A Nation of Scalpers and Immolators -- USA on and off the reservation . . . Jesus Christ Booed for the Golden Rule . . . .

"Not by hatred is hatred overcome, but only by love is hatred overcome..." Dharmmapada

Richard Hofstadter lends his historian's craft to the rather popular task of anthologizing American violence, and whatever reservations one may have about collections of umpteen separate bloody incidents, the master's hand is evident throughout. Hofstadter's thoughtful introduction gives a scholarly substance to the whole subject, delineating and expounding upon the major chronic forms of group violence in America, marking out the significant areas which invite further research, and reflecting upon the particular forms of violence that flourished in the 1960's. He regrets the rising mystique of armed struggle on the left, since force "has more characteristically served domineering capitalists or trigger-happy police, peremptory sergeants or fascist hoodlums." But "the hideous and gratuitous official violence in Vietnam" has eroded the effectiveness of appeals to peaceful protest. The 107 documentary selections have been divided as well as could be managed into eight varieties of violence—political, economic, racial, religious-ethnic, anti-radical and police, personal, assassinations and terrorism, and "Violence in the Name of Law, Order, and Morality." They are primarily eyewitness or newspaper accounts, "of distinctly reportorial character and value, rather than editorialized." Hofstadter and his younger associate Wallace provide introductory remarks for each separate piece, confined largely to the episode at hand, and cite additional pertinent references. If, as Hofstadter asserts, "the rediscovery of our violence will undoubtedly be one of the important intellectual legacies of the 1960's," then this is among the better places to linger over that legacy.

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At the fucking local Bi-Mart in Lincoln City, OR. These AMericans are fucking cub scouts, dumb as dirt, and this is it for this warped country.

Spend any time at Tea Party meetings and one thing you learn pretty quickly is that Tea Party activists are far quicker to criticize than praise politicians. But they do make exceptions, and President Ronald Reagan makes that list.

In the '70s and '80s, Reagan, who would have marked his 100th birthday Sunday, helped inspire a conservative era in American politics. Today, it's the Tea Party movement that's become a dynamic force on the right.

"Ronald Reagan was, in many ways, the original Tea Party candidate," says Craig Shirley, author of the book Reagan's Revolution. The book chronicles Reagan's run for president in 1976, taking on the political establishment and incumbent President Gerald Ford.

Gathering aims to relaunch Minutemen, fortify border, in response to caravan

[Propery owner Jeff Allen, rear left, stands with a member of the United Constitutional Patriots near a group of about 30 Brazilian migrants who had just crossed the border at Allen's property in Sunland Park, N.M., on March 20, 2019]

Heroes, here, and believe you me, dumb as fuck Russians and EuroTrashLandians and fucking elite Substackers and the Racist mother fucking Oklahoma Superintendent of Mis-Education, you just do not know what AmeriKKKa is.

Scott Warren has a checklist he goes through every time he finds a body in the desert. The earthly components are straightforward. Log the GPS coordinates. Take photographs and notes. Scour the brush for more bones and pull together all the data pertinent to the investigation that local authorities will, in theory, initiate once they arrive. These elements are basic evidence-gathering. But for Warren, the process doesn’t end there.

Warren believes that these moments merit an acknowledgement of humanity. And so, after years of recoveries, the 36-year-old has developed a modest ritual for the grim encounters. He goes quiet, lowers himself to the earth, collects the dirt around him, and then lets the soil pour through his fingers. The point, Warren says, is to take a moment to reflect or, as he puts it, “hold space.” It may not sound like much, but for him, this process and everything that attends to it is as sacred as anything one might find in a conventional house of God.

When a person dies, Warren believes, some extra-physical element of them remains, dwelling in the place where they passed. In the last six years, Warren has communed with the dead no fewer than 16 times in the desert outside Ajo, the tiny Arizona border town he calls home. Those bodies and fragmented sets of human remains have served as his window into the slow-motion disaster unfolding in the borderlands, one in which U.S. government policy funnels migrants into the desert, creating a black hole of disappearance and death of historic proportions.

In response, Warren has helped convene a network of Arizona humanitarian aid volunteers with roots that go back decades. Through sweat-drenched marches deep into the Sonoran Desert, this collective has expanded access to water and medical aid in one of the border’s deadliest and most remote corridors, and fueled a historic increase in the number of bodies accounted for there. Even for those who can’t be saved, the finding of human remains opens the door for bodies to be returned to grief-stricken families, providing answers to painful questions. In an alternate universe, one could imagine the efforts of Warren and his cohort being the kind of thing a society might actively support, or even prioritize. But that’s not what is happening in Arizona right now. — intercept

The queer as tits on a linebacker Democrats, what fucking shit heads, dirty to the core. You have NO idea how deadened and hardened the average fucking AmeriKKKan is, and it runs deep into the PMC, professional managerial class, deep into the white bro’s, and now the fucking ignorant niggerized blacks and fucking Tio Taco Hispanics.

Voting for these fuckers, the Trumpsters?

The agents considered Warren a recruiter encouraging college students to join a criminal conspiracy that involved furthering migrants’ unlawful entry into the country by providing them with water and medical aid. For Warren, the timing of their arrival was not good. Inside the Barn that day were two Central American men, Kristian Perez-Villanueva, a citizen of El Salvador, and Jose Arnaldo Sacaria-Godoy, a citizen of Honduras, who had come to the property three days earlier after a harrowing trek through the desert.

An additional crew of Border Patrol agents and local sheriff’s deputies mustered at a motel down the road before setting off. As the convoy of mostly unmarked vehicles moved in, the agents in the brush ran toward the Barn. The first of the vehicles, a purple Dodge, pulled into the driveway, coming to a stop at Warren’s feet. Men with badges and guns piled out.

Warren told them that they were stepping onto private property and requested that they leave. The agents, who did not have a warrant, persisted. With weapons drawn, they swept through the Barn. The migrants were found inside, one of them hiding in a shower. Warren was handcuffed and arrested. He was accused of providing the men with food, water, clean clothes, and a place to sleep over three days. A month later, a grand jury indicted him on two counts of harboring and one count of conspiracy. If convicted and sentenced to consecutive terms, Warren could serve up to 20 years in prison.

[“The Barn,” a humanitarian aid shelter in Ajo, Arizona, on July 11, 2018. Photo: Laura Saunders for The Intercept.]

In 1923, the British novelist D. H. Lawrence offered a grim assessment of America and Americans: “All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

Lawrence’s observations of the American character did not draw upon deep wells of direct personal experience. When he wrote those lines, he had only been living in the United States for a bit more than a year and had spent much of that time among artists and the literati. But he was neither the first nor the last to make such an observation. Nearly 50 years ago, surveying both the wreckage of the 1960s and centuries of archives, the brilliant historian Richard Hofstadter acknowledged that “Americans certainly have reason to inquire whether, when compared with other advanced industrial nations, they are not a people of exceptional violence.”

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Listen to Abby and Taylor: REALLY.

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Here’s this fucking FUCK: Putin. Putin’s Narrative Reversal on Syria

Putin may be saying they aren’t terrorists anymore as a way to get out of admitting Russia likely failed in Syria to prevent terrorists from taking over. He did not cite Russian intelligence saying these are reformed killers, but said they must be reformed because otherwise the West would have nothing to do with them, when he knows full well the West has had plenty to do with them when they were openly terrorists.

This may just be Putin trying to find a creative way out of the fact that Assad’s overthrow appears to have been a Russian defeat unless the HTS are truly reformed. And if they are reformed, still very much uncertain, the U.S. and Turkey would have been behind it, not Russia.

Editorial Comment: Moscow continues its subservience to the Sublime Porte and the Zionists. This tendency has bewildered those who have followed developments in Syria since the beginning of the war over a decade ago. If we only glance at the surface of Putin’s remarks as referent to the jihadists, it defies logic. But if we understand that Turkey is the primary support for the terrorist groups in the Levant, it becomes much clearer. And this begins to open the way to explain why Russia supported the illegal Turkish occupation of Syria, never stopped Israel from launching its barbaric attacks or its expansion in the Golan, and has never moved in any meaningful way to stop the genocide in Palestine. No authentic anti-fascist would claim to be at war with Nazis in Ukraine while backing the Muslim Brotherhood and Zionists in the Middle East unless they are abysmally ignorant of their shared history with the Nazis. Neither would they be so foolish as to conflate Zionism with Judaism or Islamists with Muslims. Yet this has been Russia’s consistent error, to their own detriment and shame. A.V.

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Black Agenda: Omali Yeshitela is chairman of the African People's Socialist Party . He and his Uhuru 3 co-defendants, Penny Hess and Jesse Nevel, were convicted of conspiracy in a federal case alleging that they acted under the direction of the Russian government. On December 16, they were sentenced in a federal court to 3 years of probation and community service. Chairman Omali joins us from St. Louis to discuss this outcome and his thoughts on this political moment in the U.S.

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Fuck the white fucking races: Here, a long time ago, 42 years ago!

The great African American poet Sonia Sanchez attended the June 12, 1982 peace rally in New York City. After the rally, she wrote the poem, “Reflections after the June 12th March of Disarmament,” published in the collection Homegirls & Handgrenades in 1984. In the poem, Sanchez asked us to not only to call for nuclear disarmament, but to understand the long history of the violence of the “inhumanitarians” that encourages war, destruction, and death:

…
I have come to you tonite because there are
inhumanitarians in the world. they are not
new. they are old. they go back into history.
they were called explorers, soldiers, mercenaries,
imperialists, missionaries, adventurers
...

Sanchez called for the world to find sanity, for a world where the elite “give up their need for excess wealth and learn how to share the world’s resources.” She asks us to “learn to suckle life not/bombs” – and to fight for peace.

Reflections after the June 12th March of Disarmament

Sonia Sanchez

I have come to you tonite out of the depths
of slavery
from white hands peeling black skins over
america;

I have come out to you from reconstruction eyes
that closed on black humanity
that reduced black hope to the dark
huts of america;

I have come to you from the lynching years,
the exploitation of black men and women by
a country that allowed the swinging of
strange fruits from southern trees;

I have come to you tonite thru the
delaney years, the du bois years, the
b.t. washington years, the robeson
years, the garvey years, the
depression years, the you can't eat
or sit or live just die here years,
the civil rights years, the black power
years, the black nationalist years, the
affirmative action years, the liberal
years, the neo-conservative years;

I have come to say that those years
were not in vain; the ghosts of our
ancestors searching this american dust for
rest were not in vain, black women
walking their lives in clots were not
in vain, the years walked
sideways in a foresaken land were not
in vain;

I have come to you tonite as an equal,
as a comrade, as a black woman
walking down a corridor of tears,
looking neither to the left or the right,
pulling my history with bruised
heels,
beckoning to the illusion of America
daring you to look me in the eyes to
see these faces, the exploitation of a
people because of skin pigmentation;

I have come to you tonite because no people
have been asked to be modern day people
with the history of slavery, and still
we walk, and still we talk, and
still we plan, and still we hope and
still we sing;

I have come to you tonite because there are
inhumanitarians in the world. they are not
new. they are old. they go back into history.
they were called explorers, soldiers, mercenaries,
imperialists, missionaries, adventurers,
but they looked at the world for what
it would give up to them and they violated
the land and the people, they looked
at the land and sectioned it up for
private ownership, they looked at the
people and decided how to manipulate
them thru fear and ignorance, they looked
at the gold and began to hoard and
worship it;

I have come to you because it is time
for us all to purge capitalism from
our dreams, to purge materialism
from our eyes, from the planet earth
to deliver the earth again into the hands
of the humanitarians;

I have come to you tonite not just for the stoppage
of nuclear proliferation, nuclear
plants, nuclear bombs, nuclear
waste, but to stop the proliferation
of nuclear minds, of nuclear generals
of nuclear presidents, of nuclear scientists,
who spread human and nuclear waste
over the world;

I come to you because the world needs to be
saved for the future generations who must
return the earth to peace, who will not
be startled by a man's/woman's skin color;

I come to you because the world needs sanity
now, needs men and women who will
not work to produce nuclear weapons,
who will give up their need for excess
wealth and learn how to share the
world's resources, who will never
again as scientists invent again just
for the sake of inventing;

I come to you because we need to turn our
eyes to the beauty of this planet, to the
bright green laughter of trees, to the beautiful
human animals waiting to smile their unprostituted smiles;

I have come to you to talk about our inexperience
at living as human beings, thru death marches and cam
thru middle passages and slavery
and thundering countries raining hungry faces;

I am here to move against
leaving our shadows implanted on the
earth while our bodies disintegrate in
nuclear lightning;

I am here between the voices of our ancestors
and the noise of the planet,
between the surprise of death and life;

I am here because I shall not give the
earth up to non-dreamers and earth molesters;

I am here to say to you:
my body is full of veins
like the bombs waiting to burst
with blood.
we must learn to suckle life not
bombs and rhetoric
rising up in redwhiteandblue patriotism;

I am here. and my breath/our breaths
must thunder across this land
arousing new breaths. new life.
new people, who will live in peace
and honor.

Sonia Sanchez, “Reflections after the June 12th March of Disarmament,” from Homegirls and Handgrenades (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1984)

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