Authoritarians’ Promise Of “Law And Order” Always Translates To Lawlessness At The Top
Human history is a crime scene, and the perps have been, more often than not, men in uniform, often agents of the law, deployed by the political class to carry out their criminal intent. A defining refrain of Adolf Hitler was: “law and order.” Law enforcement entailed the enforcement of authoritarian ideology on the German public. To wit, we are witnessing the MAGA Reich’s ICE jackboot lowered on Minnesota where Trump has sent 13.6% of all ICE agents to Minneapolis, a city that represents .13% of the population of the United States.
The uniformed criminal, Jonathan Ross, committed state-sanctioned murder on Renee Nicole Good. The murderer is the recipient of government protection. Trump administration official dissemblers even have gone so far as to disseminate the photographically debunked fiction that he sustained internal injuries by being struck by the murder victim’s vehicle. A lie that authoritarian suck-ups will continue to parrot despite its repudiated status (as well as enhance his economic well-being by fattening the proceeds flowing into his GoFundMe account(. Said authoritarian ambulatory head wounds (of the psychical kind) who insist the political class be “tough on crime” act as the enablers of official criminality. Moreover, they are often heavily armed and will kill you to prove the righteousness of their system of belief.
In 1920s Italy and Germany, the capitalist class underwrote the activities of Black and Brownshirt fascist thugs before they gained power. The late, fallen hyper-authoritarian Charlie Kirk and his Turning Point USA klavern was/and remains funded by the billionaire class. Donald Trump was mentored in his criminal grift by the fascist enforcer Roy Cohn. The Island of Manhattan was gained by colonialists in a real estate swindle. Trump aims to extend the shakedown operation to Gaza, Greenland, and beyond.
René Magritte – The Menaced Assassin (1927)
Authoritarians promise safety and security only to make safe their own criminal activity thereby securing obscene amounts of ill-gotten wealth for themselves.
Donald Trump regards the Gaza genocide as an opportunity for real estate transactions. Trump has ordered the slaughter at sea of innocent Venezuelan fishermen, kidnapped the nations president and his wife, and he has contrived a shakedown scheme to steal the nation’s oil reserves. He sends fascist Brownshirt adjacent thugs, seething with sadistic intent, into urban streets and innocent people die at their hands.
Are you sleeping more peacefully at night, MAGA loyalist?
How are you feeling about your bloated, cusp of senility man-toddler about now, MAGA denizens? Have your grocery and utility bills and general cost of living been lowered because brown people are being rounded up, shackled, and deported, and a mother was shot in the face by a trigger happy, uniformed thug.
Are you sleeping more peacefully at night, resting in the knowledge that the threat posed by Denmark’s possession of Greenland will soon be remedied by US military force?
Or, perhaps, creeping into your consciousness, is arriving the knowledge, known to those in possession of even a modicum of knowledge of history — who and what will be targeted next by the MAGA Reich?
Fascism is a runaway train of the hyper-authoritarian mind; the death train does not have a dead man’s switch.
History is bearing down on you; the trajectory of fascism is tragedy on a massive scale.
Although I realize MAGA sorehead cruelty is not a byproduct of your cult — it is the point of it. But, in the end, fascism dies ugly and its supporters, from true believers to Good German types, are not spared.
Okay, alright then, members in good standing in the MAGA klavern: Have you noticed who are the targets of ICE rousting? You have, huh?
People you regard as outsiders; people you blame for harming the economy as they are scrambling to make a living in order to continue eating and keep a roof over their heads. Ask yourself this: Has your own daily scramble improved on an economic basis since ICE thugs have been violently rounding up your fellow (darker skinned) scramblers?
Has having these human beings placed in shackles improved your ability to pay your rent and mortgage, have your utility bills and grocery bills been lowered as your wages climb? If you have children, have their prospects for the future brightened?
In Nazi era Germany, so-called “Good Germans” believed the official lies that Jews, socialists, Roma people, and other outsider groups had brought Germany to economic ruin. Hitler et.al. were held in high regard, in particular, after the Third Reich created make-work social programs. Through it all, history regards the German citizenry complicit in the rise of cultural villainy and unmatched, concomitant tragedy to come.
In the case of the present reign of The Trump Reich, the US economy is still in deep decline — and all you are receiving now and will receive in the future will be your (deserved) portion of societal villain status and the coming scorn and condemnation of history being scribed as we speak.
A point of clarification of the moral and ethical kind.
Repressive authoritarians have forsaken their privilege to power when they order armed, uniformed thugs into the streets to deploy tactics of coercion, arrest, and violence to maintain their reign of tyranny. The assertion is true from the cities and towns of Minnesota, to the streets of Tehran, to the West Bank and Gaza.
Yes, it evinces a soul-bereft depravity to act as apologist/denialist of the IDF’s genocidal rampages, continuing to this moment, in Gaza, and then to feign deep, abiding concern over the murder of the innocent in the streets of Iran. Of course, that individual’s hypocrisy should be regarded with derision but it is not cause to dismiss evincing solidarity and affinity, for the vast majority of us who are in positions of powerlessness against the forces of dehumanizing authority, of those jailed, beaten, and gunned down by bully boy regimes, from Jerusalem to Tehran to Washington DC.
The mindset of authoritarians display noxious affinities, the most pervasive being, the compulsion to subdue, even to the point of killing en masse, any and all things they cannot dominate and control. Whether it be Trump’s wit-deficient middle school-grade taunts and insults aimed at anyone who demurs from his demands for perpetual rectal tongue baths to ICE psychopathic killer Jonathan Ross snarling a misogynistic slur (“f*cking b*tch”) after he shot Renee Nicole Good in the face, authoritarians’ malignant rage for domination can never be assuaged.
Deluded that their every self-serving act, vile to outright evil, serves the greater good (which, somehow, is always in perfect alignment with their own compulsions and cravings) – despots and their followers believe they will, in the end, climb into the precincts of heaven upon a mountain of corpses.
Entrenched, entitlement-reeking power will not yield to reason.
As an historical rule, when it dies, it dies ugly. Tragic as it is, the seeds of novel worldviews are seeded in blood. Witnessing blood spilled by the caprice of tyrants can evoke a sacred vehemence in the hearts of those angered and mortified by the sight of the spilled blood of the innocent. We are powerless when imprisoned in isolation. Yet when we become unified in common purpose, they can brutalize, jail, and kill some of us. But not all of us. The only way they overcome us…is by the violence enabled by pervasive silence.
Say aloud the names of the killers and those who dispatched them onto the streets for the purpose of maintaining their illegitimate hold on power.
Novelists’, poets’, and essayists’ mission involves the expansion of awareness, even if it entails challenging cherished verities. Habits of mind must be startled into novelty-resonant awareness by the heart’s longings and the soul’s relentless Angels Of The Impossible. Deep within, we yearn to escape the confinement of ourselves and breathe in and move amid the freedom of air.
The Centauress I 1912 Wyndham Lewis
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” Albert Camus, The Just Assassins
The Great American Lie Machine manufactured and Americans bought.
The US is the land of the free. Kill enough Indians, push ever westward – then we will be free. Inform the people of the Global South they exist as our de facto colonial outposts.
“Venezuela, you are on notice, as if you didn’t know all along: ‘that is our oil cleverly hidden under your soil.’”
Listen up, lost men of America, you possess the freedom to cosplay dress-up in the uniform of the state and you are now free to shoot a mother in the face, and watch your GoFundMe grow fat with freedom dollars donated by jackboot-for-brain shitheels who swoon in admiration for your brand of freedom i.e., the freedom to kill what you cannot control.
Trouble is, once this becomes your concept of freedom — ask the Israeli Defense Force — the killing will have to be endless – because the paradox is, although you have become convinced you have been bestowed with the freedom to kill at will — what you are attempting to kill is un-killable: the spirit of freedom itself.
Hence, the un-killable truth: Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.
Thus you have lost the source of freedom: your own soul, your personal conduit to Anima Mundi, The Soul Of The World.
Freedom is a quality of the soul that one must live for, even risk dying for, but one must free oneself from the noxious notion that acting as an agent of soul-defying structures of power will endow you with freedom.
The era of MAGA, and attendant ICE raids and murders, bottomless greed and shameless, unfettered grifting, and US military shakedown criminality – has torn down the facade and revealed, the nation is ruled and defined by a criminal class of artists of the short con to outright spree killers.
The knowledge of it hurts.
Their intention is to sow fear — to cause us to be ruled by a fear of the world so severe and paralyzing that we lose the ability to love life — regardless of its inherent unmanageability — thus we can only evince fealty to our tormentor/protectors — who insist they can shield us from life’s uncertainty – as, all the while, they exacerbate chaos to an unbearable degree.
Hence our fealty must be to our indomitable hearts – the precincts within wherein we can love beyond our fears thus live in uncertainty. We are called to construct an ethos that endures against their mania to destroy, their contempt for empathy, and their driving animus to kill all they cannot control.
We must teach ourselves to gaze into the heart of darkness of the times without losing heart.
Hope, George Frederic Watts
The post Authoritarians’ Promise Of “Law And Order” Always Translates To Lawlessness At The Top appeared first on CounterPunch.org.