Dangers of a Biden Administration

Trump is terrible, okay we got that out of the way.

Biden’s attacks on the collapsing Trump "government," despite a few rhetorical bows to Bernie’s platform, is heavy on symbolism in the domestic realm. In foreign policy the Biden-ite discourse is arguably worse than Trump’s, who has been fairly consistent in avoiding new wars and even has taken steps—horror of horrors—to end old ones.

One thing you have to credit Democrats for: they know how to sniff the winds for the aroma of shifting zeitgeists. They’re all over getting rid of Confederate flags, ending the celebration of slave-owning rebel generals, and sporting kente cloth at their kneeling ceremonies. They will publicly worship the late John Lewis, who was a loyal member of their team, and quote Martin Luther King (except not the antiwar or anti-capitalist parts).

Of course, in another era mainstream Democrat symbolism took a slightly different tack, such as when Bill Clinton staged his 1992 campaign event at Stone Mountain, Georgia, [top] where the new Ku Klux Klan celebrated its revived role during the Jim Crow era. Clinton was making sure no one would Willie Horton him and so arranged a line-up of black prisoners as the backdrop to his speech, flanked by a phalanx of southern Democrat pols hostile to the fading civil rights movement.

And the Clinton flirtation with southern fried racism didn’t end with mere gestures. Sax-playing Bill, the “first black president” according to Toni Morrison, followed up with the hugely successful 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act—if you define “success” as putting hundreds of thousands of black guys in prison for long periods. Also if “vote blue, no matter who” is your entire political philosophy: cue today’s Democrats vowing to “fight for” reductions in these Draconian mandatory minimum prison terms that they were so instrumental in establishing. If they fail, of course, it will be the meanie Republicans’ fault now that the damage is done. Few will want to dredge up Senate majority leader George Mitchell’s statement that “This is a Democratic bill. The author of the bill is a Democrat. The principal supporter for this bill is a Democratic president.”

I rehash this old news to remind those eager to go back to bed—once Joe Biden is at the White House podium and putting everyone, including himself, to sleep with his recitation of bland nothingburgers—that the nation faces a series of deeply threatening crises that will not go away once Trump is dispatched to the dustbin. Simply removing the killer clowns from outer space who have leered at us for 3 ½ years won’t do a thing—we need radical policy changes and a fighting spirit equivalent to that of the white supremacists and neo-feudal minions of billionaires who now populate our mis-leadership class. We need someone who will jettison the Obama legacy of buckling to the felonious plutocrats, roll back both Bush’s and Trump’s obscene tax giveaways, resuscitate the long-dead antitrust function of government (targeting especially the internet mega-monopolists who mouth woke platitudes while ripping us off), immediately restore some emergency environmental protections, break with neoliberal orthodoxy to refashion an industrial policy that serves workers rather than corporate grifters, and come to the rescue of a populace caught between the Scylla of coronavirus and the Charybdis of debt peonage.

Bernie Sanders seems to think Biden is up to this, and while I find Bernie painfully credulous, he may be right about one thing: the pressure from below is going to be immense. Whether that pushes the corrupt Democrat machinery into first gear or not remains to be seen or, more exactly, forced to occur, by us. But there are possibilities not glimpsed in a long time.

That said, we should take note of a likely diversionary tactic emanating from the permanent war party frustrated by Trump’s unwillingness fully to indulge their belligerent fantasies: Democrat-led war scares. Biden has already said he has no interest in restoring the treaty with Iran (even if the U.S. were to be suddenly deemed agreement-capable), has attacked Trump from the right on Venezuela, and of course echoes the Putin Derangement Syndrome that has occupied Democrat hearts and minds since the first week of Trump’s presidency and the framing of Michael Flynn. His team is comprised of the usual gaggle of war-industry shills who think Trump leads a White House 5th column because he thinks nuclear war would ruin his business opportunities.

One need not sympathize with anyone in the sleazocracy to see that many shadowy forces did their damnedest to undermine Trump’s prerogatives as civilian head of state. They couldn’t tolerate any independence on that front despite Trump’s willingness to shovel ever higher mountains of public cash into the coffers of the arms makers and the uniformed services. He gave them vast opportunities for corruption and endless gifts like the destruction of nuclear weapons treaties, but it was never enough. Any attempt by Trump to pull back from Iraq or Afghanistan or not plunge further into the Syrian quagmire was instantly countered with lurid headlines of Russkie perfidy in our elections, our cyberspace, and no doubt tomorrow our underpants. All these howler propaganda campaigns based on “intelligence sources” whispering to stenographers at the Times and the Post got the full backing of the Democrat “resistance,” such as Adam Schiff (D-Raytheon).

And don’t expect any let-up in the relentless campaign to criminalize dissent on these and other fronts, such as the attempt to railroad Julian Assange for exposing U.S. war crimes. Biden’s Justice Department isn’t likely to be any less enthusiastic about dragging the much-abused Assange to a U.S. prison for “espionage” and drumming up long discredited theories about his links to the Russians (again). Nor should we expect self-appointed defenders of press freedom to endanger their access by dissenting from that shameful display.

Speaking of dissent, Trump’s experiment with disappearance squads via the deployment of Border Patrol kidnapper goons in Portland, Oregon, may give the Biden Administration creative new policing ideas. We shouldn’t succumb to any naïve fantasies about how Biden, a driving force behind the federal crime laws, will react to sustained challenges to his rule any more than we doubted Obama’s willingness to pull out the militarized police to crush Occupy.

We have our work cut out for us, and oh yes, Trump is terrible, I nearly forgot.

July Celebrates Genocide Month

[By Lionel Royer - Musée CROZATIER du Puy-en-Velay, Auvergne, France]

As we’re reexamining our history (both American and bipedal) and deciding what we want to memorialize and honor, July is a good time to reflect upon the fact that the entire month commemorates a guy who carried out genocidal slaughter in the heart of Europe. Not referring to Hitler here, but rather Julius Caesar.

There’s a new translation out of Caesar’s The Conquest of Gaul, called this time The War for Gaul, so it’s a good occasion to get past those Latin 101 lessons about how Gallia is omnis divisa in partes tres and recall that JC was a bloodthirsty imperialist who marauded through the forests of what we now call France to make himself a fortune and please the homies back in Rome with some new provinces. Some of the tribes tried to avoid or slip out of the Roman yoke while others bowed to the inevitable, but Caesar still found ways to dispatch somewhere around 700,000 to a million “barbarians” in his pursuit of glory. And he didn’t even need to discover America to achieve it.

In a sane world, this behavior would be considered deeply pathological, but instead we have no problem marveling at Caesar’s accomplishments, which also included another million Gallic civilians sent south into slavery. Plutarch in one passage reports that after a battle “the destruction was such that lakes and deep rivers were filled up with dead bodies and became passable to the Romans.” Imagine if they had had nuclear weapons or even gunpowder.

Caesar didn’t rule as dictator for very long (49-44 BCE), but he did manage to revamp the old Roman calendar into what became known as the Julian version, in which Quintilis posthumously turned into Iulius (July). Therefore, we still blithely mark our mid-summer frolics with the name of a man so notorious for mass slaughter and the slave trade that Robert E. Lee looks positively benign by comparison.

The point is not to morally relativize the Confederate slave-drivers and -traders but to revisit how easily we swallow the heroics of male bipeds whose behavior in its modern form is driving us quickly to species eradication. There is a statue of JC overlooking the Naples coast, and I gather it would occur to few Italians to remove it while plenty would be scandalized at the thought of one celebrating Mussolini. But Caesar helped Rome build its mighty empire, so Dante put his turncoat assassins Brutus and Cassius in the deepest circle of Hell, stuffed feet first into two of the three mouths of Satan himself. (Judas Iscariot got the third socket).

Human populations think it’s cool if their particular team (ethnicity, city-state, nation, empire) rules the roost, and they evidently experience little moral disquiet about how that control is maintained. Just to pick on the Romans a bit more, here’s one set of estimates of how many people died in their various campaigns to broaden and sustain the Empire: First Punic War (264-241 BCE) 400 thousand; Second Punic War (218-202 BCE) 770 thousand; Genocide of Carthage (146 BCE) population reduced from 500 to 55 thousand; Social (internal Italian) Wars (91-88 BCE) 300 thousand; Mithridatic Wars 400 thousand; Servile Wars (slave revolts) (134-71 BCE) 1 million; Gaul 700 thousand; British revolt 150 thousand; Jewish Wars 350 thousand; and so on. This doesn’t count the considerable numbers of Romans who died after falling into disfavor nor the estimated 3.5 million gladiators who died over seven centuries of games at the rate of 8,000 per arena-year. Boys will be boys.

This was obviously a polity whose elite was quite comfortable with the mind-boggling level of destruction required to sustain its dominance. But before we succumb to pride, let’s consider if there’s any reason to think that humanity or our benighted slice of it has advanced beyond such indifference—though the immediate motivations among those at the top may well have changed. For example, on the presumably incoming Biden team we find not war heroes hungry for triumphal processions to parade the captured enemy chieftains and stolen loot but Beltway sleaze merchants angling for a fat government contract for their buds in the armament industries, to which end they are determined to keep all the wars going and, better yet, to start new ones. The essential bloody-mindedness hasn’t changed, just its form.

Another variation is the sophistication of modern propaganda, but that turns out to be nothing so novel either. Romans were aghast at their unruly subjects getting a swelled head or forgetting to pay tribute and regularly sent out generals to slap down the provincials by skewering a few hundred thousand, that is, when they weren’t busy crucifying backtalking household servants. In modern times, we rely on our own interpreters of sheep entrails at the Temple of Jupiter, i.e. “intelligence sources” who whisper gnomic phrases about Russians paying off treacherous subjects to slip a dagger into a few centurions here and there. We display no greater skepticism at these oracular pronouncements from our pontifex maximus on the Potomac than the Romans did when massing their legions for a campaign against Carthage or the rebellious Helvetii.

At a less dire historical moment, one could be resigned to the incorrigible failings our of hyper-developed species and retreat to one’s garden. But when the preservation of our habitat hangs in the balance facing multiple threats, looking away from our cruel record is not an affordable luxury. We must question far more deeply, refuse easy answers, and demand nothing less than the reordering of the human spirit. Or die.

[To receive alerts of these posts, email tfrasca@yahoo.com]