The "F" Word

Photo: National Archives Collection of Foreign Records Seized, Heinrich Hoffmann collection, PD-US https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22501218

FASCIST. Are you one? Who is bringing fascism to the United States? It’s been a term loose on the lips for a good while in political discourse here. Now, it’s taking off like a TikTok video. 

We have a general notion of what fascism is; academic historians and political scientists, even literary figures, have more formal ways of talking about it. Here and now, it’s just a sound-bite insult. But given the importance of whether or not we’re heading there, we ought to stop and consider the concept during these last few days of shaky calm before The Vote.

What do we think of when we think of fascists and fascism? Storm troopers burning books; thugs in distinctive clothing (blackshirts, brownshirts) marching on/intimidating elected officials; vigilante justice and police/secret police impunity; sustained attacks on a scapegoated minority; centralized political power and persecution of dissidents; censorship, fear, regimentation, and a charismatic (to some—ridiculous to others) chief demagogue—does that cover it?

Wikipedia says fascism (FASH-iz-əm) is “a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.

Merriam-Webster adds a detail. It says fascism is a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime “that exalts nation and often race above the individual.” Can’t have populism, then, even though that used to mean “the people,” i.e., the regular people in their struggle with their bosses, the banks, and the elites in general.

The Encyclopedia Britannica notes that “fascist parties and movements differed significantly from one another” historically, but they have in common “extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism” as well as belief in “the rule of elites.” So, EB says they aren’t populist at all even though they might pretend to be. Doesn’t that sound familiar?

Humberto Eco (The Name of the Rose) once wrote a long essay on the topic and listed a dozen elements (14 actually) that he thought characterized fascism. Unlike the three definitions above, Eco emphasized that fascism is hard to pin down because it is essentially anti-intellectual and emotive. So, “fascism” may be something like pornography: a thing very hard to precisely distinguish from close cousins like erotic art but pretty easy to recognize when it’s, um, in your face. “Fascism” thus could just mean extreme bloody-mindedness for one person while for another the same behavior or policy would merit massive, even extra-constitutional resistance.

In my view, this is the key distinction that we should examine because there are plenty of signs that our polarized polity is stepping right to the edge of that conclusion, i.e., that our “democracy” is in danger and must be preserved by any means necessary, including anti-democratic ones. (“Democracy,” of course, being another emotive and hard-to-define object.)

I’m going to go through Eco’s 14 signs and see if Trump really is one, but [spoiler alert] I’ll also suggest that the finger-pointing Democrats are not immune to the accusation in certain important ways.

Eco 1: The Cult of Tradition, the idea that things were great once and we just have to get back there. MAGA sums that up nicely, and Trump’s Christian fundamentalist base certainly harkens back to a Golden Age when we were a “Christian nation” (First Amendment be damned). The Dems are really on the opposite side of this. Hillary famously praised the “innovative” coasts and the brave new world of hi-tech.

Eco 2: Anti-Modernism, a rejection not just of recent changes like civil rights, gender equity, and sexual emancipation but, in extreme cases, the Enlightenment itself, the Age of Reason that shed religious dogma for science, individual liberty, and the expanded franchise to non-property holders. Trump doesn’t reflect this much, but some of his supporters do, like Peter Thiel who laments women’s suffrage. 

Eco 3: The Cult of Action, often expressed in contempt for pointy-headed intellectuals. This is present in Trump’s movement, but it’s nothing new. The GOP has embraced this resentment since the days of Nixon and Agnew (“nattering nabobs of negativism”), and Democrats regularly play right into it, for example, by the shoddy “expert” handling of things like Covid and, most famously, Hillary’s “deplorables” line. Iva League graduate Vance says universities are the enemy except when they shut down protests against genocide.

Eco 4: Disagreement is Treason. Trump hates turncoats worse than anything and doesn’t forgive. Mike Pence isn’t welcome at his rallies (though he could go to Kamala’s and get a round of applause.) The censorship-industrial complex put together by the Dems (and cheered by most liberals) is authoritarian if not fascism-lite and certainly a solid precedent for an uglier version to come. And P.S., the Guantánamo dungeon is still open after both R and D presidencies could have shut it down. Lest we forget: no one was ever punished for torturing defenseless prisoners. The apparatus for crushing dissent has been in place for a while. If fascism is so dangerous, why did everyone sign off on its tools?

Eco 5: Fear of Difference. Trumpism is guilty, witness the anti-Obama birther conspiracy and rhetoric about immigration “poisoning the blood of our nation.”  Not to mention the allergy to transgenderism. Dems embrace “diversity” in superficial traits like ethnicity and sexual partners but draw the line at people who dare to challenge them or run against their anointed candidates (vade retro, Bernie S).

Eco 6: Appeal to a Frustrated Middle Class. Democrats handed this to Trump by not taking care of people’s concrete material wellbeing over the last few decades. So, yes, they’re resentful and have every right to be. We could say those voters are more resentful of a loss of status than survival issues, but in most cases it’s probably both. And what’s wrong with wanting some status?

Eco 7: Obsession with Plots. Q-Anon, of course; Stop the Steal, of course. But wait a minute—Russiagate? Misinformation spread by Iran? Both sides get an F.

Eco 8: Deceptively Strong/Weak Eternal Opponent. Eco says that fascism requires an enemy that is both too strong (justifying harsh measures) and essentially weak (undermining the nation). Jews fit the bill for Hitler, inferior and weak but also secretly in control of everything. I suppose the Deep State could serve here with the accusation that they’ve taken over the government but then can’t deliver in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, etc. Dems treat the MAGAs similarly, an internal fifth column (strong) but also “deplorable” and incompetent (weak).

Eco 9: Life as Permanent Warfare. This seems like a stretch to lay on one side or the other though the Trumpians are more openly belligerent.

Eco 10: Contempt for the Weak. Like true fascists, Trump mocks the weak, mocks his enemies as being weak, and seems congenitally incapable of recognizing that he ever did anything wrong. OTOH, Kamala doesn’t recognize that she ever did anything, so there’s that. And could Blinken, Biden, Harris, Sullivan be any more contemptuous of the Palestinians of Gaza? They’re defenseless, so naturally we slaughter them, right?

Eco 11: Cult of Heroism. This doesn’t seem to be a big factor in U.S. politics at present though Dems love to parade military types, showcase generals on talk shows, and run CIA agents for elective office. Who are the MAGA heroes? Kyle Rittenhouse? Trump doesn’t like to share the stage with anyone.

Eco 12: Machismo. Bingo.

Eco 13: Selective Populism: Fascism claims to speak for “the People” while enriching the elites. Both sides guilty as hell.

Eco 14: Newspeak. Where to begin? The English language long ago entered its decadent period with the shift from “torture” to “enhanced interrogation.”

Speaking of fascism, was Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally a fascist display? Liberal media certainly think so. All the Dem-leaning talk shows went absolutely ballistic, comparing it to a Nazi event held there a century ago.

Sorry, people, not convincing. After all, 400 members of BOTH parties stood and cheered a real, bonafide fascist on the floor of the House of Representatives not so long ago, one who is actively carrying out a mass murder of untermenschen before the entire world with U.S. weaponry, money, and support. Clips of that infamous display will someday terrify our grandchildren. The same liberal outlets clutching their pearls actively collaborate every day by pushing out the genocidal party line from Jerusalem. Their piously “democratic” university presidents attack anyone who objects. Now we’re supposed to forget all that and lose our minds over Trump.

Is Trump a fascist? If so, he’s got company and plenty of it.

At BRICS summit, Global South not playing along

Dozens of Global South leaders dared to gather last week at a world summit meeting hosted by Voldemort Putin in the Tatar capital, Kazan. So hey, the world didn’t stop turning because we have an election next week, imagine that.

Apparently, they didn’t agree that Mr Putin is the new Hitler, as Hillary Clinton opined in 2014, i.e., long before the Ukraine war broke out. Whatever they might think of the battle raging in eastern Europe, 30 heads of state and top officials from BRICS member and observer countries came to the powwow.

They wanted to see whether they could collaborate on a new trade and development architecture, given that the record of the last 500 years of Western-led domination has left many of them in an unenviable state.

And these were not minor players. Aside from the five original BRICS states—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa—there were the newly incorporated members such as oil giants Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates, plus Ethiopia and Egypt, suggesting the door is open for more African countries.

And sure enough, the list of 11 new candidate members includes Algeria, Nigeria, and Uganda. Southeast Asia is also heavily represented among the newcomers: Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia, that is, the four biggest and most prosperous countries of the region.

Only Latin America is largely on the sidelines. Cuba and Bolivia will be invited to join, but these are minor economic players to say the least. Venezuela was vetoed by Brazil after the glaring election theft by Maduro & Co.

News coverage has highlighted the fact that the ever-expanding BRICS far outdistances the G7 Masters of the Universe countries in real GDP, population, and geographic reach.

Less often mentioned is the fact that most of the BRICS countries aren’t keen on wars, unlike their erstwhile colonial powers, historically incapable of imagining a world that they don’t dominate. Could world trade be mutually beneficial and not inevitably exploitative? Let’s see.

The summit set itself the task of finding new ways to engage in trade without kowtowing to the interests of the Americans and the Europeans as they have had to do for centuries. That’s plenty complicated, but the meeting outlined ambitious ideas.

Western reaction has been twofold: ignore the whole thing as not worthy of our attention or mock it as Putin’s attempt to prove he’s not isolated.

News flash: he isn’t and neither is Russia.

The New York Times’ headline was typical: “BRICS Summit Offers a Glimpse Inside Putin’s Alternate Reality.” Yeah, a reality that the Times’ writers and their friends in Washington should explore, including side-to-side comparisons with their own. Narrative management—at which the U.S. is particularly expert—is no substitute for looking at facts and basing one’s actions on them.

The BBC put it this way: “Putin gathers allies toshow West’s pressure isn’t working.” Hey, Beeb, that was demonstrated 2 years ago, time to catch up! And the influential Associated Press insisted that the summit was “shadowed by Ukraine.” It certainly was for the western media, which are laser-focused on the war their countries are losing. No evidence that the rest of the world is “shadowed” by it.

Perhaps they’re less obsessed with Ukraine after having witnessed the U.S. and its allies illegally invade and destroy one disobedient country after another. Or it could be that seeing a U.S. ally slaughter defenseless civilians in Gaza for a year makes them less likely to sit up and salute at the demand that they “isolate” the Russian leadership.

The point of BRICS is that through joint cooperation they hope to carve out room to stay independent of the West’s demands and think and act for themselves. Maybe that’s why it’s proving so popular in this early stage.

Our mainstream reporters continue to whistle confidently that Russia’s economy—that they were shocked to discover was not crushed by the mighty sanctions regime imposed in 2022—still has “severe cracks beneath the surface” (BBC).

They also scoff at the idea that the diverse member states of the BRICS could ever reach agreement on important issues of trade, commerce, and finance, no doubt because they’re used to the western version where one country imposes the rules, and everyone else obeys. China and India overcoming their differences is simply “bonkers,” according to one quoted expert.

The lengthy Kazan Declaration issued at the end of the summit suggests that the BRICS countries can indeed find areas of considerable consensus, notwithstanding the ponderous turgidity of such documents. The signatories call for a reform of the outdated UN apparatus, including the Bretton Woods institutions and the World Trade Organisation, and an end to “unlawful unilateral coercive measures, including illegal sanctions.”

The Declaration includes consensus language on climate change, biodiversity, species conservation, water scarcity, terrorism, money-laundering, Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine, Sudan, Haiti, Afghanistan, and a bunch of other stuff.

It finally gets to the much-anticipated talk of new cross-border payments mechanisms, now that the U.S. has queered the dollar by stealing other countries’ cash. They “welcome the use of local currencies in financial transactions” and want to see interlinked banking networks free of American control.

Does all this add up to a New Bretton Woods, a reformulated UN, displacement of the dollar in international trade, a “South” bloc to oppose the West in a new stand-off? Yes, no, and maybe.

Turkey’s presence at the summit suggests NATO is in serious trouble, having demonstrated to the world that its expensive weapons don’t work. The UN Secretary General also attended, to howls of Atlanticist outrage.

BRICS has its own development bank and has started to lend money although the World Bank still dwarfs it. These alternatives will take years, perhaps decades, to evolve.

Reuters, to its credit, diverged from lamestream coverage by taking note of the attending countries’ serious grievances with the status quo. “People see institutions which are not really representative or democratic," it quoted one expert saying. "Infrastructure established in the 1940s after the world war, and nothing changes.” 

Net financial flows, Reuters continued, “turned negative for developing countries, meaning they paid more to service external debts than they received in new external finance.”

That is, the poor are now funding the rich. As a matter of fact, that feels a lot like how economics works here at home lately. No one should wonder at the world’s marginalized billions feeling rebellious, unrepresented, taken advantage of, and scolded. After all, so are we.

Eric Adams just doesn't know how to grift

 

I read the entire indictment issued by federal prosecutors that outlines Mayor Adams’ attempt to play with the big guys. Since influence peddling and favor-trading for campaign cash is how our system runs, it’s a bit much to see Adams tackled for business as usual. Unfortunately for Adams, he didn’t learn the basics on how it’s done.

Adams should have had better instruction from the real experts in how to move in power circles and get everyone’s back mutually scratched smoothly and silently. He didn’t get the right lawyers who know how to do deals without leaving tracks.

Adams and his staff thought they were slick OGs who had parleyed themselves into power and could sail into the big time. In fact, they’re nouveau hustlers with sloppy methods.

A good chunk of the evidence federal prosecutors have lined up against Adams is based on text messages. Text messages?? Seriously, did these folks really not get the memo about how none of that is safe or private? They even write things like, Let’s not text each other about this!

I sat on a jury last year in which a kid who conceivably could have gotten away with a serious crime screwed himself by texting incriminating statements. You get the exact same vibe from reading Adams’ staff work.

And who’s bright idea was it to organize the cash slurry for Adams’ campaigns through Turkiye? Anyone with a pulse knows that you rely on Israeli cash nowadays, and nobody will dare bother you. Some powerful people had to be very unhappy about city government being penetrated by a Muslim country. Ukraine, okay, maybe some East Europeans, solid Anglo allies elsewhere, no problem. But Istanbul? Not done!

It's almost sad to see how cheaply Adams was seduced by things like a business class seat on Turkish Airlines and a few days in a luxury hotel. No wonder we went along with Bloomberg for so long since he could buy the same hotel out of his petty cash box.

New York City tries to lessen the influence of big money in elections by matching small donations with public funds 8 to 1. That’s real money, and Adams stole it, essentially, by lining up illegal major donations and hiding them through straw donors, like a business guy’s driver who then gets reimbursed by the boss. It’s a very old game, and everyone knows it goes on. But that’s why you need experts in covering it up.

Intrepid muckrakers at The City dug up the details, which started the investigative ball rolling. (Everyone should subscribe to their daily bulletin and send them money.) While that took work, it wasn’t hard to unravel the corrupt threads.

Adams might beat the bribery charge because the Supreme Court helpfully limited those prosecutions to provable quid pro quos. But the manipulation of campaign finance restrictions is clearly laid out; I can’t see how he escapes those counts. His career is over, and the fantasies of moving on to national office and even the White House (yes, there are delusional messages in that vein) are consigned to dreamland.

That said, liberal New York shouldn’t wallow in self-righteousness because we put Eric Adams in office, and we can’t pretend we didn’t know what he was about. People succumbed to fear-mongering over crime in the subways, and Adams, a former cop, promised to pour police officers onto the platforms, which he did. We all know perfectly well what a policing response means, and we got what the majority asked for—a baton-led response to social ills. The tabloids and Murdoch’s empire were delighted and now keep up the drumbeat of scare stories so that the only possible response to the current failing policy is to double down on it.

Adams’s shamelessness was on display even before he took office. He smiled glibly and was surrounded by dubious comrades with disturbing records. His word salads could compete with Kamala’s indecipherable ramblings, and his interest in keeping the rich and powerful happy was obvious from Day One. But we demanded SAFETY above all else, and we got cops everywhere, which isn’t that but reassures white people. The sad evidence that Adams was in it for himself should have been a bright red warning light. But our overlords reminded us to be scared, and we did what they suggested. Will we do better next time?

 

World War Two started 85 years ago

[M.Świerczyński, "Warsaw, 1945"] 

“The unmentionable odour of death/Offends the September night.”

            —W.H. Auden, “September 1, 1939”

It all looks so inevitable in retrospect: the build-up of a dictatorial, war-mongering regime, the feckless response from neighboring states, the indifference to pogroms, the sniggering glee at the crushing of local communists and perhaps a coming blow to the hated Russians, and finally the gigantic explosion of all-out war, Europe consumed, quickly conquered, eventually destroyed. Sixty million dead.

Our historical memory of World War 2 is of the triumph of decency over barbarism, performed by the “Greatest Generation.” The principal lesson we carried away is to avoid “appeasement,” how Naziism arose and flourished step by step without resistance until there were no options left except a cataclysmic slaughter. The war carried off 3% of the world population, including 20% of Poland’s (5 million) and 15% of the USSR’s (26 million).

We hear quite a bit about the 1938 Munich debacle that remains the symbol of how foolish it is to attempt diplomacy with an organically aggressive state and ever to trust its promises. There is no historical figure more mocked than Neville Chamberlain returning from his final powwow with Hitler flourishing a sheaf of papers that guaranteed Czech independence.

Sullivan and Blinken share the honors as today’s Chamberlain. They flit from capital to capital emitting hollow phrases about peace and ceasefires while winking broadly to the Israelis to hurry up and complete the massacre. The world looks on placidly as real-time pogroms are committed before our eyes. Erstwhile defenders of “the rules-based order” stand by as the indulged warfare state attacks multiple enemies. America’s allies insist only that each victim stand down and never retaliate.

As their client state openly trumpets its supremacist underpinnings and applauds marauding soldiers and police as they commit atrocities and upload them to YouTube, the West turns instead to domestic dissidents, bans anti-genocide organizations, jails reporters on “terrorism” charges,  and declares the use of the term “Zionist” to be a racial slur. 

Israel may yet get its wish to drag the world into another conflagration. If they succeed, we will look back at this period as the moment when the world failed to learn the key lesson of World War Two and doomed itself to a tragic repeat.

 

Sarajevo on my mind

 

[Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Hapsburg heir, and his wife minutes before their deaths.]

If we’re in a rerun of 1938 and Vladimir Putin = Hitler, then obviously we must avoid negotiation (“appeasement”) and quickly reindustrialize to save decency and democracy. 

But what if we’re actually reliving a different historical period, say, 1914?

That was an era in which the last round of extended European bloodletting—the Napoleonic wars—was a distant memory, already a full century in the past. Those disasters were ancient history. Governments were afraid of revolution at home (1848, 1871, 1905, etc.) but not too worried about a little inter-state dust-up. They knew how to handle those.

A lot has been written about how Europe stumbled into WorldWar 1 and how no one had anticipated the enormous destruction that followed. Given that human beings haven’t changed much, we can imagine that Europe’s leaders, then as now, were confident of their respective strengths, determined not to be pushed around by [insert enemy country X], and bursting with patriotic, martial spirit. No doubt they had all read The Iliad in the original Greek. 

What sparked the Great War was the assassination of the heir to the Hapsburg throne and his wife by a Serbian nationalist. “The killing put both Austria-Hungary and Russia, which saw itself as the Serbians’ protector, in a bind. Neither one of them wanted to back down and appear weak.” Can’t appear weak! Rival alliances mobilized; armies faced off; ultimata issued forth; war ensued. But that was then.

As it turned out, stopping the war turned out to be a lot harder than setting it off. It ground on for 4 years and left 20 million dead out of a European population of some 500-plus million.

We’re not quite 100 years removed from the last cataclysm, the bloodletting of the 1940s that killed another 60 million. But hardly anyone alive today lived through that as a conscious adult.

From watching our leaders sleepwalk us towards the next round, I guess they’re comfortable with the vastly increased destructive power of modern weapons. Nukes, introduced in 1945, have remained taboo since then, but from the way world leaders talk, they’re back in play, just in case. After all, there are 8 billion of us now—maybe they’re relaxed about knocking that down to 7, a masspopulation cull as a sort of greening event, something to get us closer to Net Zero—meaning emissions, of course, not people. 

Israel is said to have a couple hundred nukes,  and many commentators say they’re not doing well at present. In any case, it’s hard to see what “success” might look like for them. A million dead Palestinians? Two million? Expulsion of the rest into Jordan and Egypt? Provoking a war between Iran and the U.S.?

All these rosy scenarios lead to a regional conflagration, and it seems that our Christian Zionists are cool with that. Armageddon is supposed to bring on the Rapture, so that’s exciting since it will mostly occur several thousand miles from Oklahoma. Maybe that’s what got them out of their seats 58 times at the recent Nuremberg rally.

And hey, assassination is back! Just like in 1914! Yes, assassination is an okay thing to do if you’re a U.S. client state. We certainly practice it ourselves when we feel the need. No one on our side is bothered by the latest iterations visited on Lebanon and Iran. It’s just policy: we kill our enemies. What could go wrong?

Probably nothing. No doubt cooler heads will prevail.

And yet, I got Sarajevo, June 28, 1914, on my mind.

Losing a war upends governance

 

“War is hell,” said General Sherman, and he was winning. It’s worse than hell when you lose, especially for the folks at the top who always promise glorious triumphs when sounding the trumpet to get the war going.

Biden may be old and sick, but if he were presiding over victory in one of his wars, I’m not sure anyone could have browbeaten him into stepping aside. FDR was half dead in 1944 when he ran for his fourth term, and he carried 38 states.

When wars go badly, the disgruntled tend to keep quiet about it even in countries where dissenters aren’t shot. Loyalty to the boys (and girls) in uniform requires that citizens keep “supporting” them long past the point when doubts about the outcome are impossible to ignore.

Unhappiness about the progress of warmaking is therefore likely to be sublimated, channeled into other forms of discontent. I lived through an illustrative episode in my adolescence watching support for LBJ, a wildly popular figure in 1964, collapse.

Of course, there were others factors aside from the Vietnam quagmire. Johnson pushed through major civil rights legislation and alienated racists. Some people disliked the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid although there was a broad national consensus in their favor. He was an effective horse-trader and acknowledged to be a master politician.

But Johnson’s decision to gamble everything on war in Asia did him in. The death toll was unacceptable—of Americans, that is. (After Vietnam, the war party kept the body counts way down.)

Nixon promised to put an end to the war and then, once in office, escalated. It wasn’t for a proud militarist to preside over humiliating battlefield defeat. Eventually, he too was ousted, ostensibly over electoral shenanigans that would be scarcely noticed today.

The unpopular war had undermined two presidents. Young draftees kept dying—until compulsory service ended in 1971. Atrocity tales filtered back home, even before the notorious My Lai massacre came to light. The secret expansion into Cambodia sparked new horrified amazement.

All the while, official discourse was dominated by Kissingerian types promising that things were going just fine, that we should stick with the leadership just a little longer, and that dissent aided the enemy. Extreme militarists continued to denounce grumblers and call for even heavier bombing of North Vietnam’s cities and ports, even for nuking them. Demagogues encouraged blue-collar workers to attack antiwar protests and to hate “draft dodgers” and peaceniks.

But a substantial minority of the population viewed all this as profoundly immoral as well as stupid. Happy talk about progress on the battlefield wasn’t as convincing in 1971, ‘72, ‘73, even as Nixon racked up a historic electoral victory over George McGovern. Nixon’s support was broad but paper-thin. Less than 2 years after his historic 49-state victory, Nixon was out.

Fast forward to today: we’re doing great in Ukraine; Russia is a gas station parading as a country (Nigeria with snow); its soldiers are drunks; and its equipment is all rusty. No one can challenge mighty NATO with the greatest fighting force in history behind it. Any day now, the Ukrainians will bounce back and chase Putin/Hitler’s armies back into Russia, which will then collapse and shatter into various parts, just like in 1991.

And Joe Biden is at the top of his game and not at all senile.

The defeat of the West in its European war of choice will be far more destabilizing than the ragtag departure from 20 years of occupation in Afghanistan. No one will take the blame for the debacle because in this country we don’t do responsibility. But someone will have to preside over it, and a likely candidate is someone expendable, a last-minute placeholder pushed into the spotlight at exactly the worst moment.

In 1974 it was Leslie Lynch King, Jr., who had been shoehorned into the vice presidency just months before after an old-fashioned cash-in-shoeboxes scandal. Leslie was better known by the name he adopted after his mother got remarried—to Gerald Ford, Sr.

Poor Leslie/Gerald was left holding the bag as the helicopters sailed away from the rooftop of the Saigon embassy. Who will get that undesirable job when the U.S. decides that Ukraine is Europe’s problem and walks away from another ignominious debacle?

Welcome, President Kamala.

 

Pending Questions

By coincidence, I just finished James W. Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. It led me to wonder aloud—and comment to friends—about the possibility of assassination—pre-July 13.

Douglass compiled a mass of information about the 2-plus years of Kennedy’s presidency, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Test Ban Treaty, and Kennedy’s readiness for neutrality in Laos and allegedly Vietnam. Everything that the war party hated.

I hadn’t known how eager Kennedy’s military chiefs were to follow up the Bay of Pigs with an invasion and, in some cases (Remember Curtis LeMay?) to launch a nuclear strike on the USSR. They hated JFK’s compromises in Southeast Asia and resisted disarmament.

They weren’t called neocons back then, but the mentality is recognizable in the unified war party of today, those calling always for more escalation, more belligerence, more “force projection,” and of course more spending on all the supposedly necessary weapons.

Today, like back then, anyone resisting or questioning the drumbeat of war was and is quickly labeled a wuss and a softie for starters, followed by accusations of doing the enemy’s bidding, a virtual or actual traitor (a la Russiagate). Back then, you were smeared as a pinko or outright commie; today’s equivalent is “agent of Putin,” someone who fails to see him as the new Hitler and probably has a secret bank account in rubles. Kennedy had a hard slog getting Senate approval of the Test Ban Treaty until it became clear that he had a potent ally: the American people.

Douglass’s thesis is that the war party—what we have begun to call the Deep State now, headquartered at the CIA—hated JFK and had him whacked. They then covered up the inconvenient facts, threatened and harassed skeptics and witnesses, and quietly eliminated any who wouldn’t shut up. (That list is extensive.) He marshals disturbing evidence to support his conclusions.

Douglass shows through 400 pages how a conspiracy at that level can work with relative ease once people realize the power of the forces determined to impose their official narrative. Many people had important facts that undermined the Oswald-as-assassin story, but they quickly saw how dangerous it was to stick to their stories, even for the first autopsy pathologists who clearly saw the front-entry bullet wound in the president’s remains and later allowed themselves to be misinterpreted.

There’s a lot we don’t know about the July 13 shooting, and old-fashioned incompetence should never be dismissed as an explanation. Why should the Secret Service function any better than the rest of our crumbling institutions?

That said, in piecing together the truth about the attempt on Trump’s life, we should be alert to stonewalling, crazy claims of easily disprovable facts, and especially pressures on eyewitnesses to unsay what they’ve already stated on the record and on camera. We should watch the composition of investigative bodies, check the members’ connections to the intelligence and Homeland Security agencies, and pay attention to the handling of forensic evidence.

We should listen carefully for news of the dead shooter’s recent movements and contacts and an explanation of his curiously opaque past.

Meanwhile, I am frankly shocked by how many people close to me find the attempted murder worthy of kinda-sorta jokes about how close the shooter came. Spare me your sick humor—assassination is no substitute for politics, and also, be careful what you endorse. What goes around, comes around as  Trump—himself the proud assassin of an Iranian general—should recall.