Op-Ed

Antonio Gramsci was not a professional philosopher. His intellect was refreshingly situated within an inherent bias towards the common people, the 'subaltern' classes, particularly the working class. 

 He argued that all people are essentially intellectuals, in the sense that all people possess the intellectual faculties for rational thinking and deduction, though “not all men have in society the function of intellectuals”.

 Thus, intellectualism should not exist for its own sake, but as a direct response to the collective needs of society. 

Every bullet fired into a crowd penetrates the national soul — or so it seems to me, as I continue to grapple emotionally with the Trump-rally shooting in Butler, Pa. on July 13, which left one attendee murdered, several others wounded and the shooter himself dead.

As with all such shootings, this goes beyond “motive” into a collective nethersphere of uncertainty. For God’s sake, what is life? Why is it so, shall we say, cheap? Why are we organized — politically, socially — primarily around its elimination? Why are guns so damn sacred . . . not to mention fighter jets, nuclear weapons, our annual military budget? Why do the following words make me cringe:

“We cannot — must not — go down this road in America, Violence has never been the answer.”

Believe it or not, Thomas Jefferson was a committed abolitionist. His original draft of the Declaration of Independence included a long screed against the slave trade beginning,

It was the ONLY passage of the Declaration removed by a vote of the Continental Congress.

I am not trying to excuse Jefferson’s rank hypocrisy as an abolitionist with humans held as property. Rather, I want to underscore that slavery was not an accepted part of our political culture. In fact, the colony of Georgia OUTLAWED slavery until just before the revolution when King George gave the Habersham family a charter to bring Africans to the colony.

Local German and Swiss farmers objected strongly to bringing in Africans, petitioning the King to reverse his decision. They wrote:

Rulings by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court favor Trump and right-wing, anti-democratic interests and values, threatening to upend an already weakened American democracy. The right-wing bias of the court goes back to Trump’s successful nominations of three reactionary justices to the court while he was president. As it stands now, there are six right-wing justices on the court and 3 “liberals.” 

In one of its most disturbing recent rulings on June 2022 the court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 law that gave women the right to an abortion. The story of this ruling is told in masterful detail by Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer in their book, “The Fall of Roe, The Rise of a New America” (publ. 2024). 

In this post, the contention about the court’s right-wing bias is exemplified by three recent Supreme Court rulings dealing with expanding gun ownership rights, deregulation, and presidential immunity.

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Bump Stocks

Supreme Court Rejects Ban on Gun Bump Stocks

Who’s in Charge Here?

Certainly not the ‘Commander-in-Chief’, whether he’s a doddering old pedophile in terminal decline, or a narcissistic comb-overed con man and convicted felon.

And, certainly not ‘We The People’, the psyoped and indoctrinated masses.

Thus, the obvious and legitimate question arises, “Who’s really calling the shots – both kinetic and pharmaceutical.  Who’s really running these dis-United States?

Chief Suspects

A) A global minority ruling class with Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum (WEF) its most familiar public face?

(B) A Zionist network of lobbyists, Israeli intelligence agents and investment bankers, the public faces of which are AIPAC, ADL and the Mossad. Plus Israeli military and intelligence contractors like Elbit Systems and Magal Security Systems.

Some will react to the notion of creative Destruction, as an obvious contradiction in terms. But, they just don't understand. According to our Ruling Classes, the term encapsulates the Engine of Progress and the vital role of the “West” in the process.

The above photos reveal less than 1% of the damage that has been done by the “Civilized World” during the so-called “American Century” - which has lasted more than a century and a half.  The US reduced EVERY Japanese city to a similar condition. And according to General LeMay, his air force destroyed every town, village, city, and hamlet in the North of Korea and most of the South. They destroyed all dams and dikes, flooding the plains, and sprayed a half-million tons of defoliants and other chemical agents. Same in Vietnam a few years later. We know about Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq again, and Libya. In Libya, they took care to ruin the “Great Man-Made River” project - which was greening the desert.

So, how is this to be seen as Progress? Michael Ledeen, of the US State Department and National Security Council explains it this way:

Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail.

Furthermore, I am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars.

We were taken to war in Iraq on a lie. Hundreds of thousands are now dead. Just imagine if the men who planned this war crime back in 2002 had had a WikiLeaks to deal with. They might not have been able to pull it off. The only reason they thought they could get away with it was because they had a guaranteed cloak of secrecy. That guarantee has now been ripped from them, and I hope they are never able to operate in secret again.

Back in September 2017 I wrote an article for the Unz Review site entitled “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars” with the subtitle “Shouldn’t they recuse themselves when dealing with the Middle East?” The article focused on the fact that most of the individuals and groups in the US that were agitating for war with Iran in particular were Jewish and most did not hide their loyalty to Israel, headed then as now by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. I argued that it was a mistake to have Jews managing America’s relationships in the Middle East in particular as some of them certainly would experience a conflict of interest that would inevitably not be beneficial to the United States. And, one might add, that in spite of that tie that binds with a foreign government, no pro-Israel group has ever been compelled to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 which would provide some transparency on finances and concerning direct contacts with the Israeli government or its Embassy in Washington.

OK, the big question: Should our country – USA! USA! – return to a place of godliness?

Suddenly the nation’s stewpot of controversy started boiling over, thanks to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito being secretly recorded agreeing with a fake conservative at the Supreme Court Historical Society dinner last week.

The fake conservative – progressive filmmaker Lauren Windsor – managed to snag (and record) a conversation with Alito at the event, in which she lamented she could see no way a conservative Christian could make peace with liberals and their focus ought to be on “winning the moral argument.” They had to “keep fighting” and, ka-wham, “return our country to a place of godliness.”

If we can end, let us say . . . slavery — the legal “ownership” of other human beings — can’t we also end other great social wrongs? Can’t we also end war?

As I ask this question, I am suddenly bludgeoned by an unexpected irony, since the United States ended slavery through a brutal war, with a death toll of perhaps three quarters of a million people.

But it was worth it, right?

Well, that’s what history tells us. It has essentially “made peace” with the war and now celebrates the moral objectives of the winning side, with all its carnage forever reduced to a statistical abstraction.

The topic of this column is the abolition of war — the urgent necessity of doing so — so, how odd it feels to begin by referencing a “good” war, which ended an enormous wrong . . . or at least forced the wrong to morph into a different, less legally blatant form of racism known as Jim Crow. (And when Jim Crow was defeated by the nonviolent civil rights movement a hundred years later, the nation’s racism morphed into such things as the “war on drugs” and an expanding prison-industrial complex.)