenhouse gas, and a hotter climate creates more of it in the atmosphere. And then there's methane......what the fossil fools have tried to sell as a 'clean transition fuel'!!! Another relativity that is also a lie. Fossil gas is mostly methane, methane is 80 times more lethal as a greenhouse gas for the 20 odd years its in the atmosphere.
Of course plants use CO2...which is why clear cut logging should be banned. But there are limits to plant's ability to absorb what we are emitting like drunken sailors....and the greenhouse effect is making many parts of the earth unhospitable to plants. Desertification is also a side effect of rising emissions and hotter climates.
So please: Stop it with your normalizing of a phenomena that has been studied long enough for the science to be damn accurate, and conservative in its predictions at the same time. CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL IS ONE MORE CARD THE FASCISTS HAVE IN THEIR RIGGEFD DECK.....people too scared to face the future we're putting in place often vote for dummies like Trump..........hoping against hope that he's not dumb, but some kind of genius capable of twisting reality off its actual trajectory.
It's a doomed hope. One that actually is worsening the many crises we face on planet earth. He's a dummy. Narcissists usually are.
"In our geological past, there were periods of time when the CO2 in the atmosphere was much higher than now."
But, this claim is false when applied specifically to humans, Aunty AI told me: " While general mammals roamed the earth during periods of extremely high \(CO_{2}\), Homo sapiens and our immediate hominin ancestors evolved in a low-carbon world.A breakdown of \(CO_{2}\) levels throughout human history:The Evolution of Humans (~300,000 Years Ago): When Homo sapiens first emerged, atmospheric \(CO_{2}\) was hovering between a low \(180 \text{ ppm}\) and \(300 \text{ ppm}\).The Entire Pleistocene Epoch (Last 2.5 Million Years): Throughout the evolution of the genus Homo (including Homo erectus), \(CO_{2}\) concentrations averaged \(230 \text{ ppm}\).The 1965 Threshold: Humans did not experience a high-carbon atmosphere until 1965, which was the exact year \(CO_{2}\) levels surpassed \(320 \text{ ppm}\)—a threshold never reached during the previous 2.5 million years.Today's \(CO_{2}\) concentrations have surpassed \(430 \text{ ppm}\), meaning modern humans are currently living in an atmospheric condition completely unprecedented in the history of our species.
The devil is in the details for sure. Or as my wonderful carpenter used to argue......God is in the details. For my money, God is a woman, since it was Nature, and a lot of those light eaters, who worked away for millennia burying the carbon....which became the fossil fuels fossil fools are now determined to dig, frack, pipe and burn.......all over a dying planet.
Ingamarie, I believe you are right. Love for Nature as taught by the pantheistic perspective is necessary these days. Following I'm quoting my most preferred multidisciplinary scientist and philosopher who writes in his book
"THE ORIGIN OF HUMANITY: EVOLUTION AND BEYOND" by Boris Kriger:
"In this light, the concept of God may be approached in two distinct modes. The first sees God as an intentional agent, a being who wills, creates, intervenes. This image has shaped much of religious thought and remains central to devotional practice. The second, more abstract mode envisions God not as a person but as the metaphysical ground of being itself—the condition of possibility, the absolute from which contingent reality arises. In this conception, God is not a cause among causes, but that through which causality itself is intelligible. Such a view may accommodate evolutionary development without contradiction, as the divine is not localized in discrete acts, but in the very intelligibility, coherence, and mystery of existence."
"In the scientific age, these sacred narratives have not disappeared. They persist in altered forms, embedded in literature, ritual, and the quiet metaphors through which people continue to make sense of loss, love, and the unknown. Even as telescopes pierce the edges of the universe and algorithms decode the genome, myth endures—not as an opponent of knowledge, but as its companion. It speaks to the layers of experience that no instrument can measure, and no formula can resolve. Myth and religion, at their best, do not deny science—they complete it. They provide a language for awe, for humility, for the awareness that beneath all comprehension lies the mystery of why there is anything rather than nothing. Thus, the symbolic origins offered by myth are not discarded in the face of modern knowledge. They are reinterpreted, deepened, reframed. They remind us that every answer gives rise to new questions, and that the heart of human existence lies not merely in what is known, but in the capacity to live within what is not. In this space, myth retains its enduring power—not to explain the stars, but to teach how to live under them".
While I do not disagree with anything you've said here, I do wish myth and religion had done a better job of interpreting the sacredness of all life......and informing us, in clear and rigorous terms...........THAT KILLING IS AN UNFORGIVEABLE SIN....THAT WAR IS AN OBOMINATYION, AND THAT THE IDEA OF ABSOLUTE POWER IS A CONTRADICTION OF THE ABSOLUTE NEED LIFE HAS FOR DIVERSITY, FERTILITY, AND BALANCE.
Too much of our myths are pure garbage....when you dig into them, men are running, ruining life's balance.......and they are celebrated for it as heros......
Much as in the Amerikkka now.........your tv stations are reifying the very few Americans killed in action.........and unable to spare a word of empathy or contrition.............for the many Iranians American bombs are killing.....including those school children.
We need a house cleaning of our mythic past, a ditching of all the war stories that glorify one part of our humanity as they slaughter another part.
Listened to Mke Pence on CNN this morning........his book WHAT CONSERVATIVES BELIEVE was featured.....but everything he said was a lie. Iran is the terrorist, Iran must be disarmed, Trump is right to be bombing a part of the living earth to smithereens..............and brave American servicemen and women (killers) are heros for taking on the defeat of a people long oppressed by Amerikkka.........if you know the history.
And to hell with the blood soaked myths. The Great Mother's curse be upon them.
Yes, Ingamarie, to hell with the blood soaked myths! I share your disgust with our present civilization but I don't forget nor regret that our Mother Nature gifted us with spirituality which was the source of myths. I'm agnostic and reject the certitude of organized religion but we created also myths that view nature as a morally responsive and nurturing force like in Ancient Greece, Gaia & Demeter or Pachamama in the Inca mythology. I have noticed that in several occasions you refer to my country as Amerikkka. Is that triple k a reference to the Ku Klux Klan or I'm missing something else?
Yes..........KKK is the ground zero that focuses more of your policy than most recognize. How much harder would it be to demonize Iranians if it weren't for the demonization of native people, and black slaves, on which your republic's wealth was founded???
Myths can be beautiful stories, or justifications for death cults.......and because of their power, they seem seductively dangerous to me. Spider woman is more appealing then Athene.......making a woman into a war goddess was a clever twisting of the Great Goddess to become a dutiful daughter serving men....I'm a literature student, so got my fill of it, then read in feminism and discovered older fertility rites....out of which, by the by, the Christ story emerges..........
The Virgin birth is the giveaway.......also the December birth. The divine mother supposedly created the world and humanity by first giving birth to a son........the part Christians wouldn't understand is that she has sex with him to begin the generations.
Obviously a myth, yes??? An honest attempt by 'primitive people' to account for how we all got here??? But at least the father was first a son......not an all powerful patriarch.
It's all part of the history of our species trying to figure things out. Now science is available to fill in the really amazing details. I find my spirituality there most often.......in my garden, see continuously how plant life has plans other than mine....and how patiently determined they can be in those plans.
This summer, we're feasting on fruits and vegis that planted themselves!!! Lettuce, Kale, spinach.....and sunflowers everywhere....far from where we plant them. Divinity is a green wish for me now.........at 80, I'll soon enough fertilize all of that.
Larry and I left the United States mentally in 2024,after the re-election of the younger Bush. Our gut-felt estrangement took physical form in February, 2006, when we moved to Mexico. We could no longer identify with a citizenry that would re-elect an administration who had knowingly lied to bring us into a war, a callous exercise of once again sending American youth into carnage. Twenty years now of being strangers in what is no longer a strange land, but home. We are so grateful.
I too left the country for Ecuador some 13 and so years ago. I did not heed Trotsky's warning that there can be no revolution in one country: Ecuador is now fascist.
Mexico is certainly lucky to have Claudia Sheinbaum. Alas, she too will find that fighting US imperialism cannot be successful in one country. This is why the fight for an organized Bolivarian Revolution is necessary.
8 pink tide countries were successfully overthrown by the US in the last nine years.
It will be a long haul but until these efforts reemerge as an international challenge to fascism, the fate of individual countries remains doubtful.
No country or even some united together can undo US hegemony. What is one to hope for? Irony says, “ Maybe I can!”
So a strong charismatic personality inserts himself and seemingly with help from his friends dismantles the power structure. The economy collapses, the military neutered etc. The population divided either angry,in despair, or apathetic. Learned helplessness reigns.
Who is this dude? Well, we are witnessing the destruction now. That charismatic character is DJT. No other entity could accomplish such a task. And that is the ultimate irony. US hegemony must end.
It does amaze me that such a person who is obviously out of control can as of now rule the world.
The great intimidator.
What most amazes and disturbs me about Trump is how elementary his language is....as a retired English teacher, I hear the nonsensical repetitions in his speech and am dismayed that anyone with a high school education can't hear the utter simplicity of most of his messages.
The man doesn't elaborate anything.....he repeats himself and you can almost gauge the size of the lie, by how many times he reinforces it...starts with his conclusions and then hammers them home by saying them over and over and over again....
What it says about the American intellect that so many fall for such stripped down rhetoric, is for me the scary thing. Dumb and dumber.....on steroids.
Totally agree. I laugh at my characterization of Trump as charismatic given the nature of his speech. Yes it takes an English teacher and a neurologist to understand the individual attraction and a psychiatrist-sociologist to understand the population.
Speaking about those experts, I refer to the book edited by a former prominent Yale faculty forensic psychiatrist “ The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” 2017. Each chapter by leaders in their field.
And ignored. It should be resurrected. It won’t happen.
But I digress. Education has been shattered. It is undervalued and taken over by social media (no book readers) AI that’s who will write the essays and a book that clarifies “ The Anxious Generation”
Public education in USA has been dissolved by design. Long term project not serving us. Serving oligarchy and power elite.
One thing i notice is that some younger people are interested in learning. Witness their interest in finding bin Laden's letter to America when they discovered it published in The Guardian (where it was promptly removed). I do see some hopeful trends for them.
When we were growing up, political assassinations of prominent people were sadly, common. Having been raised by an authoritarian fascist to obey any authoritarian, I had no idea that this violence wasn't 'normal.'
Today's young people don't remember 9/11 or even a time before current regime and all its insanity wasn't our centerpiece. So they believe this is 'normal.' They seem to have very different takes on life based on this radically-changed world they have only known and will soon run.
They also have fingertip access to so much info that we simply did not. They're exploring ideas and bringing their creativity to the world in ways we could not imagine. So where things are actually going is unclear to me. Short term looks very tough. Long term may be shockingly better... tho we won't be around by then. Encouraging them to bring their best originality to the future. Grateful they're not saddled with 20th century approaches...
Agreed. Social media and AI are great resources that we didn't have when we were growing. The hope is that younger generations of good natured people will effectively use them. I'm hopefull.
It's looking bad on almost every front. I see it daily.....the inability of people to craft an argument or present an idea with any development at all. trump starts from his conclusions.....many ordinary Americans do the same. Rince and repeat.......or hell.........forget the rinse, just repeat. Boring as well as scary.
Thinking has become subversive, we are not rewarded for critical thinking but punished.
Texas GOP Declares: “No More Teaching of ‘Critical Thinking Skills’ in Texas Public Schools“
The Texas GOP’s hidden curriculum against critical thinking and other educational threats to authoritarianism is now part of its official platform.
By
Danny Weil ,
Truthout
Published
July 7, 2012
https://truthout.org/articles/texas-gop-declares-no-more-teaching-of-critical-thinking-skills-in-texas-public-schools/
Various sources, both popular and scholarly, attribute the following passage to Joseph Goebbels on the big lie: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
The greatest enemy of the fascistic state.......or the Christian nationalist one, which is almost the same thing. We should be careful of conflating good governance with bad, and perhaps consider supporting some of those democratic socialists rising in your country......INSPITE OF ALL THE NONSENSICAL GUFF YOUR COUNTRY SPOUTS ABOUT SOCIALISM...it was our Tommy Douglas got universal medical care started in Canada.
He was voted the most famous Canadian a few years ago....a bonefide socialist (and Baptist minister).
His use of elementary language is purposeful, no doubt counseled by Bannon, Gorka or Miller. They understand the loss of reason and the appeal of the Enlightenment and thus appeal to people on the same level as sit coms.
As to Reagan and the neo liberal moment, yes, this was definitely a vote for the Repeal of the New Deal as counseled under the Powell Memo (https://www.facebook.com/61584470466339/videos/this-is-the-second-instalment-of-my-series-on-the-powell-memo-first-filmed-in-th/1554491568945418/).
And it worked. The baby boomers went from hippiedom to silver cocaine spoons around their neck running off to not Woodstock but to the horizon of Milton Freedom's false hope: neo liberalism which is now neo serfdom.
They became the petty bourgeoise.
All this as the civil rights movement was peeled back, its leaders murdered.
Now, we live in what Peter Thiel correctly calls The Straussian Moment
https://www.hoover.org/research/peter-thiel-straussian-moment-0
It's the Big Lie
"The big lie is the name of a propaganda technique, originally coined by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, who says “The great masses of the people… will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one,” and denotes where a known falsehood is stated and repeated and treated as if it is self-evidently true, in hopes of swaying the course of an argument in a direction that takes the big lie for granted rather than critically questioning it or ignoring it."
All well and good, with this caveat: Trump doesn't talk simple talk as a strategy, it's an accurate indication of his thought processes.
His lies may be big....but they are also laughable, if you follow the news.
Like those school kids were killed by Iranians who managed to steal a few Tomahawk missiles!!! Iran broke the MOU, not the brainiac who tried to cheat by running ships through the Oman channel in direct violation of item 5 of the agreement!!! Iranians are begging to resume talks after they've actually said talks are off because Americans can't be trusted.
He lies all the time, confident that he bullshits the world into being.
But I don't think he's any Goebbels....
We are in a bit of a mess though, since as you say, we went down the neoliberal highway, deluded by the expensive suits on the fascists from the Chicago School of Economics.
In Canada we had Tommy Douglas and the CCF/NDP........so weren't so quickly or easily fooled....though by now of course, we're all in the leaky boat western elites have crafted to help them suck up all the wealth our extractivist lifestyles have created. Europe is sinking under its own arrogance and false assumptions as well...........and the only good news we have is that China is rapidly transitioning off fossil fuels.
Ironic is it not???
US hegemony, like Rome, will gradually disperse over time due to changes in international relations or, perhaps climate change, nuclear war or AI.
I have no illusions that this hegemony, which took two world wars and the majority of the post WWII regime, will be dispersed or overcome soon.
I think of dirty fingers fumbling to open a lock. Eventually you get in but the fumbling can take years.
Gradually we were groomed to accept Empire.
Bush two, another stolen election much like elections here in S. America, whereby Bush was hoisted into office by the white shirt revolution brought to us by Roger Stone, who one never hears of anymore.
Homeland Security, the National Defense Authorization Act, belts and shoes off at the airport and the war on 'terror'; all landscape for a new fascism.
Changes in language paralleled changes in material and subjective reality as the chess board was moved, the pieces moved without anyone knowing.
The Fourth Reich started with Bush or before.
Trump is merely the extension of the monstruous reality.
Neoliberalism, and Regan and our Canadian look alike Mulroney singing "When Irish Eyes are Smiling" on our national tv sent a chill into my heart that hasn't evaporated much since.
Nostalgia, sentimentality, and a neoliberal capitalist ideology that told us government was the problem and capitalist privateers the answer.....privatize, deregulate and lower taxes (for the rich primarily).
WHAT DID WE EXPECT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN???
It’s all been spelled out in the Powell Manifesto. Written in August 1971. It is the foundation of Project 2025. No campaign in any political sense can reverse what has happened to America in the last 50 years.
The Confederacy has taken hold. It’s a battle that has never ended.
The only answer is worldwide revolution of the working classes. Trotsky was right!
I write incessantly that the Confederacy has won the Civil War. Of course not militarily but thru persistence.
The only rebuttals, “Yes they have prevailed but the struggle continues”.
I don’t think it’s likely that the culture of the South will change.
Sure it will. You just haven't given them enough time yet. Living in a culture that depends on the exploitation of others, doesn't make it easy to forgive yourself your sins............easier to keep justifying them.
But no empire lasts forever.
"But what truly severs your ties to a country is to see so many people, ordinary people, supporting the regime even after witnessing its evil — to see so many choosing to be evil." Precisely as obtains in the irreparably failed former United States -- now fulfilling the [true] intent of its slavemaster founders by becoming the new (and this time omnipotent) Thousand Year Reich.
With its ideological thrust provided by the legions of its Original Nazi war criminals it adopted as advisors and comrades-at-arms, and its irresistible technology subsequently shaped by their ideological clones, its Nazification is literally unstoppable. It is therefore effectively eternal, doomed to prevail until ChristoNazism fulfills its ultimate patriarchal purpose by exterminating our species and poisoning our Mother Earth to literally everlasting lifelessness.
Totally agree w Lars. As DC native living down south now for more than 3 decades... southern culture is here to stay. It was here long before the empire and it'll be here long afterwards.
That would be 2004, not 2024. The Bush election.
you know you can go back and edit, right? click on 3 dots on right side of your post. cheers!
OMG benevolent and wise Mexico that never had a political problem.
Mexico was invaded twice by the US. The entire S. West belonged to MX before we stole it.
1914 was no different.
And the cartels supported by the US?
Mexico always had a political problem.
Now, its problem is different for it wants to change the page in a book written by the US.
My wife and I effectively left the United States in 1973 and never go back, despite some of our loveliest friends being there, now too old to travel to us, and at that time, some of our parents. I was then 30 and my wife only 21. We thought that the U.S. was fascist enough under Nixon. I thought then that I'd never say it, but Nixon, though a horrid war criminal and a common criminal to boot, was a pussycat compared to what's there now. People talk endlessly about Trump. Yes, he's really, really bad, but he's not worse than Obama (just read Glen Ford), who is conceived as saintly. A vicious fake. Trump is just more disgusting, but in the end, that's just meaningless "optics". Then there was Ronald Reagan, not to mention Bill Clinton. These are the sort of people that the American electorate votes for. People were recently singing the praises of Joe Biden. They forgot his 53-year record. You can sell Americans anything. Trump is thoroughly worthless, but at least he saved the world from Hillary, who might have set a new record for viciousness, despite the competition. But what has changed more significantly than the presidents, without it's being taken seriously enough, is the U.S. Congress (I refer to both houses). At one time, there were congresspeople in both parties who had enough integrity to exercise a degree of "Congressional Oversight". They even sent some (but only some) of the worst people to jail for the right reasons. Now the Congress is literally bought and paid for. I count only about 5 or 6 members (and a very few ex-members) of Congress that I would trust with anything at all. The Congress has always been heavily corrupt, but the level of corruption has long ago gone to well over the critical mass, and it seems that that fact means that the game is lost for good. That's much more significant than an out-of-control presidential zoo. Another saintly figure, Abraham Lincoln, supposedly said that "You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time", and whether he said that or not, he really ought to have known, because he spent most of his time doing both. In other words, "What goes around comes around" or, in the French version, "Plus ça change plus c’est la même". Mon bon Dieu . . .
A must read post and a most read book by all of us who are already strangers and by those who understand that soon the may also become a stranger.
Thank you Ece and thank you Chris for the reminder.
I just finished reading Nation of Strangers for the California Review of Books. Temelkuran speaks clearly, brooks no false hope, and yet the book isn't entirely hopeless. More than 20 years ago, Chris Hedges became a guide to what "cutthroat" capitalism would ultimately do to this country and the world. I've lived through it, watching it unfold, year after year. Very few seemed hip to the destruction, from the Patriot Act, the Iraq War, the Roberts Supreme Court, and of course, the Trump Regime. I have no illusions now. Stranger in my own country? Absolutely.
All rooted in the Powell Manifesto. Written in 1971.
Yes, the blueprint. Good point.
"Home for “the abyss of the unhomed self” is no longer a place. It is not “a thing of the past or a destination to be arrived at in the future.” It is found in “these moments of being fully in myself, an intermittent sense of wholeness, a rare but precious feeling of normal people, and it will only be in the here and now.”
And this is why I'm in my home here at USA but enjoying my inner life through meaningful books and fine arts and keeping an eye to choose the correct politicians that will return our democracy. I'm hopeful.
Despite the "like" I gave you, I must quibble with your statement that, "very few seemed hip to the destruction." That is not how it happened; the damning truth is, just as H.L. Mencken observed, the U.S. was designed by its founders as the planet's one and only Moron Nation, thus to forever hide the truth of slavery and its socioeconomic descendants with the lies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Thus it has [always] been ruled by its Moronic Majority which -- pridefully ignorant moral imbeciles, misogynists and Aryan supremacists one and all -- either ignored the carnage or, as in the associated murder and torture, gleefully applauded it. Such is the [real] US, our species' ultimate vector of doom, its truly Evil nature hidden by the world's most diabolically effective propagandists until the remainder of the world was deemed weak enough to conquer.
I take the point. I like Mencken.
Aryan?
We moved permanently to Canada in 2006. I recognize much of my own experience in what Ece relates, but I do not share her cynicism or negativity. Human beings do not need to be defined by their national identity or by their governments, or even by previously cherished communities when those communities no longer support or share values. One of our great human virtues is our ability to create new connections and new ways of being in service to one another. Not all of us recognize this, and many cling to previous associations and identity markers just as they do to false hope. But as individuals we always have choice of how we relate to others, what our attitude will be as we face adversity, and whether we decide to help or to simply watch as things happen around us.
For those of us who escaped the US and fled to other countries, we will find that the stench of fascism is like coffee brewing. There is no escape from global fascism and although nationalism is certainly not the answer we would be fools to think we have escaped something by fleeing.
Welcome to Canada, but please. Don't imagine "all of us have choice". Poverty is a real limit, and for increasing numbers of human beings, grinding poverty is the reality. Children born into marginalized communities do not have the same choices as white middle and upper middle class people.
The irony is that too often, those of us who can exercise real choice choose not to do so.....opting instead for a good lifestyle, regular vacate ons, and material blessings.
We only need look around. Fires are raging across Canada's north......we are largely helpless against them. People are losing what equity they may have built up over the years.......while our PM and the Alberta Premier plan more dilbit pipelines to Canada's coastline. Lying to the people all the while, that this unrefined tar is going to make us more independent from the fascists who largely own it, and have the upgraders and refineries to turn it into the gasoline or ICE cars keep guzzling.
Imagine your choices if you live along those pipeline routes. Or in our northern boreal.
Until those of us with wherewithall make better choices, its going to get much worse.
And I fear, quickly too. And I haven't even mentioned the Canadian government's support of the Israel military, or our decision to spend more on American made weapons of mass destruction. The F-35???
How many of us have 'chosen' to bone up on that expensive waste of money???
Mother Nature will correct itself. I’ve learned to respect nature. Not in a sense of helping it clean the water, land and air. I mean I get a rush of sanity knowing that anything humankind has done to nature will be reversed in a heartbeat.
I visit my imagination to see a planet turn back the hands of time. To reclaim what is rightfully its own.
I watched a u-tube doc about Chernobyl.....and the land abandoned after the melt down. That is exactly what is happening...with even the appearance of a black type of fungus that is eating radiation. When it comes to clean up, and long term survival, the fungus' have it all over us.
They even do their own chemistry....in ENTANGLED LIFE I read there is one that stops moving when it comes up against something poisonous to it.....stops perhaps for a week, or a century.......and then, when it has figured out the antidote, it starts moving again......and devours what had at one time been poisonous but was now somehow nuetralized by what the fungus figured out.
All Praise to the Mother.
Sociopaths don't have that need for connection, just props in a play starring themselves.
Surely, we are living in a world more and more shaped in their image and likeness, as they accumulate the power to do so.
well said
Thank you for the kind words.
And thank YOU for saying so perfectly what needed saying.
There are lots of us who use the word genocide about Israel and there are lots of us who stand up for Ukraine and for Gaza. Her mistake, or delusion, is that she thinks she is the only enlightened one. I am 91, I have seen a lot and a lot of changes. She thinks that only what is happening to her is the only thing that will ever happen. Have hope. Keep hope alive.
I disagree. She is right when she writes that fascism is moving like a dangerous skin rash and promises to be more dangerous as time and dislocation continue. And as to hope, she is also right: hope is an emotional response to decaying reality . What is needed is steadfast determination, a recognition of the enemy and a strategy to fight.
You will not find this in the US or actually in much of the world.
What is happening to her is what is happening throughout the world.
We must have the courage to call it out.
Not to mention, work and support alternatives that promise what that dread socialism often promises: Equality, Living Wages, Good Schools, Public Education and Health care.
All totally possible, once we stop wanting to kill each other and instead start working together, sharing the wealth and moving toward a sustainable energy system that isn't designed to bring us Hot House Earth.
When we were promised "Fire Next Time".........war and fossil fuel burning was likely what the Almighty saw in our futures. Only real resistance and real alternatives can save us now. Progressive virtue signalling has to be jettisoned for actual IDEAS AND REAL ALTERNATIVES.
Or we're done.
I didn't get that impression, but then, I've read HOW TO LOSE A COUNTRY. It didn't happen overnight, and Ece was involved in resisting that slide into fascism.
I'm reminded of people I know....who as far as I can tell, did nothing when the genocide in Gaza started.........but who now seem to want to claim they 1. saw it as a genocide from the beginning, and 2. still want me to shut up about it, because hey!!! Their silence didn't mean 'they didn't know"....and who am I to be bringing it up in polite conversation!!!
Conflating Gaza and Ukraine is part of the problem. To really know what is happening, you have to dig into the details. Only then do you see the west's complicity in both killing fields. Only then grasp the role of the war machine in taking us all to authoritarian types of fascism.
And of course, come to suspect that both killing fields are eroding democracy and putting strong men with guns in its place. Poverty is a consequence of military spending....money has to come from somewhere. And as the people lose hope, they fall victim to lying fascists...who promise what they don't intend to deliver.
Thank you, Joan! While i have not yet read the book, I couldn't agree with you more. I simply don't sit it all as so limited, either.
"The void left by the lost word “will soon be filled with harmless words kindly suggested by the power-approved words, such as war, even though the other side is primarily civilians. ‘Let’s not call it a genocide but ‘atrocities.’ Eventually, it will become impossible to join the public conversation without uttering only those approved words. They will operate as signal flares to show that you are not using the criminalized word. This is how fascism works. It not only silences people but also forces them to speak in a certain way.”
In a brilliant book published in 1947, called The Language of the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer puts forth the conviction that the language of the Third Reich helped to create its culture. As Klemperer writes: "It isn't only Nazi actions that have to vanish, but also the Nazi cast of mind, the typical Nazi way of thinking, and its breeding ground: the language of Nazism."
Every word under fascism was tied to the party line. The use of language was unconsciously absorbed as the language of the 'times'.
Under the development of the Fourth Reich we face the same problem: the mis-characterization and the distortion of language for the sake of hiding the reality we live under: for language can be used to reveal or disguise reality in the interest of power, to conceal as well as reveal.
An excellent point........it elaborates on the silences I have experienced in social and intimate settings, if anyone should be so clueless as to mention Gaza, genocide, or our national complicity in same. And I'm speaking from western Canada.
The most galling is the quick ways I can be dismissed....as if "everyone knows about all that, so why re-hash it now"? Figuring that to know, and be on side is sufficient, and the rest is silence........is one big red flag that should tell us fascism is winning.
Silences or more candidly, the use of a language of denial. I was talking to a Canadian the other day about our situation here in EC and she said, "Well, to change the subject...." Change the subject as if dialing subjectivity makes it so. No, unfortunately, we need to pay attention to our world. Then, the suggestion dropped about TV night and I understand, but TV night will not change the trajectory of the US or anywhere else. The language of denial is unconscious, seeks to shift the conversation, uses argument stoppers to derail dialogue or as you said, silence.
Exactly. And the most infuriating part of the diversion game, is the impression they seek to give, at the same time as stopping the conversation........that they know all this already, are on side, but its old news so let's move on to more interesting topics.
That the topic of more interest is often 'them' is the final kicker in the game of silence they play......while managing to chatter on endlessly about very little.
And yes.......it is mostly unconscious....but often there's also a tinge of 'wanting to be right, without having to take any verbal risks'.
The superiority of the silencers is what's most off putting about them.
For Americans, where life is that of a gunslinger, being right is everything. for well reasoned people, finding the right answer or result is more important than being right. Alas, the narccism Trump is using appeals to many who wish to be right.
American culture is deeply enmeshed in judging, blaming and finding fault to dismiss ourselves and deflect responsibility. We absolve ourselves, stop there and move on. Seems to be part of being so dedicated to 'individualism.'
This practice is embedded in our social, political, legal institutions and every day life and language. Like breathing air, we don't even notice it.
It prevents us from looking inward first for self-awareness and self-reflection - the tools that might help us communicate recognition, caring, compassion and love with and for one another.
Long as we all wanna be 'right' by judging and blaming, (reinforced by each other) we excuse ourselves from productive and constructive changes. And the beat goes on...
I blame the school system. Teaching for memorization, instead of for thinking....creates people who honestly believe there are 'answers' and the smart people are the ones who know what those 'answers' are.
We hear it on our national broadcaster too often. Phrases like 'People want answers'........never mind we still haven't asked the right questions.
But then, for fascists, the erosion of critical thinking skills is de rigour.
https://truthout.org/articles/texas-gop-declares-no-more-teaching-of-critical-thinking-skills-in-texas-public-schools/
It is not that we should be answering questions as much as questioning answers.
Education died with TV and the Vietnam War.
In fact, it was and has now been replaced by cyber warlords, as the biggest school district in the world.
A place to get answers.
How sad.
For only questions surface what poses as answers and only critical interrogation can hope to penetrate lies and propaganda.
The part that cuts deepest is the lost word. Fascism does not only silence people. It trains them to speak in permitted phrases until truth sounds impolite and cruelty sounds administrative. Gaza becomes “war.” Exile becomes “processing.” Homelessness becomes “policy failure.” The stranger is created one euphemism at a time. And eventually home is not the country that claims you, but the people who refuse to let language be housebroken by power.
"The final blow...comes from those whom you think of as your people, your side." Yes. The U.S. Dem party (Labour, Liberals elsewhere) dumped the New Deal and Keynesian economics to go neolib, supporting corporate (neoclassical) economics allegedly because enabling the top means trickle down benefits everyone else. In 40 years, it hasn't. Rather than acknowledge their responsibility for a deeply inequitable econ system, absolutely visible in the Rust Belt and the well-documented deaths of despair, the Ds and their PMC loyalists blamed the last election on stupid voters. Never mind it was deliberate govt policy to outsource manufacturing.
Oh, but "No Kings" rallies--as if were Trump gone, the Ds will fix everything. Why isn't the slogan No Oligarchs and No Plutocrats? Because we nobodies are to meekly accept a choice between an oligarchy of Ds and their 20%er PMC supporters or a plutocracy of Rs and their 1%er and corporate allies. Both sides fine with an economics that considers devastation of humans and ecosystems as externalities; they don't count. What does is profit. Furthermore, this econ philosophy believes the only real motivation is the utility function, individual personal gain. Thus anyone saying differently must be naive or a demagogue. The chief source of this, Milton Friedman, advised Pinochet because "democracy interferes with Market efficiency."
It gets worse. The econ dogmatists have come up with their own stats about climate change, based on more of their faulty assumptions. For one, they confuse weather with climate, extrapolating from skewed info to come up with an arithmetic small rise when the data of real scientists already is showing a logarithmic sharp curve rise. One at a conservative econ institute said "the disruption to economic production would be severe, the costs too great; it would be better to do nothing." Therefore when desperate brown hordes of the global South pour north, we'll be told either they die or we will. Gaza is a dress rehearsal.
Extraordinary interview with Ece too.
Thank you for the introduction to Ece Temelkuran. I find the idea of 'loss of home' is critical to understanding where find ourselves today. Have humans been searching for a lost home since agriculture? With 'no direction home' all we have is endless, Sisyphean invention.
Oh thank you for this amazing piece and the interview with Ece, there is such truth in it that it cuts to the bone.
I believe it was the Biblical John who said "I was a stranger and you welcomed me" along with clothing and feeding. It is very good advice. Land claimed by two peoples, Israel and Palestine, Pakistan and India, leads to conflict. The land can't be expanded but, if we consider our mothers, it can be shared. Every family does it. That's the way to go...the choice to make.
it's also what we as parents teach our children when they're 5
Both Hedges and Temelkuran must know about, but neither mentioned, "A Nation of Strangers" by Vance Packard. How did this brilliant sociologist –author of best-sellers in the 1950s and '60s– slide into obscurity? Why, back in the day, did the lefty intellectuals not ballyhoo him like they ballyhooed C. Wright Mills?
Even David Halberstam, in his great book The Fifties, devotes a chapter to Mills and gives Vance Packard only a passing mention in reference to Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique: "She went to New York to attend a speech by Vance Packard, the writer. He had just finished his book The Hidden Persuaders, about subliminal tactics in advertising. His efforts to write about this phenomenon in magazines have been completely unsuccessful, he said, so he turned into a book, which had become a major bestseller. The parallels between his problems and hers were obvious."
Maybe the left intellectuals figured Packard didn't need any more recognition, he was reaching the masses, whereas Mills, with White Collar and The Power Elite, was reaching the academics.
Packard's book "The Pyramid Climbers" covers the same ground as "White Collar." Packard also published studies of planned obsolescence ("The Waste Makers"); threats to privacy posed by computers and surveillance technology ("The Naked Society"); impact on children of constant financial striving ("Our Endangered Children"); and US multimllionaires ("The Ultra Rich: How Much is too Much")
Although Halberstam overlooks Vance Packard, "The Fifties" contains multitudes of interesting info. Especially to geezers who vaguely remember the first few Holiday Inns and great bargains at Corvette's.
Ece Temelkuran is an extremely perceptive and courageous human. The current fascist misleaders of her native Turkey may not possess the capacity appreciate these attributes but she is welcome in my country (USA) at any time.
Dividing us from each other is the plan.
Where I suggest the Chris needs to be careful, is that our Overlords have no loyalty to any ideology, culture or place. They are only loyal to their status as Overlords and will tell any lie, and betray anyone.
Why do I say this? Because Chris accepts the Climate Change Narrative which mixes truths and lies. The truth is complex and nuanced. It is a narrative that is accepted by the Academic, Media, Managerial Classes, but not by the people closest to the land. The climate of the earth is always changing, and CO2 is a gas necessary for life. In our geological past, there were periods of time when the CO2 in the atmosphere was much higher than now. A healthy ecosystem sequesters massive amounts of CO2. In fact plants like an atmosphere with higher CO2. An unhealthy ecosystem gives off CO2, and in far greater amounts than our use of petroleum. This is the lie of the Climate Change movement because it focuses the attention to the Oil industry, without addressing big agriculture, Urban planning, the mining industry and its never ending quest for minerals, etc.
In short, the Climate Change Narrative pits us against each other, while failing to improve our natural world. In short, the Climate Narrative makes us Strangers to each other.
"This is the lie of the Climate Change movement because it focuses the attention to the Oil industry, without addressing big agriculture, Urban planning, the mining industry and its never ending quest for minerals, etc."
Good point. All extractionist models must be confronted. We see this in Latin America where the fight for minerals and extraction is confronted by a large indigenous movement.
This must be the agenda of any correct political movement: to stope the extractionist policies of the mining industry, the urban planning industry that fails to see the environmental costs and big agriculture, like Soy Beans that have destroyed agriculture in Brazil.
Yes. But then you're standing against those data centres, which are the solution a beleagured right is presenting to a planet awash in war, poverty and neoliberal casino capitalism.
There isn't much about our current $$$$$$$$$$way of life that is sustainable. International tourism?? Jet travel??? ICE cars??? Space travel???
And let's not forget, transitioning off our love of gadgets and BIG, BIGGER, BIGGEST machinery is going to take a few rare earth metals.......unless of course, their monopolized by artificial stupidity centres.
Dissing a climate movement because it isn't taking on every big stupid idea coming out of dead ass Amerikkka serves who???
Good heavens John....you're inventing a lie out of whole cloth and then projecting it onto the side that is trying to tell us where our excessive burning of every damn thing is taking us.
I think you are doing exactly the same dance fascists do when they justify the Zionists in Israel.........relativize everything. Argue that 'war isn't bad, it's necessary, we just have to employ it wisely and everything will unfold as it should do'
The truth is, war is the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases..........and those gases aren't just CO2 John. Water vapour is also a greenhouse gas, and a hotter climate creates more of it in the atmosphere. And then there's methane......what the fossil fools have tried to sell as a 'clean transition fuel'!!! Another relativity that is also a lie. Fossil gas is mostly methane, methane is 80 times more lethal as a greenhouse gas for the 20 odd years its in the atmosphere.
Of course plants use CO2...which is why clear cut logging should be banned. But there are limits to plant's ability to absorb what we are emitting like drunken sailors....and the greenhouse effect is making many parts of the earth unhospitable to plants. Desertification is also a side effect of rising emissions and hotter climates.
So please: Stop it with your normalizing of a phenomena that has been studied long enough for the science to be damn accurate, and conservative in its predictions at the same time. CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL IS ONE MORE CARD THE FASCISTS HAVE IN THEIR RIGGEFD DECK.....people too scared to face the future we're putting in place often vote for dummies like Trump..........hoping against hope that he's not dumb, but some kind of genius capable of twisting reality off its actual trajectory.
It's a doomed hope. One that actually is worsening the many crises we face on planet earth. He's a dummy. Narcissists usually are.
"In our geological past, there were periods of time when the CO2 in the atmosphere was much higher than now."
But, this claim is false when applied specifically to humans, Aunty AI told me: " While general mammals roamed the earth during periods of extremely high \(CO_{2}\), Homo sapiens and our immediate hominin ancestors evolved in a low-carbon world.A breakdown of \(CO_{2}\) levels throughout human history:The Evolution of Humans (~300,000 Years Ago): When Homo sapiens first emerged, atmospheric \(CO_{2}\) was hovering between a low \(180 \text{ ppm}\) and \(300 \text{ ppm}\).The Entire Pleistocene Epoch (Last 2.5 Million Years): Throughout the evolution of the genus Homo (including Homo erectus), \(CO_{2}\) concentrations averaged \(230 \text{ ppm}\).The 1965 Threshold: Humans did not experience a high-carbon atmosphere until 1965, which was the exact year \(CO_{2}\) levels surpassed \(320 \text{ ppm}\)—a threshold never reached during the previous 2.5 million years.Today's \(CO_{2}\) concentrations have surpassed \(430 \text{ ppm}\), meaning modern humans are currently living in an atmospheric condition completely unprecedented in the history of our species.
The devil is in the details for sure. Or as my wonderful carpenter used to argue......God is in the details. For my money, God is a woman, since it was Nature, and a lot of those light eaters, who worked away for millennia burying the carbon....which became the fossil fuels fossil fools are now determined to dig, frack, pipe and burn.......all over a dying planet.
Ingamarie, I believe you are right. Love for Nature as taught by the pantheistic perspective is necessary these days. Following I'm quoting my most preferred multidisciplinary scientist and philosopher who writes in his book
"THE ORIGIN OF HUMANITY: EVOLUTION AND BEYOND" by Boris Kriger:
"In this light, the concept of God may be approached in two distinct modes. The first sees God as an intentional agent, a being who wills, creates, intervenes. This image has shaped much of religious thought and remains central to devotional practice. The second, more abstract mode envisions God not as a person but as the metaphysical ground of being itself—the condition of possibility, the absolute from which contingent reality arises. In this conception, God is not a cause among causes, but that through which causality itself is intelligible. Such a view may accommodate evolutionary development without contradiction, as the divine is not localized in discrete acts, but in the very intelligibility, coherence, and mystery of existence."
"In the scientific age, these sacred narratives have not disappeared. They persist in altered forms, embedded in literature, ritual, and the quiet metaphors through which people continue to make sense of loss, love, and the unknown. Even as telescopes pierce the edges of the universe and algorithms decode the genome, myth endures—not as an opponent of knowledge, but as its companion. It speaks to the layers of experience that no instrument can measure, and no formula can resolve. Myth and religion, at their best, do not deny science—they complete it. They provide a language for awe, for humility, for the awareness that beneath all comprehension lies the mystery of why there is anything rather than nothing. Thus, the symbolic origins offered by myth are not discarded in the face of modern knowledge. They are reinterpreted, deepened, reframed. They remind us that every answer gives rise to new questions, and that the heart of human existence lies not merely in what is known, but in the capacity to live within what is not. In this space, myth retains its enduring power—not to explain the stars, but to teach how to live under them".
While I do not disagree with anything you've said here, I do wish myth and religion had done a better job of interpreting the sacredness of all life......and informing us, in clear and rigorous terms...........THAT KILLING IS AN UNFORGIVEABLE SIN....THAT WAR IS AN OBOMINATYION, AND THAT THE IDEA OF ABSOLUTE POWER IS A CONTRADICTION OF THE ABSOLUTE NEED LIFE HAS FOR DIVERSITY, FERTILITY, AND BALANCE.
Too much of our myths are pure garbage....when you dig into them, men are running, ruining life's balance.......and they are celebrated for it as heros......
Much as in the Amerikkka now.........your tv stations are reifying the very few Americans killed in action.........and unable to spare a word of empathy or contrition.............for the many Iranians American bombs are killing.....including those school children.
We need a house cleaning of our mythic past, a ditching of all the war stories that glorify one part of our humanity as they slaughter another part.
Listened to Mke Pence on CNN this morning........his book WHAT CONSERVATIVES BELIEVE was featured.....but everything he said was a lie. Iran is the terrorist, Iran must be disarmed, Trump is right to be bombing a part of the living earth to smithereens..............and brave American servicemen and women (killers) are heros for taking on the defeat of a people long oppressed by Amerikkka.........if you know the history.
And to hell with the blood soaked myths. The Great Mother's curse be upon them.
Yes, Ingamarie, to hell with the blood soaked myths! I share your disgust with our present civilization but I don't forget nor regret that our Mother Nature gifted us with spirituality which was the source of myths. I'm agnostic and reject the certitude of organized religion but we created also myths that view nature as a morally responsive and nurturing force like in Ancient Greece, Gaia & Demeter or Pachamama in the Inca mythology. I have noticed that in several occasions you refer to my country as Amerikkka. Is that triple k a reference to the Ku Klux Klan or I'm missing something else?
Yes..........KKK is the ground zero that focuses more of your policy than most recognize. How much harder would it be to demonize Iranians if it weren't for the demonization of native people, and black slaves, on which your republic's wealth was founded???
Myths can be beautiful stories, or justifications for death cults.......and because of their power, they seem seductively dangerous to me. Spider woman is more appealing then Athene.......making a woman into a war goddess was a clever twisting of the Great Goddess to become a dutiful daughter serving men....I'm a literature student, so got my fill of it, then read in feminism and discovered older fertility rites....out of which, by the by, the Christ story emerges..........
The Virgin birth is the giveaway.......also the December birth. The divine mother supposedly created the world and humanity by first giving birth to a son........the part Christians wouldn't understand is that she has sex with him to begin the generations.
Obviously a myth, yes??? An honest attempt by 'primitive people' to account for how we all got here??? But at least the father was first a son......not an all powerful patriarch.
It's all part of the history of our species trying to figure things out. Now science is available to fill in the really amazing details. I find my spirituality there most often.......in my garden, see continuously how plant life has plans other than mine....and how patiently determined they can be in those plans.
This summer, we're feasting on fruits and vegis that planted themselves!!! Lettuce, Kale, spinach.....and sunflowers everywhere....far from where we plant them. Divinity is a green wish for me now.........at 80, I'll soon enough fertilize all of that.
Thanks for the good conversation.