As World warns of WW I-Style Nationalisms, Top 5 Nations Trump Demonizes

French President Emmanuel Macron warned, as Europe prepares to commemorate the end of World War I a century ago on November 11, that the world is entering a new age of destructive nationalism.

Virulent nationalism roiled Europe and killed over 80 million people in the two world wars. That is more than the population of a contemporary European country like France or Germany.

Macron did not say so, but he must have had Trump on his mind. The president has attempted to whip up nationalist and racist anxieties on a scale not seen since the Fascist axis of the 1930s and 1940s.

If British anti-Germans spoke of “the Hun” in the early twentieth century, Trump has offered us a whole new vocabulary of hatred.

In the world according to Trump, patriotism is no longer enough and must be replaced by nationalism (Mussolini’s party was the Nationalist Fascist Party). Charles DeGaulle observed that patriotism is loving your country an nationalism is hating other peoples’ countries.

And here are the top five ‘nations’ Trump hates:

1. Muslim-majority countries. “Islam hates us,” he pronounced. (Except for Muslim countries willing to suck up to the United States, which is most of them). Thus, Trump imposed his Muslim visa ban.

2. Iran: Trump violated the treaty with Iran; and now he is waging economic war on Iran— which is sure to result in new trouble.

3. Trump castigated Mexicans as rapists and criminals, and wants to wall them out.

4. Trump has now extended these insults to Guatemalans and other Central Americans, using them to insult our intelligence by presenting a small group of women, children and noncombatants seeking asylum at a port of entry), as a major threat.

But Trump’s National Security Adviser called up Brazil’s fascist new president, Jair Bolsonaro and praised him to the skies. So it is only the non-fascist Latinos that Trump hates.

5. China, Trump yells, is taking advantage of us. He is pursuing a wideranging trade war with that country that will almost certainly at some point seize up the world economy and plunge it into a deep recession.

The chances of a military encounter with China in the South Pacific can also not be ruled out.

These nationalist conflict promoted by Trump are far more dangerous than most people realize.

Juan Cole @ Informed Comment.

Inverse PC: Ignoring White supremacists and other far-right extremists

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White supremacists and other far-right extremists have killed far more people since Sept. 11, 2001, than any other category of domestic extremist. The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism has reported that 71 percent of the extremist-related fatalities in the United States between 2008 and 2017 were committed by members of the far right or white-supremacist movements. Islamic extremists were responsible for just 26 percent. Data compiled by the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database shows that the number of terror-related incidents has more than tripled in the United States since 2013, and the number of those killed has quadrupled. In 2017, there were 65 incidents totaling 95 deaths. In a recent analysis of the data by the news site Quartz, roughly 60 percent of those incidents were driven by racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, antigovernment or other right-wing ideologies. Left-wing ideologies, like radical environmentalism, were responsible for 11 attacks. Muslim extremists committed just seven attacks.

These statistics belie the strident rhetoric around “foreign-born” terrorists that the Trump administration has used to drive its anti-immigration agenda. They also raise questions about the United States’ counterterrorism strategy, which for nearly two decades has been focused almost exclusively on American and foreign-born jihadists, overshadowing right-wing extremism as a legitimate national-security threat. According to a recent report by the nonpartisan Stimson Center, between 2002 and 2017, the United States spent $2.8 trillion — 16 percent of the overall federal budget — on counterterrorism. Terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists killed 100 people in the United States during that time. Between 2008 and 2017, domestic extremists killed 387 in the United States, according to the 2018 Anti-Defamation League report.

“We’re actually seeing all the same phenomena of what was happening with groups like ISIS, same tactics, but no one talks about it because it’s far-right extremism,” says the national-security strategist P. W. Singer, a senior fellow at the New America think tank. During the first year of the Trump administration, Singer and several other analysts met with a group of senior administration officials about building a counterterrorism strategy that encompassed a wider range of threats. “They only wanted to talk about Muslim extremism,” he says. But even before the Trump administration, he says, “we willingly turned the other way on white supremacy because there were real political costs to talking about white supremacy.”

In March 2018, a 20-year-old white evangelical Christian named Mark Anthony Conditt laid a series of homemade I.E.D.s around Austin, Tex., in largely minority communities. The bombs killed two African-Americans and injured at least four others over the course of several weeks, terrorizing the city, yet the local authorities preferred to describe Conditt, who committed suicide, as a “very challenged young man.” Also last spring, another white man, 28-year-old Benjamin Morrow, blew himself up in his apartment in Beaver Dam, Wis., while apparently constructing a bomb. Federal investigators said Morrow’s apartment doubled as a “homemade explosives laboratory.” There was a trove of white-supremacist literature in Morrow’s home, according to the F.B.I. But local cops, citing Morrow’s clean-cut demeanor and standout record as a quality-control manager at a local food-processing plant, made sure to note that just because he had this material didn’t mean he was a white supremacist. “He could have been an individual that was doing research,” the local police chief said.

In this atmosphere of apparent indifference on the part of government officials and law enforcement, a virulent, and violent, far-right movement has grown and metastasized. To combat it, some officials have suggested prosecuting related crimes through expansion of the government’s counterterrorism powers — creating a special “domestic terrorism” statute, for instance, which currently doesn’t exist. But a report released on Oct. 31 by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School argues that the creation of such a statute could easily be abused to target “protesters and political dissidents instead of terrorists,” and that law enforcement already has ample authority to prosecute domestic terrorism: “Congress must require that counterterrorism resource decisions be based on objective evaluations of the physical harm different groups pose to human life, rather than on political considerations that prioritize the safety of some communities over others.”

The report also calls out the Justice Department for its “blind spot” when it comes to domestic terrorism and hate crimes, which Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein conceded earlier in the week. During a conference on Oct. 29, Rosenstein said that according to the latest F.B.I. crime report, “88 percent of agencies that provide hate-crimes data to the F.B.I. reported zero hate crimes in 2016.” The Justice Department was reviewing the accuracy of the reports, he noted. “Simply because hate crimes are not reported does not mean they are not happening.”

In 2016, the latest full year of data available from the F.B.I., more than 6,100 hate-crime incidents were reported, 4,270 of them crimes against people (as opposed to, say, defacing property). And yet only 27 federal hate-crime defendants were prosecuted that year. “The F.B.I. knows how many bank robberies there were last year,” says Michael German, an author of the Brennan Center report and a former F.B.I. agent, “but it doesn’t know how many white supremacists attacked people, how many they injured or killed.”

More concerning to German, though, is that law enforcement seems uninterested in policing the violent far right. During the first year after Donald Trump’s election, protests and riots erupted across the country, often involving men with criminal histories who, by definition, were on the law-enforcement radar. During the so-called Battle of Berkeley in March 2017, for instance, a far-right agitator named Kyle Chapman became a hero to the alt-right after he reportedly pummeled an anti-fascist counterprotester with a billy club. Chapman was a 41-year-old who had two previous felony convictions. He proceeded to travel around the country, engaging in violence at other protests, now under the online moniker Based Stickman — a cheerful reference to the Berkeley attacks.

The NYT Magazine.

Trump and the caravan: lying again

Thanks to the president doubling down on his racism lately when it comes to a caravan of Central American immigrants heading toward the border, the Pentagon has had to step in and do damage control. Trump has made some outrageous claims about how he’s sending 15,000 troops to the border to stop this caravan, and the Pentagon just made him look like a complete idiot. Earlier this week, Trump said in an interview:

As far as the caravan is concerned, our military is out. We have about 5,800. We’ll go up to anywhere between 10,000 and 15,000 military personnel on top of border patrol, ICE, and everybody else at the border. We have to have a wall of people.”

Currently, there are 5,200 military personnel deployed at the border, and no one knows where Trump is pulling this 15,000 number from. The Pentagon has responded after Trump’s irresponsible comment, as the Associated Press reported:

The Pentagon says ‘more than 7,000’ troops were being sent to the southwest border to support the customs and border protection agents. Officials said that number could reach a maximum of about 8,000 under present plans.”

I think we can all agree that 8,000 is nowhere near 15,000 — so this was just another one of Trump’s lies, which was shut down by his own military commanders. This has got to be embarrassing enough for Trump, but there’s more. The Pentagon has debunked previous reports that 14,000 military personnel could be sent to the border:

On Monday, officials announced that about 5,200 were being deployed. The next day, the air force general running the operation said more than the initially announced total were going, and he pointedly rejected a news report that it could reach 14,000, saying that was ‘not consistent with what’s actually being planned.’”

Trump is obviously lying left and right now that he only has a few days to scare voters into voting GOP in the midterm election. Fortunately, everyone — even his own people — keeps proving just how untrustworthy he is.

Source.

How American Policy in Honduras Created the Refugee Crisis

Several years ago we saw mass migration from Honduras during the Obama administration, including almost 70,000 unaccompanied minors showing up at the border. That is now repeating itself, but with the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy making the situation dramatically worse. And much of this, as Joseph Nevins of the North American Congress on Latin America documents, is a result of deliberate US policy to destabilize that country in the name of profit.

You’ve no doubt heard the phrase “banana republic” bandied about, but you may not know the history of it. Honduras is the country about which it was invented in the late 1800s. Specifically, it was about the Cuyamel Fruit Company, later called United Fruit Company, and now known as Chiquita Brands International. In the 1890s. US-based fruit companies essentially took control of Honduras, owning all the good land for banana production and disrupting the trade in that country’s other major crop, coffee.

By the early 1900s, more than a million acres were owned for banana production, but the profits all went to the wealthy landowners, not the poor peasants who actually worked the land. Indeed, they were made all the more impoverished by being denied access to most of that country’s agricultural land. There were uprisings now and then, but they were put down by American military interventions, directly in 1907 and 1911, and indirectly through military aid and control throughout the rest of the 20th century. It got particularly bad under Reagan, who used Honduras as a training and staging ground for the Contras seeking to overthrow the government in Nicaragua.

American aid and support for the Honduran oligarchy and the American companies they helped enrich ensured that this country would remain desperately poor with a massive disparity in wealth. The people live in poverty while the ultra-rich control the government and the military. Post-Reagan, there was a moment of optimism as with the election of liberal reformer Manuel Zelaya in 2006, but he was soon put down in a military coup — almost all of the Honduran officer corps was trained by the American military and involved the families of those oligarchs — and that reignited what is now essentially a failing state (for everyone but the rich, that is). Nevins writes:

Organized crime, drug traffickers and the country’s police heavily overlap. Impunity reigns in a country with frequent politically-motivated killings. It is the world’s most dangerous country for environmental activists, according to Global Witness, an international nongovernmental organization.

Although its once sky-high murder rate has declined, the continuing exodus of many youth demonstrates that violent gangs still plague urban neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, post-coup governments have intensified an increasingly unregulated, “free market” form of capitalism that makes life unworkable for many. Government spending on health and education, for example, has declined in Honduras. Meanwhile, the country’s poverty rate has risen markedly. These contribute to the growing pressures that push many people to migrate.

This is what people are fleeing, and it’s little better in neighboring countries in Latin America. They are fleeing the organized crime cartels that Trump is falsely accusing them of belonging to, just like he accuses Syrian refugees of being part of ISIS when it is, at least partly, ISIS that they are trying to escape. The story of American foreign policy in the 20th century was largely the story of how we installed and propped up one corrupt, barbaric dictator after another, ostensibly in the name of stopping communism but really in defense of the profits of American companies. We created the conditions that give rise to the refugee and human rights crisis, then declare it a crisis and crack down on the victims of our own policy. We should be ashamed of that, but I’m not sure most Americans are even capable of such shame.

Fox News Talking Head tells the Truth about the Caravan

Brazil’s Neo-Liberal Fascist Road to Power

Introduction

The decisive electoral victory of far-right Brazilian presidential candidate, Jair Bolsonaro startled politicians and analysts of the traditional parties of the left and right. The possible implications for the present and near future raises a number of fundamental questions whether it represents a ‘model’ for other countries or is the result of the specific circumstances of Brazil.

We shall proceed by outlining the socio-economic events and policies of Brazil which led up to rise of the highly authoritarian, neo-liberal Bolsonaro regime. We will then discuss if similar circumstances are emerging elsewhere and whether antiauthoritarian popular-democratic politics challenge the threat. We will conclude by evaluating the future of far-right regimes and their enemies.

Brazil :Two Decades of Military Rule and the Legacy of Impunity

Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship between April 1964 and March 15, 1985. Though the military formally withdrew from the regime it retained many powers and prerogatives, including impunity for the thousands of cases of arbitrary violations of human rights including torture and assassinations.

However, during the height of the so-called ‘economic miracle’ during the 1970’s, sectors of the middle class supported the rule by the triple alliance of private business, state enterprise elites and the military. Only when the regime faced a major crisis in the early 1980’s did the military give way to electoral politics. The authoritarian legacy remained embedded in the political culture of the military and its followers. With the deepening economic crises of neo-liberalism, the corruption of civic culture and the increase of crime during the second decade of the 21st century, a militarized political movement headed by Jair Bolsonaro came to the fore.

The Social Bases of the Authoritarian regime

Most commentators have emphasized the amorphous mass of voters’ discontent with political corruption as the basis for the rise of the right. Moralism and insecurity with street crime were cited as the driving force of rightwing extremism.

Yet powerful economic power elites played a decisive role in propelling Bolsonaro to power. While masses were in the street, the Brazilian National Agricultural Confederation, the Federation of Banks and other prominent elite associations provided the funds, the legitimacy and legislative muscle. Over 40% of the Senate and Congress was controlled by the ‘ruralist bloc’, which came out in favor of Bolsonaro. Many of the voters who previously supported ex-President Cardoso’s center-right candidate Geraldo Alickman defected to the authoritarian right reducing his estimated vote by half.

The judiciary, under the influence of the agro-business and banking elite exploited political corruption to discredit and prosecute the center-left and the traditional political parties, leading to the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff and the arrest and prosecution of the leading left candidate Lula Da Silva.

From Authoritarianism to Fascism

Bolsonaro’s appeal to the elite is grounded in his program of savaging the working class: he promises to freeze public salaries for twenty years; lower pensions and increase retirement age up to twenty years; increase the role of the military and police in repressing strikes and land reform movements; end all restraints on pillaging the Amazon forest; lower taxes for the rich, deregulate the private economy and privatize the public sector.

In effect the Bolsonaro’s policies follow the script of a corporatist – neoliberal state: fascism with ‘free markets’. The pro-military policies are code words for mass repression; his pro-business strategy is disguised by an embrace of ‘family values’ and virulent hostility to working women, Afro-Brazilians, gays and indigenous people. His crusade against crime excludes bankers, landowners and industrialists who bribed politicians and congress- people – only the latter were prosecuted.

The Future of Neo-Liberal Fascism; Wave of the Future?

Will Bolsonaro’s version of neo-liberal fascism set the mark for other Latin American countries? Will his regime intervene and overthrow progressive countries? Will his victory in Brazil spur similar developments throughout the world?

Read it all, essay by James Petras.

Jair Bolsonaro in quotes

If you think Trump can be outrageous, try Bolsonaro. In his own words:

“I am in favor of a dictatorship, a regime of exception.” – Open session of the Câmara dos Deputados, 1993

Interviewer: If you were the President of the Republic today, would you close the National Congress? “There’s no doubt about it. I’d do a coup on the same day! It [the Congress] doesn’t work! And I’m sure at least 90 percent of the population would throw a party, would applaud, because it does not work. Congress today is good for nothing, brother, it just votes for what the president wants. If he is the person who decides, who rules, who trumps the Congress, then let’s have a coup quickly, go straight to a dictatorship.” – Câmara Aberta TV program, May 23, 1999

“The pau-de-arara [a torture technique] works. I’m in favor of torture, you know that. And the people are in favor as well.” – Câmara Aberta TV program, May 23, 1999

“Through the vote you will not change anything in this country, nothing, absolutely nothing! It will only change, unfortunately, when, one day, we start a civil war here and do the work that the military regime did not do. Killing some 30,000, starting with FHC [then-president Fernando Henrique Cardoso], not kicking them out, killing! If some innocent people are going to die, fine, in any war innocents die.” – Câmara Aberta TV program, May 23, 1999

“I will not fight nor discriminate, but if I see two men kissing in the street, I’ll hit them.” – Folha de São Paulo newspaper, May 19, 2002

“I’m a rapist now. I would never rape you, because you do not deserve it… slut!” – Rede TV, speaking to Congresswoman Maria do Rosário, November 11, 2003

“I would be incapable of loving a homosexual child. I’m not going to act like a hypocrite here: I’d rather have my son die in an accident than show up with some mustachioed guy. For me, he would have died. … “If your son starts acting a little gay, hit him with some leather, and he’ll change his behavior.” – Participação Popular, TV Câmara, October 17, 2010

Preta Gil, actress and singer: If your son fell in love with a black woman, what would you do? “Oh, Preta, I’m not going to discuss promiscuity with whoever it is. I do not run this risk and my children were very well raised and did not live in the type of environment that, unfortunately, you do.” – CQC, TV Bandeirantes, March 28, 2011

“If a homosexual couple comes to live next to me it will devalue my home! If they walk around holding hands and kissing, that devalues it.” – Playboy Magazine, June 7, 2011

Interviewer: Are you proud of the story of Hitler’s life? “No, pride, I don’t have, right?” Interviewer: Do you like him? “No. What you have to understand is the following: war is war. He was a great strategist.” – CQC, TV Bandeirantes, March 26, 2012

Interviewer: Have you ever hit a woman before? “Yes. I was a boy in Eldorado, a girl was getting in my face…” Interviewer: Put her against the wall, a few taps? Pah! “No, well, no… [laughs] I’m married. My wife isn’t going to like this response.” – CQC, TV Bandeirantes, March 26, 2012

“[Homosexuals] will not find peace. And I have [congressional] immunity to say that I’m homophobic, yes, and very proud of it if it is to defend children in schools.” – TWTV, June 5, 2013

“I would not employ [a woman] with the same salary [of a man]. But there are many women who are competent.” – SuperPop, RedeTV!, February 15, 2016

“Beyond Brazil above all, since we are a Christian country, God above everyone! It is not this story, this little story of secular state. It is a Christian state, and if a minority is against it, then move! Let’s make a Brazil for the majorities. Minorities have to bow to the majorities! The Law must exist to defend the majorities. Minorities must fit in or simply disappear!” – Event in Campina Grande, Paraíba, February 8, 2017

“Violence is combated with violence.” – The Noite with Danilo Gentili, SBT, March 20, 2017

“I went with my three sons. Oh the other one went too, there were four. I have a fifth also. I had four men and on the fifth I had a moment of weakness and a woman came out.” – Speech at the Hebraica Club, Rio de Janeiro, April 3, 2017

“If I [become president], there won’t be any money for NGOs. These worthless [people] will have to work. If I get there, as far as I’m concerned, every citizen will have a firearm in their home. You will not have a centimeter demarcated for indigenous reserves or quilombolas [settlements of the descendants of escaped and freed slaves that have protected status.]” – Speech at the Hebraica Club, Rio de Janeiro, April 3, 2017

“Has anyone ever seen a Japanese begging for charity? Because it’s a race that has shame. It’s not like this race that’s down there, or like a minority ruminating here on the side.” – Speech at the Hebraica Club, Rio de Janeiro, April 3, 2017

“The big problem in Brazil is that the government is at the jugular of businessmen. […] The worker will have to decide: less rights and employment or all the rights and unemployment.” – Event in Deerfield Beach, FL , October 8, 2017

“I’ll give carte blanche for the police to kill.” – Event in Deerfield Beach, FL, October 8, 2017

“Since I was single at the time, I used the money from my [congressional] housing stipend to get laid.” – TV Folha, January 11, 2018

“This group, if they want to stay here, will have to put itself under the law of all of us. Leave or go to jail. These red marginals will be banished from our homeland.” – Live video address to a rally in São Paulo, October 21, 2018

“You will not have any more NGOs to quench your leftist hunger. It will be a cleansing never before seen in the history of Brazil.” – Live video address to a rally in São Paulo, October 21, 2018

“You will see a proud Armed Forces which will be collaborating with the future of Brazil. You, petralhada [a derogatory term for Workers’ Party supporters] will see a civilian and military police with a judicial rearguard to enforce the law on your backs.” – Live video address to a rally in São Paulo, October 21, 2018

Corroborating links @TI.