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Trump’s ‘Shock and Awe’ Campaign and the Early Resistance
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/trumps_shock_and_awe_campaign_and_the_ea
rly_resistance_20170202/
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Posted on Feb 2, 2017
By Paul Street
Adrián Martínez / CC BY-SA 2.0
(https://www.flickr.com/photos/127787973@N06/32393275156/in/photolist-Rmu195
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X-RmtExw-RpZwXT-RbCUTy-Qbh1jK-QbgVgD-RbDmQy-Rej1GB-QbgJM2-Q8uj8W-RpZf5V-QRH2
mN-QcnY32-RcKfhA-Rra2sf-QuNeXP-RpKXvE-RoU5uE-Rssmoa-Rg7DWD-Qahuej-KkuQsw-Qah
tvf-QSoKNd-RdshUh-RrNN2F-Qd5Ha4-Qd5GpB-Rg7ybk-RdshnA-QSoLGs-QSoLcj-QSoTpA-Ro
hfVG-QSoNkC-Qd5JUg-RrNX4P-Qd5FCr-Qd5Ff2)
Listening to liberal acquaintances and other liberal voices in the media
during the newly minted presidency of Donald Trump, they seemed shaken and
surprised that he was moving ahead forcefully with the terrible and vicious
policies he said he would pursue. They found it hard to process that the
Deplorable One was really and “already” taking executive action to:
● “Build the [southern U.S. border] wall” and even more absurdly “make
Mexico pay for it.”
● Deport immigrants who have been ordered to leave the country.
● Cut federal funding to “sanctuary” cities, which don’t enforce
federal immigration laws on undocumented immigrants.
● Construct detention facilities along the Mexican border.
● Dismantle the Affordable Care Act (threatening to destabilize insurance
markets and eliminate health coverage for untold millions of Americans) on
an urgent timetable.
● Roll back federal regulations on financial institutions and other
businesses.
● Ban immigration for citizens of seven majority Muslim countries―Syria,
Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen―for 90 days.
● Fire an acting attorney general who refused to defend his
constitutionally challenged travel ban.
● Prohibit federal taxpayer dollars from being used to fund
nongovernmental organizations “providing counseling or referrals for
abortion or advocating for access to abortion services in their country.”
● Implement a federal hiring freeze except for the military, directing the
Office of Management and Budget to formulate a plan to “reduce the size of
the Federal Government’s workforce through attrition.”
● Advance-approve and clear roadblocks for the two bitterly fought and
ecocidal oil projects: the Dakota Access Pipeline (meant to transport vast
quantities of fracked oil from North Dakota to Illinois) and the Keystone XL
Pipeline (to move carbon-rich Canadian tar-sands oil down to the Gulf
Coast).
● Elevate Steve Bannon, his cryptofascist top political adviser, to a full
seat on the principals’ committee of the National Security Council, while
downgrading the NSC roles of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of
national intelligence―a chilling move.
● Nominate a far-right Republican (Neil Gorsuch) to fill the Supreme Court
seat that Republicans in Congress refused to let Barack Obama fill for the
last year of his presidency.
● Appoint the leading Christian evangelical Jerry Falwell Jr., president
of Liberty University (who said after the San Bernardino shootings of
December 2015 that “if more people had conceal-carry [gun] permits
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/12/05/liberty-uni
versity-president-if-more-good-people-had-concealed-guns-we-could-end-those-
muslims/?utm_term=.2e9d0aea4153) , then we could end those Muslims”), to
head a task force on reforming higher education
(http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jerry-falwell-jr-asked-lead-trump-educa
tion-task-force-n715116) .
● Order a drone attack and commando raid in Yemen that killed 30 people,
including many women and children and Anwar al-Awlaki (https://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki ) ’s 8-year-old-daughter (who bled to death after
being shot in the neck) in an operation planned and handed to Trump by the
Obama administration
(https://theintercept.com/2017/01/30/obama-killed-a-16-year-old-american-in-
yemen-trump-just-killed-his-8-year-old-sister/) .
Then there were the outrageous statements on and off Trump’s “big
beautiful Twitter account” (Trump’s weird words
(http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/nov/11/trump-threatened-unleash-tw
itter-account-megyn-kel/) ), which remains creepily active in his
presidency. The day after his inauguration, Trump went to the Central
Intelligence Agency to childishly complain about the media’s supposed
underestimation of the size of his inauguration crowd and to say that
Islamic State arose because the U.S. failed to “keep the oil” when it
invaded Iraq. “Maybe we’ll have another chance” to take Iraq’s oil
(http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2017/01/23/donald-trump-iraq-oil-isis-st
arr-lwe-tsr.cnn) , Trump added.
Both in not-so-presidential tweets and in a talk with congressional leaders,
Trump repeated his false and debunked claim that 3 million to 5 million
votes were cast illegally
(http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/01/27/fact-check-more-trum
p-deception-voter-fraud/97130820/) in the election, robbing him of a win in
the popular vote. This bizarre charge is meant to amplify his anti-immigrant
narrative and to justify future efforts to roll back nonwhites’ voting
rights in the 2018 (midterm congressional) and 2020 (presidential year)
elections.
Trump tweeted that he might “send in the Feds” to “fix Chicago
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/01/24/trump-threa
tens-to-send-in-the-feds-to-address-chicago-carnage/?utm_term=.5065d61ff3a1)
”―that is, address the city’s high murder rate by imposing some version
of martial law “stop and frisk” in the city’s black ghettos.
The president told ABC News he wants to build “safe zones” inside Syria to
keep refugees from leaving that country―an incredibly provocative policy
that would necessitate significant, direct U.S. military escalation in that
country’s territory.
Trump preposterously tweeted
(http://www.npr.org/2017/01/31/512768357/donald-trumps-supreme-court-pick-in
-100-words-and-9-tweets) that his extreme right, multimillionaire Supreme
Court pick (Gorsuch) is “respected by all.”
And Trump said this about the cancellation of a previously planned meeting
with the president of Mexico: “Unless Mexico is going to treat the United
States fairly, with respect, such a meeting would be fruitless.” Orwell
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell ;) would have been impressed.
Mexico naturally refuses to bow to Trump’s unfair and disrespectful claim
that they should pay the U.S.―an imperial state that stole Mexico’s land
and has mercilessly exploited that country for more than a century―to build
a wall to “protect” that rich and powerful nation from its poor and
exploited southern neighbor.
Call it “Shock and Awe.” The Tyrant is only getting started.
‘We Just Had an Election’ or ‘You Had Your Input’
Oh, but didn’t the new president face epic and indeed historic mass
demonstrations―including millions of Americans wearing pink “pussy hats
(http://www.npr.org/2017/01/21/510997192/with-pussyhats-liberals-get-their-o
wn-version-of-the-red-trucker-hat) ”―across the nation? Doesn’t he know
that he really lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots? Doesn’t
he see that he’s coming into the presidency with the lowest approval rating
in the history of modern polling?
Many liberals seem to think that these facts would humble Trump and the
other sociopaths in his white nationalist and possibly fascist (more on that
below) presidency, deterring them from moving ahead with their bold,
far-right agenda.
But thin-skinned megalomaniacs and arch-authoritarian sociopaths don’t care
about public opinion any more than they worry about the common good. They
care about winning at all costs, by any means necessary.
Bannon, who is “positioning himself not just as a Svengali but as the de
facto president” (in the words of The New York Times’ editors
(https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/opinion/president-bannon.html) on
Tuesday), does not sweat mass protests by “privileged liberals.” He
relishes “the left’s” agitation and looks forward to using it to rally
Trump’s white-nationalist “heartland” base against the “bicoastal
liberal elite.”
Trump’s response to the mass demonstrations was to complain that the media
was overselling them and deliberately downplaying the size of his
inauguration rally.
He also tweeted this
(https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/823150055418920960?lang=en) :
“Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had
an election! Why didn’t these people vote?”
It was a revolting comment on at least three levels. The first nauseating
thing is that he has no basis for suggesting that the marchers didn’t vote.
The preponderant majority of them certainly did.
The second stupid thing is that Trump failed to see the difference between
two very different kind of politics: voting in strictly time-staggered,
narrow-spectrum, major-party, candidate-centered electoral carnivals and
taking to the streets around key social and policy issues between, beneath
and beyond those quadrennial electoral extravaganzas.
The third and perhaps most disgusting thing is the assumption that a
president atop a purported democracy is beyond accountability to the public
once he’s won the only real gauge of popular sentiment that matters: an
indirect election through Electoral College decision once every four years.
As George W. Bush’s White House spokesperson Dana Perino explained
(http://www.commondreams.org/views/2008/03/28/american-public-says-governmen
t-leaders-should-pay-attention-polls) when asked if the citizenry should
have “input” on U.S. foreign policy in March 2008: “You had your input.
The American people have input every four years, and that’s the way our
system is set up.”
So what if the popular majority doesn’t actually elect the U.S. president
in accord with elementary democratic principle of “one person, one vote”
under “our system,” set up by wealthy merchants and slave owners for whom
popular sovereignty was the ultimate nightmare? After Obama won his second
term in 2012, Trump denounced the Electoral College
(http://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-calls-electoral-college-a-disaster
-during-2012-tweetstorm/) as an undemocratic atrocity. As its beneficiary
in 2016, however, his opinion of the system switched on a doublespeak dime
and his previous opinion went down Orwell’s memory hole.
Straight Out of Goebbels
And besides, Trump insists, and most of his base seems to agree, he didn’t
actually lose the popular vote. Trump’s fraud charge, recited again and
again, is straight out of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Third Reich propaganda
minister.” Repeat a lie a thousand times,” Goebbels said, “and it becomes
the truth.” Goebbels used that principle to run his horrific campaign
against Europe’s Jews.
It’s the same idea with Trump’s preposterous claims that the U.S. is being
ravaged by wild hordes of illegal-alien criminals or that climate change is
not indisputably the result of human activity. Recite the myth again and
again―like the insane right-wing claim that Hillary Clinton and Obama were
radical leftists―and it becomes a material force in history. That’s what
happened with the Bush administration’s ridiculous allegations that Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq was linked to al-Qaida and 9/11 and was stockpiled with
weapons of mass destruction―gigantic deceptions that were disseminated with
no small help from the mass media, including no less of a “liberal”
outpost than The New York Times.
The Not-So-Super Power of Huge Marches
Speaking of Bush, the invasion of Iraq, mass demonstrations and The New York
Times, we recall that newspaper’s description of the giant U.S. and global
demonstrations that occurred against Dubya’s forthcoming arch-criminal
invasion of Iraq. “The fracturing of the Western alliance over Iraq and the
huge anti-war demonstrations around the world this weekend,” the Times
wrote in a mid-February 2003 headline story
(http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/17/world/threats-and-responses-news-analysis
-a-new-power-in-the-streets.html) , were “reminders that there may still be
two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.”
The article was subtitled “A New Power in the Streets.”
Did Bush, Dick Cheney (Dubya’s “de facto president”) and the rest of the
neoconservative cabal that made U.S. foreign policy in Bush Junior’s
presidency care about the other “superpower in the streets” in March of
2003? They did not. The “Shock and Awe” bombing show
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_and_awe ;) exploded in Baghdad even as
millions protested the criminal assault in U.S. streets and around the
world.
France’s then-president Jacques Chirac was “stupefied” when Dubya gave
him the following reason for the invasion: “This confrontation is willed by
God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a
New Age begins.” (I don’t mean to suggest that Iraq was invaded primarily
to fulfill Bush’s demented evangelical understanding of Scripture. Dubya
was a man out of his depth, manipulated by neoconservative
petro-imperialists hoping to buy another half century of unchallengeable
U.S. global hegemony
(https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-new-imperialism-9780199278084?c
c=us&lang=en&) by securing imperial control of Iraq’s vast petroleum
reserves―and then marching on to grab Iran’s.)
If It Walks Like a Duck
Trump is not driven by evangelical (or any other kind of) Christianity. But
where is he coming from with this incredible, white-nationalist policy
blitzkrieg in his first two weeks? In some educated parts of the U.S. left,
it is fashionable to smirk at the notion that Trump is a fascist or any
other kind of ideologue. He’s just, the line goes, a really rich,
incredibly selfish and wealth-, celebrity- and attention-worshipping
narcissist―an amoral man-child who says and does whatever he can to grab
and hold wealth and power.
It’s hard to know what really goes on in the mind of a sociopath like The
Donald, but there are reasons to suspect something darker. His first wife
reported that Trump kept a collection of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside―
a possibly relevant fact. His top political adviser and newly minted NSC
boss Bannon is a cryptofascist at best, and a real one at worst. And if
Trump walks and quacks like a fascist duck, it may not really matter how
conscious he is of how his authoritarian, corporatist, militarist, imperial,
sexist, racist, nativist, hyper-masculinist and white-nationalist Venn
diagram (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venn_diagram ;) overlaps with fascist
ideology and style past and present. As the left journalist David Talbot
notes in his recent collection of interviews with Chris Hedges
(http://skyhorsepublishing.com/titles/11665-9781510712737-unspeakable) ,
“the beast with orange hair … tapped into the long-simmering rage and
resentment of these working families and underclass. And along with the
electrifying leader, came all the other hallmarks of classic fascism―the
over-heated rhetoric, the scapegoating of minorities, the thuggish
violence.”
Resistance: Beyond Anti-Trumpism
So how do you fight American fascism? Like many on the “hard left,” I’ve
been worried that the mass marches against Tyrant Trump’s inauguration
might end up like the ones that preceded Dubya’s re-crucifixion of
Mesopotamia―a big, momentary blast of liberal fury largely devoid of
longer-term political and organizational movement power beneath and beyond
the quadrennial electoral extravaganzas that are sold to us as “politics,”
the only politics that matters. I’ve feared they would remain captive to
the all-too-pervasive definition of meaningful citizen participation as
marking a major party-dominated ballot once every four years and then going
home to let other and much richer people run the world into the ground. I’
ve also fretted that they’ve been overly driven by the fact that the new
president, atop what Mike Lofgren called the “visible state”―itself a
cloak for the underlying, unelected, and interrelated “Deep State
(http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317654/the-deep-state-by-mike-lofgr
en/9780143109938/) ” dictatorships of money, class and empire―is, like
Dubya, a nasty, white, Republican Bush and not a more outwardly smart and
(neo) “liberal” Democrat like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.
Progressives must not let Trump become a great red cape in the hands of the
ruling-class matadors
(http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/04/beyond-anti-trump/) . We charge,
screaming “Down with Trump” while the owners plunge their weapons into our
passing hides. We must learn to head for the masters who hold the swords and
spears behind the cloak. Those masters are the same, whichever major party
and personalities hold power in Washington. Resist Trump/Bannon we must, but
we cannot afford obsession with Trump.
With the impressive mass protests that have occurred in U.S. airports (and
not just the major ones) in response to Trump’s Muslim travel ban, there
are reasons to think that the anti-Trump/Trumpism resistance might have
strong legs beyond the election cycle. The president can count on more mass
opposition to the many provocative policies he has yet to unveil. Wait until
the openly ecocidal, climate change-denying Trump administration (which
installed the CEO of the leading greenhouse gas crime syndicate, ExxonMobil,
as secretary of state) takes on Standing Rock, the great Native American-led
vanguard of the desperate popular struggle to protect prospects for a decent
human future by keeping fossil fuels in the ground. That could prove to be
an epic confrontation.
Serious progressives must work to make all this anti-Trumpism about much
more than just doing the neoliberal Deep State’s work by getting Trump and
other Republicans out and some new combination of more palatable Democrats
and Republicans in elective power. As the resistance gathers and expands, we
must strive not merely to defeat one terrible Trump policy after another or
to oust the big Republican meanies. Upton Sinclair got it right in the
original socialist newspaper version of “The Jungle”: The Democrats and
the Republicans are “two wings of the same bird of prey.” They are not
identical, and there are more than just tiny differences between them, but
they both function in their own ways and through both conflict and
collaboration with each other for the same reigning wealth and power
structures of class, race, money and empire. It’s the dismal,
dollar-drenched and neoliberal nothingness of the Democrats (rightly
described by the late political scientist Sheldon Wolin
(http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9175.html) as the nation’s
“inauthentic opposition” party) that sets the ever more right-wing and
wildly unpopular Republican Party up for victory
(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_the_republican_party_rules_a_nation
_that_hates_it_20161125) again and again.
The movement we need has to be about something much bigger and different
than merely elevating the political power of corporate- and empire-captive
Blue America (home to the multicultural airport protests) over corporate-
and empire-captive Red (“heartland”) America. We must be careful not to
feed the hateful ruling-class game
(http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/20/divide-and-rule-class-hate-and-the-2
016-election/) of racial, ethnic, regional, gender, partisan and
territorial divide-and-rule, which pits the more white, rural, evangelical
Christian and Republican “flyover zones” of “the heartland” against the
more urban, multicultural, “educated,” bicoastal and Democratic zones
(where the big planes land and take off) while Wall Street, Silicon Valley,
the military-industrial complex, the military and police state and other
parts of the permanent government bureaucracy concentrate wealth and power
ever further upward.
We should struggle more ambitiously to bring down the whole structure of
ruling-class governance and “marionette theater” electoral and
parliamentary politics that has brought us to the present dystopian moment.
The revolution we must demand cannot be just a “kinder and gentler,” more
outwardly but superficially democratic and constitutional version of the
same system
(http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/27/the-empire-has-no-clothes/) that
created Trump. We need to build organizations
(http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/chris_hedges_talks_with_michael_gecan_
build_organizations_empower_20170109) and develop movement cultures and
political strategies fitted for a long-term popular struggle to restructure
politics and policy in accord with the principle of popular sovereignty―the
ultimate nightmare
(http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Enough-with-the-Holy-Founders-Unde
mocratic-Constitution-20150531-0025.html) of those who have stood atop the
American system from the War of Independence through the current new Gilded
Age.
A now savagely unequal (the top 0.1 percent in the U.S. is worth as much as
the bottom 90 percent
(https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/13/us-wealth-inequality-top-0
1-worth-as-much-as-the-bottom-90) ), openly plutocratic
(https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_
page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf) and arch-imperial
American system
(https://www.amazon.com/American-Grand-Strategy-Corporate-Networks/dp/041584
4983) that delivers the fake-democratic choice between “lying neoliberal
warmonger[s]
(http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/08/18/vote-lying-neoliberal-warmonge
r-its-important) ” like the Clintons and Obama on one hand and deplorable
white nationalists and militarists like Trump and Bush Junior on the other
is long overdue for something bigger than just another deceptive “change”
election or even an impeachment. It is ripe for revolution.
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