Miriam,
My thought is that the Electoral College is in place to protect the
Oligarchy, not actually our government, just as is the DNC.
It is this Oligarchy, the Ruling Class, the Loyal Subjects of the
Corporate American Empire who have deceived us for generations. We
have been sold a bill of goods. We think that we are a nation of
Rugged Individuals, because that is what our "Handlers" tell us. But
they are well organized. Still, we have been conditioned to believe
the banning together is cowardly, and a Commie plot to take over our
wonderful "Free" government of rugged individuals.
The fact is that there is no true "communism" being practiced. The
first hurdle in establishing such a self government it to find a way
of blocking the Greedy Opportunists from moving in and taking over.
How do we change the mindset of a people who have been conditioned for
so long to believe that riches are the God Given Reward for cleverly
seizing control?
Solve that problem and we might have a chance at survival.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/9/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Everything surely is connected. I keep talking about bureaucracy and size.
I
talked about it in relation to community medicaid. I talk about it in
relation to how badly our society functions and how impersonal and uncaring
human interractions have become, at least here, where I live. And now watch
as Trump first, refuses to provide his income tax returns with no
repercussions and next, refuses to divest himself of all of his business
interests and put them in a blind trust, with no repercussions. And that
second refusal will have real consequences for foreign policy. He has a
private security guard because our government secret service is, I suppose,
not loyal enough to him in his way of thinking. No repercussions. He became
President Elect because he won a majority of votes from the Electoral
College. The reason for its existence is supposed to be to protect the
country from an unwise choice on the part of the people, a choice of
someone
who might, perhaps be mentally or physically ill, or become a dictator. But
the electors, most of them anyway, followed laws and traditions that say
they are bound to vote for the person who received the majority of votes in
their state. So the systems, the bureaucracies, just goes on grinding away,
heedless of reality or consequences. It's really terrifying.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, January 09, 2017 10:40 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: When Fear Comes
First, a salute to Meryl Streep for her heroic act of chastising the
decadent behavior of the incoming regime. Here's hoping that her example
of
speaking out and taking a stand, is infectious. Fear and misdirection are
the two top weapons of Empires. I believe that it is vital that we read
again and again the quote in Chris Hedges below article, by Solzhenitsyn:
"Do not pursue what is illusory-property and position; all is gained at the
expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell
night. Live with a steady superiority over life-don't be afraid of
misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the
same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to
overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and
hunger don't claw at your insides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet
can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can see, and if both ears can
hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us
most
of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart-and prize above all else in the
world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold
them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do
not
know: it might be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how
you
are imprinted in their memory!"
Carl Jarvis
Truthdig
>
When Fear Comes
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/when_fear_comes_20170108/
Posted on Jan 8, 2017the spring of 1947.
By Chris Hedges
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
Alexander Solzhenitsyn in "The Gulag Archipelago," his profound
meditation on the nature of oppression and resistance in the Soviet
gulags, tells the story of a man who was among prisoners being moved in
The former front-line soldier, whose name is lost to history, suddenlyleft alone.
disarmed and killed the two guards. He announced to his fellow
prisoners that they were free.
"But the prisoners were overwhelmed with horror; no one followed his
lead, and they all sat down right there and waited for a new convoy,"
Solzhenitsyn
writes. The prisoner attempted in vain to shame them. "And then he
took up the rifles (thirty-two cartridges, 'thirty one for them!') and
He killed and wounded several pursuers and with his thirty-secondleper.
cartridge he shot himself. The entire Archipelago might well have
collapsed if all the former front-liners had behaved as he did."
The more despotic a regime becomes, the more it creates a climate of
fear that transforms into terror. At the same time, it invests
tremendous energy and resources in censorship and propaganda to
maintain the fiction of the just and free state.
Poor people of color know intimately how these twin mechanisms of fear
and false hope function as effective forms of social control in the
internal colonies of the United States. They have also grasped, as the
rest of us soon will, the fiction of American democracy.
Those who steadfastly defy the state will, if history is any guide, be
decapitated one by one. A forlorn hope that the state will ignore us
if we comply will cripple many who have already been condemned.
"Universal innocence," Solzhenitsyn writes, "also gave rise to the
universal failure to act. Maybe they won't take you? Maybe it will all
blow over."
"The majority sit quietly and dare to hope," he writes. "Since you
aren't guilty, then how can they arrest you? It's a mistake!
"Does hope lend strength or does it weaken a man?" Solzhenitsyn asks.
"If the condemned man in every cell had ganged up on the executioners
as they came in and choked them, wouldn't this have ended the
executions sooner than appeals to the All-Russian Central Executive
Committee? When one is already on the edge of the grave, why not
resist?"
"But wasn't everything foredoomed anyway, from the moment of arrest?"
he asks. "Yet all the arrested crawled along the path of hope on their
knees, as if their legs had been amputated."
Resisting despotism is often a lonely act. It is carried out by those
endowed with what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr
(https://www.britannica.com/biography/Reinhold-Niebuhr ;) calls
"sublime madness." Rebels will be persecuted, imprisoned or forced to
become hunted outcasts, much as Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and
Edward Snowden are now. A public example will be made of anyone who
defies the state. The punishment of those singled out for attack will
be used to send a warning to all who are inclined to dissent.
"Before societies fall, just such a stratum of wise, thinking people
emerges, people who are that and nothing more," Solzhenitsyn writes of
those who see what is coming. "And how they were laughed at! How they
were mocked!
As though they stuck in the craw of people whose deeds and actions
were single-minded and narrow-minded. And the only nickname they were
christened with was 'rot.' Because these people were a flower that
bloomed too soon and breathed too delicate a fragrance. And so they
were mowed down."
"These people," he goes on, "were particularly helpless in their
personal lives; they could neither bend with the wind, nor pretend,
nor get by; every word declared an opinion, a passion, a protest. And
it was just such people the mowing machine cut down, just such people
the chaff-cutter shredded."
When I returned to the newsroom at The New York Times after being
booed off a commencement stage in 2003 for denouncing the invasion of
Iraq, reporters and editors lowered their heads or turned away when I
was nearby. They did not want to be touched by the same career-killing
contagion. They wanted to protect their status at the institution.
Retreat into rabbit holes is the most common attempt at self-protection.
The right-wing cable shows were lynching me almost hourly. Soon I was
given a written reprimand and public rebuke by the newspaper. I was a
The machinery of the security and surveillance state, the use of
special terrorism laws and the stripping of civil liberties become
ubiquitous. The lofty rhetoric of liberty and the reality of the
chains readied for the public creates magic realism
(http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/magical-realism.html ;) . Reality
and the language describing reality are soon antipodal. The
pseudo-democracy is populated with pseudo-legislators, pseudo-courts,
pseudo-journalists, pseudo-intellectuals and pseudo-citizens. Nothing
is as it is presented.
Demagogues, Solzhenitsyn reminds us, are stunted and shallow people.
"Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty,"
he
writes.
"The overall life of society comes down to the fact that traitors were
advanced and mediocrities triumphed, while everything that was best
and most honest was trampled underfoot," he observes. Ersatz
intellectuals, surrogates "for those who had been destroyed, or
dispersed," took the place of real intellectuals.
"After all," Solzhenitsyn writes, "we have gotten used to regarding as
valor only valor in war (or the kind that's needed for flying in outer
space), the kind which jingle-jangles with medals. We have forgotten
another concept of valor-civil valor. And that's all our society
needs, just that, just that, just that!"
This kind of valor, he knew as a combat veteran, requires a moral
courage that is more difficult than the physical courage encountered
on the battlefield.
"This unanimous quiet defiance of a power which never forgave, this
obstinate, painfully protracted insubordination, was somehow more
frightening than running and yelling as the bullets fly," he says.
The coming arrests mean that a wide range of Americans will experience
the violations that poor people of color have long endured.
Self-interest alone should have generated sweeping protest, should
have made the nation as a whole more conscious. We should have
understood: Once rights become privileges that the state can revoke,
they will eventually be taken away from everyone. Now those who had
been spared will get a taste of what complicity in oppression means.
"The traditional image of arrest is also what happens afterward, when
the poor victim has been taken away," Solzhenitsyn writes. "It is an
alien, brutal, and crushing force totally dominating the apartment for
hours on end, a breaking, ripping one, pulling from the walls,
emptying things from wardrobes and desks onto the floor, shaking,
dumping out, and ripping apart-piling up mountains of litter on the
floor-and the crunch of things being trampled beneath jackboots. And
nothing is sacred in a search! During the arrest of locomotive
engineer Inoshin, a tiny coffin stood in his room containing his newly
dead child. The 'jurists' dumped the child's body out of the coffin
and searched it. They shake sick people out of their sickbeds, and
they unwind bandages to search beneath them."
"Resistance," he writes, "should have begun right there, at the moment
of the arrest itself. But it did not begin." And so the mass arrests
were easy.
And what at that point constitutes victory?
"From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly
behind you," he writes. "At the very threshold, you must say to
yourself: 'My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there's
nothing to be done about it.
I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die-now or a little
later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, and so the
sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me
those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on, my
body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience
remain precious and important to me."
"Confronted by such a prisoner, the interrogation will tremble,"
Solzhenitsyn writes. "Only the man who has renounced everything can
win that victory."
The last volume of Solzhenitsyn's trilogy chronicles camp uprisings
and revolts. These revolts were impossible to foresee.
"So many deep historians have written so many clever books and still
they have not learned how to predict those mysterious conflagrations
of the human spirit, to detect the mysterious springs of a social
explosion, not even to explain them in retrospect," Solzhenitsyn
writes. "Sometimes you can stuff bundle after bundle of burning tow
under the logs, and they will not take.
Yet up above, a solitary little spark flies out of the chimney and the
whole village is reduced to ashes."
How do we prepare? Solzhenitsyn, after eight years in the gulag,
answers this too.
"Do not pursue what is illusory-property and position; all is gained
at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated
in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life-don't be
afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after
all, all the
same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the
cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and
if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides. If your back isn't
broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can
see, and if both ears can hear, then whom should you envy? And why?
Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify
your heart-and prize above all else in the world those who love you
and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part
from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not
know: it might be your last act before your arrest, and that will be
how you are imprinted in their memory!"
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