This is What Dignity Sounds Like

Sona Jobarteh, Gambian artist, delivers this spectacular track.

Listen and learn, America.

Dignity

Busy so I can't do more than jot a few notes, but I have to say this about the immolation of my homeland:

Really, America? 

You're going to just let a bunch of zero-star kleptocrats who share a teleprompter for a brain burn your country to the ground, without a single major protest in a single square of a single city?

I'm currently visiting a society which has only the tiniest fraction of your wealth -- which isn't their fault, but the fault of imperial history (they're working hard to fix this problem.)

But they have something you don't have, America.

Dignity.

Portal...

...time to learn.

Heliotrope

I've spent my entire adult life in the deepening shadow of imperial decline, guided only by Adorno's deepest meditations, an inextinguishable light for the second nightfall he knew would come. Now the time has come to chase the dawn.

Brightness Calling

Everything I write these days is tinged with rad-soaked elegy.

Chapter 3 of Meditations on Geopolitics is up -- comments/critique welcome. I make no claim to being any kind of historical specialist, my only goal is to offer a productive rethinking and synthesis of the past. For too long, the Left has ceded geopolitical thinking to the Opposing Team. Time to take back our history, as well as our planet.

Keen observers will note the size of each chapter is increasing. This is due to the increasing scale and complexity of each period.

Next up: Chapter 2 of Worlds to Win.
 Never thought I'd outlive Britain. But the Scots are leaving, Northern Ireland will follow, and the tumble-down stub of what some wit will dub Wengland will regress into a slightly less violent version of post-1816 Argentina.

Twelve Stars Versus Barbarism

The fine folks at DiEM25 have their proposal up for a New Deal for Europe. Excellent stuff. Also, shouts out to the people of Romania for their wondrous and inspiring anti-corruption protests. Soon the whole planet is going to be one gigantic EuroMaidan.

From the Party of Lincoln to Huylo's House-serfs

It's been a long, slow decline from the Republic Party of Lincoln the Liberator to the repulsive slagheap of Domwald the Despot, from the party which lambasted the corruption of Big Government to the party of gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement and prisons, from the party of small business to the party of Goldman Sachs, from the party which ended slavery to the party of an outright Fascist who swears fealty to Putinism's tinfoil Czarism. John Schindler, top notch intelligence expert and historian (check out his excellent Fall of the Double Eagle, an incisive look at the military implosion of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1914, the disaster which triggered the horror and carnage of the 1914-1945 Thirty One Years War), delivers the goods: The Spy Revolt Against Donald Trump.

Full disclosure: I'm in political disagreement with Schindler on 95% of all political issues. But this is an emergency situation where that 5% matters. Either we fight for a Republic in which political disagreements are still possible, or we perish in an autocracy too horrible to contemplate.

It's either Amerimaidan, or Ameripocalypse.

Choose, America.

For the Children Shall Lead Us

From 1937 to 2017.

Never. Again.

We resist.

Sunset of the Super-empires

Many fine folks have stepped up to the plate to critique the suicidal kleptocracy, self-immolating  authoritarianism, and self-destructive xenophobia of the US empire in its death-throes, so there's no need for me to duplicate their efforts.

But there is one thing we digital citizens of the planet ought to be thinking about which isn't drawn directly from today's nightmarish headlines, but which enables us to understand those headlines, and to begin to resist the catastrophe. It is something which makes this period of history uniquely dynamic and, in some ways, downright unmappable.

This is the fact that we are living in the twilight of the super-empires.

Back in 1910, just fourteen world empires controlled 90% of the world's population and 95% of its economic resources. These empires were, in rough order from the mightiest to the least powerful polity, the British empire, the US empire, the German empire, the French empire, the Russian empire, the Austrian empire, the Japanese empire, the Ottoman empire, the Dutch empire, the Belgian empire, the Italian empire, the Qing empire, the Spanish empire and the Portuguese empire.

All fourteen empires disintegrated over the course of the 20th century. The process was long and bloody, requiring two world wars, a depression, and a Cold War. The first to expire was the Qing dynasty of China in 1911, while the last to go was the Soviet Union, a.k.a. the Russian empire 2.0, which collapsed in 1991.

That doesn't mean they are gone entirely. The super-empires left significant legacies of influential social institutions, deep-rooted cultural practices, and pervasive modes of political mobilization.

While the economic hegemony of the US expired in the crash of 2008, its political hegemony lingered on, like a relentless advertising campaign for a product which has long vanished from the shelves, for another eight years. That hegemony came to a crashing end in November 2016 (a Clinton administration would have delayed the crash slightly until 2018, but the thing itself was inevitable). 

What happens now is genuine multipolarity, where decisions taken by the EU, China, India and numerous other polities are as important (and sometimes more important) than those taken in the US. This is terrifying to nativists, bigots, xenophobes, and ultra-nationalists all across the world. They are furious -- a fury which more often than not takes the form of completely Americanized and wholly bogus anti-Americanism. The classic case of this wholly Americanized anti-American rage is Putinism, the fake nationalism of the one hundred Russian billionaires who are stealing the energy-rents of a nation of 142 million citizens.

Nowhere is the fury of the revanchists at the end of US hegemony more pronounced than in the heartlands of the former super-empires. Every single leading revanchist movement is located in a former super-empire: Brexit in the UK, the Despot in the US, Putinism in Russia, Erdoganism in Turkey, rampant xenophobia in Austria, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, Berlusconism and its successors in Italy.

What they all have in common is the desire to return to the days of imperial glory -- the glorious days of men with guns and women without voting rights, of unrestricted power for a tiny elite and grinding poverty for everyone else.

The five exceptions are nations which either had a full-scale anticolonial revolution, e.g. China, or else openly confronted the burden of their imperial and colonial crimes, e.g. Japan and Germany thanks to their post-1945 democratizations, and Portugal and Spain thanks to their 1970s democratic revolutions.

Just as these revanchisms have begun to unite into a single coordinated movement, so too must the resistances against these revanchisms begin unite across national borders, to share experiences, tactics, and stories, and to learn from each others' struggles. From the global commons, we must begin to construct a global solidarity.

It Happened Here

It can't hap just happened here. The latest ukase of the Despot bans entry to all refugees, holders of valid US visas, and holders of green cards from seven nations who happen to be Muslim. This includes people with dual citizenship, including citizens of Canada, France, the UK and many other nations. (Anyone who has ever applied for a visa or green card knows how extreme and thorough the vetting process is. Nobody gets through without being checked dozens of times by multiple agencies.)

It gets worse.

At the same time, the Despot's NSC will be run by Bannon, a white supremacist nutjob, and Flynn, a failed general and full-time Kremlin stooge -- and without the input of the CIA or Pentagon. No, seriously, please read that again: the agency charged with defending America will be run without the input of the intelligence community or the Defense Department.

What. In. The. Actual. F%*#.

Remember, this isn't the judgement of some marginal, wacky Leftwinger. This is the judgement of a seasoned, highly conservative former intelligence official with a proven track record of expertise.

These two moves are not the prelude of fascism.

They are Fascism -- with a capital F.

Fascism is the exercise of untrammeled dictatorial authority by a supreme leader over a society by whipping up irrational hatred of and discrimination against a specific ethnic group or groups.

How many terrorist deaths have refugees, visa holders and green card holders caused the United States over the past decade?

Zero.


And now the Despot has literally outsourced America's military might to two villains straight out of a Batman movie. What will they do with this power?

Come for the rest of us, of course.

So now we fight. We fight for our democracy. We fight for our dignity. We fight for our freedom. We fight for the very survival of the planet.

Spontaneous protests broke out in dozens of airports, and the ACLU sued in court to block the Despot's ukase, and won a temporary stay. Thoughtful conservatives are beginning to question the Despot's sanity.

The battle has begun. Join the ACLU, if you can.

Stop. Think. Write. March. Resist.

Sony and Bethesda Do the Right Thing

Will there be videogames in the time of Shadow? Oh hell yes. While battling the minions of political Evil issuing from the Despotism's interdimensional portal, it's just as important to fight and win the cultural battles. This is a long way of saying kudos to the folks at Sony and Bethesda for finally making fan-created mods available to the PS4 version of Fallout 4.

I'm sure there were some uncomfortable compromises on all sides involved, but trust me, you can't imagine the amazing level of customer goodwill these sorts of decisions generate. Fan media has become one of the most powerful forces of aesthetic production in the world today, and we all need to treat it with respect and care. Keep up the good work!

Dear Plutocrats

Greetings, African and Eurasian oligarchs, East Asian and South Asian princelings, American lumpen-billionaires, and European plutocrats.

We regret to inform you that after 20 years of declining real wages, the 7 billion of us who work for a living have decided to rebel against your corrupt and disastrous overlordship of the world economy.

Thank you for proving that Karl Marx was correct.

While we decide on the exact timing, severity, and nature of your future doom, how about a nice game of chess?

Assembling the Big Tent

How far gone is the empire? So far gone, even the Yale historians are joining the barricades. Timothy Snyder tells students the lessons of Ukraine: if you want your republic back, you'll have to fight for it.

#J20

The Shadow falls.

We resist.

Fake Leftists: The Infantile Disorder of Dying Empires

Casey Michel hits it out of the park with How Putin Played the Far Left.

The fake Leftists of the 21st century all share one feature: they love empire -- just not the one they live inside and benefit from, but cannot be bothered to actually resist.

Instead of critiquing their country's own imperialism, understanding its past and present history, grasping their own complicity in its structures, and joining with the collective resistances against all empires -- that is, against the looting spree of Wall Street, against the toxic austerity of the euro-empire, against the machinations of Chinese, Indian, Indonesian and Brazilian plutocrats, etc. -- they ignore all these struggles and instead swear fealty to some other empire they know nothing about.

Then they project their most lurid neocolonial/Orientalist/Occidentalist fantasies on that foreign empire. Anything from their own empire is coded as evil, anything from the foreign empire is coded as good.

Here in the US, the result has been the fake journalism of Julian Assange, a paranoid creep who believes that only he should have secrets, the fake dissent of Ed Snowden, a minor sysadmin who is now regularly trotted out to Putinist press events like the pet hamster of the FSB he is, and the fake campaign of Jill Stein -- because if you are for ecological sanity and social justice, you must be against imperial war, and that includes Putinism's criminal aggression against and occupation of Ukraine.

The time has come for those of us who comprise the real Left -- and this means anyone who believes in and works for more fairness and less exploitation, more schools and fewer missiles, more sharing and less greed -- to repudiate the fake Left, and call them out for what they are: perfectly ordinary Rightists.

If the fake Leftists love empires so much, they can have them. The rest of us have empires to resist, and social movements to build.

Plutocracy Is A War On Children

Philadelphia is a city with a glorious history. It was pre-revolutionary America's largest single city, with about 40,000 inhabitants in 1775. It was the cradle of American democracy, the place where the Continental Congress met. It was also the cradle of American mass literacy -- the home of Benjamin Franklin and his printing press.

Today, though, Philadelphia is an icon of another kind: the barbarism and savagery of plutocratic looting. The 0.1% have destroyed Philadelphia's industrial base and have been wrecking public services for forty years.

Today, the birthplace of American literacy has a public school system with 224 schools and 134,000 students. Now guess how many full-time librarians work at those schools.

A couple hundred, surely? Nope. Maybe fifty or sixty?

Not a chance.

Eight.

That's right, only eight full-time employees serve 134,000 students. (Hat tip to Diane Ravitch for the link).

Why? Because those students aren't the children of the 0.1%. So they don't get librarians, or books, or teachers.

Plutocracy is a war on children.

Uprising Against The Despot

And here I was being gloomy about the future of humanity. The Sunlight Foundation is tracking the Despot's outrageous conflicts of interest, the Despot's deep financial ties with sleazy Eurasian thugs are finally coming to light, 51% of the American people openly detest the cretin, and now even Marco Rubio is grilling the Despot's choice for Secretary of PetroState, Rex Tillerson. Things are about to get hectic. Check in with Sarah Kendzior, Adam Khan and and John Schindler for all the latest anti-Despot news.

Brain Training

Visiting the broken shambles of the Northeast, the cradle of the Atlantic radicalisms of 1780-1791 and the American counter-revolution of 1775-1789. What makes it all worth it: the ramshacklitude of row houses, tiny yards stuffed with children's toys, and narrow streets actively hostile to automobiles. I felt like I finally exited Fallout 4's Glowing Sea. And then there's the glory of Northeastern coffee shops (may the blessings of the Goddess fall upon Green Line Cafe -- cappucinos worthy of canonization). Not really a vacation, though -- there's witcher's work to be done.