Miriam:
On this list I may be a loner. However in the general public it would
seem that I have a great deal of companionship. I am also more or less
of the opinion that a goodly number of us are not in the billionaire and
millionaire classifications. Who knows maybe the Koch Brothers are
fallible!
Richard
On 12/12/2016 4:26 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
Richard,
You're probably the only person on this list who doesn't think that Trump's
election is a disaster for everyone in the country, aside from billionaires.
Even your friends the Koch brothers, don't like him much.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Richard Driscoll
Sent: Monday, December 12, 2016 1:16 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Demagogue-in-Chief
All:
Oh my goodness.
I did not know the facts(?) as presented herein. I guess that the good old
USA is soon to be SOL and way up t he creek with not paddles.
Richard
On 12/12/2016 5:53 AM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
Truthdigoutrageous. All love, devotion and allegiance will be to Trump.
Demagogue-in-Chief
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/demagogue-in-chief_20161211/
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Posted on Dec 11, 2016
By Chris Hedges
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
For Donald Trump, the presidency will be a vast stage for
accommodating his megalomania and insatiable appetite for money. Those
who mock, defy or anger him will feel the wrath of the state. Those
who are not obsequious will be cast aside. He will invest most of his
energy in his brand. Self-promotion is the only real talent he
possesses. Corruption, already rife within the political system, will
explode into a full-blown kleptocracy. Manufactured stories about
Trump's prowess, brilliance, sexual allure and goodness, as well as
how America is becoming "great again," will be pumped out by the White
House smoke machine. He will demand encomiums that will become ever more
Trump is the sick expression of a dysfunctional political system andcommon good.
mass culture that celebrate the most depraved aspects of human
nature-greed, a lust for power, a thirst for adulation and celebrity,
a penchant for the manipulation of others, dishonesty, a lack of
remorse and a frightening pathology in which reality is ignored. He is
the product of our escapist world of constant entertainment. He
embodies the mutation of values in American society that has
culminated in an enormous cult of the self and the abandonment of the
"When a population becomes distracted by trivia," wrote Neil Postmanwill be dangerous.
(http://neilpostman.org/) , "when cultural life is redefined as a
perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation
becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people becomes an
audience and their public business a vaudeville, then a nation finds
itself at risk: cultural-death is a clear possibility."
Demagogues-insecure and crippled by an unbridled narcissism and seldom
of high intelligence-play to the inverted values of a decayed society.
They attack all who do not kneel before the idol of "the great
leader." "Saturday Night Live" can continue to go after Trump
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/11
/20/fa
ke-donald-trump-returns-to-snl-and-the-real-one-is-not-happy/?utm_term
=.7ed9
4d79d476 ) , but Trump, as president, will use every tool in his
arsenal, no matter how devious, to banish such public ridicule. He
will seek to domesticate the press and critics first through the
awarding of special privileges, flattery, gifts and access. Those who
cannot be bought off will be destroyed. His petulant, childish taunts,
given authority by the machinery of the security and surveillance state,
Trump's fight with the Fox News host Megyn Kelly illustrates hison me."
vindictiveness. Kelly, who was sexually harassed by Roger Ailes when
Ailes was Fox News chief, questioned Trump on her television program
about allegations of rape made by Trump's first wife, Ivana. Ivana
Trump later recanted the allegations, although she had provided
graphic details of the rape in a signed deposition during divorce
proceedings. Trump was furious with Kelly for raising the matter.
In an interview by Terry Gross
(http://kdlg.org/post/megyn-kelly-trump-and-media-were-dangerous-phase
-right -now ) on "Fresh Air" that was posted last week, Kelly said
that for months Trump attempted "to woo me-not romantically, but just,
you know, into favorable coverage." Trump demanded that she phone him,
Kelly said, and she did so. There was a moment in that telephone
conversation when he realized he had failed to persuade her, she said.
"He became very angry. He told me I was a disgrace, that I ought to be
ashamed of myself, and that's when he said, 'I almost unleashed my
beautiful twitter account against you and I still may.' "
The conflict between the two exploded after the first Republican
primary debate, in August of 2015, in which Kelly asked Trump about
his derogatory comments about women.
Kelly was savagely attacked by Trump for nine months after the debate,
including repeatedly on Trump's "beautiful twitter account." The
attacks ended when Kelly went to Trump Tower to film what she called
"a softer focus interview" with Trump but which in journalism slang is
called a "puff piece," one that flatters the subject of the interview.
Kelly told Gross that the attacks by Trump "unleashed a chaos in my
life unlike any I have ever experienced."
"I was receiving death threats regularly, serious death threat against
me, against my family," she said. "Strange men showed up at my
apartment building demanding to see me in a threatening manner. People
started casing my home. Photographers were found on my property. I
don't know if they were private investigators or what they were, but
people started digging into my past, bothering my mother, bothering my
closest friends, bothering my high school friends, trying to dig up dirt
"The c-word was in thousands of tweets directed at me," she said.after you,"
"Lots of threats to beat the hell out of me, to rape me, honestly the
ugliest things you can imagine."
"The thing I was most worried about-I have a seven, a five and a
three-year-old-and I was worried I would be walking down the street
with my kids and somebody would do something to me in front of them,
that they would see me get punched in the face, or get hurt."
Kelly said the "crescendo of anger" sent "my life into lockdown."
When Gross asked Kelly about the "alt-right" figures gathered around
Trump, including Steve Bannon, Kelly was unequivocal. "They will come
she said. "They will target you. And they will be relentless about it."rule.
Ridicule especially antagonizes the demagogue. It deflates the
pretentious and the powerful. It reduces to human size those puffed up
by their self-importance. It exposes them for who they are. It affirms
the self-respect and dignity of the oppressed. Demagogues, lacking the
capacity for self-transcendence, cannot see the ludicrousness and
absurdity of their pretensions. They cannot distinguish between their
inner fantasies and reality. They can belittle and ridicule others, as
Trump does, with great cruelty, but they see nothing humorous about
similar treatment directed at the self-created edifice of their own glory.
"There are people who tell jokes," goes a joke illustrating the morbid
humor prevalent among the populace in East Germany during the communist
"There are people who collect jokes and tell jokes. And there areexhibited by Trump.
people who collect people who tell jokes."
I have covered numerous demagogues as a foreign correspondent,
including the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, the Panamanian
dictator Manuel Noriega, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the Libyan
dictator Moammar Gadhafi and the Syrian dictator Hafez Assad of Syria,
as well as Erich Honecker of the former East Germany, Nicolae
Ceausescu of Romania and Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia. They had
different idiosyncrasies and styles. Gadhafi and Ceausescu loved the
spectacle and pomp that come with power. Milosevic and Assad spent
long periods out of the spotlight. But all had patterns of behavior
Bertolt Brecht (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Bertolt-Brecht ;)prologue:
's "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui" provides the blueprint for how
demagogues work. It is the story of a Chicago mobster cornering the
cauliflower market in 1930s Chicago through threats, blackmail and
coercion. It is also a thinly disguised allegory for the rise of Adolf
Hitler and the Nazis. The Barker, who opens the play, lays it out in the
Trump's misogyny is well documented.
Ladies and gentlemen, we present today,
The great historical gangster-play!
Learn all bout blackmail and framing! Further:
How to succeed in big business through murder.
Demagogues expend great energy marginalizing, censoring and silencing
all critics, something the corporate state has already done to
dissidents such as Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader. They use the media,
especially the airwaves, as a vast public relations department to
amplify their lies and promote their personality cults. They destroy
cultural and education institutions, replacing them with rote
vocational training, nationalist kitsch and tawdry entertainment. They
elevate members of their family, sect, tribe or clan to the inner
circles of power. (Trump's tribe, of course, is the billionaire
class.) They put generals in key positions. Those in the military
appeal to demagogues because they are not trained to think but to be
obedient. The military also does not shrink from violence. The
demagogue and the inner circle grow fabulously rich by pillaging the
state. They live in private inner sanctums of opulence and depravity
that resemble Versailles or the Forbidden City
(http://www.chinahighlights.com/beijing/forbidden-city/ ;) . They
banish anyone in the court who tells them unpleasant truths. They read
into the most benign acts wild conspiracies. They often sexually
assault girls and women. Hussein and Gadhafi were notorious rapists.
Demagogues foolishly see the elaborately staged public events held fordecisions based on hallucinations.
them as proof that a populace loves and respects them. And in the
final, decrepit stages of their rule they became grotesque parodies of
themselves. The sycophants around them, profiting from the orgy of
corruption, feed their gargantuan self-delusion. The demagogues,
believing they are divinely inspired geniuses and omnipotent, make
When a demagogue reaches that stage, society can be obliterated.it "the eighth wonder of the world."
Demagogues usually seek to immortalize their grandeur in huge building
projects that are monuments to their immortality. Saddam Hussein
sought to rebuild the ancient city of Babylon. He constructed a
replica of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II on the ruins of the
original, embossing his name, like Nebuchadnezzar II, on many of the
bricks. Gadhafi built the largest irrigation system in existence, calling
Ceausescu, whose birthday was a national holiday, constructed arule.
massive palace, The People's House, at a cost of $1.75 billion in
Bucharest. He conscripted as many as 100,000 workers for the project.
There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, who died from accidents during
the construction. The palace, which is the second largest building in
the world, after the Pentagon, has 3,500 tons of crystal and 1 million
cubic meters of marble. It was two-thirds finished in December 1989
when the regime was overthrown. In a visit to the national museum that
winter, I found it filled with idealized portraits and busts of
Ceausescu. Rooms were devoted to hagiographic accounts of his mythical
life story. Building projects and image creation of this kind make
Trump-who has decorated his residence in Trump Tower
(http://www.idesignarch.com/inside-donald-and-melania-trumps-manhattan
-apart
ment-mansion/) as if he were Louis XIV, the Sun King-salivate.
Demagogues foster the psychosis of permanent war, which often leads to
actual war. The psychosis of permanent war becomes a tool to abolish
civil liberties and condemn dissent as treason. Huge expenditures go
into the military, which demagogues see as an extension of their
personal power, while the rest of the country decays. There is nothing
a demagogue loves more than a big military parade.
The story of demagogues is as old as civilization. They have risen and
fallen like the tides, always leaving in their wake misery,
destruction and death. They exploit the frustrations and anger
generated by a decayed society. They make fantastic promises they
never keep. They demonize the vulnerable as scapegoats. They preach
hatred and violence. They demand godlike worship. They consume those they
Demagogue-in-Chief
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