Resist Empire

Support TomDispatch
Donate
Tomgram

Clarence Lusane, Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned

Posted on

It should be hard to imagine, but sadly it isn’t. In the next year, almost anything — all too literally — could happen. Donald Trump, that other old man in the room, could indeed go down, thanks to all those McDonald’s and Wendy’s burgers he’s consumed. Or he could be convicted of one or more felonies and lose Republicans unwilling to vote for someone officially labeled a “criminal” (or so some polls tell us might be possible anyway). Unlikely as it might seem right now, he could even lose the Republican nomination to Nikki Haley (though I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one). And of course, he could be beaten next November by Joe Biden or, in turn, Biden could go down in some unexpected (or do I mean expectable?) way, leaving the aging Trump to face a vigorous younger Democrat in 2024. (And in case you’ve noticed all the parentheses in this paragraph, they only emphasize how dauntingly unknown that future of ours remains.)

But regrettably, The Donald could also do just what too many polls of this moment are suggesting and win the presidency for the second time. While ensconced once again in the Oval Office, he would, of course, still find himself embroiled in court cases and wouldn’t be able to pardon himself when it comes to the state charges. If he were convicted, watch out! We already know that, behind (but not so very far behind) the scenes, right-wing think tanks are working at top capacity to create a next-time-around Trumpian government that would be ever more divorced from the democracy we’ve known and ever more autocratic. Its power would, of course, be centered on — yes, Donald Trump! And if so, revenge would be the theme of the day, week, and year.

With that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Clarence Lusane lay out for you just what it would mean for the Trumpublican Party’s slogan to change from Make America Great Again (MAGA!) to Make America Fascist Again (MAFA!) and just how certain aspects of the history of this country would help make such a transformation all too possible. Tom

Make America Fascist Again (MAFA!)

The Future If Donald Trump Returns to the Oval Office

By

On February 19, 1942, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. It initiated a Department of Defense program that resulted in the rounding up and incarceration of about 122,000 individuals of Japanese descent. They were to be placed in federal “relocation centers” that would popularly become known as “internment camps.” As it happened, they were neither. They were prisons set up to house and so violate the civil and human rights of a despised and racially different group defined as "the enemy."

Although that executive order did not, in fact, mention a specific ethnic or racial group, it was clearly understood that the prisons were not being established for citizens or residents of German or Italian descent, the other two nations then at war with the United States. While not a single person of Japanese ancestry was found to have spied on this country or to have committed acts of sabotage against it, pro-Mussolini and pro-Hitler demonstrations, rallies, and propaganda had been commonplace. Before the war, fascist groups had been allowed to organize and spread propaganda from coast to coast. Some even had influence over and alliances with members of Congress, mainstream journalists, and well-known scholars.

Read More
Tomgram

Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox, Three Nations Under God(s)

Posted on

At some level, it’s not complicated. Making civilians, including children, responsible for the acts of a guerrilla group should obviously be considered a crime. And that crime is functionally being supported by my country. In early November, after denouncing the acts of Hamas on October 7th as the crimes that they were, Volker Türk, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, added that “the collective punishment by Israel of Palestinian civilians amounts also to a war crime, as does the unlawful forcible evacuation of civilians.” Unfortunately, the U.N. remains a remarkably powerless organization.

And no less sadly, despite the recent ceasefire in Gaza, ending (however briefly) the killing of civilians at historic rates in our time, little has changed there. Yes, during those ceasefire days, increased amounts of food, fuel, and water were delivered to Gaza to remedy the Israeli decision to cut off more than two million people (almost half of them children) from such essentials, whether they had anything to do with October 7th or not. Still, it remains a horror that what’s largely been delivered to Gazans, including those hundreds of thousands of children, has been disease, starvation, and water that’s unsafe to drink.

People there are now all too literally starving to death. Pregnant women, in particular, find themselves in a hell on earth without functional hospitals or much else, including housing, significant parts of which have been destroyed by Israeli bombing. Meanwhile, the response of President Biden and crew to all of this has essentially been to ignore it and offer ever more support to Israel.

Today, with Israel having resumed its bombardment of Gaza after a week-long truce ended, TomDispatch regulars Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox put this nightmare in a larger international context — of not just the United States but India as well, while reminding us of how key countries have aided and abetted a nightmare of the first order. Tom

The Israel-India-U.S. Triangle

Its Human Toll Will Be Incalculable

By and

In 1981, India’s post office issued a stamp showing the flags of India and occupied Palestine flying side by side above the phrase “Solidarity with the Palestinian people.” That now seems like ancient history. Today, Hindu nationalists are flying the flags of India and Israel side by side as a demonstration of their support for that country's catastrophic war on Gaza.

It’s a match made in heaven (or do we mean hell?), because the two nations have similar “problems” they’re trying to “solve.” Israel has long been engaged in the violent suppression of Palestinians whose lands they occupy (including the current devastation of Gaza, an assault that 34 U.N. experts have labeled a “genocide in the making”). Meanwhile, India’s Hindu nationalist government continues the harsh oppression of its non-Hindu minorities: Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and indigenous people.

Read More
Tomgram

Ariel Dorfman, The Donald (Duck, Not Trump) Chronicle

Posted on

I first posted a piece by Ariel Dorfman at TomDispatch in October 2004 and began my introduction this way: “I met him in the spring of 1980 soon after he arrived in the United States. He had already been in exile from Pinochet’s Chile for seven years. I was an editor at Pantheon Books when one day he swept into my office, tall and exuberant, with his youngest son in a stroller. At the time, I knew his name only because it sat next to that of a man named Armand Mattelart on the cover of How to Read Donald Duck, an account — both Marxist and amusing — the two had written for the Allende government on the impact of Disney comics in the Third World. Soon after we began to talk, he launched into a critique of Babar, the French elephant whose adventures were chronicled for children by Jean de Brunhoff. I was particularly interested because de Brunhoff’s books had been icons of my childhood.”

And we’ve never stopped talking. But when he first walked into my office more than 40 years ago, despite his grim experiences in Chile, I doubt either of us could have imagined the world we now find ourselves in. Yes, he already had plenty to say about Donald Duck (and Walt Disney). But honestly, could we have dreamed of an America in which the other Donald — and you know just who I mean! — had already been this country’s president for four years and now stands a reasonable chance of returning to the White House in 2025 and turning the U.S. into a distinctly authoritarian-style state (with all too much help from various right-wing think tanks)? Only the other day, he stated quite clearly that, if president again, he wouldn’t hesitate to target anyone he considered an opponent with the full power of a transformed state. And given his attitude toward climate change and fossil fuels, he would undoubtedly play a grim role in the further transformation of this planet into a living hell.

In the context of Dorfman’s piece today about Donald Duck and our Disneyesque planet, think of that Donald of “ours” as the ultimate American quackpot.

And in the increasingly flaming world of fire and war we now live in, after you’ve read Dorfman’s article (while you’re at it, don’t miss his remarkable new novel The Suicide Museum), my one piece of advice is, as its title suggests: Duck! Tom

Duck!

Walt Disney and Salvador Allende Are Still Fighting for Our Souls

By

This year marks the anniversaries of two drastically different events that loomed all too large in my life. The first occurred a century ago in Hollywood: on October 16, 1923, Walt Disney signed into being the corporation that bears his name. The second took place in Santiago, Chile, on September 11, 1973, when socialist President Salvador Allende died in a military coup that overthrew his democratically elected government.

Those two disparate occurrences got me thinking about how the anniversaries of a long-dead American who revolutionized popular culture globally and a slain Chilean leader whose inspiring political revolution failed might illuminate -- and I hope you won't find this too startling -- the dilemma that apocalyptic climate change poses to humanity.

Read More