Tuesday, June 13, 2017

OMNI VEGETARIAN ACTION NEWSLETTER #38

OMNI

VEGETARIAN ACTION NEWSLETTER #38

JUNE 14, 2017.

Edited by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology

OMNI’s JUNE VEGETARIAN POTLUCK is Wednesday, JUNE 14, at OMNI, Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology (2^ND Wednesdays). We start eating at 6:00. All are welcome.

You may want to enjoy and discuss some old or new vegetarian or vegan recipes, to talk about healthier food, or you are concerned about cruelty to animals or warming and climate change. Whatever your interest it’s connected to food; whatever your motive, come share vegetarian and vegan food and your views with us in a friendly setting.

If you are new, get acquainted with OMNI’s director, Gladys Tiffany. At OMNI is located at 3274 Lee Avenue parallel to N. College east of the Village Inn and south of Liquor World. More information: 935-4422; 442-4600.

Contents: OMNI Vegetarian Action #38, June 14, 2017

Health, Nutrition, Industrial Agriculture

Industrial Agriculture and Pathogens

Eating (or Not) Fish

Ethics, Industrial Food System, Protection of Animals, Empathy, Compassion, Do No Harm

Vegan Ethics of Compassion, Mark Hawthorne

Nonviolence and Animal Liberation, Cindy Sheehan

Climate Catastrophe From Eating Meat

More Effective Communication

Table of Contents for #37

Health, Nutrition

Farming Pathogens: An Evolutionary Biologist on the Links Between Big Ag and Disease

Industrial agriculture is creating entirely new "agro-environments" for deadly pathogens to thrive.

BY RURAL AMERICA IN THESE TIMES. In These Times newsletter June 10, 2017

THE FISH ON MY PLATE BY JASON BRESLOW, APRIL 25, 2017.

Q&A: Why Paul Greenberg Spent a Year of His Life Eating Fish

Imagine eating fish, every day, for a year. What would that mean for your health?

It’s a question that journalist Paul Greenberg set out to investigate in the new FRONTLINE documentary, The Fish on My Plate.

Greenberg, the best-selling author of American Catch and Four Fish, says this unique one-man study was motivated by a desire to understand which fish are “good for me and good for the planet.”

A lifelong fisherman, Greenberg began casting lines with his father when he was just five years old. From a young age, he says, he began to understand that overfishing carried far-reaching environmental implications.

Today, more than four decades later, global fish consumption is at an all-time high, with growing demand increasingly depleting natural fisheries. As Greenberg notes, “We’re producing about 80 to 90 million metric tons of wild seafood every year from the ocean … that is equivalent to the human weight of China.” Fish farming — or aquaculture — is helping to fill the void, yet critics say the practice creates more problems than it solves.

Ahead of the April 24 premiere of The Fish on My Plate, we spoke with Greenberg about lessons learned from his year of eating fish, why he says “we’re going to have to change the kinds of seafood that we eat,” and why he calls the omega-3s found in fish oil the “Forrest Gump” of molecules. Here’s what he had to say. MORE http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/the-fish-on-my-plate/

Ethics, Protection of Animals, Empathy, Compassion, Do No Harm

Mark Hawthorne, A Vegan Ethic

Embracing a Life of Compassion Toward All. Changemakers, 2016.

http://markhawthorne.com/project/a-vegan-ethic/

Veganism is a journey, and A Vegan Ethic explores veganism as an infinite model of social justice.

“If veganism is about doing your best to not harm any sentient life, we must logically extend that circle of compassion to human animals as well,” writes Mark Hawthorne in this practical, engaging guide to veganism and animal rights. Along with proven advice for going and staying vegan, an overview of animal exploitation, and answers to common questions about ethical eating (such as “Isn’t ‘humane meat’ a good option?” and “Don’t plants feel pain?”), A Vegan Ethic draws on the work and experiences of intersectional activists to examine how all forms of oppression - including racism, sexism, ableism, and speciesism - are connected by privilege, control, and economic power. By recognizing how social justice issues overlap, we can develop collaborative strategies for finding solutions.

Mark talks about living as a vegan and his book at https://youtu.be/EXqEjUNqsOw

Reviewed in VegNews Magazine on Jul 1 2016.

REVIEWS & ENDORSEMENTS

As a vegetarian transitioning to a vegan lifestyle I found A Vegan Ethic extremely thought provoking, informative & comprehensive. The book goes so much further than dealing with diet & animal cruelty. The author, Mark Hawthorn also covers human rights and equality issues... something I hadn't really considered as part of my vegan transition. It has inspired me not only to stop eating the few animal products I occasionally consume (eggs, cheese, butter & honey) but to also be mindful about how & where my plant based foods come from. I would certainly recommend A Vegan Ethic to anyone who is interested in raising their awareness of cruelty & exploitation to all living creatures (non-human & human). ~ Ali Thornett, Top 200 Amazon Reviewer

MORE http://www.changemakers-books.com/books/vegan-ethic

Cindy Sheehan’s SOAPBOX, May 30, 2017: Veganism and the need for animal liberation, Non-violence and its extension into our diets.

On the soapbox this week Cindy speaks with committed animal liberation and environmental activist Bob Linden. Bob speaks with Cindy about non violence against animals and the planet in the form of veganism- abstaining from eating anything that comes from the exploitation of animals.

Audio interview here: http://cindysheehanssoapbox.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-people-speak-w-cindy-sheehan-bob.html

Climate Catastrophe, Carnivorism, Corporate/Industrial Food System

(At May Vegetarian Potluck we showed the new film What the Health! created by the makers of Cowspiracy. Info: http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2017/05/omni-vegetarian-action-newsletter-37.html )

MenuScientific Amer

ican

Guest Blog

People Still Don't Get the Link between Meat Consumption and Climate Change By Annick de Witt. Scientific American, April 11, 2016. SUBSCRIBE

A new kind of messaging could make it easier to appreciate the enormous benefits of moving away from a meat-heavy diet

Credit: Westend61/Getty Images

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Over the last decade or so, the media have slowly but steadily fed the public information about the staggering impact of our meat-eating habits on the environment, and on climate change in particular. For instance, one recent study found that a global transition toward low-meat diets could reduce the costs of climate change mitigation by as much as 50 percent by 2050. From scientific reports and articles in magazines, to viral Facebook videos to documentaries like Cowspiracy and Meat the Truth, the news about the exorbitant contribution of a carnivorous to the greenhouse problem is clearly spreading.

However, despite all these messages, new research by my colleagues and myself shows that most people are still not aware of the full extent of meat’s climate impacts. We examined how citizens in America and the Netherlands assess various food and energy-related options for tackling climate change. We presented representative groups of more than 500 people in both countries with three food-related options (eat less meat; eat local and seasonal produce; and eat organic produce) and three energy-related options (drive less; save energy at home; and install solar panels). We asked them whether they were willing to make these changes in their own lives, and whether they already did these things. While a majority of the surveyed people recognized meat reduction as an effective option for addressing climate change, the outstanding effectiveness of this option, in comparison to the other options, was only clear to 6% of the US population, and only 12% of the Dutch population.

That is remarkably low! Considering that climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time, wouldn’t we want people to know the power of a simple solution that is in their own hands?

In terms of communication efforts for behavioral change, the outstanding effectiveness of reducing meat consumption could be a game-changer: knowing that it makes such a big difference may motivate people to change. This is particularly so, because the research results also show a direct relationship between this knowledge and people’s willingness to consume less meat as well as their actual meat consumption. So knowledge does seem to be power, in this case.

However, to put that last finding in perspective, this may not be a causal relationship. People who already eat less meat may be more open to hear and retain information on the climate impacts of meat, while people who eat lots of meat may be more inclined to deny or downplay it. That is, behaviors may inform knowledge as much as knowledge informs behavior. And as many studies have shown, although knowledge is an important aspect of behavioral change, it alone is rarely enough for people to change their lifestyles. Changing behaviors as intimate and culturally engrained as people’s daily dietary habits therefore demands a careful consideration of the psychological and cultural dynamics at play.

Currently, most communications around meat and climate change are in the category of ‘the pointing finger’, thereby creating guilt, shame, and stigmatization among committed carnivores, and activating psychological mechanisms of denial and downplay. Stating that eating meat is ‘bad’ therefore doesn’t seem to work that well.

However, for people who already identify as environmentalists, this strategy can be very effective. They tend to embrace this message, especially if the finger is pointed at an external other they are suspicious of (e.g., ‘the capitalist system’, ‘the meat-industry’). We see this in the success of Cowspiracy, which readily convinced countless people to ‘go vegan.’ Many of these people have a postmodern worldview, are aligned with environmental values, and are suspicious of the corporate influences in our economic system ~ so the message is easy to digest.

However, if these communications are hoping to convince the rest of the population, we urgently need to move beyond finger pointing tactics. This counts particularly for people with more traditional and modern worldviews, who generally don’t identify as environmentalists or hold strong green values. Perhaps this is the reason environmental organizations have been remarkably silent on the issue of meat consumption, and why the topic is still often lacking in discussions on climate change. Since we haven’t quite figured out how to communicate it in a non-paternalistic, non-judgmental way, most institutions stay away from meddling in affairs as personal as what is on one’s plate.

We seem to be in dire need of an inspiring and empowering narrative about climate change and the impact of our diets. The good thing is, the situation around meat is empowering, as it puts the power back in our own hands (and mouths). We are not at the mercy of the system, but have substantial influence ourselves. Likewise, it is that the most effective way by far for individuals to do their part tends to also lead to better health, weight control, creativity in the kitchen, and animal welfare. While environmental behaviors often involve sacrifices, the meat-reduction option offers a range of personal benefits.

According to a 2015 Chatham House Report “Changing climate, changing diets”, people in industrialized countries consume on average around twice as much meat as experts deem healthy. In the US the multiple is nearly three times. Adoption of a healthy diet would therefore generate over a quarter of the emission reductions needed by 2050! The invitation for people is thus not to give up their delicious steak and become vegetarian (something they may consider ‘extreme’), but rather to do something that serves themselves: eat a little less meat and get healthier. Become ‘flexatarian’, as people call this new trend. For a world that is also struggling with obesity and many other health problems, the news couldn’t be better; address two massive problems for the efforts of one.

In addition, this meat-reduction option fits seamlessly with an era in which the ‘consciousness movement’ increasingly influences mainstream culture. People pay more attention to the origins of their food, value their connection with nature, and generally show more concern for their health and well-being, including food habits and body awareness. We see this for example in the countless yoga studios popping up in big cities, the 'hipness' of organic food, the super foods that are nowadays also found in conventional supermarkets, and struggling fast food corporations like MacDonald’s. It also resonates with the ubiquitous search for 'balance'. This means that the cultural evolution of society is moving in the right direction: we have the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, working in favor of us.

This is of crucial importance. As many authors have argued, the greatest potential for a shift towards sustainable lifestyles is through a change in culture and worldview—a shift in assumptions about human nature, our relationship with the (natural) world around us, and our aspirations for the ‘good life’. Food touches on social habits and norms; plays a role in mediating power and status; is often key to social participation and acceptance; and is expressive of collective values and identity. Consumption and lifestyles therefore tend to be shaped more by people collectively than individually. The most effective strategies thus engage people in groups, and give them opportunities to develop their understanding and narratives about food in dialog together.

One of my master students, Lena Johanning, translated this idea by developing postcards that humorously depict "flexitarian" superheroes on the front, with an invitation for a veggie dinner on the back, coupled with some amazing fact about meat and climate change. In that way, she framed plant-based dinners not only as environmentally effective, but also as fun and social, an opportunity for people to get together and explore.

Concept by Lena Johanning, design by Rutger Cox

Developing a range of approaches, including framing plant-based dinners around creative cooking and the deliciousness of vegetables, around the health and weight loss benefits, or around what it means for animals and our connection with nature, could be an effective way to speak to a wide range of people. Although no studies have been done to scientifically examine such approaches, considering what is at stake, it is certainly worth the experiment. Then, policy makers and environmental organizations can start to tap into and reinforce the changing culture and Zeitgeist. In that way, the change can start to accelerate, supporting us to collectively get better at creating the world we want.

References:

De Boer, Joop, De Witt, Annick, & Aiking, Harry. (2016). Help the climate, change your diet: A cross-sectional study on how to involve consumers in a transition to a low-carbon society. Appetite, 98, 19-27.

Michaelis, Laurie. (2007). Consumption behavior and narratives about the good life. In S. C. Moser & L. Dilling (Eds.), Creating a Climate for Change. Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Contents: Vegetarian Action Newsletter #37, May 10, 2017

http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2017/05/omni-vegetarian-action-newsletter-37.html

Vegan Poetry

Dr Ravi P Bhatia. Seeking Peace in Vegetarianism

Health, Nutrition

VegNews each number packed with articles, recipes, ads for products about veg/vegan food.

What the Health! New film about meat eating/carnivorism vs. health.

Marta Zaraska. “Vegetable Regimen Can Aid Weight Loss, Researchers Show.” NADG (March 27, 2017).

Masterson, “Science, Not Emotion.” NADG (April 29, 2017). Vs. CAFOs.

Protection of Animals, Compassion

Wayne Pacelle. The Humane Economy: How Innovators and Enlightened Consumers Are Transforming the Lives of Animals. From the Humane Society of the United States. Dolores Proubasta, “Lawmakers Target Free Speech to Protect Industry.”NADG (3-17-17). Arkansas’”Ag-gag” Bill.

Brian Bolton. Evangelicals Inconsistent on Animal Care. Freethought Today · March 2017.

https://ffrf.org/publications/freethought-today/item/28877-evangelicals-inconsistent-on-animal-care-by-brian-bolton

Chicago Tribune Editorial. “Attacking Animal Cruelty.” NADG (May 8, 2017).

OMNI Vegetarian Newsletter (October 2017)

Hawthorne, A Vegan Ethic

PETA Global (Spring 2017)

Climate, Carnivorism

Bourdain, Documentary Wasted! The Story of Food Waste

Climate and Eating Meat Google Search, May 2, 2017.

Monday, June 5, 2017

OMNI TOTALITARIAN, FASCISM NEWSLETTER #3

OMNI

NEWSLETTER ON FASCISM, TOTALITARIANISM USA #3, June 5, 2017

Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace and Justice

(#1 Jan. 10, 2012; #2 April 17, 2014)

http://omnicenter.org/donate/

What’s at stake: See Newsletters on Bill of Rights, Capitalism, Civil Liberties, Corporations, Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Money, Nationalism, National Security State, Permanent War, Presidential Power, Consequences of Wars, Checks and Balances of Powers USA,

Q: Will US bulwarks of freedom, equality, and democracy (Bill of Rights, etc.) prevent fascism? Or has money and our economic system already defeated democracy from within?

CONTENTS: US FASCISM, TOTALITARIANISM #3

History

John Broich, “How the U.S. Press Normalized Mussolini and Hitler”: Journalists didn’t recognize the threat until too late.

Roberto, “The Origins of American Fascism”: “The question now is whether Trump and his circle of ultra-nationalist fanatics, Wall Street barons, generals, and assorted political hacks can engineer an American-style Gleichschaltung, ‘bringing into line. . . ‘.”

From Google 6-3-17:

examples of fascism in america

fascism defined

basic principles of fascism

what is fascism in simple terms

fascism characteristics

fascism for dummies

Novels about US Fascism, Totalitarianism

Google Search, 6-3-17 (first page only, keep on clicking next)

It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis [and Donald Trump], Google Search, 6-3-17

Trump’s Totalitarianism, Neofascism

“This Is Not Populism.” Monthly Review 69 no. 2 (June 2017). (Also see his earlier essays: Foster and Gregory Meyerson. “Fascism and the Crisis of Pax Americana.” Socialism and Democracy 22, no. 2 (2008). Neofascism in the White House.” Monthly Review 68, no. 11 (April 2017).)

Donald Trump and Fascism, Google Search, 6-3-17

3 Essays from In These Times Newsletter JUNE 3, 2017 ON STRUCTURAL OBSTACLES TO PROGRESSIVE POLITICS, DANGER OF CONSITUTIONAL CONVENTION, NEED FOR ANTIFASCIST MOVEMENT.

Sloan Poem, To the Protectors

Earlier Newsletters on Totalitarianism in US

http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2012/01/fascism-usa.html

http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2014/04/

HISTORY OF US FASCISM

John Broich, “How the U.S. Press Normalized Mussolini and Hitler.” Peace in Our Times (Spring 2917).

4 V3N2—Spring 2017 Peace in Our Times • peaceinourtimes.org “Journalists didn’t recognize the threat of fascism until it was already too late.” MORE [DB1] http://www.classwars.org/PeaceTimesSpring2017.pdf

Yet some journalists, like Hemingway, and journals, like The New Yorker, rejected the normalization of anti-democratic Mussolini. John Gunther of Harper’s, meanwhile, wrote a razor-sharp account of Mussolini’s masterful manipulation of a U.S. press that couldn’t resist him.

The ‘German Mussolini’

Mussolini’s success in Italy normalized Hitler’s success in the eyes of the American press which, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, routinely called him “the German Mussolini.” Given Mussolini’s positive press reception in that period, it was a good place from which to start. Hitler also had the advantage that his Nazi party enjoyed stunning leaps at the polls from the mid ’20s to early ’30s, going from a fringe party to winning a dominant share of parliamentary seats in free elections in 1932.

But the main way that the press defanged Hitler was by portraying him as something of a joke. He was a “nonsensical” screecher of “wild words” whose appearance, according to Newsweek, “suggests Charlie Chaplin.” His “countenance is a caricature.” He was as “voluble” as he was “insecure,” stated Cosmopolitan.

When Hitler’s party won influence in parliament, and even after he was made chancellor of Germany in 1933—about a year and a half before seizing dictatorial power—many American press outlets judged that he would either be outplayed by more traditional politicians or that he would have to become more moderate. Sure, he had a following, but his followers were “impressionable voters” duped by “radical doctrines and quack remedies,” claimed The Washington Post. Now that Hitler actually had to operate within a government, the “sober” politicians would “submerge” this movement, according to The New York Times and Christian Science Monitor. A “keen sense of dramatic instinct” was not enough. When it came time to govern, his lack of “gravity” and “profundity of thought” would be exposed.

In fact, The New York Times wrote after Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship that success would only “let him expose to the German public his own futility.” Journalists wondered whether Hitler now regretted leaving the rally for the cabinet meeting, where he would have to assume some responsibility.

Yes, the American press tended to condemn Hitler’s well-documented anti-Semitism in the early 1930s. But there were plenty of exceptions. Some papers downplayed reports of violence against Germany’s Jewish citizens as propaganda like that which proliferated during the foregoing world war. Many, even those who categorically condemned the violence, repeatedly declared it to be at an end, showing a tendency to look for a return to normalcy.

Journalists were aware that they could only criticize the German regime so much and maintain their access. When a CBS broadcaster’s son was beaten up by brownshirts for not saluting the Führer, he didn’t report it. When the Chicago Daily News’ Edgar Mowrer wrote that Germany was becoming “an insane asylum” in 1933, the Germans pressured the State Department to rein in American reporters. Allen Dulles, who eventually became director of the CIA, told Mowrer he was “taking the German situation too seriously.” Mowrer’s publisher then transferred him out of Germany in fear of his life.

By the later 1930s, most U.S. journalists realized their mistake in underestimating Hitler or failing to imagine just how bad things could get (though there remained infamous exceptions, like Douglas Chandler, who wrote a loving paean to “Changing Berlin” for National Geographic in 1937).

Dorothy Thompson, who judged Hitler a man of “startling insignificance” in 1928, realized her mistake by mid-decade when she, like Mowrer, began raising the alarm.

“No people ever recognize their dictator in advance,” she reflected in 1935. “He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will.” Applying the lesson to the United States, she wrote, “When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”

John Broich is an Associate Professor of History at Case Western Reserve University. He has written on environmental history, the history of race and empire, Royal Navy history, and WWII history. This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Roberto, Michael Joseph. “The Origins of American Fascism.” Monthly Review (June 2017).

Home › 2017 › Volume 69, Issue 02 (June 2017) › The Origins of American Fascism

Dear Reader, we make this and other articles available for free online to serve those unable to afford or access the print edition of Monthly Review. If you read the magazine online and can afford a print subscription, we hope you will consider purchasing one. Please visit the MR store for subscription options. Thank you very much. —Eds.

https://monthlyreview.org/2017/06/01/the-origins-of-american-fascism/

Cover photo from David Renton's Fascism: Theory and Practice.

Michael Joseph Roberto formerly taught history at North Carolina. His book tentatively titled The Coming of the American Behemoth, forthcoming from Monthly Review Press.

Donald Trump’s presidency marks the most acute stage of the protracted crisis of U.S. imperial hegemony and its trajectory toward neofascism. The president, his closest advisers, and some key cabinet members are now promoting an openly racist, xenophobic, and nationalist ideology. As John Bellamy Foster has noted, none of this is new to right-wing politics. But he is right to argue that the scale and intensity of recent attacks on immigrants, women’s rights, LGBTQ people, environmentalists, and workers signal a qualitative ideological break with the mainstream of liberal capitalist democracy. The question now is whether Trump and his circle of ultra-nationalist fanatics, Wall Street barons, generals, and assorted political hacks can engineer an American-style Gleichschaltung, “bringing into line” the rest of the executive, the judiciary, the military, and the media behind Trump’s agenda “To Make America Great Again.”¹

Following Samir Amin’s analysis of fascism’s revival in contemporary capitalism, Foster places Trump’s neofascism in a larger historical context, pointing out key differences between the “classic” German fascism of the interwar period and the neofascism of our own time. He also finds important parallels. Both forms of fascism arose at crisis points in the history of world capitalism: Germany in the 1930s was an advanced industrial nation-state crippled by the Great Depression; and the United States today (despite its unrivaled destructive power) appears increasingly as a moribund capitalist empire sapped by persistent stagnation at home and challenged abroad by the rise of China and rival imperialist blocs. Foster thus confirms others’ characterization of contemporary U.S. neofascism not as a historical accident, but as a slow-building structural crisis, one that could very well become a crisis of class rule itself.²

Most importantly for my analysis, Foster cites a 1952 exchange between Marxist economist Paul Baran and MR founding editor Paul Sweezy, in which both agreed that fascism was one political form in the monopoly-imperialist phase of capitalism, making it difficult to recognize the precise “jumping [off] place” between liberal democracy and fascism. Following Baran and Sweezy, Foster sees this break at the point when a “severe crisis threatens property relations.” This is the back story that explains Hitler’s rise to power. Comparably, Trump’s neofascism is the outcome of a protracted crisis that marks our own qualitative break from neoliberalism. MORE

https://monthlyreview.org/2017/06/01/the-origins-of-american-fascism/

What can a class analysis tell us about fascism’s national particularities and early forms? Why was there no mass movement for a separate fascist party in the United States? The lessons of several now-forgotten works of scholarship from the 1930s are critical to our understanding of American fascism—not only for what they tell us about its history, but also about how to fight it today.… | more…

MORE https://monthlyreview.org/2017/06/01/the-origins-of-american-fascism/

[Here is the final paragraph:]

But who is really in charge? On the basis of its particular development in the United States, the American Gleichschaltung seems more likely to be a collaboration than a dictatorship—a collective undertaking by those who administer Republican control at all levels of government.³² Though many of the leading figures of financial capital backed Hillary Clinton, these same members of the 1 percent now stand to benefit from the new administration’s attacks on all forms of economic regulation and intervention, as already suggested by the “Trump wave” buoying global stock markets. At long last, the split in the ruling class that in the 1930s characterized the struggle between the progressive Roosevelt faction and the fascist monopolists appears to have been resolved in favor of the latter.³³

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Novels about US Fascism, Totalitarianism

Google Search, 6-3-17 (first page only)

How is America going to end? Five steps to totalitarian rule.

www.slate.com/articles/news_and.../the.../how_is_america_going_to_end_2.html

Aug 6, 2009 - As Hitler and Mussolini prepared to storm Europe, fascism began to generate interest in the United States. In Sinclair Lewis' 1935 novel, It Can't ...

Nine Must-Read Books in the Age of Donald Trump - Newsweek

www.newsweek.com/nine-must-read-books-age-donald-trump-520589

Nov 13, 2016 - Nine Must-Read Books in the Age of Donald Trump ... The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt: Arendt was a Jewish intellectual and ... American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America By Chris Hedges: ...

'It will be called Americanism': the US writers who imagined a fascist ...

https://www.theguardian.com › Arts › Books › George Orwell

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It Can't Happen Here - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can%27t_Happen_Here

It Can't Happen Here is a semi-satirical 1935 political novel by American author Sinclair Lewis, and a 1936 play adapted from the novel by Lewis and John C. Moffitt. Published during the rise of fascism in Europe, the novel describes the rise .... of fascism and totalitarianism in terms of traditional American political models ...

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Books shelved as totalitarianism: 1984 by George Orwell, Animal Farm by George Orwell, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, ...

George Orwell's Letter On Why He Wrote '1984' - The Daily Beast www.thedailybeast.com/george-orwells-letter-on-why-he-wrote-1984

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It Can’t Happen Here [and Donald Trump] by Sinclair Lewis, Google Search, 6-3-17

It Can't Happen Here - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can%27t_Happen_Here

It Can't Happen Here is a semi-satirical 1935 political novel by American author Sinclair Lewis, and a 1936 play adapted from the novel by Lewis and John C.

‎Plot summary · ‎Reception · ‎Adaptations · ‎Legacy

Happen Here is the only one of Sinclair Lewis's later novels to match the ...

Reading the Classic Novel That Predicted Trump - The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/.../classic-novel-that-predicted-trump-sinclar-lewis-it-cant-hap...

Jan 17, 2017 - Doremus Jessup, the protagonist of Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel “It Can't Happen Here,” sees something dark and terrible brewing in American ...

Getting Close to Fascism with Sinclair Lewis's “It Can't Happen Here ...

www.newyorker.com/.../getting-close-to-fascism-with-sinclair-lewiss-it-cant-happen-h...

Oct 19, 2016 - Alexander Nazaryan writes about a stage adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's “It Can't Happen Here” in the context of Donald Trump's Presidential ...

4 Sinclair Lewis Novels More Relevant Than 'It Can't Happen Here ...

www.weeklystandard.com/4-sinclair-lewis-novels...it-cant-happen-here/.../2006586

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It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis — Reviews, Discussion ...

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Rating: 3.8 - ‎6,310 votes

The only one of Sinclair Lewis's later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith,It Can't Happen Here is a cautionary tale about the ...

How does Donald Trump stack up against American literature's ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../how-does-donald-trump-stack-up-against-american-...

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TRUMP’S NEOFASCISM

Three Essays by John Bellamy Foster

Foster and Gregory Meyerson. “Fascism and the Crisis of Pax Americana.” Socialism and Democracy 22, no. 2 (2008).

“Neofascism in the White House.” Monthly Review 68, no. 11 (April 2017).

“This Is Not Populism.” Monthly Review 69 no. 2 (June 2017).

MONTHLY REVIEW

AN INDEPENDENT SOCIALIST MAGAZINE

Home › 2017 › Volume 69, Issue 02 (June 2017) › This Is Not Populism

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REVIEW OF THE MONTH

This Is Not Populism

by John Bellamy Foster (the editor of Monthly Review).

I am concerned with power politics—that is to say, I make use of all means that seem to me to be of service, without the slightest concern for the proprieties or for codes of honor. —Adolf Hitler1

The rise of Donald Trump to president of the United States is commonly thought to represent the triumph of “right-wing populism,” or simply “populism.”2 The term populism is notoriously difficult to define, since lacking any definite substantive content. It is used in the dominant discourse to refer to any movement that appeals to “the people,” while attacking “the elites.”3 In the United States, populism has a much older history associated with the great agrarian revolt of the late nineteenth century.4 But today the concept primarily has to do with the growth in Europe, and more recently in the United States, of so-called right-wing populism—and only secondarily with what are labeled left-wing populist movements, such as Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, or Occupy in the United States.

Right-wing populism is a euphemism introduced into the European discussion in the last few decades to refer to movements in the “fascist genus” (fascism/neofascism/post-fascism), characterized by virulently xenophobic, ultra-nationalist tendencies, rooted primarily in the lower-middle class and relatively privileged sections of the working class, in alliance with monopolistic capital.5 This can be seen in the National Front in France, the Northern League in Italy, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, the UK Independence Party, the Sweden Democrats, and similar parties and movements in other advanced capitalist countries.6

The same basic phenomenon has now triumphed in the United States, in the form of Trump’s rise to chief executive. Yet mainstream commentary has generally avoided the question of fascism or neofascism in this context, preferring instead to apply the vaguer, safer notion of populism. This is not just because of the horrific images of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust that the term fascist evokes, or because it has been increasingly used as an all-purpose term of political abuse. Rather, the liberal mainstream’s aversion to the neofascist designation arises principally from the critique of capitalism that any serious engagement with this political phenomenon would entail. As Bertolt Brecht asked in 1935: “How can anyone tell the truth about Fascism, unless he is willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth?”7

In today’s political context, it is crucial to understand not only how the failures of neoliberalism give rise to neofascism, but also to connect these developments to the structural crisis of monopoly-finance capital—that is, to the regime of concentrated, financialized, and globalized capitalism. Only based on such a thoroughgoing historical critique is it possible to conceive the necessary forms of resistance. MORE https://monthlyreview.org/2017/06/01/this-is-not-populism/

The New Barbarism

As indicated above, the White House has been the site of competing allegiances: responses to the interests of monopoly-finance capital on one side, and to Trump’s lower-middle class base on the other. While there is no doubt that the administration will ultimately prioritize the former over the latter, betraying its claims to populism, to retain any credibility with its base the White House nonetheless must perform an elaborate dance—promoting the interests of the corporate rich, while distancing itself from the upper-middle-class professional strata so loathed by Trump’s supporters.53 His policies must give “expression” to lower-middle class interests and, to some extent, working-class demands—even if these are not to be realized.54 The political and strategic constellation represented by Bannon, Breitbart, and the Mercers is therefore vital.

Hence, the neofascist strategy that marks the Trump White House thus far is likely to continue, incorporating both the alt-right and plutocratic factions. Upon entering the White House, Trump immediately raised up representatives of the alt-right, who had been key to his campaign. Here the role of Bannon, still Trump’s chief strategist, and the main link to Breitbart, remains central. Ideologically the alt-right relies on the ideas of thinkers such as Evola, Dugin, and Oswald Spengler (the influential early twentieth-century German historian and author of The Decline of the West).55 Bannon has demonstrated considerable acquaintance with Evola’s work, professing admiration for Evola’s “traditionalism…particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism” and the expansion of white-European cultural sovereignty. For Bannon, the right’s global struggle is to be seen in terms of a renewal of the historic war of the “Judeo-Christian West” against Islam, now extended to include the national-cultural exclusion of non-white immigrants into Europe and the United States.56

A crucial part of the streamlined neofascist appeal that Bannon imparted early on to the Trump campaign and then carried over to the White House is geared to economic nationalism. Bannon argues that “the globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia.” This points to a kind of empire in reverse, where working-class, white Americans, who formerly benefitted from unrivaled U.S. hegemony in the world economy, are now seeing their jobs taken away by Asians, while they are being flooded by “illegal” Latino immigrants, and by refugees from Middle East countries dominated by “radical Islamic terrorists.” Crony capitalists, financiers on the take, and liberal globalists are all to blame. Trump, Bannon, Breitbart, and the alt-right rely heavily on racially coded language (or dog whistles) as signals to reach their more militant, white supporters, who are encouraged to see immigrants, refugees, and non-white populations generally as constituting a combined economic and cultural threat.57

The racial strategy can be seen in Bannon’s repeated references metaphorically to the Camp of the Saints. This is the title of a novel by French writer Jean Raspail; undoubtedly one of the most racist works of its kind ever published. In 1975, when the book was translated into English, the usually staid Kirkus Reviews wrote that “the publishers are presenting The Camp of the Saints as a major event, and it probably is, in much the same sense that Mein Kampf was a major event.” This rabidly racist novel depicts an invasion by 800,000 “wretched creatures,” refugees on the derelict Last Chance Armada, who seek to take over France, as a beachhead into white Europe, “the camp of the saints.” Meanwhile hordes of Chinese threaten Russia, a French cruise ship has been seized in Manila, and barricades have been erected by whites around black ghettos in New York. The title comes from St. John’s Revelation (20:9): “And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from the God of heaven, and devoured them.” From page 1 on the book is full of murder, rape, carnage, atrocities, and the most extreme forms of racism, reducing people to body parts: with severed (racially signified) body parts strewn everywhere. Its cover advertises it as “the apocalyptic, controversial, bestselling novel about the end of the white world.” It is intended to generate the emotional, subintellectual basis, in Evola’s terms, for unutterable violence—directed not just at Asians but at all non-white races, who are seen as racial threats.58

The Camp of the Saints has been taken up by the alt-right as a kind of racist code. For Bannon, it refers to refugees flooding from the Middle East and Africa into Europe. As he declared in 2015, “It’s been almost a Camp of the Saints-type invasion into Central and then Western and Northern Europe.” A year later, he stated: “The whole thing in Europe is all about immigration. It’s a global issue today—this kind of global Camp of the Saints.”59 After pointedly alluding to the Camp of the Saints in an interview with Jeff Sessions—now U.S. Attorney General, who Bannon has described as “one of the intellectual, moral leaders of this populist, nationalist movement in this country”—Bannon asked: “Do you believe the elites in this country have the backbone, have the belief in the underlying principles of the Judeo-Christian West to actually win this war [against immigrants, refugees and Islam]?” Sessions answered, “I’m worried about that.”60 Others have taken this up as well. Iowa GOP Congressman Steve King, referred in a radio interview in March 2017 to the possibility of race wars in the United States today, strongly recommending that people read The Camp of Saints in this context.61

Trumpism is rife on a daily basis with racism, misogyny, and extreme nationalism. Bannon and Breitbart refer coyly to the alt-right movement as one made up of “working-class hobbits”—a term for its “forgotten” white, lower-middle class/working-class adherents. This refers back to a negative reference by Arizona Republican Senator John McCain to Tea Party “hobbits.”62 Bannon took it up as an ironic term, standing for Trump’s hardcore constituency. In doing so, though, he was undoubtedly aware of the earlier neofascist “Hobbit Camps” that had been formed in Italy, with a similar meaning. Indeed, the U.S. alt-right, as represented by Breitbart, could be described today as a toxic mixture of European neofascism, U.S. white supremacism, and Christian fundamentalism.

The Trump phenomenon draws on some of the most sordid aspects of U.S. past, including genocide (of Native Americans), slavery, Jim Crow, and imperialism. Of all U.S. presidents, the one that is seen by Bannon (and by Trump himself) as most closely related to the new resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is Andrew Jackson—ostensibly because of the popular-democratic upsurge associated with him, and his attack on the Bank of the United States; but also undoubtedly because of his wealthy slaveholder status, his gruesome role in the Indian Wars, and his government’s forcible removal of the Eastern tribes in the Trail of Tears. Trump declared in an interview in April 2017 that if Jackson had still been alive (he died sixteen years before the Confederate forces opened fire on Fort Sumter) and presumably had been president, he would have prevented the Civil War—an absurd statement doubtless meant as a dog whistle to his alt-right, white supremacist supporters, who idealize the slave South and the Confederacy.63

Trump’s own outlook and ambitions intersect ideologically with the alt-right as his 2011 book, Tough Times: Make America Great Again, shows. Trump declared on the campaign trail that “the only important thing is the unification of the people—because the other people don’t mean anything.”64 Nevertheless, the owner of Trump Tower in Manhattan represents monopoly-finance capital, first and foremost. Indeed, Trump’s attacks on “crony capitalism” and his calls for “draining the swamp” are belied by the billionaires and lobbyists that he has brought into his administration, and the cronyism which is everywhere visible, starting with his own family and extending to the special access to the president given to those ultra-wealthy interests who belong to his Mar-a-Lago Golf Club.65

The neofascist thrust of the Trump White House can be seen in those chosen to occupy key, strategic roles. An example of this is Curtis Ellis, a member of Trump’s beachhead transition team, appointed as special assistant to the Secretary of Labor. Ellis, a Breitbart author, wrote an article in May 2016 for the World News Daily called “The Radical Left’s Ethnic Cleansing of America.” In this article, which was to be celebrated by Bannon and featured on Breitbart, Ellis argued that, for the globalist left “the death (literally) of white working people is a desired outcome, a feature not a bug….The death of American working-class whites was planned by the radical left and carried out with willing executioners at the highest levels of American politics, academia and business.”66 Such nationalistic-racist views aimed at the left and at non-white populations were strongly encouraged by Trump in his campaign for the presidency, and his actions since coming into office.

Trumponomics and the Crisis of the U.S. Political Economy

“The neoliberal era in the United States,” Cornel West had declared, “ended with a neofascist bang.”67 Neoliberalism was itself a ruling-class response to the deepening economic stagnation of the capitalist economy, as the quarter-century of prosperity from the late 1940s through the early 1970s broke down. Needing a stimulus, the U.S. economy resorted first in the Reagan period to military spending and tax cuts, but soon benefitted more fundamentally from the long decline in interest rates (the so-called Greenspan put), which fed a period of vast debt-credit expansion and what Paul Sweezy called “the financialization of the capital accumulation process.”68 The result was a bubble economy that continued into the Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies, then came to a sudden end with the bursting of the housing bubble and the subsequent crisis of 2007–09. Trillions of dollars were poured into corporate coffers in an attempt to “bail out” defaulting financial institutions, as well as heavily indebted non-financial corporations. The subsequent economic recovery has been one of sluggish growth or secular stagnation—a period of “endless crisis.”69

Everywhere neoliberalism has come to stand for policies of austerity, financial speculation, globalization, income polarization, and corporate cronyism, creating what Michael Yates has called “The Great Inequality.”70 “Across the advanced economies,” Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato write, “the share of GDP going to labor fell by 9 percent on average between 1980 and 2007…. In the United States, between 1975 and 2012, the top 1 percent gained around 47 percent of the total increase in incomes.”71 Wealth inequality has increased even faster. In 1963, the average wealth of families in the ninety-ninth percentile in the United States was six times that of wealth holders in the fiftieth percentile; in 2013, it was twelve times.72

All of this has been accompanied by the erosion of U.S. hegemony in the world economy; the growth of a new imperialism based on the global labor arbitrage (taking advantage of wage differentials between the global North and South); the changing role of manufacturing and investment in the context of the digital revolution; and neoliberal attacks on labor. These factors have enormously undermined the position of the working population in the United States, while also intensifying the exploitation of workers in the global South. What was once seen—in hyped-up fashion—as a “social contract” between capital and labor in the heyday of U.S. hegemony and prosperity has now disintegrated entirely. With it has disappeared what was once called the “labor aristocracy,” a minority of relatively privileged, largely unionized workers in the advanced capitalist world who benefitted indirectly from unrivaled U.S. imperial hegemony and the siphoning of profits from the global South.73 Monopoly-finance capital now freely outsources production from the global North to the global South, in what has become a new age of imperialism characterized by a race to the bottom for workers throughout the world economy.74

The social democratic campaign of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 election showed the potential for a grassroots left upsurge in this context—the main fear of the ruling class. But Sanders’s extraordinary campaign, representing an approach that would undoubtedly have won in a contest with Trump by drawing on a far wider working-class base, was blocked by a Democratic Party establishment that had long since put into place a superdelegate system and a structure of control through the Democratic National Committee, expressly designed to prevent such a left takeover of the party. The road was thus left open to Trump. In this context there is no real doubt about the source of Trump’s success. He received a remarkable 77 percent of the vote among those who said their financial situation had worsened in the preceding four years.75

Few understood this overall economic dynamic better that Bannon, the strategic brains behind the Trump campaign, who had worked on Wall Street as an investment banker—before moving to Hollywood and making ultra-right-wing political films, testing the zeitgeist, and finally taking over Breitbart. With a realism completely lacking in neoliberal circles, he remarked: “I don’t think there’s any doubt that the world is in the beginning state of a crisis that it can’t avoid.” Raging against liberals, he stated that the left globalists destroyed “the American working class…. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f—ed over.”76

Trump’s declarations about the “carnage” in the U.S. economy (in his Inaugural Address written by Bannon and his Breitbart colleague, Stephen Miller, now a special adviser to Trump), his claims that the United States should have taken the Iraqi oil as payment for its deposing Saddam Hussein, and his so-called “truthful hyperbole” regarding labor statistics (he claimed the unemployment rate in 2016 was “as high as 35 [percent]” or more) were all part of this same strategy.77 This also included his attack on unfair trade (taken from the playbook of the left), his emphasis on protecting Social Security, his proposal to cut prescription drug prices through competitive bidding, and his promised trillion dollars for infrastructure spending. All of this was designed to draw support from wage workers that the Democrats abandoned.

Likewise, the virulent attacks on illegal immigrants and refugees, the building of the wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and Trump’s strong law and order stance (including suggestions that Black Lives Matter be put under federal surveillance) were all part of the attempt to consolidate mass support for Trump in class-economic and racial terms.78

Casting aside the Obama-era Trans-Pacific Partnership, Trump has raised the prospect of trade and currency wars with China to save American jobs. He appointed as director of the White House National Trade Council economist Peter Navarro, author of The Coming China Wars, which accuses China of unleashing a “new imperialism” on the globe, and of currency manipulation. The United States, Navarro argues, should end its “mutually parasitic economic codependence” with China and fight back economically (and militarily). Among Navarro’s other works are Death by China (2011) and Crouching China: What China’s Militarism Means to the World (2015).79

Trump has vowed to more than double the rate of growth of the economy. Yet his economic policy is largely a supply-side one of generating windfalls to monopoly-finance capital through wholesale deregulation, and lavish tax cuts mainly for the wealthy and corporations. He repeatedly declared that he would hugely expand infrastructure spending, which would give a boost to the real estate and construction sectors. Yet since the Trump plan is based on tax cuts to firms rather than a massive increase in spending, and is supposed to be strung out over ten years, it will do little to stimulate the economy as a whole. Indeed, none of this can lift the economy out of stagnation. The most likely result is continued slow growth, possibly interrupted by a bubble effect in the financial sector.80 The one thing that is certain is the business cycle. The economy is nearing its peak and recession is on the horizon—to be expected within a few years.

Any prospect for real economic gains for the mass of the population will run into the triple contradiction of economic stagnation, financial crisis, and declining U.S. hegemony that characterize the epoch of monopoly-finance capital. Rather than alter these conditions, Trump’s economic policy is likely to aggravate the problem. This means that the Trump regime will probably gravitate as its only economic option to further military spending increases, and imperialist adventures, coupled with greater economic repression of workers at home, particularly among the poorest sectors of the work force—conceived as the surest way to “Make America Great Again.”

The greatest danger under these circumstances is that an increase in internal repression—Bannon is on record as supporting Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunt in the 1950s—will have its counterpart in an increase in external repression and war without bounds, seen as a way of lifting the economy.81 Already certain restraints on the global use of force have been removed. A new upsurge in barbarism nationally and internationally is in the wind: this time armed with weapons capable of destroying the world as a place for human habitation. Indeed, the exterminism that is a real danger in these circumstances is already evident in the renunciation of all efforts to contain climate change, which Trump calls a “hoax.” This, then, threatens the eventual collapse of civilization (and even the extinction of humanity) under a continuation of capitalist business as usual.

Resistance in the “Post-Truth Society”

In “Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties” Brecht stated:

Nowadays, anyone who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must overcome at least five difficulties. He must have the courage to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed; the keenness to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed; the skill to manipulate it as a weapon; the judgment to select those in whose hands it will be effective; and the cunning to spread the truth among such persons. These are formidable problems for writers living under Fascism, but they exist also for those writers who have fled or been exiled; they exist even for writers in countries where civil liberty prevails.82

Brecht would not be at all surprised that the rapid growth of neofascism in the United States and Europe has coincided with the declaration by the Oxford Dictionaries that the “word of the year” for 2016—in recognition of Trump’s political rise—was the adjective “post-truth.” Significantly, another word on the short list for word of the year was “alt-right.” The Oxford Dictionaries define “post-truth” as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”83

Blatant violation of the truth, and what Georg Lukács called “the destruction of reason,” has always been associated with fascism, and has helped prepare the ground for its rise.84 It is impossible to understand our current social reality divorced from class analysis; nor is it possible to resist that reality effectively without class organization. A defining feature of contemporary liberal-democratic ideology, which set the conditions for today’s post-truth society, has been “the retreat from class,” and particularly from the notion of the working class—ironically brought back into the mainstream in relation to Trump.85 This makes it possible for the vague term populism to cloak the growing neofascist threat of our time.

Resistance to these trends is only possible, as Brecht reminds us, by first having the courage, the keenness, the skill, the judgment, and the cunning to address the truth with respect to this demonic political phenomenon. It is necessary to recognize the truth in its historical, structural, and dialectical connections, insisting on the fact that today’s neofascism is the inevitable product of the crisis of monopoly-finance capital. Hence, the only effective way to resist, is to resist the system itself. Against today’s “neofascist wind,” the movement toward socialism is the final barricade, the only genuine class-human-ecological defense.

MORE: 85 nOTES

https://monthlyreview.org/2017/06/01/this-is-not-populism/

End Foster on neofascism not populism

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ALEXANDER REID ROSS

TO THE PROTECTORS

By Gerald Sloan (rcvd 11-26=16)

We will all be fitted at birth

with orange jumpsuits