A response to "Let's Stop Searching for a "Messiah" and Build a Movement"
Sunday, 25 May 2014 09:30By Dave Johnson, Campaign for America's Future
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/23926-lets-stop-searching-for-a-messiah-and-build-a-movement
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Yes we need movement building, but we need something more. We need a catalyst, for a profound paradigm shift that has been gestating in the minds and hearts of the American people for years now, a terrible resolve that's been forming and deepening, a quiet transformation taking place below the surface, nearly ready to burst forth.
We've had 14 years now, since our choice of President was stolen from us by the grandson of the founder of the CIA, son of the Station Chief in Dallas on Nov. 22 1963, with the acquiescence of the candidate many of us had rallied around and the collusion of the Supreme Court. 12 years since the largest worldwide protest event in history was blandly ignored and the war on Iraq launched based on shameless transparent lies. Ten years since his Democratic challenger, imitation Irishman, fellow Oligarch and fellow Bonesman John Kerry rolled over and conceded another election. We've seen the environmental justice and food justice movements swell to global proportions, only to be branded and persecuted as terrorists. We've seen a growing groundswell of demand for fair wages and workplace justice even as our remaining unions are driven into the ground.
We've seen a phony banker-financed movement of renewal led by a CIA Protegee posing as the Second Coming of Jesus give hope and change a bad name. We've watched in horror as he guts our constitution, launches campaigns of murder around the world and compromises away our most basic economic demands with only a token resistance. We've struggled without success to turn back the open handover of our Federal government to the super-rich, establishing the principles that money is free speech but speech is not free.
Everywhere people are coming to the conclusion that we are headed for catastrophe, that issue movements, electoral movements, campaigns to petition our government or pass laws are not enough, that the forces we are up against are too great. That there is not time to win the reforms that are needed to turn back the unfolding disaster before events overtake them. Everyone is so busy defending on their own fronts - or just surviving - to find the energy to support each others' struggles.
We've had four years now to digest the lessons of Occupy. Not just the hundreds of thousands who participated but the tens of millions who were watching, hoping, thinking about joining in. Everywhere the dawn is rising on an understanding that it's all one enemy, one great obstacle opposing and blocking us on every front and dragging us down together. Occupy had some deep weaknesses, but it was the movement we were ready for and it helped catalyze these realizations.
People everywhere - activists, former activists and just plain folk - are quietly drawing deep conclusions. Tens of millions have concluded that "what we really need is a revolution." They mostly don't know what that means - the revolutions taught us in school, especially our own, don't look much like what actually happened - but mostly what stops them is the persistent illusion that we're alone, that "all those other stupid lazy people out there" don't understand or care. It's an illusion being carefully cultivated and protected by the corporate media. It's their final line of defense. When some event strips away that illusion, as the Obama Campaign and Occupy started to, when the millions find our voices together and discover each other, it will be an Emperor's New Clothes moment.
A Presidential Race can be a moment for all the movements and demands to come together, for all the streams of our people to converge. Could a bid by Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders provide us with this moment?
Every time I hear Elizabeth Warren or speak with her I am impressed by her sincerity, her passion, her deep anger at the banksters and oligarchs - and her readiness to call on us to organize and take the lead from the politicians. Her campaign could be the catalyst, the spark that brings all our movements together into one great movement, that gives us our voice, and through which we can share and build a vision of a renewed life beyond the horizons of our collapsing financial system. My deep fear is that a presidential bid by Elizabeth Warren could be used as a final attempt to steer us into another dead end, to circle the herd and corral us again - but I am thinking she won't and couldn't stop the forces her campaign would unleash.
Or Bernie Saunders' campaign could be the catalyst.
Or the spark could be some outrageous act to stop them or steal our victory again.
Or events could overtake us before election season is in full swing, and the catalyst could be a new spontaneous Occupy-like movement triggered by some outrageous shock or affront, like that triggered by the Bank Bailouts in 2009.
A presidential win for either Warren or Saunders would require a mass mobilization to blast our way into the Democratic Party process, to check their efforts to block our candidate from the media and debates, to block our voters from the polls and steal their votes. It could end with millions marching on Washington demanding the validation of the outcome when they steal it. It's climactic moment could be when our brothers and sisters in the police and military refuse their orders to fire on us.
It would not be something that could be contained by a Party Machine. And it would not be something that could be stopped on Inauguration Day. Obama pulled that off once, and many have reflected on it deeply since then. It won't work a second time.
Inauguration Day could be the day of Jubilee, the opening of a new stage in the battle between a newly energized and awakened people and the forces that are oppressing us. The organizing would just be getting started, and would roll on until every workplace, every neighborhood and every block of every city, town and village, every school, and every military and police barracks is organized around the demand for democracy and the tasks of making it work.
It could happen with amazing rapidity, because it's been so long delayed.
Like the American Revolution - the one you probably don't know about because they deleted it from our histories. It was hardly dreamed of in the Spring of 1774, but by mid-Summer the whole of Massachusetts at least was in ferment and organizing and by October we had swept British rule from most of New England and replaced it with direct popular rule - without bloodshed. Descriptions of that process look remarkably like Occupy and much less like the revolution of the Tea Party Patriots. (See www.revolution1774.org/)
We must not be afraid to throw ourselves into this battle, whatever form it takes, whether it is mass protests in the streets or a people's presidential campaign. Whatever the form, when the millions take up the cause it will be the battle for democracy, for our lives, for the survival of our children and their children's children, with everything on the line.
There will be no excuse for sitting it out.
Sunday, May 25, 2014
Sunday, May 11, 2014
Self-righteous judgmentalism of the oppressor nations
re: Putin's Latest Target: Free Speech on the Internet
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/23632-putins-latest-target-free-speech-on-the-internet
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Truthout editors and readers need to recognize that Russia - and through it our whole civilization - is faced with an existential threat eminating from the US-based Empire. The media coverage - and non-coverage - of the unfolding horror in Ukraine is atrocious, comparable to the worst of the Cold War era.
That Russia harbors Edward Snowden while restricting the internet is only a contradiction if taken out of context. Russia is the intended victim of a well-prepared assault, with the neo-Nazi anti-Russian putschist government put in place by the US in Ukraine the driving wedge. Like Ukraine, Russia is riddled with CIA, MI6, Mossad and German operatives, many of them placed or recruited through pseudo-liberal NGO's. That the Russian government is corrupt can make this harder to see, but it is still the intended victim, targeted for refusing to submit and being cynically and extravagantly painted as the villains by our corporate and "public" media.
This is a moment when the Truthout community needs to choose between standing against the Empire or effectively siding with it the way the Cold War Liberals did from 1945 to 1990. This is perhaps a more dangerous moment than the Cuban Missile Crisis, because our Empire is entering its death throes, its leaders are losing their grip on reality, and are threatening taking the world down with them. We who are in the "Belly of the Beast" have a special responsibility we cannot escape. To understand yet fail to act to block it, to hide behind ahistorical moralistic positions while ignoring the radically asymmetry of the US-Russian confrontation, is cowardice. A site that fails to convey this overarching reality and panders to the self-righteous judgmentalism of the oppressor nations does not fully deserve to call itself "alternative".
I would suggest going to RT.com for news about Ukraine, and globalresearch.ca for analysis. Not perfect, but good, solid. If reading these leaves you feeling like you're entering an alternative reality, consider that you may instead be leaving one.
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[Reply to comment:]
Mulga, Thanks for the acknowledgment. However I do blame TruthOut. Getting news of what is actually happening in the world to the American people - and in particular to the American left - is critically important, a matter of life and death actually, and that's a responsibility that this site [TruthOut] pretends to have taken on.
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[Reply to comment:]
Mulga, Thanks for the acknowledgment. However I do blame TruthOut. Getting news of what is actually happening in the world to the American people - and in particular to the American left - is critically important, a matter of life and death actually, and that's a responsibility that this site [TruthOut] pretends to have taken on.
The American public and our bought and paid for Congress, following the lead of the British people and Parliament, amazed the world by stopping a war last October. That was only possible because too much news had leaked out about what was actually going on. No doubt it helped that American soldiers were publicly declaring they would not go to war to defend Al Qaida.
If the news gets widely distributed that the US Government is backing actual flaming Nazis in Ukraine, who shot their way into power Nazi-style and are doing actual murderous Nazi stuff, consolidating their rule with bullying, murder, and intimidation, lies and deception, backed by US-paid mercenaries and apparently under the personal direction of the chief of the CIA, this whole adventure could perhaps be stopped.
But if progressive activists who have come to trust TruthOut to give us "the rest of the news," and at this critical juncture instead get fed this kind of slimy drivel, they have potentially been neutralized.
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[Reply to comment:]
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[Reply to comment:]
Cossack, How's this for a bit of reality? Here's some ground eye views from East Ukraine a few days ago:
Did you see anything like this on CNN or ABC? If they had shown these images, how could they have fit them into their narrative?
How in particular could they frame this as Russian expansionism?
Could you?
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