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Yves here. Full-throated criticism of the second Trump assassination attempt, and linking it to our culture of violence, is not as common as it ought to be. Instead, there’s far too much mainstream commentary, often of the weakest tea possible denunciation of violence before returning to more of the same (and sometimes even more heated) Trump vitriol, or “He had it coming” takes.
Even though this piece focuses on how guns allow for immediate and irreversible satisfaction of the desire to hurt and/or subdue another person, the celebration of violence in the Anglopshere seems to be reaching new (sick) levels. Israeli genocidal blood lust appears to be getting more followers. Twitter saw an explosion of tweets celebrating Mossad ingenuity in finding a new way to commit large-scale terrorism via exploding pagers and walkie-talkies. Glenn Greenwald described how many had a psychosexual angle, delighting it the prospect of having blown off the testicles of Hezbollah members. It must be disappointing to them to learn that eye injuries were more common and that in addition to two children dying in the pager blasts, two medical workers were also killed. From Le Monde:
Doctors in Lebanon spoke on Wednesday, September 18, of horrific eye injuries and finger amputations, a day after Hezbollah paging devices exploded across the country, killing 12 people and wounding up to 2,800. “The injuries were mainly to the eyes and hands, with finger amputations, shrapnel in the eyes – some people lost their sight,” said doctor Joelle Khadra, who was working in the emergency room at Beirut’s Hotel-Dieu hospital…
Khadra told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that Hotel-Dieu, located in the Lebanese capital’s Christian-majority Ashrafieh district, treated about 80 injured. Around 20 “were admitted to intensive care immediately and were put on ventilators to ensure they wouldn’t suffocate due to the swelling in their faces,” she said…
A doctor at another hospital in Beirut said he worked all night and that the injuries were “out of this world – never seen anything like it.”….
“We have a lot of injuries with amputated fingers” because people were holding the pagers in one or both hands, he said, while some people who had been sitting on the floor also had wounded feet. But the “most devastating” wounds were when the pagers blew up in people’s faces, he said, citing up to 40 patients with eye injuries, most of them severe.
Around three-quarters of those patients “lost one eye completely, and the other eye is either somewhat salvageable or barely salvageable”, he said, while “15 to 20%… lost both eyes in a way that’s irreparable.”
As Zagnostra just said in comments:
I don’t think people have processed just what a shift in psychology happened with these rigged pager remote explosions, as well as ipones, and solar panels. We have entered a new phase of technological fascism that will take years to ripple through society.
Snowden’s warnings were theoretical, these bombings are real and people are dead. The phone I’m holding can be a time bomb, and yet, I’m still using my phone? We have all become naked to the face of evil.
The US will suffer blowback, but the first concern is not the physical kind:
This was the top. Israel’s actions in two rounds of device explosions in Lebanon and Syria have also exploded the market for US and Israeli tech, components, and software.
Future marketing worldwide will emphasise products free of any US-Israeli taint. https://t.co/7IV3ADGdXB pic.twitter.com/Z5ysazSaSR
— Kathleen Tyson (@Kathleen_Tyson_) September 19, 2024
Israel too:
Extraordinary the number of zionist shills who have gloatingly tweeted to me about how much Israeli tech is in western consumer electronic devices.
They are too stupid to grasp that industry buyers are urgently researching alternative suppliers this very moment.
Plus even the…
— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) September 18, 2024
By Robert C. Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. Originally published at Common Dreams
“The man suspected in the incident… camped outside the golf course in West Palm Beach with food and a rifle for nearly 12 hours, according to court documents filed Monday. He is accused of lying in wait for the former president before a Secret Service agent opened fire, thwarting the potential attack.”
The guy was apparently waiting to assassinate Donald Trump—attempt No. 2 this election season to kill the former president. The would-be alleged assassin was thwarted before he fired a shot, but still…
What the hell?
Something is crazy-wrong in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. I think it amounts to this (to put it in advertising terms): The kwik-option to make your point—to win the argument—is way too readily available. Hate someone’s politics? Feel ignored? Feel your interests being threatened? There’s a far simpler “solution” available than actually tying to address the issue in the real world: Just kill it!
While I support more stringent gun-control regulations, I have minimal faith in a purely bureaucratic fix to this enormously psycho-spiritual issue. America is the inheritor of the delusion of empire—not just geopolitically but domestically. Our country was born not just in a cry for freedom (for some), but also in slavery and genocidal land theft. This hellish facet of our history hasn’t gone away. Our national belief in violence may hide behind the words on the Statue of Liberty—“Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…,”—but this belief is at the core of who we are and how we act.
Let me put this another way: This is the god we worship.
We have a trillion-dollar annual military budget and—certainly throughout my lifetime—have launched unbelievably horrific wars around the world. We’ve claimed the mantle of global colonialism. We support our “interests” (excuse me, our security and our values) with, as Vice President Kamala Harris put it, “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”
This is how you get cheers: We run things, man. We run the planet. Hurray! My point here is that this attitude spreads—domestically—like a social disease. If you are a stalwart, unskeptical patriot, you have no choice but to worship the god of violence. And maybe, just maybe, you feel the presence of this god not just abstractly, at the level of the national government, but within your own soul. Hold a gun in your hand and suddenly you have the agency of the commander-in-chief. What could happen next is not hard to imagine. Indeed, as we know, it happens all the time.
In other words, mass killings, political assassination attempts or, indeed, any resort to violence, especially when such phenomena start to become “normal,” indicate a social problem that transcends gun availability. For God’s sake, why is this happening? It’s a social problem that is, you might say, spiritual in nature, and must be addressed as such—whatever that means.
At the very least, it means that, as a society—as a species—we need to move seriously beyond our worship of the god of violence, or what theologian and author Walter Wink has called “the myth of redemptive violence.” We need to move beyond our unquestioned assumption that it settles conflict and fixes problems. Talking to one another—negotiating with the enemy, transcending conflict by working to create a world that works for everybody—can be unimaginably complex. It doesn’t make for quick and easy headlines or movie plots.
Indeed, in the real world, violent “solutions” always cause further harm, even if some temporary good is also accomplished. Violent victories come with repression and eventual backlash. But you wouldn’t know this from the myth of redemptive violence, which endlessly portrays violence—well, “good violence”—as consequence free.
As I wrote several years ago:
Strike up the orchestra. Here’s how it plays out: John Wayne, the Ringo Kid, has climbed atop the stagecoach and the Apaches are tearing after them as the music swells. In two minutes of the 1939 John Ford classic Stagecoach, I counted 15 Indians dying, each one flying dramatically off his horse. There are hundreds of them, hooting, armed with rifles, but they never hit anyone. They have almost no impact on the valiant stagecoach, on which four white men return fire at the savages with grim precision. One of them actually has a wry smile on his face, relishing his opportunity to do so. They blast away. Eventually the cavalry shows up and the Indians flee.
Yeah, the myth of redemptive violence is God’s gift to scriptwriters. And worse. It’s God’s pseudo-gift to lost souls who decide that their best hope is to blast all their problems off Planet Earth.
I write these words believing only this: Violence will never fully go away, but national policy must transcend war. All we can do is keep pushing beyond that myth of redemptive violence—toward redemptive connection and understanding.
I end with the words of a 12-year-old boy named Jose, who was in a writing class I convened for a while, many years ago, at a Chicago elementary school. I learned much about the nature of gang life from his words, including the ritual of tossing someone’s shoes over a telephone wire, as a memorial, if he’s shot, if he’s killed.
In a writing exercise, Jose wrote:
One of my friends he got stabbed with a pencil because he was in a gang, but now he isn’t in a gang because he doesn’t want his family to see his shoes dangling from a telephone wire. And he wants to go back and fix all the things he has done wrong and now he never wants to have a relation with a gang member. Now he is in my house to play video games.
America, America: It’s possible to transcend war. It’s possible to stop worshiping the god of violence.
Thank you, Yves.
Small world. I know Kathleen. We have worked together on operational resilience. We also belong to the same City professional bodies.
Further to this post, Kathleen, ex NY Fed and Bank of England, is working on alternatives to western technology, payment systems, currencies, banks / investors with firms and countries.
In the midst of this terrible tolerance for violence, I’m heartened by the fact that there are still sane people out there who criticize what has quickly become absolute Imperial Barbarity. Just occasional people I talk to, young or old, who are stunned by the wars and the rhetoric and don’t know what to make of it. I think I’ll tell them how grateful I am to hear their compassion and sympathy for the world, because I’ve never told them so they probably don’t know it.
On the other hand, this feels like a collective loss of any reality by those at the top, that this attitude, callousness, and cruelty is (for them) needed to stomach the prospect of going to War. Big War. This phenomenon is dove-tailing neatly with the material reality of an empire that is slipping on every front, being eclipsed by a more effective rival, has the whole world to lose, and a lot of military hardware that might make the difference “if only those damn civilians would let us take the gloves off!”
Well, those civilian-politicos are getting a bit blood-thirsty themselves.
Recently, I saw a big pickup truck, with a lift ki,t sporting a bumper sticker that read something like this “support our troops abroad, especially the snipers”. A man looking to be in his thirties was driving. I have seen many wannabe killers sporting these types of death-cult messages in various forms. I don’t think these (mostly) dudes would think it funny if their family members were taken out. Stupid humans don’t seem to think about consequences. “Kill them All and let God sort it out”
“…While I support more stringent gun-control regulations, I have minimal faith in a purely bureaucratic fix to this enormously psycho-spiritual issue…”
I agree. I was raised with firearms, trained with firearms of all types. However, this problem is psycho/social/cultural. Banning or severely curtailing firearms would do very little. US dwellers are raised with the glorification of war “Shock and Awe”, marketing and all. Extreme violence is ubiquitous, TV, films, video games, advertising etc. Sports events are turned into hyper nationalistic displays with anthems, flags, jet planes flying overhead etc. almost like a Nuremberg rally. Much has been written about this sort of thing. This death-cult mentality must change in order to curb violence in the US.
Mass shootings become commonplace and many are desensitized. The mass murders of the Other abroad (Iraqis, Libyans, Palestinians, Syrians…) is celebrated and supported by many of these types. The suit-and-tie wearing pencil-necked coward politicians “talk tough”, and threaten violence, are called “hawks” while they would promptly soil themselves if they actually faced danger. This is sickening to me, at least Roman emperors and medieval kings fought with their troops. The conditioned masses love this and support the “tough talking” politicians. Plus, war and violence is very profitable for the oligarchy.
Regarding the DT assassination attempts: I am surprised that the heavily armed “patriot” supporters have not tried to retaliate against the “libruls” trying to kill their Lord and Savior. (I know a couple of these types personally). I have heard a lot of talk of violence against the “libruls” Will the tough-talking, posturing “tough guys” unleash some serious political violence? The plebs can kill each other, while the oligarchy imposes martial law. (We hope this does not happen).
re: your last para. Maybe the MSM has been misinforming you about their bogeymen, aka the deploradoes. / ;)
MSM? What’s that? Is that music/entertainment group like BTS? I prefer B.E.T though https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbIUtW4JRNk
If folk listen to dese bruddahs advice, we no have dese problems. Aloha!
Thanks. / :)
Watch out for the lawn signs in whatever neighborhood you may be. Likewise with the pickup trucks- watch out for the loudest exhaust systems.
No worries, I know those dudes. When the Mad Max Moment comes, we can all shoot each other it’ll be fun!
DH Lawrence – The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.
Well lots of American souls are nonessential. Accidental even. Do these poetic generalizations have any truth content? I assure the late Mr Lawrence that my soul is not hard isolate or a killer–can souls kill? Sounds Halloweenie.
It’s a vibe
I once had an argument with a wrist-tattooed survivor of the Shoah about whether the human lust for power, control, and violence are born in us. He still believed that this human trait is learned; I still believe that it must be civilized out of us.
Empathy is a learned behavior.
Disagree. Ours is a cooperative species. It is how Homo sapiens (occasionally wonder about the sapiens part) evolved to become, currently, the dominant animal life form on the planet. The 4-5% of the species who can be considered sociopaths or psychopaths, with some overlapping, are not empathetic. The overwhelming majority do have an innate empathy.
The big question is WHY do these individuals rise to positions of power and authority, especially when their rise can be said to have been facilitated by the majority. And what is to be done if the species is to exist beyond the 200,000 plus years that it already has?
The facilitation seems largely to reside in the non-psychopath not having the time or energy to outlast the psychopath, that the “nons” throw up their (our) hands and walk away from the nickel and diming, the clutching, the tantrum, that the psychopath throws.
Because the heterogeneity of human neurotypes evolved in a very different environment than late stage neoliberal capitalism offers. Either we change the environment which favours the sociopaths/psychopaths or they will continue to flourish at the expense of the rest of us.
I think humans are conditionally cooperative species: we cooperate with our ‘kin,” against “outsiders.” The meaning of “kin” or “tribe,” however, is unclear and fuzzy, always changing and evolving. Successful political and social leaders are able to broaden what “kin” means to expand the scope of cooperation, but they are often countered by the destructive ones (who think themselves so clever) who expand the scope of “outsiders.”
It is, ultimately, a sociocultural process, beyond the individual. As such, the extension of the “kinship” runs contrary to both Liberal individualism (a point excellently elucidated by our own Aurelien in his substack) and current fetish with identarian essentialism. If successfully extending “kin” means people not merely saying “you and I do not share parents, but we are brothers” but actually meaning it, (common enough notion in all cultures) identarianism (you and I do not share parents, so we can never be real brothers) and individualism (I don’t care even if we are brothers, I’ll do what I want and familyblog you if you get in the way) present difficult, if at all surmountable, obstacles to humans’ innate but very conditional inclination to cooperate.
My own young childhood experience directly contradicts your claim. I am sure many others will concur.
It takes years of training to turn children into human beings and it often does not take.
Empathy is definitely inborn. For a few thousand years, many humans have been trapped in cultures where a few people rule over everyone else, and rulers encourage the worst in people in huge numbers of ways. In societies where nobody rules, and everyone agrees on how they’ll treat each other, empathy is the norm. Some of these healthy cultures still exist today.
America, like many other unhealthy cultures, has rulers who impose law on everyone else, and this leads to predictable pathologies whenever people accept being ruled as legitimate. Much reduced empathy is a common pattern in unhealthy cultures.
I think that empathy develops in infancy due to the biological imperative that human beings are born helpless and completely dependent on a parent who nurses them face-to-face. Empathy isn’t innate but rather is socialized through these biological imperatives.
This is why empathy is so fragile and difficult to restore once it has been broken or betrayed.
I strongly disagree.
We are part of the animal kingdom. Violence and aggression are part of our nature. We cannot expel the shadow, nor should we try. We need to integrate it.
When we deny our nature, we lose control of it. Contrast the bullied child who explodes with uncontrollable rage with someone who has made peace with his violent side, and is thus able to maintain proportion.
Contrary to comforting black and white thinking that violence is bad, violence can solve problems. I was bullied as a boy. Fighting back was the right thing to do – but it also made me feel foolish. That feeling can be redemptive, as in this scene from Suits. After another fight, with a working class bully, when we were both trudging sheepishly off to see the principal, I realized that he and I were not so different – except that I had a future, while he likely did not, and that the real problem was the system that put us in a rotten situation. I often wonder if this is why I sympathize with “deplorables” today. Another fight I had in high school cleared the air and created a friendship.
Of course power and control can go too far, but in general power is a good thing: it is the ability to get things done. So is control. When we sense that we have no control over our lives we become depressed, stressed, we even die sooner. The question of violence is not one of good against evil, but of balancing yin against yang.
I believe that attempts to “civilize” violence out of us cause violence. Caught a neoliberal technocratic order, we increasingly lack control over our lives. We are commanded to “be kind” by bureaucracies that torment us. Is it any surprise that when we are given the opportunity for two minutes of hate we respond like a bullied weakling given the chance to strike out, or that we identify with the violence of the imperium and its crimes against its enemies? And what is “civilizing” violence out of us but attempting to force and control us against our will?
Men commit most serious acts of violence. I suspect that attempt to bring boys up to not be violent, not to roughhouse, not to play with guns is having exactly the wrong effect, creating men who reject and do not understand their own nature, and then act out in bad ways. I suspect this is true of women too. Socially pressured to suppress aggressive tendencies, their acting out can be just as destructive.
As for empathy, I think it too is innate. But it is oriented around a victim-victimizer dynamic, and is often the emotional foundation of some of the worst acts of collective violence. Just as suppressing aggression and violence can be harmful, out of control empathy produces hate. I think this is where we are.
Instead of denying an essential and valuable part of our nature, we should be finding ways to work with it to become balanced and whole.
P.S.: I imagine you might agree with some of what I say. I mean to take your words as a jumping off point, not to box you in to a narrow point of view.
Agreed that violence and aggression are our nature. It is only the infant naked ape’s necessity for nurture from a caregiver that forms empathy — which channels our inherent aggression into cooperation. Voluntary cooperation is what I refer to as empathy and civilization, not Hobbesian elite control.
Our society suffers from an excess of self-absorption, the opposite of empathy. The entire “self-esteem movement” has done nothing but advance our inherent lust for power, control, and violence in the service of personal greed. Watching television isn’t a cooperative activity. Consumerism isn’t a cooperative activity.
All Yang and no Yin.
I had to calm down my daughter after the first assassination attempt. She wished he had died.
I told her this type of thinking is toxic to one’s soul and that it encourages others to do the same thing, maybe to the person leading her “team”.
I think she realized the path she was starting to walk down was a dark one.
Good for you.
We need a Terry Pratchett to handle this level of insanity through righteous satire. I can imagine him writing a story where future presidential candidates are evaluated based on how many times people attempted to assassinate them. If the number is low, they must not be very important or a threat to the status quo. If the number is high, then people will take notice of the candidate as a force for good. If they survive…
Thank you. I think DT beat you to it. I saw a headline saying he told a crowd on candidates of importance get shot at.
My wife was voicing similar until I pointed out all the details of the security failures, luckily that caused her to admit that wasn’t good at all. Then I reminded her of JFK, which she never likes me doing.
Reminds me of the John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs appearance this week. Sachs is the voice of reason who understands where all this violence takes us. Mearsheimer is the “realist” who admits at one point “in his heart” he agrees but that just ain’t how the world works.
I think too many of us dismiss this type of violence and have leaned too much into being detached realists unfortunately.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvFtyDy_Bt0
The miniaturization of violence is suddenly here. I’ve read there are now guided bullets, no assassin necessary. Getting less political and more uncivil at the same time. Sounds like a new definition of evil. It’s easy for the UN to condemn atomic mega bombs but it will be harder to establish whom to condemn when killing becomes individualized. When our collective level of apprehension kicks in we will have lost one of our oldest control mechanisms because we won’t even know who it is we need to shun. It’s very disconcerting.
I don’t recall when exactly it started, but when the Star Spangled Men in uniform started referring to military adversaries as “the Bad Guys,” the infantilization of violence (excellent and descriptive phrase by the way) had set in to our elites like tertiary syphillis.
I think it was under W and Rummy, GWOT, but maybe they tried it out in the Balkans.
Bringing back memories of our bombing of Serbia and our new tech UAVs “accidentally” managing to precisely explode at the Chinese embassy. Oh gosh, our mistake.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/072399china-embassy.html
July 23, 1999
In a Fatal Error, C.I.A. Picked a Bombing Target Only Once: The Chinese Embassy
By ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON — The director of the CIA disclosed Thursday that the agency had selected just one target in the 11-week air war over Yugoslavia, and its decision led to the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in May.
“It was the only target we nominated,” the director, George Tenet, said at a rare public hearing of the House Intelligence Committee.
After the strike on May 7, which killed three Chinese and wounded at least 20 others, the CIA decided it better go back to its usual business of spying, a U.S. official said Thursday. Reeling from its error, the agency almost immediately suspended other preparations it was making to forward additional targets to help NATO.
Tenet also acknowledged publicly that the CIA had employees and maps that could have told military planners the correct location of the embassy. But they were not consulted, he said…
These acts(the pager and walker talkies), will last for generations. How come Dad has only three fingers? Why does my Uncle only have one eye? Why was there an explosion at a funeral and why did so and so die at it?
You know how this goes on and on.
And the X postings, could not be more accurate, why would anyone in this world trust any electronic devices Israel? What would they tell you,”Don’t worry, it’s safe in your geographic region?”
My first thought about those people who had lost the use of both eyes was Paul in Dune Messiah where he loses his”sight” to a stonecutter but gains the ultimate vision.
We can’t get rid of our special relationship with Israel fast enough.
While we do live in a violence centric media saturated environment, I think the real false god whom is worshiped and becomes the OK escape goat for violence is individualism.
There are few people in this world who would not use violence to defend themselves if violently attacked.
While that means most of the rest of us at least conceptually agree that violence is a valid option for defense, I want to be clean I’m not supporting the use of violence.
That said, we live in a political reality where many people feel alone and desperate. Both major political parties promise help, but only deliver peanuts unless you’re part of the donor class.
Just think of all the political messages out there about protecting your kids, your family or even your community. It’s the justification for so much militarization of policing. At the same time the calls for protecting others (kids, family, community), there are few calls for organizing families and communities. We typically talk esoterically about others, but then the mental burden for protection falls back on the individual.
That, I would argue, is not by accident. The donor class knows they can trigger fears and reaction by playing to individual and non-individual (community) fears of attack, but so long as ORGANIZATION of the population is denied, outside of acceptable areas (example: lets restrict guns, lets arm teachers, etc…) then they stay in power.
As this all ramps up as more and more people become desperate and it’s the “other bad peoples fault” (said by donor class support groups), then it’s only reasonable for desperate individuals (aided and abetted by our violence driven media) to eventually think the only way to save themselves and their family is to commit an act of violence like shooting former President Trump… and that’s only as of today. Given the current dynamic which is NOT geared to resolving real issues most for people, politicians might need a job hazard pay bump.
“There are few people in this world who would not use violence to defend themselves if violently attacked.”
Probably true. Also, the majority of youtube and tiktok clip showing random violence indicates that all of us are not trained in applying and defending from violence, not too different from the chimps – which are stronger.
False. You don’t watch enough crime shows.
Women are conditioned to cower when attacked. The general reason is the average man is bigger and stronger than the average woman, so women getting argumentative or worse with men will generally result in the man beating the shit out of the woman. So women are strongly acculturated not to do that.
In fact, there are methods, taught in what are actually not self defense courses (the philosophy is not defensive, it is “If someone really wants to hurt you,, you have to render them immobile first) that are suitable for people who are smaller, weaker and slower to use against assailants. There are over 160 vulnerable points on the body (such as testicles, voice box, kidneys). Hit any two hard enough in succession and you shut the central nervous system down.
On crime shows, I regularly see women cowering when a man is threatening them at close range and they have easy lines of attack, like tryinng to gouge the guy’s eyes out, and, say, when he recoils, stomping on his foot hard enough to break it.
Now the reality is (again contrary to your claim) most people are inhibited about inflicting violence on another person’s body. On of the points of a course I took was to disinhibit the participants enough to be effective if they faced a real threat and could not run away. One of the things they did was go over examples and tapes of people who merely engaged in protracted defensive efforts (as in they were fit enough to do so) and wound up dead.
With a determined assailant you really to need to be willing in inflict trauma like crushing their balls.
Amid all of the actual war violence ongoing betwixt Israel and Hamas, and the attempted violence upon a highly visible candidate to serve as the next President…stawk markets are surging ever higher still ( US equity indexes, I mean ). Often remarked that the stupidest timeline can’t possibly get weirder. Throw in some rhetorical punditry from talking heads on both left and right…bring to a nice boil?
The Jackpot is a’coming. Gird your loins or arm your investment portfolio as necessary, should you have anything invested directly or on your behalf like a state employee or teacher retirement program. Thinking myself about what may lie ahead in the next 4 to 6 years…yikes.
Black Swan has entered the Jackpot chat.
It may take a bit of time, but I feel this will have an impact beyond what any of us can imagine.
I support the use of violence as a right of resistance. Of the dozens of assassination attempts on Hitler, even one successful attempt would have saved many lives. No one thinks the Germans should have protested “peacefully” against the Nazis. What about Gaza? Should Hamas “peacefully” protest Israel? One of the reasons that democracies produce corrupt governments is that their people have been brainwashed to believe that violence is evil, and to firmly believe that if they are dissatisfied with politics, they should vote in elections every few years or march with placards. That has made violence the monopoly of state power and eliminated the greatest threat to the ruling class: the possibility of revolution. We must understand that they will only back down when their positions and lives are threatened. Many Russians believe that Prigozhin’s rebellion led to the exposure of corruption in the Russian army and defense ministry.
“Of the dozens of assassination attempts on Hitler, even one successful attempt would have saved many lives.”
I used to think this was true, much like lots of other people. It’s a fairly common view. Great man theory of history and all that. But, I think a fuller understanding of history allows you to realize how little that would have accomplished.
You have to paint a picture that includes the collective trauma and bloodlust for revenge that came out of the horrors of WWI, the harshness of the peace of Versailles, the dysfunction baked into the global economy of the inter-war years (including the Gold Standard and the British Pound-Sterling as reserve currency, and the push for austerity to protect hard currency policies). You’ve got to include western leaders and their sympathies with Hitler and the Nazis (I’m looking at you, Churchill, in particular) and the attempts to use German re-armament as a tool to bash Stalin’s USSR.
Keep in mind, there’s new weapons of war on the battlefield like tanks and air power and military leaders often haven’t worked out just how to use these new inventions, or how much killing power they really offer.
Now, sprinkle in some massive strategic blunders in the German high command about how they’re going to feed themselves with an ongoing blockade from the Royal Navy, while waging a war in the east. Adam Tooze’s ‘Wages of Destruction’ is particularly good on this.
I’m sure I’m missing some key elements, if others want to chime in. Nonetheless, once you’ve got a bigger grasp of those elements…knocking off Hitler seems…well, fairly minimal in its impact.
“Great man theory of history and all that…”
All through Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” the great man theory of history is examined. The importance of the work is still reflected in being part of the syllabus in several classes a term at my university. Kutuzov is Tolstoy’s response, as several characters in the book come to understand.
I don’t think anyone behind this quite understands what they’ve done. Israeli tech wasn’t just behind things like cell phones and routers. They’re leaders in exporting automation technology world wide. This is currently an $80 billion USD market.
The Israelis have (had?) quite a start-up culture over there for industrial automation. The building sensors and variable speed fans weve been discussing to assist with COVID-19 mitigation indoors? Lots of that equipment has Israeli control devices inside. Here’s a list from 2021 of companies in Israel that produce parts and software and components we see all over the world. It’s kind of brilliant when you think about it. If there’s a back door hack for a gas control valve to a furnace or a boiler in a building you don’t need to put any explosives inside. You just need to communicate with the smart valve and have it enter a state where it releases enough fuel to create the kind of explosion you want to see. Or, have it cause the appliance it’s controlling enter into a dangerous condition resulting in an explosion.
The global market for smart devices and coordinated technology was huge. I can’t believe it will remain that way. I guess it was only a matter of time. Our CIA killed vaccination programs in the Middle East and Africa with their operation to find Bin Laden. Now Mossad/MI-6/CIA may have destroyed the market for tech exports and an entire category of control devices. All the things we were hoping could be used to keep people safer and more comfortable given climate change and infectious aerosol spread.
Go Team USA… :(
What happened after Snowden revealed Dell’s ties to the CIA and NSA?
Nothing.
Many people continued to buy and use Dell computers as before, thinking, “I’m not a terrorist, so the government can’t spy on me”.
Completely different audience. Completely different context. Insurance companies, embassies, property managers, will care about this risk.
I don’t believe so. Many will also think that it’s better to go with the devil that you know ………. If everyone is spying on you, the only choice you have is which side would you rather have the information ?
Given the sheer amount of [family-blog]-you economic and other kinds of violence committed by the powerful in this country against working people, I’m astonished at how peaceful everything is. Violent sentiment is not violence itself. The attitude of the powerful in America for those who sustain their very existence is an open sneer.
Indeed. The national memory is very short and the corporate media wishes it were even shorter. But I’m so old I do remember when people used to not just sit there and take it – Weather Underground, SLA, Black Panthers, etc. Not condoning every action of these groups, just pointing out that they happened, and somewhat frequently.
The reason why the American revolutionaries were crushed in the 1970s was because they lost the support of the general population. Today, government is much better at crushing dissent, but it is increasingly corrupt and incompetent otherwise, and I think that will keep the support for whatever revolutionaries appear; in the 1970s, people thought that peaceful reform was possible, which meant continued support for the government as well as a lack of support for revolution, but now?
Incidentally, that was the story in 1770s. There was much hope until just a few years before the American Revolution broke out, that some kind of compromise through the British Parliament was possible–on both sides of the Atlantic. It took some years of frustration before the (future) Americans were largely fed up with the British. Whether they were “corrupt” or not is up for debate–but the point was that London could, when they didn’t want to negotiate, pull the rank, so to speak, and force their “solution.” No good faith bargaining was ultimately deemed possible.
Incidentally, this is the problem with every “government.” As they say, a successful government has a monopoly on legitimate use of violence. But “legitimacy” is a fuzzy and slippery concept. If you use threat of using violence as the ultimate argument in negotiations (deliberately twisting the saying attributed to Louis XIV, I think, that the artillery is the ultimate argument of kings), you’re not negotiating in good faith and at that point, you’re not really legitimate any more–at least towards the people that you just pulled that off. But where is the boundary between “legtimate” and “illegitimate” use of violence/force by the state in the grand scheme of things? How many people can the government piss off like that before it is deemed unacceptable by enough people? No one really knows until that boundary is crossed. But it helps if the government is at least partly run by people who are well connected to the public opinion among many diverse segments of society–what was once termed the “intelligence of democracy.” Well, we’ve given up on that sort of intelligence decades ago, it seems, so we may well be teetering on that boundary (with “violence” defind broadly).
Trump is still alive, thank the Gods.
I know down here in Louisiana, my fellow neighbors would be doing something if Trump had been killed.
I believe they breathed a sigh of relief when he survived, and I think that in conjunction with the RFK Jr endorsement has led to an opening for dialogue where the people of the right wing are listening to Leftists/Marxists/Economic Populists such as myself in a grand alliance of the Left & Right against the Neoliberals & Neoconservatives.
Only 45ish more days to go before this window closes again…
No more Divide & Conquer!
Long Live Connect & Understand!
Great comment! Thanks. When I saw, back in the 90s, that the Democratic Party was going like an express train to the (fascist) right I knew we needed something new. Our natural allies are on the right at this point in our history as the DP has gone as far as its possible to go to the right with their obsession with war as a way of being and hoping to jail those of us who spread “misinformation”–this new move on the part of Democrats has been kind of implemented on the sly but now they are right out there saying it in public. Anyone who knows anything about the pre-Clinton DP cannot possibly vote for the now fascist (in every sense of the word) DP.
The “radical centrists” of the Uniparty are the enemy of the people.
Those radical centrist are more like Italian Fascists
Colonel Wilkerson, on Danny Davis’s channel, commented that this attack was a path the US has not wanted to start down because the US is very vulnerable to similar sabotage. We may come to regret this.
Blowback is destined to visit the Empire’s metropole — in one form or another.
http://www.public.asu.edu/~jmlynch/273/documents/FreudEinstein.pdf
July 30, 1932
Dear Mr. Freud:
The proposal of the League of Nations and its International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation at Paris that I should invite a person, to be chosen by myself, to a frank exchange of views on any problem that I might select affords me a very welcome opportunity of conferring with you upon a question which, as things now are, seems the most insistent of all the problems civilization has to face. This is the problem: Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war? It is common knowledge that, with the advance of modern science, this issue has come to mean a matter of life and death for Civilization as we know it; nevertheless, for all the zeal displayed, every attempt at its solution has ended in a lamentable breakdown…
— A. Einstein
http://www.public.asu.edu/~jmlynch/273/documents/FreudEinstein.pdf
September, 1932
Dear Mr. Einstein:
— Sigmund Freud
The united states is nothing more than a mass grave cosplaying as a country/economic system.
I decided several years ago to stop watching any sort of violent films or tv. I’m glad I did because it seems that all hollywood can defecate out these days is movies glorifying violence and sadism.
Surely we’re in bread & circus mode. Wonder what will happen when we run out of bread?
RFK Jr said to Tucker Carlson he thinks the current level of anger and hostility in the country is being orchestrated. Thinks it began immediately after the Occupy Wall Street protests and the thought line “The 99% vs the 1%.” The idea was to turn people against each other in a 50%-50% way and crush the idea of the 99%. All to keep the oligarchs in power and continue funneling wealth up to the top from the middle and working classes.
If that was a plan it seems like it worked. How many new billionaires do we have? How much increase in childhood poverty and homelessness? The MSM, owned by six giant corporations, does its part to stoke the anger and keep the citizens fighting among themselves.
It’s all derivative of Jay Gould’s boast that he could hire half of the working class to kill the other half.
While mentioned in passing in the article I’d suggest the core of the problem isn’t that a gun allows one “to take arms against a sea of troubles” but, rather, gives a small person the opportunity to affect history – after all who, otherwise, would have heard of Gavrilo Princip? Who can’t at least have a shot (sic) at the names involved in the Kennedy assassination? Such, I’m sure, was the true motive behind both attempts on Trump.
And the problem is that the US is full of guns, and small people.
the only stickers still on my ragged old truck are a Bernie2016 , a bob marley “emancipate yourself…”
and a great big “99%”.
somehow, these 3 have survived the work that truck does for all these years.
of course, gone are the days when these were conversation starters in the feed store parking lot…opportunities for New New Deal Evangelism.
so i painted in blue “Thought Criminal” on the headache rack, just in case.
as for the rest…lots of great thoughts above.
this is pretty much trump country…the tiny handful of Team Blue people i know…well…they must be hiding in their hillforts,lol…because i never see them…although i only go to town maybe 4 times a month.
the rest of the folks i run into on my town runs are either a-political(at least in public)…or express a mild sort of horror at these events….but i haven’t heard yet any mea culpas expressed for the last 30+ years of kill a commie for mommy and “open season on libtards”, etc.