Truthdig
A Last Chance for Resistance
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_last_chance_for_resistance_20170319/
Posted on Mar 19, 2017
By Chris Hedges
President Trump exits Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base on Sunday,
following a weekend trip to Florida. (Jose Luis Magana / AP)
The crawl toward despotism within a failed democracy is always incremental.
No regime planning to utterly extinguish civil liberties advertises its
intentions in advance. It pays lip service to liberty and justice while
obliterating the institutions and laws that make them possible. Its
opponents, including those within the establishment, make sporadic attempts
to resist, but week by week, month by month, the despot and his reactionary
allies methodically consolidate power. Those inside the machinery of
government and the courts who assert the rule of law are purged. Critics,
including the press, are attacked, ridiculed and silenced. The state is
reconfigured until the edifice of tyranny is unassailable.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
(http://www.biography.com/people/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-9488509 ;) in The
Gulag Archipelago noted that the consolidation of Soviet tyranny was
stretched out over many years because it was of primary importance that it
be stealthy and unnoticed. He called the process a grandiose silent game
of solitaire, whose rules were totally incomprehensible to its
contemporaries, and whose outlines we can appreciate only now.
Czeslaw Milosz
(https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/czeslaw-milos
z ) in The Captive Mind also chronicles the incremental expansion of
tyranny, noting that it steadily progresses until intellectuals are not only
forced to repeat the regimes self-praising slogans but to advance its
absurdist dogmas. Few ever see the tyranny coming. Those who do and speak
out are treated by the authorities, and often the wider society, as
alarmists or traitors.
The current administrations budget proposes to give
(http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/trumps_budget_proposal_war_mach
ine_wall_society_most_vulnerable_20170316 ) the war industry, the domestic
policing agencies, the fossil fuel industry, Wall Street, billionaires and
the national security and surveillance agencies more than they could have
imagined possible before the election. These forces, as in all fascist
states, will be the pillars of the Trump regime. They will tolerate Donald
Trumps idiocy, ineptitude and unbridled narcissism in exchange for
increased profits and power. Despots are often buffoons. Appealing to their
vanity and ego is an effective form of manipulation. Skilled sycophants can
play despots like musical instruments for personal advancement.
Trump, like all despots, has no real ideology. His crusade
(http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/30/wall-street-basher-trump-loving-goldman-guys
-for-his-team.html ) against Wall Street, including Goldman Sachs, and the
billionaire class during the presidential election campaign vanished the
moment he took office. He has appointed
(http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/324027-trump-names-another-goldm
an-sachs-exec-to-senior-administration-role ) five former Goldman Sachs
employees to high posts in his administration. His budget will bleed the
poor, the working class and the middle class and swell the bank accounts of
the oligarchs. He is calling for abolishing the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting
(http://fortune.com/2017/03/16/trump-budget-public-broadcasting/) and the
National Endowment for the Arts
(http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-entertainment-news-updates-march
-trump-budget-nea-cuts-real-hed-1489674364-htmlstory.html) and the cutting
of programs that provide legal service to low-income people and grants to
libraries and museums. If Trumps budget is approved by Congress, there will
not even be a pretense of civil society. Trump and his family will profit
from his presidency. Corporations will profit from his presidency. Wall
Street will profit from his presidency. And the people will be made to pay.
Despots demand absolute loyalty. This is why they place family members in
the inner circles. The Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, whose vanity
rivaled that of Trump, and Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein filled their
governments with their children, siblings, nephews, nieces and in-laws and
rounded out their inner courts with racists, opportunists and thugs of the
kind that now populate the White House.
President Trumps point man on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations is a
longtime Trump Organization lawyer with no government or diplomatic
experience, reads the opening paragraph of a New York Times article
(https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/us/politics/trump-advisers-experience.ht
ml) headlined Prerequisite for Key White House Posts: Loyalty, Not
Experience. His liaison to African-American leaders is a former reality-TV
villain
(http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/omarosa-donald-trump-director-afri
can-american-outreach-article-1.2715927 ) with a penchant for résumé
inflation. And his Oval Office gatekeeper is a bullet-headed former New York
City cop
(http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/trump-security-guard-hits-proteste
r-face-video-article-1.2348516 ) best known for smacking a protester on the
head.
Despots distrust diplomats. Diplomats, often multilingual and conversant
with other cultures and societies, deal in nuances and ambiguities that are
beyond the grasp of the despot. Diplomats understand that other nations have
legitimate national interests that inevitably clash with the interests of
ones own country. They do not embrace force as the primary language of
communication. They are trained to carry out negotiations, even with the
enemy, and engage in compromise. Despots, however, live in a binary universe
of their own creation. They rapidly dismantle the diplomatic corps when they
take power for the same reason they attack intellectuals and artists.
Trumps proposed cut of nearly 29 percent to the State Departments budget
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/state-departments-28
-percent-cuts-hit-foreign-aid-un-and-climate-change/2017/03/15/294d7ab8-0996
-11e7-a15f-a58d4a988474_story.html?utm_term=.f23aee983171) , potentially
eliminating thousands of jobs, is part of the shift away from diplomacy to
an exclusive reliance on violence or the threat of violence. The
militarization of the diplomatic corps, with the Central Intelligence Agency
and military intelligence operatives often taking over embassies, especially
in conflict zones, began long before Trump took office. But Trump will deal
the coup de grâce to the diplomatic corps. Despots replace diplomats with
sycophants with no diplomatic experience, such as Secretary of State Rex
Tillerson, who promise to impose the despots will on the rest of the world.
The dismantling of a diplomatic corps has dangerous consequences. It leaves
a country blind and prone to wars and conflicts that could be avoided. Leon
Trotsky (http://www.biography.com/people/leon-trotsky-9510793 ;) called
Josef Stalins foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, who negotiated the
disastrous 1939 Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact that left the Soviet Union
unprepared for German invasion, mediocrity personified. The other
signatory of the pact, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was a former champagne
salesman. Ribbentrop, as Molotov did with Stalin, parroted back to Adolf
Hitler the leaders conspiratorial worldview. Ribbentrop, again like Molotov
with Stalin, knew that Hitler always favored the most extreme option.
Molotov and Ribbentrop unfailingly advocated radical and violent solutions
to any problem, endearing themselves to their bosses as men of unflinching
resolve. This is what makes Steve Bannon so appealing to Trumphe will
always call for Armageddon.
There are three institutions tasked in a functioning democracy with
protecting the truth and keeping national discourse rooted in verifiable
factthe courts, the press and universities. Despots must control these
three to prevent them from exposing their lies and restricting their power.
Trump has not only attacked the courts but has also begun purges of the
judiciary with his mass firing of U.S. attorneys
(http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/323444-sessions-asks-46-obama-er
a-us-attorneys-to-resign) . The Trump White House plans to fill 124
judgeshipsincluding 19 vacancies on federal appeals courtswith corporatist
lawyers such as Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch who are endorsed by the
reactionary Federalist Society
(https://www.law360.com/articles/806797/trump-says-federalist-society-will-p
ick-his-judges-for-him) . By the time Trumps four-year term is up,
Federalist Society judges could be in as many as half of the countrys
appellate seats.
Trump has continued to attempt to discredit the press. During his rally in
Nashville, Tenn., on Wednesday, he told the crowd, Some of the fake news
said I dont think Donald Trump wants to build the wall. Can you imagine if
I said were not going to build a wall? Fake news. Fake, fake news. Fake
news, folks. A lot of fake. He went on to say in an apparent reference to
the reporters covering the rally, Theyre bad people.
The attacks on universities, which will be accelerated, are on display in
the budget proposal. The Department of Health and Human Services, the
National Science Foundation, NASA, the Department of Education, the Commerce
Department, the National Institutes of Health, the Energy Department and the
Department of Veterans Affairs all give grants and research money to
universities. Colorado State University, for example, gets about 70 percent,
or $232 million, of its research budget from federal sources. In February,
Trump suggested he might attempt to cut federal funding for universities
such as UC Berkeley. His comment was made after a riot at the California
school forced the cancellation of a speech there by the far-right ideologue
Milo Yiannopoulos, who has called Trump Daddy.
(http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/06/19/happy-fathers-day-daddy-donald/)
A university will of course be able to get corporate funding for research if
it casts doubt on the importance of climate change or does research that can
be used to swell corporate profits or promote other business interests.
Scientific study into our ecocide and the dangers from chemicals, toxins and
pollutants released by corporations into the atmosphere will be thwarted.
And the withering of humanities programs, already suffering in many
universities, will worsen.
It will be increasingly difficult to carry out mass protests and civil
disobedience. Repression will become steadily more overt and severe. Dissent
will be equated with terrorism. We must use the space before it is shut.
This is a race against time. The forces of despotism seek to keep us
complacent and pacified with the false hope that mechanisms within the
system will moderate Trump or remove him through impeachment, or that the
looming tyranny will never be actualized. There is an emotional incapacity
among any population being herded toward despotism or war to grasp what is
happening. The victims cannot believe that the descent into barbarity is
real, that the relative security and sanity of the past are about to be
obliterated. They fail to see that once rights become privileges, once any
segment of a society is excluded from the law, rights can instantly be
revoked for everyone.
There is a hierarchy to oppression. It begins with the most
vulnerableundocumented workers, Muslims, poor people of color. It works
upward. It is a long row of candles that one by one are extinguished. If we
wait to resist, as the poet C.P. Cavafy wrote, the dark line gets longer
and the snuffed-out candles proliferate.
For-Profit Colleges Gain Beachhead in Trump Administration
Sarah Silverman: Billionaires Need Us, So Heres How You Can Stick It to
Them (Video)
John Oliver Warns Trump in the Presidents Own Words That His Budget Is a
Bad Deal (Video)
The Cost of Trumps Wall Compared to the Programs Hes Proposing to Cut
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