Okay, I caught some American YouTubers discussing the possibility of a ‘national divorce’ in America the other night. I didn’t quite know what it was, but suspected it was about the dissolution of the USA. After all, it couldn’t be that all American domestic marriages had now become so terrible that a mass divorce across the Land of the Free was the only solution. It seems a congresswoman, whose name I’ve completely forgotten, declared that the political divisions in the nation were so bad that the red and blue states – those held by Republicans and Democrats respectively – should separate. This would, of course, mean the dissolution of America. One YouTuber posted a piece last night wondering if it would be possible.
Okay, I’m British. I haven’t been to America, and what I know about the country comes from books, TV, magazines, newspapers and radio, as well as talking to American friends and people who have lived and worked in the US. So, I’ve got no particular expertise. But it seems to me that the idea is totally mad. Firstly, I’m not sure that the political divisions are necessarily that deep or that pervasive to warrant states’ ceding from the Union. Yes, there always have been a far left strand in American politics, particularly regarding race and gay rights. We took over affirmative action from America, renaming it positive discrimination. Much of the Critical Social Justice movement, which is really just a postmodern twist on Marxism regarding Black rights, gender and feminism and gay and trans rights and other issues, is imported and influenced by American developments. This is particularly true of Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory. Nearly twenty years ago, when I was beginning studying archaeology at Bristol Uni, one of the American students on the course complained that we worse than her country. But some of the controversy in these and other areas just seems the result of really hysterical propaganda.
I remember what the bonkers American right said about Barack Obama. According to the nutters, Obama was a Black nationalist with a burning hatred of Whites, and was, depending on who you listened to, a Maoist Commie, a Nazi, a militant atheist and a secret Muslim planning to overthrow Christian America and make it subservient to Islam. One pair of Lutheran pastors in a church radio station went as far as declaring that he would be a dictator, who would kill more people than Mao. Alex Jones was prophesying that he would use an environmental catastrophe to seize power and force decent Americans into refugee camps.
The truth is Obama was none of these things. As people remarked at the time, he couldn’t simultaneously be a Marxist, Nazi, atheist, Muslim, Black nationalist subversive, and indeed he wasn’t. Despite the hoo-ha and the Nobel Peace Prize, he really didn’t do much for Black America. A few years ago, he said he always thought of himself as moderate Republican. He certainly acted like one, continuing Bush’s militaristic, imperial wars. Domestically he pushed through the charter schools despite community opposition in many areas. I think these are like the academies over here. Even Obamacare wasn’t the radical assault on private healthcare the Republicans screamed it was. It wasn’t a single-payer system, like the one advocated by Bernie Sanders. It simply made private health insurance more affordable to more Americans. It wasn’t even a Democrat policy – Obama took it over from Newt Gingrich, a Republican politico who proposed it in the ’90s.
And the same people are screaming that Biden is ‘far left’, when they aren’t suggesting he’s too old and doddery to hold the office of president. That accusation to me holds far more water. Biden is a bog-standard corporatist Democrat. He got in because the powerbrokers in the Democrat party didn’t want Bernie getting the nomination. Or somebody like the good senator from Vermont. But Biden pushed trans rights, and so he must be a communist.
I’ve read the Communist Manifesto and other bits and pieces by and about Marx and Engels. You won’t be surprised that neither of them wrote very much, if at all, about gay rights. I think it was also illegal in Soviet Russia, punishable with seven years in a forced labour camp. I’ve also got the impression that it was illegal generally in much of the Communist bloc. Contemporary gay rights are very much a western, post-War development, and not confined to one side of the political spectrum. Margaret Thatcher voted for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1968 or whenever it was, while Labour politicians like Jim Callaghan were opposed. Her former Personal Private Secretary, Matthew Parris, was one of the founders of the gay charity Stonewall. Section 28 was frightening, as it did look like the Tories wanted the mass imprisonment of gays, but it was brought in, so I’ve heard, because a school or schools in one London borough was teaching gay rights and there was a fear that this included paedophilia.
There are real issues with the contemporary trans movement. There’s been a devastating critique of the treatment of the children who came to the Tavistock Clinic in London. Many of them were just confused kids, often neuro-divergent. A very high percentage were autistic, depressed, in care, or came from families where one parent was a sex abuser. Eighty per cent of the boys were same-sex attracted, and ninety percent of the girls. Nearly all of these were nevertheless put on puberty blockers and progressed to surgical transition. It has been estimated that if the children had been treated properly, both medically and ethically, only two percent of them would have had done so. Gay opponents of trans militancy, like Barry ‘the EDIjester’ and Clive Simpson and Denis Kavanagh view this is a new form of conversion therapy, in which they gay is not prayed away, but dispelled with drugs and surgery. Many of the kids said they preferred to be trans rather than a gay man or lesbian woman. This is internalised homophobia.
There are also issues regarding women’s sports and privacy and dignity, as shown in the recent scandals about the incarceration of extremely violent, predatory, biologically male rapists in women’s prisons. But many of the critics of this aspect of trans militancy are socialist feminists. Left-wing ladies were against this long before Matt Walsh appeared and claimed it for the Republican right, demanding to know where all the feminist women were. They were there, just ignored. And people like Simpson and Kavanagh are worried about the absence of the left and ordinary people with just moderate political views from protesting this issue. They said in their recent Queen’s Speech video that the American right is the equivalent of our far right. If ordinary people don’t make themselves heard, they’re afraid it’ll be left to far right organisations like Patriotic Alternative, who’ll protest against Drag Queen Story Hour and there will be a backlash against gays in general. I fear this is happening already. Correct, Not Political not only protest against Drag Queen Story Hour, but against gay rights generally. And the ‘Terfs’ don’t necessarily hate trans people. The EDIjester talks about how he knew and partied the night away with trans people and drag queens back in the 1970s. In a recent video describing his experiences in Glasgow, Mr Menno, another gay critic of the trans movement, was moved to tears. So many of the trans people who came out to protest Kelly-Jay Keane and her women were trans-identified women, some of whom, despite their declarations that they were happy, seemed to be anything but. And J.K. Rowling, despite being a moron when it comes to Corbyn and the anti-Semitism smears, has never urged the hatred or murder, let alone the mass murder, of trans people. And to be fair, the book criticising the Tavistock, Time to think, also includes statements from people who transitioned, who were happy in their new gender.
Okay, this is the situation in Britain, but it also exists in America, where some of the most powerful opposition to the militant trans movement comes from left-wing as well as right-wing ladies. Helen Pluckrose, who is a staunch critic from the left of the Critical Social Justice Movement, holds the position that it should be possible to work out a compromise position between the trans rights advocates and their opponents, but she fears that this may not be possible considering how entrenched and intransigent the debate has become.
There have also been problems in America with rioting due to Black Lives Matter, as well the assassination, and planned assassination of various politicians by Antifa. Andy Ngo’s been putting up a number of videos about this, though considering his own record of falsifying reports sometimes a little scepticism might be in order. But that doesn’t mean that everyone who supports Black Lives Matter, or simply thinks more should be done to help impoverished Blacks and people of colour, is a Marxist revolutionary wanting to tear up the flagstones, raise the barricades and shoot cops. Similarly, despite well publicised cases, I don’t know how many school teachers in America, or even here for that matter, are draping the LGBTQ++ flags around their classrooms, indoctrinating kids in Queer Theory and taking them to inappropriate drag shows. Probably much fewer than the impression Walsh and his ilk would like to give.
And people don’t necessarily hold opinions that are uniformly right or left. Many Republicans now genuinely support gay rights, including marriage, as well as trans rights. And I can imagine that for some Americans it might just be a matter of differing priorities. For example, I’m sure there are some Americans, who vote Democrat because they approve of what exists of the American welfare state and some policies towards the poor, women and minorities, but aren’t necessarily in favour of the more radical social policies. Ditto for some Republicans, who may support, against the stereotype of the right, gay and trans rights, but are afraid of what they see as the left’s attack on personal freedom. Some of these people cross party lines on some issues, and how they vote may depend on what is of greater importance to them at that moment.
I can remember reading an interview with an American author, who said that America is a weird mixture of the radical and deeply conservative, often in the same individuals. Looking at it from outside, it seems to me that there’s far more that unites Americans – a common political discourse and tradition than divides them. Certainly not the point where the country’s dissolution should be a serious consideration. I really don’t think these divisions are so deep as the economic and political division over slavery that caused the American Civil War.
But I fear this is being pushed by the Libertarian far right. Way back in the early part of this century White Supremacists like Richard Spencer were and are calling for the creation of a White ethnostate. The extreme right-wing, anti-feminist YouTuber Theodore Beale, alias Vox Dei, was looking forward to the collapse of America and the emergence of such a Whites-only state. And others have been posting up pieces about the coming collapse of the US since. I also found a piece on YouTube ages ago, which featured an interview between one of the Libertarian intellectual leaders, who was looking forward to the creation of a Libertarian, low-tax, free trade, no welfare and everything privatised state in the American heartland. They didn’t have a name for it yet, but were provisionally calling it ‘Reagan’ after Ronald Reagan.
I’ve no doubt that if you’re a rich industrialist, who can afford private schooling and has no chance of being unemployed or needing Medicare or Medicaid to pay your medical bills, such a state would would be an absolute paradise. But if you’re poor and a member of the working class, you’d be a dirt-poor, exploited wage slave, just like the ‘factory slaves’ over here in the 19th century. They can fantasize about the benefits of competition all they like, but on its own it ain’t going to drive medical bills down, provide better schools or create better working conditions. As for the economy, one of the goals of the invasion of Iraq was to liberalise the Iraqi economy. This meant American multinationals seizing the country’s oil and state industries, and removing the tariff barriers protecting its economy. This was planned by the Neo-Cons to create a new, prosperous Iraq, as the kind of economic order they’d like in America.
It didn’t work. When the tariff barriers were removed, any country that could dumped its goods cheap in Iraq. Iraqi industry couldn’t compete. There was a massive wave of bankruptcies and unemployment shot up to astronomical levels. If a similar state is created in the US, then that’ll also happen there. Only big business could compete, and the small businessman or woman would go under.
This is what I’m afraid is really driving the call for a new national divorce between right and left-wing American states. It isn’t abou8t irreconcilable political differences, but about the weird fantasies of the Libertarian extreme right about a state of their own. A state that in reality would be a dystopian nightmare. The panic about Critical Social Justice is just a means to push this.
And I’m afraid that calls for the dissolution of America would also be echoed in this country. Carl Benjamin and the rest of the Lotus Eaters are Libertarians, and I think they’d love to have a similar type of government over here. Indeed, one of them actually said so in one of their videos. If the calls for the dissolution of America become stronger, I think the right-wing nutters would demand something similar for Britain, despite their hostility to regionalism and the fact that England has been a united country since the reign of Edmund Ironside in the 9th or 10th centuries.
‘E Pluribus Unum’. I think it means ‘Out of Many, One’. The motto of the American nation. Well, I hope it continues that way and ordinary Americans ignore the panics caused by the extreme right.
I thought so as soon as I saw his wretched video attacking the NHS yesterday. It struck me then as the act of a frightened man trying to discredit a rival political and medical institution. Yesterday Black American conservative Thomas Sowell put out a short video, just under five minutes, urging Americans to choose the American healthcare system over the British because it was better. Er, no. On so many levels. The American healthcare system is so dire that when Thatcher sent her personal private secretary Patrick Jenkin to America to see how it worked so she could do it to Britain, he joined the full-on cabinet rebellion against her when she tried to privatise the NHS. Yes, private American hospitals don’t have the crowding, and I dare say have more choice, than the NHS but that comes at a price. And more and more Americans are unable to afford it. As a result, good, hardworking, severely normal Americans have to say up years before they can afford the hospital care for American mothers to give birth. There is also a much higher infant mortality rate than Europe. Our NHS is no longer the world’s best because it has been comprehensively run down by the Tories and Blairite Labour for decades. But it’s still better than the American system. And the private American system is in crisis. Robert Reich put up a post on YouTube about how it’s falling apart. I’ll try to find it. A friend of mine trained as a doctor, and according to him, American private hospitals are being kept afloat by American public subsidies. As for the utilities, a number of American states have state-owned electricity companies that produce power more cheaply than private firms. In that sense, Reaganite capitalism is failing.
Now Sowell has put out another video with the title that more Americans are falling for socialism. ‘And it’s bad’. Naah. America has a very respectable socialist tradition going all the way back to the Knights of Labor in the 19th century. From what I can see, socialism may even have been stronger in the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It seems that former president Barack Obama has also stirred things up a little by saying that America needs single-payer healthcare. Of course, it’s a bit rich that he says that now, when he refused to implement it in office and went for Obamacare instead, which is based on a Republican plan from Newt Gingrich. What the west needs is a return to the social democratic consensus of a strong welfare state, properly funded public healthcare, nationalised utilities and strong unions. The consensus that gave Britain a rising standard of living up to the 70s. A form of politics that could and should stop the movement to the far right as immigrants get blamed for the poverty caused by neoliberalism. But obviously even this mild form of socialism is anathema to someone like Sowell, who’s a fan of the discredited economics of Milton Friedman.
Monetarism died in the late 1980s. Reaganomics and Thatcherism have run their course. And the Tories have run out of candidates for prime minister so they’re recycling old ones like Johnson and Rishi Sunak.
Last Sunday, 7th January 2018, was the Golden Globes. This got on the news around the world, not just because of the coverage of which actors and films were given awards, but because the female actors wore black in solidarity with all the women, who had suffered sexual abuse, harassment and exploitation. This culminated in one of the leading actors at the ceremony announcing that Hollywood’s ladies would stand in solidarity with every woman, who had suffered such sexual abuse and assault, and that they would be dedicating a special fund to help poor women sue their abusers.
Coming after the scandals about Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes and others at Fox News, including its long running host, Bill O’Reilly, such an announcement is clearly well meant, and for many women facing the cost of having to drag their abuser, who is probably their boss, through the courts, the prospect of being able to get some money from a charity dedicated to helping them would surely be welcome. But not all women, and not all feminists, saw it quite like that.
Roza Halibi in Counterpunch and the Sane Progressive on YouTube both put up pieces about it, criticising the move. Many women, including the French actress Catherine Deneuve, are critical of the #Metoo movement as they feel it demonises men. All men are now being viewed as sexual predators, real or potential. They also object to the way distasteful and unpleasant forms of sexual contact – like the boss with wandering hands – has been lumped in and conflated with far more serious forms of sexual abuse, like rape and women being told that if they don’t sleep with their boss, they’ll lose their jobs. Groping is unpleasant and humiliating, and it’s quite right that there should be a campaign to stop it. But it’s not at the same level as the other two.
They also found the stance of the individual actresses involved in the speech and this display of solidarity hypocritical. Weinstein’s behaviour was known for years by people within Hollywood, including Meryl Streep. And at the time they kept their mouths firmly shut. Some of this might have been because Weinstein was a powerful man, and no matter how respected and successful they were as ‘A’ list actors, he could have the power to destroy their careers, as he threatened numerous aspiring actresses if they wouldn’t sleep with him. But some of it no doubt was also the attitude of the time, to put up with it regardless.
But there’s also an attitude that the speeches against sexual harassment and exploitation were also a form of faux feminism, by rich, entitled women, who were trying to appropriate the protests by ordinary, middle and lower class women. Critics like the Sane Progressive and Halibi have argued that the successful protests always come from below. They are won by ordinary working people standing up for themselves and demanding further rights and change. They are not achieved by members of the upper classes deciding that they will charitably act as the saviours of the lower orders. The #Metoo activism at the Golden Globes represents very rich, entitled women trying to take control of a protest by their sisters lower down the social scale, and wrest it away from any meaningful challenge to a corrupt system as a whole.
The same critics have also made the point that the #Metoo activism has also acted as a diversion. Sexual abuse is only part of a whole series of problems corporate capitalism is inflicting on American society. This includes mass poverty and starvation, the further denial of rights to low paid workers, Trump’s attempts to repeal Obamacare and destroy Medicare, the destruction of the environment, and the political paralysis caused by a corrupt party system taking money and its orders from wealthy donors in big business, rather than acting in the interests of ordinary citizens. All of these issues need tackling, but the leadership of the Democrat party has become, under the Clintons and Obama, as thoroughly corporatist as the Republicans, and has no interest in tackling these issues. That would harm the interests of their donors in big business. So they make symbolic liberal gestures. Like Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency last year. Her policies were more neoliberalism, corporate greed, and aggressive militarism. For ordinary Americans she offered nothing but more poverty and exploitation. But she claimed that, because she was female, she was somehow an outsider, and that a victory for her would thus be a victory for women. Even though, as the lowest paid group, women would have suffered the most from a Clinton presidency. If you didn’t vote for Clinton, you were automatically a misogynist. And if you were a woman, and didn’t vote for her, she and her followers denied it was because you had opinions of your own. Rather, you were just doing what your husband or boyfriend told you. So much for Clinton believing in women’s independence and their agency as human beings.
But this experience of a very rich, entitled woman trying to make herself appear liberal when she was anything but, has clearly coloured some left-wing and feminist attitudes in America towards other attempts by the rich to embrace or promote left-wing causes. Clinton’s liberalism was a fraud, and so some people are suspicious that the actresses stressing their commitment to rooting out sexual abuse are less than wholehearted in their determination to ending the general poverty, exploitation and other issues plaguing American society. And just as the corporate Democrats are desperate to take power away from the real radical left, like Bernie Sanders, so these ladies are trying to take power away from ordinary women, determined to solve the problem their own way. Because this challenges their position in society and their political influence as arbiters and spokespeople of the nation’s conscience.
Now I think the #metoo speeches were well meant, regardless of the possible hypocrisy of some of the actresses involved, and hopefully some women will benefit from the money available to sue their abusers. But the Guardian’s Marina Hyde a few years ago wrote a book, Celebrity: How Entertainers Took Over the World And Why We Need an Exit Strategy, pointing out numerous instances where Hollywood celebs decided to take over a cause, only to make the situation worse. There’s a very good case to be made against such Hollywood activism. And this problem may well become more acute, as more celebs decide to promote symbolic issues, while leaving the other problems affecting ordinary people untouched.
I found this fascinating little clip of a speech by Lenin, the founder of Soviet Communism, on Maoist Rebel News, presented by Jason Unruhe. I am very definitely not a Maoist, as I think it’s undeniable that he was one of the most murderous tyrants of the 20th century. About 60 million Chinese died in the purges and mass starvation created by the ‘Cultural Revolution’, and countless precious art treasures and other monuments from the country’s rich, ancient past, were destroyed.
Nevertheless, this piece is interesting and important as it shows how the Bolsheviks took seriously the threat of anti-Semitism, and were keen to stamp it out. Unruhe made the video in response to an appearance by Rick Harrison of Pawn Stars on Mark Levin’s radio show. Harrison owns the pawn shop featured in the show. It’s an American programme, but it’s also shown over here on one of the satellite/cable channels. I tried watching it once, when it was on the History Channel, in the vague hope that it might actually be interesting. It wasn’t. The programme largely consisted of the crew musing over various artifacts – in this case, a couple of pistols left over from the Old West – and speculating about how much they were worth. It reminded me a little of the Beeb’s antiques’ programmes, with the exception that the people looking at the antiques didn’t actually seem to know very much about them, apart from the very basics.
On Levin’s show, Harrison went off and laid into Barack Obama. Obama was ‘anti-business’ and blamed the Jews and intelligentsia for everything, just like Lenin. Well, no. Barack Obama is not at all like Lenin. Barack Obama is very definitely not ‘anti-business’, even remotely. As the Jimmy Dore Show and other alternative news shows have pointed out, ad nauseam, Obama is a bog-standard corporatist politician. He tried to privatise the public schools by turning them into Charter Schools, the American equivalent of British academy schools. Even Obamacare is private enterprise. It was originally dreamed up by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and promoted by Newt Gingrich, an arch-Republican. The last time I looked, America was still very much a private enterprise economy. Obama has even said that he considers himself to be a ‘moderate Republican’.
But such accusations are almost par for the course for the bonkers end of the Republican party. There have even been right-wing Christian radio hosts declaring that he was a mass-murderer, who was secretly planning to kill even more people than Mao and Stalin. And this is apart from all the hysterical screaming that he was a Communist-Nazi-crypto-Islamist terrorist intent on bringing about the fall of America and western civilisation.
He also spent eight years in power, and has now departed. Nobody was assassinated, or rounded up in cattle trucks to be deported to death camps. Or incarcerated in FEMA, which would be the modern equivalent, if you believe Alex Jones. But the rhetoric shows the sheer, blind hysteria that gripped some of these maniacs whenever Obama was mentioned.
Unruhe points out that it is factually incorrect that Lenin blamed the Jews for the problems of the nascent Soviet Union. He states that the Soviet leader spent a year touring the former Russian Empire, denouncing anti-Semitism and Jew hatred. How is this known? Because there are recordings of him. He then plays one. It’s clearly from a gramophone recording, complete with crackles and scratches, but it is subtitled in English. My Russian really isn’t very good at all, but from what little I can catch, the translation is accurate, and it states what Lenin is actually saying.
Lenin states that it is the capitalists, the landowners and the tsars, who were trying to stir up hatred against the Jews, as a way of dividing the working people of all nations and getting them to hate each other. He states that it is a medieval, feudal superstition, that exists only when workers and peasants are kept in slavery by the landlords. He says that most Jews are workers, and therefore our brothers. He acknowledges that amongst the Jews there are capitalists, the bourgeois and kulaks, just as there are all of these amongst Russians. He states that this hatred against the Jews is being stirred up by the capitalists to divert attention away from who really is exploiting working people: capital!
He cries out several times ‘Shame upon the tsars’ for stoking hatred against the Jews, for stirring up pogroms, massacres and persecution.
Unruhe points out in his introduction to the speech that it was actually Lenin’s opponents, the tsars, who were anti-Semitic. This is solid, established fact. Nicholas II was viciously anti-Semitic himself, and believed firmly in the ‘Blood Libel’ – the poisonous myth that Jews killed Christian children and used their blood to make the matzo bread for Passover. One of the issues that discredited Nicholas II’s rule was his repeated attempt to prosecute a Jew, Beilis, on this charge, despite the most anti-Semitic of his ministers telling him that it was stupid and ridiculous.
And in opposition to the workers’ and revolutionary movements, there were the Black Hundreds. These were groups of extreme right-wing supporters of the traditional order, who were viciously anti-Semitic.
It’s obviously glaringly true that Lenin was ‘anti-business’. But saying that makes it appear as though it was just a matter of prejudice. It wasn’t. Russia’s working people and peasants at the time laboured in appalling conditions, with many on literal ‘starvation wages’. And although the serfs had been freed in the 1860s by Alexander I, their lords and masters still treated their workers as unfree slaves. There were cases where factory masters told their workers ‘We own you!’ Hence before the Bolshevik coup there were hundreds of strikes and peasant revolts up and down the Russian Empire. You can easily see why before Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power, there was a revolution that overthrew the Tsar, and the workers began electing left-wing parties like the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Trudoviks and Socialist Revolutionaries on to the workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ soviets they set up to represent their own interests against the power of the capitalists.
As for the capitalists and business using anti-Semitism to divide working people of all nations, anti-Semitism in the West has been rightly discredited and regarded with loathing by the majority of people since the defeat of Nazism. But the right has used racism to try and attack the left and organised Labour. You can see it in the way the Tories have tried to stir up nationalist sentiment against Muslims and other ‘unassimilable’ immigrants, quite apart from the fearmongering about workers coming from elsewhere in the EU and eastern Europe.
I’m not a fan of Lenin. He created a very authoritarian system, which eventually led to the murderous tyranny of Stalin. But he was no anti-Semite, and his speech still remains a very relevant commentary on the political uses of racial hatred.
This is the second part of my article on the interview with Abby Martin on the Jimmy Dore Show. Martin is the presenter of the Empire Files on TeleSur English, and a former presenter at RT. She is impassioned, incisive and tells the story of the victims of American and western imperialism both abroad in the Middle East and elsewhere, and the mass of severely normal Americans at home burdened with the tax bill and the sheer rapacious greed of the neoliberal, corporate elite.
She states that Boeing and the other big corporations fund the adverts in the media simply to show the journos, who’s paying their wages, and so keep in line. The media is now all about advertising, not news.
They then talk about the rampant Russia-phobia, which Martin says is causing her to lose her mind. At first she just thought it was the product of Trump and his brown shirts. Dore rips this to shreds by pointing out that it’s not Russia that preventing Americans from getting what they want on a range of issues. 90 per cent of Americans want some form of gun control. But they ain’t getting, and it’s not because of Russia. 80 per cent of the US wanted a public option for Obamacare. Didn’t get it. Not because of Russia either. Americans also want Medicare For All and free college education. Denied that too – but not by the Russians. And everybody in America wants the wars to end. And it ain’t the Russians that are preventing that from happening. The people really screwing America is Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, big pharma, and the fossil fuel industry.
Back to Boeing and its adverts, the company’s funding Meet the Press to shut the press up. Half of America doesn’t believe in climate change, because it’s just presented by the media as just another point of view. And this is because the networks are funded by the fossil fuel industry. And the networks bring on general after endless general to talk about how the US should go to war with North Korea. All they talk about is how the war should be fought, but they are never challenged on the reason why. They never bring on Medea Benjamin, the head of the anti-war opposition group, Code Pink, except to mock her. Similarly, you never see union leaders on TV, nor are there any anti-war voices. As for Brian Williams, who was sacked for telling porkies about how he took fire, his real crime was that he didn’t tell his audience that the ‘objective’ news he was broadcasting was paid for by the generals who appeared on his show.
They then talk about the revolving door between the generals and the defence contractors. After the generals retire, they go to work for some company like General Electric. Martin talks about the $500 million in one bill sponsored by John McCain, to train the Ukrainians against Russian aggression. She caustically and accurately remarks that ‘we’re now funding neo-Nazis’, after setting up the coup that overthrew their last president. America is also giving $750 million to Israel for defence.
The Russia scare was hatched by Ralph Mook and John Podesta in the Democrat party, and it’s grown into a huge conspiracy. Martin describes how she saw it all developing three years ago when she was working for RT. They first attacked Al-Jazeera, demonising it as the propaganda wing of Saddam Hussein. Then they turned against RT as a network and her personally. She states that the report on which the accusations are based is rubbish. It looks like it was half written by some unpaid intern. There’s that contempt for any truth or real fact in this document. She noticed when one of RT’s presenters publicly resigned over Putin’s annexation of the Crimea. That was a psy-ops operation launched by William Kristol, one of the founders of the Neocons and the head of the Project for the New American Century. There was absolute no proof that Russia was meddling in American democracy. And half of the document attacked Martin personally. It was fomenting radical discontent, and the elite hated the way they covered third parties, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street. so talking about how half of America has less than $1,000 in savings is now Russian propaganda. It’s at this point that Martin states she never said anything in praise in Putin. She states that there are plenty of leftists and socialists working at the network, not because they like Putin, but because there is nowhere else to go.
They then talk about how the Democrat party is full of people, who voted for Bush twice. And particularly the way Keith Olberman, whom Martin had previously admired, came out and publicly apologised to George Dubya. She states that Bush is a war criminal. He set up a gulag (Guantanamo) killed and tortured people wholesale, but when he appeared on Oprah she held his hand as if he was Buddha! Martin said she realised Obama was a fake when he refused to prosecute the war criminals. So now they have Trump, who’s hated because he’s a narcissist, but knows he will have people applauding every time he bombs people. They ask rhetorically whether the media will apologise to Nixon if Trump wins a second term.
They then go on to discuss how Trump is actually less dangerous, and more of a threat to the establishment, then Mike Pence, the Vice-President. Martin describes Pence, with good reason, as a ‘Christian ISIS who wants to kill gays’. He’s psychotic, but you wouldn’t have the cult of personality you have with Trump. She states that the Christian Evangelicals love him, as without him they wouldn’t have got in. And so Pence and DeVos are quite happy to use him as the fall guy, taking the rap for the policies they’re pushing through Congress. Trump represents the worst elements in society – the cult of celebrity, of reality TV shows, the adulation given to millionaires. She states that Joyce Behar, another personality, was paradoxically the voice of reason when she said on one interview that things wouldn’t be better if they only got rid of Trump. No, not if that meant Mike Pence becoming president. They talk about how, when Bush was in power, everyone talked about Bush Derangement Disorder. Then it was Obama Derangement Disorder, and now its Trump Derangement Disorder. But Dore also points out that progressives dodged a bullet with Trump. Voting for the lesser of two evils meant that they got Trump, who is too incompetent to get his policies through.
A few days ago I put up a post about the nightmare, alternative future described by the British SF novelist Stephen Baxter in his novel, Titan. Baxter’s a writer of hard SF, a subgenre in which the fiction is nevertheless grounded in solid, known science fact, though often with an element of artistic license. Titan was written in 1995, and is partly set in the decaying America of the first decades of the 21st century. A militantly anti-science president, Maclachlan, has been elected with the support of the Ku Klux Klan and Christian fundamentalists. Maclachlan shuts down NASA for good after a shuttle disaster. The launch complexes are closed down. Those that aren’t demolished become simply tourist attractions, as do the agency’s headquarters and mission control. One of these, a museum to the Apollo moon landings, is altered so that it promotes instead the spiritual experiences many of the astronauts did have during their missions. Maclachlan also introduces legislation demanding that only the Aristotelian cosmology of Thomas Aquinas, with its crystal spheres, is taught in schools. What is left of the agency is given over to the USAF under the paranoid and nationalistic General Hartle, who is very much like the rogue American General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s classic nuclear black comedy, Doctor Strangelove.
Against this, the agency attempts to launch one last, great space mission, a crewed voyage to Titan, where the Cassini probe has found evidence of active biological chemistry.
I commented in my post on the remarkable similarity between the policies of the fictional Maclachlan and Donald Trump. Maclachlan is fiercely nationalistic, and withdraws American peacekeepers from their stations around the globe, as well as pulling America out of NAFTA and the various other free trade agreements. America also pulls out of the World Bank and the IMF, and the UN is kicked out of New York. Like the real anti-Semites of the America Far Right, Maclachlan believes that the US is under ‘Israeli occupation’. Maclachlan also dismantles the country’s welfare programmes, especially those benefiting Blacks and other minorities, and starts building a wall with Mexico.
He also devises a policy to deal with America’s increasingly aging society: euthanasia chambers for the unwanted or neglected elderly. These are euphemistically called ‘Happy Booths’. There’s a very touching scene in which the last, fictitious surviving Apollo spaceman, Marcus White, is gassed to death in one of these chambers by a couple of nurses, who are every bit as malign as Nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. By this time, however, White is so confused with dementia, that he is lost in the delusion that he is back as a middle-aged man at NASA in his prime, suiting up and breathing the pure oxygen in preparation for another flight to the Moon.
This is interesting, as it completely turns on its head one of the truly despicable pieces of propaganda the Republicans were running ten years ago to make sure the American public didn’t get single-payer healthcare. Instead, we had Sarah Palin and the rest of the maniacs screaming that the introduction of single-payer healthcare, where all Americans would have free medical treatment financed by the state, would lead to ‘death panels’. Palin herself made a speech about how she didn’t want her children facing them. The idea was under a socialist system, medical care would be rationed. Those individuals deemed to be a waste of state money and resources, such as the elderly, would thus be humanely killed.
It was a disgusting piece of propaganda, based partly on the murder of the disabled in Nazi Germany. The Nazis were also pro-euthanasia, producing propaganda forms with titles such as I Don’t Want to Be Born. It was also based partly on the vile views of some of the founders of the Fabian Society, particularly H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, who were very much in favour of eugenics and the sterilization of the biologically unfit.
Unfortunately, many Americans were taken in by this bilge. There was a BBC report on the truly horrific state of American healthcare, in which a clinic offering free treatment in California immediately attracted 50,000 + prospective patients. These are the 20 per cent of Americans, who couldn’t afford their private healthcare before the introduction of Obamacare. The Beeb’s reported also attracted the attention of Republican supporters, who’d believed all the rubbish they’d been fed by Palin and her stormtroopers. One of these was an elderly man, who rushed up to the Beeb’s crew and shouted ‘Your healthcare system stinks!’ When they politely asked him how so, he looked confused, and began to mutter about ‘death panels’.
There are no death panels in Britain, or anywhere else with a socialized, or state-funded medical system. As for Germany, state financing of medical treatment for the workers was introduced by Bismarck in the 1870s, nearly fifty years before the Nazis seized power. There is a problem, where dying individuals may be refused treatment of expensive and/or experimental drugs or other procedures on the NHS because the costs far exceed any chance of success. This is very much a controversial issue, as we’ve seen the past week with the parents fighting to send their dying son over to America for treatment. However, there are no death panels.
The ‘Happy Booths’ described in the book are a piece of artistic invention by Baxter. Conventional Christian morality rejects euthanasia for the same reasons it has traditionally ruled out abortion, except in certain very restricted circumstances. This is because both judge that there are certain forms of human beings, such as the unborn and the disabled, who are held not to have the same rights to life. If it is permitted to kill the disabled and the unborn, it is argued, there is a danger that the same attitude will spread to other groups also considered inferior, like the Jews and other ‘untermenschen’ in Nazi Germany. And Baxter is aware of this, as elsewhere in the book he describes how the British relative of one of the astronauts, stricken by CJD or ‘Mad Cow Disease’, is going to a euthanasia clinic even though their parents consider it unchristian.
A president dependent on the support of right-wing Christian fundamentalists would alienate a sizable part of his constituency if he did. What happens instead is that, through its hostility to state medicine and the welfare state, Republican politicians of Maclachlan’s type make it impossible for the poor, severely ill to support themselves. Hence Bernie Sanders’ chilling statistic that 50,000 Americans die each year because they cannot afford private medical treatment.
This is basically the same attitude of Tory party under David Cameron and Theresa May. They have extended the sanctions system and the Work Capability Tests to make it as difficult as possible for the unemployed and the disabled to quality for state support. The result of that has been that researchers at Oxford University found that in 2015 alone, 30,000 people died through the Tories’ austerity policies. And Mike over at Vox Political reported yesterday that, according to the Skwawkbox, there’s a nasty clause in Universal Credit, which means that the claimant has to find a job in two years, or they lose their benefit.
This is a right-wing ‘genocide of the disabled’, as Mike, Johnny Void, Stilloaks, Tom Pride and the Angry Yorkshireman have said on their blogs, and Jeffrey, one of the great commenters here, has said on this. But it’s carefully hidden. The victims aren’t actually killed, they’re simply left to die. And the few politicos, who dare to call it what it is, are denied their ability to sit in parliament.
On Friday Mike commented on a piece in the Disability News Service about Mr. Jared O’Mara, a disabled Lib Dem MP, who has called the Tories’ policies towards the disabled ‘eugenics’, and stated that they want disabled people to ‘suffer and die’. Mr. O’Mara is to be commended for the way he tried to tackle Iain Duncan Smith, the former head of the DWP and therefore the government’s chief minister responsible for implementing this policy. However, Mr. O’Mara finds it impossible to find anywhere in the House of Commons to sit during debates. There is insufficient seating for all 650 MPs, and there is no form available for disabled MPs to fill in stating that they have particular seating needs. As Mike says, this is all very suspicious.
As a religious person, I can’t say I’m happy about the anti-religious stance of Titan. I went to a Christian college for my undergraduate degree, and some of the students were Creationists. I am not saying that their literalist reading of the creation story in Genesis is correct, but I have to say that they were, by and large, decent people. Those I met weren’t racists or political extremists, and I know that one or two were actually left-wing. I also can’t say that they were anti-science, outside of the very specific field of evolution. Moreover, since the election of Donald Trump there has been the emergence of a religious Left in America, something which couldn’t have been predicted when Baxter wrote the book back in the 1990s. One of the authors of the collection of articles attacking the Neo-Cons, Confronting the New Conservatism, pointed out that the Neo-Cons were not necessarily going to be politically dominant for ever. Kansas, and many of the other mid-western Republican states, had in the 1920s been centres of the Social Gospel movement, which combined Christianity and Socialism. It’s possible that as more Americans recognize how truly disgusting Trump and his party are, Christians over the other side of the Pond may return to it.
However, Trump and his administration are anti-science. The Republican party is strongly opposed to climate change, and so there has been a concerted attack on environmentalism since Trump took office. Legislation protecting America’s glorious natural heritage has been repealed, and federal scientists responsible for monitoring the environment have been effectively gagged. They may not publish any scientific papers supporting climate change, and the federal agency itself has been effectively gutted.
Titan also portrays a future suffering from global warming and catastrophic climate change, as do very many of the SF novels written during the same decade, such as Bruce Sterling’s Heavy Weather. So far Trump hasn’t wound up NASA, though I don’t doubt that the agency is still under considerable pressure to keep expenses under control. But the real harm is being done by Trump’s deliberate rejection of climate change to appease powerful donors from industry, particularly the Kochs in big oil. This denial of climate change, and that of the other world leaders, will lead to the deaths of millions worldwide. If it hasn’t already.
I’ve mentioned several times over the past week or so the hypocritical smears the Tory press – the Torygraph, Scum and Heil – have published claiming that Jeremy Corbyn was a supporter of IRA terrorism, and, by implication, of the Manchester terror attack last Monday. Corbyn wasn’t. He did support attempts to find a peaceful solution to the Troubles through negotiation, something Thatcher and the Tories loudly denied they were doing, but did anyway. Both the Belfast Telegraph and the Irish Times have hailed the Labour leader as a man, who strove for the best for the people of Ireland and Ulster. Ian Paisley’s wife even said that Corbyn was courteous and polite.
So, not quite the fanatical supporter of Irish nationalist terrorism these papers wanted to smear him as.
And the Tories, under Thatcher, did their own supporting of terrorist violence in Ulster. Peter Taylor’s 1999 documentary, Loyalists, featured interviews with leading Ulster Loyalist politicos and terrorists, one of whom admitted that they were getting information from British intelligence in the late 1980s allowing them to kill members of the IRA and other Republicans.
And that hasn’t been the only incident, where terrorists supported by the British state have committed atrocities. The last one was just a week ago. In Manchester.
Jim Kavanagh writing in Counterpunch has a piece pointing out that the family of the suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, were members of a Libyan Islamist terrorist group, who were given sanctuary in Britain as part of NATO’s recruitment of such terrorists in their campaign to overthrow Colonel Qaddafy. He attacks the racist double standards of the western media, for giving massive attention to attacks like this in the West, while paying much less attention to the other victims of Islamist violence in Africa and elsewhere in the world. Such as Mali, where 100 people, mostly Russians, Chinese and Africans, were butchered by two Islamist terrorists at the Bamako hotel a few years ago.
He reminds his readers that, despite Qaddafy’s own political posturing, Libya was a secular state with the highest standard of living in Africa. And Qaddafy himself hated and persecuted the Islamists. The late ‘mad dog of the Middle East’ and his son, Saif, even tried to warn Blair, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that if he was killed, the terrorists would move on to attack Europe and there would be a massive influx of refugees into the continent.
Kavanagh also reproaches American liberals for believing that you can be politically liberal, and still support western imperialism. He states that Barack Obama and Killary, whose gloating over the death of the Libyan dictator was particularly repulsive, have so far presided over more carnage than Donald Trump. American liberals are deluded if they believe that they can unleash and then contain the Islamist terrorists they have recruited, armed and trained at will. He compares terrorist atrocities like that committed in Manchester to the film ‘Groundhog Day’, whose hero is doomed to go through the same day again and again. And this, he feels, will continue until something immeasurably more horrific finally wakes Americans up to the horrific reality.
He states
‘Last Monday, jihadi suicide bomber Salman Abedi blew himself up at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, killing 22 people. Salman grew up in an anit-Qaddafi Libyan immigrant family. In 2011, his father, Ramadan Abedi, along with other British Libyans (including one who was under house arrest), “was allowed to go [to Libya], no questions asked,” to join the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an al-Qaeda-affiliate, to help overthrow Qaddafi. In Manchester, as Max Blumenthal puts it, in his excellent Alternet piece, it was all “part of the rat line operated by the MI5, which hustled anti-Qaddafi Libyan exiles to the front lines of the war.” In Manchester, Salman lived near a number of LIFG militants, including an expert bomb maker. This was a tough bunch, and everybody—including the cops and Salman’s Muslim neighbors—knew they weren’t the Jets and the Sharks. As Middle East Eye reports, he “was known to security services,” and some of his acquaintances “had reported him to the police via an anti-terrorism hotline.”
Could it be any clearer? The Abedi family was part of a protected cohort of Salafist proxy soldiers that have been used by “the West” to destroy the Libyan state. There are a number of such cohorts around the world that have been used for decades to overthrow relatively prosperous and secular, but insufficiently compliant, governments in the Arab and Muslim world—and members of those groups have perpetrated several blowback attacks in Western countries, via various winding roads. In this case, the direct line from Libya to Mali to Manchester is particularly easy to trace.‘
‘The jihadi attackers in Mali and the jihadi bomber in Manchester were direct products—not accidental by-products, but deliberately incubated protégés—of American-British-French-NATO regime change in Libya, a project that was executed by the Obama administration and spearheaded by Hillary Clinton.
Before the glorious revolution, Libya under Ghaddafi had the highest standard of living of any country in Africa, according to the UN Human Development Index. Before the jihadi onslaught backed by NATO bombing campaign, Ghaddafi’s Libya was an anchor of stability in North Africa, as even the U.S. and British governments knew and acknowledged, per a 2008 cable from American foreign service officer Christopher Stevens, published by Wikileaks:
Libya has been a strong partner in the war against terrorism and cooperation in liaison channels is excellent…Muammar al-Qadhafi’s criticism of Saudi Arabia for perceived support of Wahabi extremism, a source of continuing Libya-Saudi tension, reflects broader Libyan concern about the threat of extremism. Worried that fighters returning from Afghanistan and Iraq could destabilize the regime, the [government of Libya] has aggressive pursued operations to disrupt foreign fighter flows, including more stringent monitoring of air/land ports of entry, and blunt the ideological appeal of radical Islam.
The US-British-French-NATO humanitarian intervention put an end to that by overthrowing the Libyan government under entirely phony pretexts, in contravention of fundamental international law, and in violation of the UN resolution they claimed as a justification. The executioners and beneficiaries of that aggression where the jihadis who have been rampaging from Mali to Manchester. It’s a bright, clear line.
Ghaddafi himself warned Tony Blair that “an organization [the LIFG].has laid down sleeper cells in North Africa called the Al Qaeda organization in North Africa.” Ghaddafi’s son, Saif, warned that overthrowing Libya’s would make the country “the Somalia of North Africa, of the Mediterranean” and “You will see millions of illegal immigrants. The terror will be next door.”’
‘Manchester is the latest iteration of a scenario we’ve gone through so many times now, like some groundhog-day dream. At the end of my post two years ago, I was urging and hoping that Americans would wake up. But a lot of American liberals and lefties, including Berniebots, still like to imagine there’s a political space they can inhabit called Progressive Except Imperialism. There isn’t. Imperialism with Social Security and Medicare and Obamacare—even single-payer healthcare—is imperialism, and it’s reactionary and supremacist. Equal-opportunity imperialism is imperialism. African-American, women, Latinx, or LGBTQ presidents, generals, and drone operators do not make it any less criminal, or dangerous, or any less inevitably erosive of all those cherished progressive domestic programs.‘
The recruitment of Islamist terrorists goes back further than Blair, Bush, and Obama and Killary, right back to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher gave sanctuary in this country to Islamist terrorists as part of the proxy war against the Russians in Afghanistan. She and Ronnie celebrated them, because they were anti-Communists fighting against ‘the Evil Empire’. And the Russian ambassador told the Americans that once the Salafists had finished with them, they would come for America.
And this came horribly true on 9/11. Having defeated the Soviet Union, the Saudi-backed terrorists believed they could bring down the other superpower, America.
As for Thatcher, one of the terrorists she gave asylum to in Britain was a monster, who blew up a plane-load of schoolchildren flying to Moscow in order to kill the Soviet officers also on board.
And the same Islamists she settled in Britain became part of the wider underground of radicalised Islamist discontent.
Corbyn never supported terrorism. But Thatcher, and her New Labour protégé, Tony Blair, certainly did. And the results were Loyalist terrorists acting as Thatcher’s death squads in Ulster, and Islamist terrorism in Britain.
And Theresa May made it all easier for the Manchester bomber and those like him by cutting the numbers of the police force, armed forces and border guards. And when members of Her Majesty’s finest tried to warn of her of this danger, she sneered at them.
Jeremy Corbyn has promised to reverse all this. Which, despite all the Tory screaming and posturing, trying to portray them as the party of great war leaders since Churchill, Corbyn and the Labour party represent this country’s best hope of peace and security.
The current crisis hitting the NHS isn’t an accident. The Tories – and Blairites – have had a decades-long policy of privatising the NHS and starving it off funds going back to the days of the molten Tory tin goddess herself, Maggie Thatcher. Thatcher wanted to privatise the NHS as part of her campaign to destroy the welfare state as a whole. That she couldn’t was down to two things – there was a massive cabinet revolt, as they realised it would be, er ‘highly courageous’ in the words of Sir Humphrey in ‘Yes, Minister’. In other words, they knew it would cost them the next election. Also, her private secretary Patrick Jenkin actually visited America and found that there healthcare system is rubbish, with 55 million people unable to afford their health insurance before Obamacare, and about 30,000 folks dying every year due to lack of medical care.
But this didn’t stop her or them. She wanted to engineer a situation where 25 per cent of Brits would have private medical insurance. And over the next three decades and more the Tories and the Blairites opened up more of the NHS to private industry through the Private Finance Initiative and other schemes whereby private hospitals and clinics are now contracting in to provide services for the NHS, while the NHS is being privatised, starved of funds and broken up.
Even as far back as the 1970s Britain actually gave less funding to its health service than the other countries in what is now the EU. And that funding has been further slashed as part of a spurious programme of cutting the deficit by the Tories.
Jeremy Corbyn has said he intends to reverse this. He will find an extra £37 billion for the NHS, including £10 billion to correct the hardware problems, which left our health service vulnerable to hackers last weekend.
Well, as the TV host Victoria Derbyshire tweeted, they had seventy years to solve the problems of the NHS, but didn’t.
One of the journos at the Beeb, Jon Ironmonger, doorstepped Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, for his comments on Labour’s pledge. The result is very telling. Hunt kept his mouth firmly shut, and peddled off as fast as he could into the London traffic.
Like May, Hunt depends on first being programmed by the spin doctors at Tory Central Office. Without Linton Crosby to type the soundbites into ZX 81 1 Kilobyte powerhouse that is his brain – for those of you, who remember ’80s home computers – Hunt and the rest of them have nothing to say. And so they disappear as fast as they can into the smoke and petrol fumes.
This was put up on the 27th March on the Secular Talk YouTube channel, so I don’t know if this is still going through Congress. In this clip, Secular Talk’s Kyle Kulinski reports that not all Democrats in Congress are complete sell-outs, and some have responded the proper way to the failure of TrumpCare: they’re now pressing for Medicare for All. John Conyers has proposed it in the House of Representatives, and the awesome Bernie Sanders is proposing it in Senate. 72 Democrats have backed it, but this is less than the total 192 Democrats in the House.
The bill also has the backing of National Nurses United, Brand New Congress, and the Justice Democrats group of progressive Democrats.
Kulinski recommends that his viewers should get on to their congressman, if he’s a Democrat, and urge him to vote for this bill. He also urges them to make it clear that if he does not, then they will vote against him in the next election. He gives the example of a comment from a politico that what really gets things going at Congress is when the phones start ringing.
There is also a petition up at the Justice Democrats’ website supporting the bill, which Kulinski also urges his viewers to sign.
Kulinski states that now is the time to introduce this bill, as they have the support of 55 per cent of the country. One of the leading Democrats, who does not support it is Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi wants to lead the Democrats, but believes that giving everyone proper access to medical care is a step too far. Kulinski also states that those Democrats, who don’t want to support Medicare For All, but maintain that they should just stick to supporting Obamacare are sell-outs. He makes it clear that Obamacare is a great step forward, but it is at heart a right-wing solution. It was proposed by Newt Gingrich way back in the 1990s, and various forms of it have also been backed by Richard Nixon and the Heritage Foundation in the 1980s. It’s an improvement, but still has very severe drawbacks.
Kulinski goes on to urge his viewers to point out to their Democratic representative that they can even rub the Republicans’ noses in it by citing Trump back at them. Trump said in a speech that he believed in Medicare For All. Quote: ‘If a nation can’t look after its sick people, then it’s over. I believe in Medicare For All’.
He makes it very clear that this reform is needed. There are 53 million people, who cannot afford medical insurance in America. Every other developed country has some form of free medical care. It is also bizarre and iniquitous that the country can find billions to fund the war in Syria, and give massive corporate bail-outs and subsidies to the banks and big business, but then states that Medicare For All is too expensive, and the existing Medicare budget needs to be cut.
Remember Louise Mensch? She was a Tory MP over here, who appeared several times on TV before giving it all up to move to America. She was one of those, who regularly spouted outrageously stupid, uninformed, bigoted drivel. I’ve reblogged a number of articles from other left-wing bloggers taking apart her opinions to show them for the nonsense they are. One of the funniest critiques had a rough diagram of her face with an open mouth with an ‘X’ across in red, surrounded by a red border and captioned ‘Gobsh*te’ as an appropriate warning.
In this clip from TYT Politics, The Young Turks’ Michael Tracey talks about how he loves Mensch, because she has effectively abandoned reasoned political commentary to drone on about her weird conspiracy theories, and so is effectively discrediting the Republicans and the establishment media from within. He states that she had begun her political career as a propagandist for Marco Rubio. I think Rubio’s a Republican politico of the stripe that went into vapours about how Obamacare was a depraved Marxist plot to destroy American healthcare and thought that conditions should be made even worse for the unemployed and those on welfare. Which shows just how unpleasant Mensch’s own Conservative opinions must have been when she was an MP in Britain.
Now she’s given up trying to talk up Rubio, and has instead appeared on various chat shows telling America that just about everything and anyone she doesn’t like is part of a nefarious conspiracy by Putin. According to her, Andrew Breitbart, the head of the news agency that bears his name, was assassinated by Putin because the Russian president wanted his company to be taken over by Steve Bannon. She accused Glenn Greenwald, the respected left-wing journalist, of working for Putin and smeared his paper, the Intercept, as the Ivancept. She even accused Bernie Sanders of working for the Russians. This is nonsense, of course, but somehow she’s being taken seriously by a number of mainstream TV shows. She appeared on Bill Maher’s show the other night, when the comedian and news commenter gave her a very credulous reception.
Taylor loves her, because she is so bonkers that she’s unintentionally discrediting that part of the American political spectrum, just as the warm welcome she’s been given on TV shows by hosts, who really should know better, is also unintentionally discrediting their shows. The lesson here is: the mainstream media just broadcast paranoid bilge, like Louise Mensch. Go to the Internet and The Young Turks and other sites like them for proper, informed news and opinion.
Mensch has clearly taken over the massive Russophobia of the corporate Democrats, and their obsession with blaming the leaks about their own corruption on Russian intelligence. There isn’t much proof of this, and WikiLeaks themselves said they got the information from a disgruntled insider, not from Putin’s minions in Russian intelligence. I’ve put up a piece on here commenting on an article in Counterpunch, which reported how the Corporatist Democrats, the Washington Post and a very unpleasant group of racists and eugenicists accused a series of left-wing reporters and news organisations of being Russian propagandists in receipt of this information, without any proof whatsoever. It seems Mensch has simply taken this lies and expanded them until it seems she thinks that Putin is responsible for everything she thinks is wrong about American politics.
Now that she’s finally joined the ranks of the conspiracy theorists, we can start speculating how long it will be before she ends up like Alex Jones, babbling about how the global elites that control the world a really extradimensional satanic reptoid aliens, and that Hillary Clinton is a demonically possessed cyborg, who is part of a vast paedophile conspiracy. It’s the next step in this kind of madness.
And perhaps we also owe America an apology for exporting her over there, and thus wrecking American politics just that little bit more. Sorry, America.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 