bigtree
bigtree's JournalIt being anti-Semitic actually meant you lose federal funding support, we'd have to stop paying Trump.
...take away all of his millions in tax exemptions.
The president who made slurring Jewish Americans a standard in his presidential campaigns isn't a credible judge of Harvard's or any other institution's treatment of ethnicity.
Donald Trump’s anti-Semitism controversies: A timeline
https://www.timesofisrael.com/donald-trumps-anti-semitism-controversies-a-timeline/
Trump’s long history of trafficking in antisemitic tropes
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/17/trump-history-antisemitic-tropes/
Trump’s Crocodile Tears for the Jews
This selective sensitivity to anti-Semitism allows Trump to have dinner at his Florida home with bigots such as Kanye “Ye” West and the Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes one day, then assail liberals for anti-Jewish prejudice the next. And it allows some hard-left activists to rightly critique the white nationalism seeping into mainstream Republican politics, yet simultaneously justify anti-Semitism that’s cloaked in the guise of “anti-Zionism”—with some even adopting the terminology of the neo-Nazis they claim to oppose.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/08/trump-anti-semitism-comments-fox-news/679459/
Trump Goes Full Anti-Semite, Unloads on American Jews in Wildly Bigoted Rant
Prior to being elected, Trump suggested to a room full of Jewish people that they “control” politicians through money. He tweeted an image of Hillary Clinton’s face atop a pile of cash next to the Star of David and the phrase, “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” And he capped off his campaign by releasing an ad featuring the faces of powerful Jewish people with an ominous voiceover about them comprising a “global power structure” that has “robbed our working class” and “stripped our country of its wealth.”
Later, upon moving into the White House, and just six months after his claim of being the least anti-Semitic person in the universe, he refused to condemn a group whose ranks included neo-Nazis. In August 2019, in an attempt to win over (???) Jewish voters, he declared “they don’t even know what they’re doing or saying anymore.” Speaking at the Israeli American Council in Hollywood, Florida, that December, he “dipp[ed] into a deep well of anti-Semitic tropes,” suggesting, among other things, that Jews only care about money.
In clips aired on the Unholy podcast, the former president—who may or may not make another run for office in 2024—went on a lengthy rant about how American Jews supposedly aren’t loyal enough to Israel, invoking a longtime anti-Semitic trope about Jewish people and allegiances to another countries. Speaking to journalist Barak Ravid, who appeared on the podcast, Trump said: “There’s people in this country that are Jewish that no longer love Israel. I’ll tell you the Evangelical Christians love Israel more than the Jews in this country. It used to be that Israel had absolute power over Congress and today I think it’s the exact opposite, and I think [Barack] Obama and [Joe] Biden did that. And yet in the election, they still get a lot of votes from Jewish people…which tells you that the Jewish people, and I’ve said this for a long time. The Jewish people in the United States either don’t like Israel or don’t care about Israel. I mean, you look at The New York Times, The New York Times hates Israel, hates them, and they’re Jewish people that run The New York Times, I mean the Sulzberger family.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/12/donald-trump-anti-semitism-jews-israel
What Donald Trump has said about Jews
The president has helped spread dangerous anti-Semitic conspiracy theories
One of the oldest stereotypes about Jews is that they are all money-grubbing chislers — a prejudice that was at the root of countless medieval pogroms. Trump has implied or straight-up said this many times. In a 1991 book, John O'Donnell, the former president of the Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino, said Trump had told him: "Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day." He later called O'Donnell a "loser" in an interview with Playboy, but allowed that, "The stuff O'Donnell wrote about me is probably true."
In December 2015, Trump gave a speech before the Republican Jewish Coalition and said, "I'm a negotiator like you folks, we are negotiators ... Is there anybody that doesn't renegotiate deals in this room? This room negotiates them — perhaps more than any other room I've ever spoken in." He also asserted they wouldn't support him because he couldn't be bought: "You're not going to support me because I don't want your money. Isn't it crazy?"
In July 2016, he tweeted an image attacking Hillary Clinton, originating from the notorious cesspit 8chan, displaying a star of David over a pile of cash.
Probably the worst anti-Semitic propaganda Trump has pushed is the classic conspiracy theory that Jews control world politics and the global economy. In the last days of the 2016 campaign, he rolled out an ad featuring three rich Jews — then-Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and financier George Soros — over a narration decrying "those who control the levers of power in Washington," and the "global special interests" who "partner with these people who don't have your good in mind." The obvious implication is that Hillary Clinton is a cat's paw for a global Jewish conspiracy. As Josh Marshall writes, "These are standard anti-Semitic themes and storylines, using established anti-Semitic vocabulary."
https://theweek.com/articles/835714/what-donald-trump-said-about-jews
Antisemitism Increased Under Trump. Then It Got Even Worse.
The radicalization of the Republican Party has helped white nationalism flourish. Antisemitism started increasing in 2015, when Donald Trump came on the political scene and electrified the far right, then spiked during his administration. Trump is now gone, but the Republican Party has grown more hospitable than ever to cranks and zealots. Two Republican members of Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, spoke at a white nationalist conference this year.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/29/opinion/antisemitism-post-trump.html
________________________
The Real Purpose of Trump’s Executive Order on Anti-Semitism
Donald Trump has a knack for taking some of humanity’s most problematic ideas and turning them on their head to make them even worse. He has done it again. On Wednesday, he signed an executive order that will allow federal funds to be withheld from colleges where students are not protected from anti-Semitism—using an absurdly defined version of what constitutes anti-Semitism. Recent precedent and the history of legislative efforts that preceded the executive order would suggest that its main targets are campus groups critical of Israeli policies. What the order itself did not make explicit, the President’s son-in-law did: on Wednesday, Jared Kushner published an Op-Ed in the Times in which he stressed that the definition of anti-Semitism used in the executive order “makes clear what our administration has stated publicly on the record: Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.”
Both Kushner and the executive order refer to the definition of anti-Semitism that was formulated, in 2016, by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance; it has since been adopted by the State Department. The definition supplies examples of anti-Semitism, and Kushner cited the most problematic of these as the most important: “the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity”; denial to “the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g. by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor”; and comparing “contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” All three examples perform the same sleight of hand: they reframe opposition to or criticism of Israeli policies as opposition to the state of Israel. And that, says Kushner, is anti-Semitism.
One does not have to be an anti-Semite to be an anti-Zionist, but one certainly can be both an anti-Semite and an anti-Zionist. Trump, however, has inverted this formula by positioning himself as a pro-Zionist anti-Semite. He has proclaimed his support often for the state of Israel. His Administration’s policies, which have included moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and, more recently, declaring that the U.S. does not view Israeli settlements in the West Bank as illegal, have pleased the state of Israel, especially its most militantly expansionist citizens. Over the weekend, however, at the Israeli American Council National Summit, in Florida, Trump gave a speech that brimmed with Jewish stereotypes: Jews and greed, Jews and money, Jews as ruthless wheeler-dealers. “A lot of you are in the real estate business because I know you very well,” he said. "You’re brutal killers, not nice people at all.” It was the kind of stuff that requires no definitions, op-eds, or explanations—it was plain, easily recognizable anti-Semitism. And it was not the first time that Trump trafficked in anti-Semitic stereotypes. The world view behind these stereotypes, combined with support for Israel, is also recognizable. To Trump, Jews—including American Jews, some of whom vote for him—are alien beings whom he associates with the state of Israel. He finds these alien beings at once distasteful and worthy of a sort of admiration, perhaps because he ascribes to them many of the features that he also recognizes in himself.
The new executive order will not protect anyone against anti-Semitism, and it’s not intended to. Its sole aim is to quash the defense—and even the discussion—of Palestinian rights. Its victim will be free speech.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-real-purpose-of-trumps-executive-order-on-anti-semitism
I remember original Duers talking about fears of being disappeared right after 9-11, at the start of this site
...folks worried about what they'd do if the site was shut down by the government, or if bloggers were going to be arrested.
It was just a question then, a prospect which was defended against on myriad fronts.
It's no longer a question today. The courts are weakened by the lack of enforcement ability on rulings, and the Trump administration is willing to accept any injustice that serves their personal or political interests.
We're all rightly and correctly forward and unbridled in our political opposition, but for the second time in my life, witnessed to the remnants of Jim Crow and segregation, there is a real threat of retribution and assaults against protest and resistance.
We've watched as Trump is not only attacking the press, but is taking coercive actions against those in the press who report against him or take actions contrary to his interests. It's just a small step from there to government repression of critics or opponents of the Trump administration who don't have any agency or means to defend themselves.
And, remember, the penalty Trump said today that he wants to pursue for American citizens he or his regime merely claim are criminals, without proving any of that in court, is abduction from the U.S. to a supermax prison in El Salvador with no visible chance of return.
American citizens disappeared, for dissent, into a black hole hell in a dictatorship.
Don't go to sleep on this. If Trump gets his way and continues to defy the SCOTUS, none of us are safe in this country.
Not even people like Chris Krebs who actually toiled loyally for Trump in his first term, but is now the subject of a monarchical executive order to investigate him for what amounts to alleged statements criticizing the dear leader.
Americans are comfortable dissociating themselves from those of us who experience injustice or strife, because they can - until they can't. Many have never experienced a government that wasn't just indifferent to their rights, safety, and livelihoods, but outright hostile.
This is the crisis that was worried and warned about at this site's outset, now so very real. I suspect that even now, not many are willing to allow themselves to believe this deportation fight is about them.
But this is a test of our system of law. And it's a test of our nation's people, who at this point, look like they may be willing to wait and watch other people get picked off and disappeared before finally recognizing the wolf at their own door, again.
Bullshit. The President of El Salvador is coming to the White House on Monday
...he can bring Abrego Garcia with him.
Kyle Cheney @kyledcheney
BREAKING: Trump administation attests that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is alive and secure but is under the "sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador."
Mr. Garcia was under the authority and protection of the United States. Which used to mean something in the world.
El Salvador accepted a fee from the Trump administration to hold convicted criminals in its Terrorism Confinement Center mega prison. Not one of those prisoners Trump kidnapped and flew to that gulag have been 'convicted' of anything in the U.S..
The U.S. is paying El Salvador $6m to imprison approximately 300 individuals there for one year.
Nothing in that agreement makes these prisoners property of the country of El Salvador. Presumably, if El Salvador was to try to release any of the Venezuelans on their own there would be stiff resistance from the WH.
Mr. Garcia, who was granted asylum by a U.S. judge, was 'mistakenly' abducted away to a U.S. sponsored jail in El Salvador by U.S. officials.
Under what terms did these prisoners become wards of the country of El Salvador? How does that work, and where is that established on any agreement?
There is no credible system of 'justice' in El Salvador, so calling it an 'authority' best describes the repressive intention of the courts to carry out their president, Nayib Bukele's edits against 'gangs' which have resulted in sweeping mass arrests and indefinite detention in these mega-jails without fair trial or recourse.
ICWA:
“They are saturating the courts and announcing the arrests in the press, and those who are arrested are branded, even if they are proven innocent.” He compared the strategy to the “scorched earth” military operations that led to some of the worst atrocities of the Civil War, recalling in particular the notorious case of El Mozote, in which an entire village—mostly women and children—was slaughtered by the Salvadoran military in 1981.
“These people are threatened and terrorized by the gangs on one side and by the PNC and the army who see everyone from that community as suspicious. They target whole families who are suspected to be connected to the gangs. It’s very difficult for youths to defend themselves with these extraordinary measures in the prisons, they aren’t allowed to see family or even their defense attorneys. Their right to defend themselves is being violated.”
The order allowing Mr. Garcia to remain in the U.S. was supposed to protect him from these atrocities in El Salvador, but the Trump administration is intent on feeding even more people into that hell hole, finding an outlet for his viciousness, and a kindred spirit for his cruel fascism in their barbarous president, Nayib Bukele.
Shock and awe from the wealthy class of politicians and press that Donald Trump could destroy their livelihoods, too
...we're all watching the shock and awe from the pols and press which spent the entire Biden presidency clucking their tongues at the historic recovery he'd managed to produce in the wake of Donald Trump's last negligent and costly reign in office, and promoting the absurdity that what the republican Congress managed to block and slow down represented a Democratic failure to do more on the economy.
Instead of allowing that recovery to continue, a booming Biden economy celebrated by almost every major economist, one which is still said to have been on track to at least 4% growth if Trump just stayed out of its way, this president was intent on breaking American's progress just because he could.
What stands out as I watch the incredible outpouring of concern and scorn on myriad business news outlets from so many impeccably dressed white-haired men who we've seen cheerfully and confidently in the past laying out how their money is moving through our hands to their own, is how extensively and comprehensively; how desperate they are to explain the details and intricacies of the economics that under-gird our own lives and livelihoods but is really just cold and calculating business to them.
For what may well be the first time in their lives, these money men in and outside of government are looking at the prospect of their place on the economic pyramid eroding fast, threatening to make them as vulnerable as the majority of struggling Americans they've routinely disregarded in their economic projections and manipulations.
They are in various stages of grief, from denial to acceptance, with more than a few looking for an upside for them in the disruption and chaos, hoping that there's some 'art of the deal' waiting in the wings to rescue them back to Mar a Lago for cocktails at the evening hour.
The most delusional is one repeated today by several what there was some fault and cautionary lesson to be learned in the way Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and others focused on the certain destruction of our democracy and democratic system of government by this republican class of ne'er-do-well businessmen who only got into politics because they failed at everything else.
The complaint is that instead of the Democratic campaign focusing on 'other things,' like Jan. 6 and the threatening Trump dictatorship, Democrats should have been leaning more into the fake, hyped concerns about high prices in a booming Biden economy generating record employment and wage growth.
"They should have been talking about prices instead of democracy,' goes the refrain, as if the actual anti-Democratic actions by Trump in declaring a fake emergency to impose these crippling tariffs isn't the actual point here.
There's a republican Congress RIGHT THERE in the majority with full power to legislate away this contrived authority Trump is assuming for so many of his executive actions, but the president's refusal to adhere to the law has been met by the republican majority with complicity and indifference.
The reasons for this American crisis that threatens to send America back to the mercantile system of trade and economics are entirely rooted in our democracy, and in republican legislators' refusal to defend their own part in our Democratic system of government to provide a check on the Executive.
It wasn't Democrats who muddled that question, though. The media withdrew into a fantastical denial of what had occurred in the last Trump presidency, pushed aside a multi-felony indictment IN COURT for trying to overturn the last election and harped continually about EVERY false projection from the republican campaign about voter anxiety over high prices.
But the actual threat was that all of the control of the economy would be in the hands of the person and party that was clearly demagoguing it, claiming loudly that tariffs would replace the personal income tax, and ignoring the cautions from Democrats that all of the republican economic arguments were regressive and would only lead to more evisceration of our government and more money out of our Treasury going to Trump and republicans' wealthy benefactors.
The explanation from these well-dressed, panicked people this morning for their neglect in making the full case to Americans about the consequences and devastating effects of the tariffs Trump was promising to effect on his OWN volition was that they believed the talk was a negotiating tactic.
Now there's a vain hope among these moneyed mavens that the actual enactment of the tariffs is still just a bluff that will lead to perfect phone calls and negotiations- and that, if only Democrats would just explain more....
Trump told a crowd in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 2023:
“Biden and his radical left allies like to pose as standing up as allies of democracy... Joe Biden is not the defender of American democracy, Joe Biden is the destroyer of American democracy.”
At the Munich Security Conference that February, VP Kamala Harris asked, “whether it is in America’s interest to fight for democracy or to accept the rise of dictators, or like some in Washington “to embrace dictators and adopt their repressive tactics.”
That's still the question today, despite the struggle of those newly enlightened by their own foisted petards to come to that realization that the source of their own power to resist the instant evisceration of millions of their dollars is in the defense of our democratic system of government that Trump is self-servingly dismantling.
OMB's Director In Charge Of Any Shutdown, Russell Vought, Project 2025 Architect
Six minutes of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought refusing to say whether he’ll follow the law of the land—the Impoundment Control Act—during his Senate Budget Committee nomination hearing.
Tim Kaine Confronts Trump's OMB Nominee Vought With His Own Words About Villifying Federal Workers
Russell Vought is 'more dangerous' than Gabbard, Hegseth: Democratic Senator
'Godfather of Ultra-Right...': Schumer calls Trump’s OMB Director nominee Russell Vought 'dangerous'
MUST WATCH: Vought's Response To Question About Trump's Executive Orders Has Whitehouse Stop Clock
'Your Words, Quote...': Mark Warner Shows No Mercy To Trump's OMB Director Russell Vought
Chuck Schumer Sends Blunt Warning About Russell Vought: He Will Try To Freeze Federal Funding Again
'You Don't Want Them Traumatized Do You?': Tim Kaine Brutally Confronts Vought About Past Statements
Russell Vought, one of the key authors of Project 2025 and a former Trump cabinet member, was recorded on a hidden camera talking to what he believed to be relatives of a wealthy conservative donor about a right-wing blueprint for a second Trump term. #CNN #news
Trump OMB Director who would manage govt during a shutdown has said he intends to put the federal workforce in "trauma"
...is it really such a slam dunk to put the fate of furloughed wokers in the hands of close Trump ally and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought who recently axed Biden-era guidance on shutdown procedures from its website?
___The Washington Post reported that it's not yet clear which parts of the government would close in the event of a shutdown this weekend. The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), spearheaded by close Trump ally and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, recently axed Biden-era guidance on shutdown procedures from its website, the Post reported.
In the event of a shutdown, the OMB would have wide latitude to decide what is deemed "essential" government work. With the president's blessing, OMB could determine that DOGE was doing essential government work and keep it open while other agencies did furloughs, for instance, making it easier for Musk's team of employees to access internal systems and operate freely.
https://www.newsweek.com/doge-government-shutdown-donald-trump-2044442
“Put Them In Trauma”: Inside MAGA Leader Russell Vought’s Plans For A New Trump Agenda
A key Trump ally detailed plans to deploy the military in response to domestic unrest, defund the EPA and put career civil servants “in trauma” in a series of previously unreported speeches that provide a sweeping vision for a second Trump term.
In private speeches delivered in 2023 and 2024, Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, described his work crafting legal justifications so that military leaders or government lawyers would not stop Trump’s executive actions.
He said the plans are a response to a “Marxist takeover” of the country; likened the moment to 1776 and 1860, when the country was at war or on the brink of it; and said the timing of Trump’s candidacy was a “gift of God.”
Another priority, according to Vought, was to “defund” certain independent federal agencies and demonize career civil servants, which include scientists and subject matter experts. Project 2025’s plan to revive Schedule F, an attempt to make it easier to fire a large swath of government workers who currently have civil service protections, aligns with Vought’s vision.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
“We want to put them in trauma.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-key-ally-russell-vought-agenda_n_671fed62e4b0a55cb4cdec09
Wired: How a Government Shutdown Would Help Elon Musk
In just over 48 hours, the government will partially shut down unless Congress can pass a continuing resolution. New reporting from Wired finds Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency might just want Washington, D.C., to close for a few days. Makena Kelly, senior politics writer at Wired, and Vittoria Elliott, reporter at Wired, join "America Decides" to explain.
watch:
WIRED Senior Editor Leah Feiger joins Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond to explain why Elon Musk might actually want a government shutdown.
listen: https://www.wired.com/story/uncanny-valley-podcast-elon-musk-government-shutdown/
more:
...a government shutdown could work to the benefit of Trump and Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), because the executive branch has broader powers over what to close and what to keep open in the event funding runs out.
The Washington Post reported that it's not yet clear which parts of the government would close in the event of a shutdown this weekend. The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), spearheaded by close Trump ally and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, recently axed Biden-era guidance on shutdown procedures from its website, the Post reported.
On Thursday, a White House website that included instructions for what to do in the event of a shutdown led to an error message. The Post reported that the White House budget office, which typically gives workers two days advance notice of government funding changes, told officials on Wednesday to "hold for additional guidance from us before making any employee notifications."
In the event of a shutdown, the OMB would have wide latitude to decide what is deemed "essential" government work. With the president's blessing, Vought could determine that DOGE was doing essential government work and keep it open while other agencies did furloughs, for instance, making it easier for Musk's team of employees to access internal systems and operate freely.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/why-elon-musk-and-doge-might-love-a-government-shutdown/ar-AA1ASqkN
NEW Quinnipiac Poll Brings More BAD News For Trump
Larry Sabato @LarrySabatoNEW Quinnipiac Poll--Bad news for Trump. Approval down to 42% (53% disapprove). Disapproval high on economy (54%), federal workforce (54%), Ukraine-Russia (55%), trade w/Mexico (56%), trade w/Canada (58%). 62% think supporting Ukraine is in our national interest.
https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3921
ALSO in Q Poll findings:
By 60% to 33%, respondents OPPOSE eliminating the Department of Education.
By 57% to 35%, respondents think UNVACCINATED children should not be allowed to attend schools or childcare facilities.
Republicans are an imposture.
Forty-one percent of Republicans view Russia as either “friendly” or an “ally,” a CBS News/YouGov poll released Sunday found, as nearly half of Americans view President Donald Trump as backing Russia in its war against Ukraine—even before the president’s dramatic meeting Friday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/more-than-40-of-republicans-see-russia-as-friendly-poll-finds-as-americans-largely-think-trump-backs-moscow-in-war-with-ukraine/ar-AA1A653X
There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy. Winston was taking part in a demonstration in one of the central London squares at the moment when it happened. It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the Spies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bald skull over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head. His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then maddened. At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker's hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or three minutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.
Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs -- all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere. The work was overwhelming, all the more so because the processes that it involved could not be called by their true names. Everyone in the Records Department worked eighteen hours in the twenty-four, with two three-hour snatches of sleep. Mattresses were brought up from the cellars and pitched all over the corridors: meals consisted of sandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled round on trolleys by attendants from the canteen. Each time that Winston broke off for one of his spells of sleep he tried to leave his desk clear of work, and each time that he crawled back sticky-eyed and aching, it was to find that another shower of paper cylinders had covered the desk like a snowdrift, half burying the speakwrite and overflowing on to the floor, so that the first job was always to stack them into a neat enough pile to give him room to work. What was worst of all was that the work was by no means purely mechanical. Often it was enough merely to substitute one name for another, but any detailed report of events demanded care and imagination. Even the geographical knowledge that one needed in transferring the war from one part of the world to another was considerable.
All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some of them yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colder climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods. But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Whichever power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or Southern India, or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies. The inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to the status of slaves, pass continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, to control more labour power, to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, and so on indefinitely. It should be noted that the fighting never really moves beyond the edges of the disputed areas. The frontiers of Eurasia flow back and forth between the basin of the Congo and the northern shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific are constantly being captured and recaptured by Oceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the dividing line between Eurasia and Eastasia is never stable; round the Pole all three powers lay claim to enormous territories which in fact are largely unihabited and unexplored: but the balance of power always remains roughly even, and the territory which forms the heartland of each super-state always remains inviolate. Moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples round the Equator is not really necessary to the world's economy. They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war. By their labour the slave populations allow the tempo of continuous warfare to be speeded up. But if they did not exist, the structure of world society, and the process by which it maintains itself, would not be essentially different.
The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient -- a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete -- was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process -- by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute -- the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.
The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three super-states, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This -- although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense -- is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: War is Peace.
excerpts from 1984: https://www.george-orwell.org/1984/16.html
Trump asks why Ukraine doesn't want to 'settle' (surrender), admitting Putin's 'hitting them harder than he has been"
...BBC:
He added that he believes Putin wants to end the war but he cannot say the same of Ukraine.
"I think he's hitting them Ukraine harder than he's been hitting them," Trump said. "And I think probably anyone in that position would be doing that right now."
"I want to know they [Ukraine] want to settle and I don't know they want to settle," Trump said, when asked why he had cut off aid to Kyiv.
..it's clear why '"Putin is hitting Ukraine harder than he's been hitting them," as Trump said to reporters, sounding more like a man exasperated that Russia's attacks hadn't forced them to surrender, than concerned at all with the safety of Ukraine.
There isn't any other reason why Trump is being belligerent to Ukraine, all of the complaints about 'trusting' Zelenskyy after they staged an Oval Office confrontation, done in concert with the attacks by Russia.
At the very same time the U.S. president is complaining about Ukraine not 'settling' with the aggressor who is "hitting them harder than he was," Trump personally had the intelligence sharing with Ukraine shut off immediately, leaving the country completely blind to the Russian's obligingly increased attacks.
It's not a coincidence, or some major blunder.
Trump is loudly insisting on 'peace' in much the same way that Putin is demanding peace from the citizens of Ukraine whose homes, schools, hospitals and other civilian areas he's subjecting to his increased attacks in coordination with Trump; the U.S. president sending very clear signals from the WH for Putin to not only continue violently repressing Ukraine, but intending with his very clear and direct actions and words to ensure the Russian dictator succeeds in his military despotism against their sovereign neighbor, our ally.
He just is. Trump is coordinating with Russian attacks against Ukraine.
There's no other way to describe what's happening right in front of us. Our U.S. president is helping Putin destroy Ukraine in an embarrassing effort to be 'made' by the Russian mobster; in a bid to join the cadre of the world's despots.
He's not even as a leader in even that degeneracy, but, a mere simp of Putin, openly trusting and giving fealty to him, more than our U.S. allies. And, in the process, displaying his instinctive obsequiousness toward autocrats like a petty thug desperate enough for their attention to do their dirty work.
And here's the evil in what's happening against the nation's will. Trump and his administration is doing this just to extort Ukraine's minerals. How do we know?
The Trump administration’s special envoy to Ukraine and Russia said Thursday that Ukraine “brought it on themselves” in regard to the cutoff of intelligence sharing from the US.
“That’s a pretty major concession to Russia, to constrain Ukraine’s ability to target and hit Russian forces,” CBS’ Margaret Brennan, who was moderating the conversation with Keith Kellogg at the Council on Foreign Relations, said of the cutoff on intelligence sharing. “This pressure really seems to be directly impacting potentially what they can do on the battlefield.”
“Very candidly, they brought it on themselves, the Ukrainians,” Kellogg said.
Asked what Ukraine will have to do to turn intelligence sharing and flow of military aid back on, Kellogg pointed to the proposed minerals deal between the US and Ukraine.
“The reason he came to the White House was to sign a document that was going to say this is us going forward — it’s not signed,” Kellogg said of Zelensky. “My point would be, and my personal belief would be, you don’t move forward until you get a signed document. Period.”
...so, its even more despicable than coordinating the cutoff of our military intelligence with Russia to allow Putin to "hit Ukraine harder than he has" because, as Trump told reporters, "it may be easier dealing with" Moscow than Kyiv.
Trump is brazenly advantaging the genocide of Putin against Ukraine to extort the country's precious minerals, demanding they surrender them and their sovereign nation, cynically and dishonestly claiming to want 'peace' without there existing ANY U.S. or Russia guarantees for the safety of Ukrainians under their increased attacks.
He's not only advantaging his extortion off of Russia, he's openly helping Putin "hit Ukraine harder" as he abandons a three year effort by this country to aid them in the fight against our nation's own enemy, a defense of Ukraine's war effort supported to this day by an overwhelming majority of Americans.
Very candidly, they've told on themselves.
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