I did not support Mr. Trump’s aspirations to return to the house from which he was evicted four years ago, perhaps improperly so, we’re not likely to ever know. But I certainly did not support the continuation of the tyranny under which so many in the United States and abroad have been forced to live during the past four years. I am and have been a political independent for many decades although I have supported third party candidates, including candidates from political parties with very differing philosophies, political parties like the Libertarian Party and the Green Party and various socialist movements. In truth, like Albert Einstein and Noam Chomsky and Nelson Mandela, etc., I consider myself a democratic socialist philosophically. Thus on the day after the presidential electoral victory of Donald J. Trump, I watch public reactions with interest and, I confess, a bit of ambivalence. I especially note with a bit of sardonic humor how, furious, president-elect Trump’s Deep State critics in the media and the Democratic Party seek to sow panic and more discord, whining that he will now seek revenge for all of the trauma they sought to cause him and many other opponents through abuse of the legal and penal systems during the past four years. Hell, during the past eight years.
Their fear is understandable, a rapist fears angry parents, angry siblings, angry spouses and police and prosecutors too. And that fear is well earned. And perhaps it’s justified if not justifiable. Perhaps those who have abused the justice and penal system so flagrantly during the past four years are in for a taste of their own medicine. But perhaps not. During his first term in office Mr. Trump, after all, did not seek to prosecute the Clintons or their allies, even after the Steele Dossier affair.
There are other possibilities.
Having been the victim of tyranny in action and abuse of power by the Biden administration, not only against him but against thousands and thousands of ordinary citizens, against Jill Stein, Cornell West and Robert F. Kennedy, against thousands of patriotic Americans who protested on January 6, 2021 in a manner much less flagrant than did American “heroes” in Boston Harbor centuries ago or opponents of police brutality against African Americans just five years ago, perhaps his attitude will surprise even those quacking in their boots in fear of chickens coming home to roost.
Perhaps his administration will focus on critical issues such as sane electoral safeguards, safeguards like easy to obtain voter identification with photographs, fingerprints and other verifiable forms of minimizing fraud while concurrently seeking to assure that participation in electoral processes by all eligible voters is facilitated. And perhaps he will recommend legislation to Congress outlawing censorship and other means of threatening the exercise of freedom of opinion and freedom of expression, whether by public authorities or by the monopolistic private entities that have gained control over the infrastructure most of us now use to communicate. And perhaps he will propose additional legislation to Congress and state legislatures that will outlaw and severely penalize the abuse of the penal and judicial systems for partisan political purposes, eliminating related immunity which leads to impunity. And perhaps his solicitor general can convince the Supreme Court to overturn the egregious decision in Sullivan v NY Times which has facilitated the death of objective journalism in the United States and facilitated the character assassination of so many, including Mr. Trump. And perhaps Mr. Trump will propose a constitutional amendment that will outlaw legalized bribery through political contributions and generous fringe benefits such as free travel, etc., and seriously regulate the utterly corrupt lobbying industry.
Perhaps Mr. Trump will avoid the meddling in the affairs of other countries, including the imposition and maintenance of ludicrous punitive economic sanctions and economic blockades that destroy their economies and create a crescendo of illegal immigration seeking solace in the land that made them all kinds of promises if they’d only turn against their brethren, and, then, perhaps he and his political allies will support meaningful and fair immigration reform that will encourage compliance with applicable laws, not only by depriving violators of all related benefits and building walls, but by providing for prompt, fair and equitable procedures for immigration by foreigners who have a legitimate basis to seek permanent residency and then citizenship the way the ancestors of most current citizens of the United States once obtained it.
Perhaps Mr. Trump and other members of his administration and others who have been victims of the autocracy and tyranny rampant during the Biden administration, instead of seeking revenge and becoming mirror images of their adversaries, will do the foregoing, not in a mean spirited manner but in a manner that will heal wounds, minimize polarization and really “Make America Great Again”, but internally, not in an adversarial manner against the world. That may not be likely but Mr. Trump is rarely predictable, and he is not always wrong. And only someone who has been made to suffer what Mr. Trump was made to suffer during the past eight years can really understand why the foregoing changes are so essential for America’s quest to someday attain the promises laid out in the Declaration of Independence, hypocritical though they were, and the premises set forth in the Preamble to the Constitution.
Like many Americans, I have lost faith in both major political parties and in the institutions of government, at least at the federal level, but if Mr. Trump would follow the path described above (unlikely, I know), he would earn a place on Mount Rushmore even higher than that occupied by the four deeply flawed former presidents enshrined there, all men who, notwithstanding their shortcomings, nevertheless seem to have made a positive lasting impression.
Perhaps an exercise in wishful thinking but “if our reach does not exceed our grasp, then what’s a heaven for”? _____
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
Faith in electoral processes all over the world seems to be at all-time lows, largely because, for so long, elections in most places have been manipulated, either through distortion of information presenting false scenarios and expectations or, because of threats of economic or military castigation should voters fail to follow electoral scripts designed by their self-perceived “betters”. As last resorts, until fairly recently, orchestrated coups d’état and even direct military intervention from abroad were popular; however, new technologies, especially with respect to communications and hackable electronic voting have reintroduced a strain of subtlety. The British and the French were the past masters of such manipulation but for a century at least, it has been the United States that has taken over that function, initially through the State Department but now through intelligence agencies; and intelligence agencies acting more and more on their own. Power, of course, is the ultimate prize, economic power derived through theft of natural resources but more and more, through organized war profiteering of the kind Ike warned against as he left office.
Until recently, the foregoing did not bother United States citizens very much, even when it involved domestic electoral fraud. We were aware that domestic electoral fraud was not unusual. Bribery was a tradition as was vote buying and, when all else failed, destruction of ballots with replacements stuffed into ballot boxes. Nor unusual were the super patriotic voting dead. In any case, electoral promises were always illusory, few felt they would be kept and fewer seemed to care that they’d been deceived. Elections were a sort of game, like baseball perhaps, but of the Black Sox variant. Now, however, chickens seem to have come home to roost. Of a sudden, the United States electorate really seems to care about the results, albeit futilely so.
One cannot tell if the United States federal elections of 2020 (both presidential and for the Senate, i.e., in Georgia) were “stolen”, something a substantial portion of the United States electorate believes. We will probably never find out. But groundwork for electoral fraud in 2020 was facilitated by the orchestrated response to the Covid 19 pandemic, with electoral safeguards demolished both bureaucratically and judicially, purportedly in the name of democracy. During the past decade electoral safeguards have been minimized in the United States in a manner not seen anywhere else in the world. Almost everywhere else, at least the illusion of ballot security is maintained with voters required to establish who they are through picture identification, signatures and finger prints before being permitted to exercise their so-called “sacred franchise”. Additionally, ballots are strictly restricted to voting booths, with their collection strictly controlled. Those are the norms except in a number of states in the purportedly United States.
Electoral manipulation in the United States would seem difficult on a national scale given the nature of federalism, with important electoral functions vested at the county level, but in a society so polarized, electoral fraud need not be widespread but rather, concentrated at the points most equally divided in the states with the most electoral votes, and with efforts coordinated at the national level through sources of logistical and legal support.
Electoral orchestration has evolved from an art form to a science. Of course, implementing the groundwork for successful electoral manipulation is not enough, it must at least be flavored with plausible deniability. Thus, the same bureaucracy and judiciary that facilitates electoral creativity shields electoral fraud from being proven by refusing to seriously investigate allegations of electoral improprieties, usually dismissing most such allegations on technicalities after which, the corporate media that supported the electoral misconduct in the first place, loudly proclaims that the allegations were bogus and that those alleging the existence of electoral fraud are evil, seditious “election deniers”. That is the world in which the citizenry of the United States now lives, the same world the United States has forced on so many other countries whenever it suited the interests of those who controlled it.
Democracy, in the sense of majority rule, does not exist anywhere and never has, even absent electoral shenanigans. It doesn’t exist because most people are not interested enough in electoral participation, either because it bores them or because they believe it is futile, thus, because of inadequate participation, majorities are rarely possible. Instead, the majoritarian concept is replaced by mere plurality, i.e., were usually more votes are collectively cast against a specific candidate or proposal, or not at all, than in favor. However, for some strange psychosocial reason, both the victims and the victimizers of political fraud feel that a semblance of popular government is essential, something we perhaps inherited from the Greeks and the Romans.
In a few days the people of the United States, both citizens and in all probability a number of non-citizens as well, will again earnestly participate in an electoral charade, a futile exercise by a populace utterly polarized by a corrupt corporate media, a corrupt entertainment industry and a corrupt bureaucracy, all making us relatively easy to manipulate, although we seem to be tottering closer than ever to a breaking point as more and more people have somehow gotten the impression that their votes can make a difference. Indeed, we may be approaching a possibly violent breaking point such as has not been seen in the United States in over a century and a half, and that, despite the best efforts of the powers-that-be to create the impression that, as the Borg may someday become fond of saying, “resistance is futile”. During the past four years it has become clear that, under Democratic Party rule, protest will not be tolerated unless it is orchestrated by the right people (e.g., the “woke”), that has been made more than abundantly clear through prosecution and persecution of those who dared to express their refusal to accept what they honestly believed was a stolen election in 2020. A reality which many, too many, discovered on and after January 6, 2021. It is worth noting how different the attitude towards rejection of electoral results deemed fraudulent is when the protestors are political allies of the United States, as in the recent cases of Venezuela and Georgia (the country, not the state), as opposed to our opponents. Evidently protest abroad is patriotic when in support of United States puppets but involves terrorism when challenging those the United States places and maintains in power. At home, it’s even more hypocritical. Electoral protest in the United States against results orchestrated by those who really rule us is anathema, it is seditious and treasonous, notwithstanding the platitudes redolent in our Declaration of Independence.
As an aside, I wonder what vice president Kamala Harris will do in the unlikely event that her opponent prevails when it comes time for her to exercise her constitutional function and certify the result. An unlikely situation given my pessimistic analysis of probabilities but, wouldn’t that be interesting? The Chinese have a curse that sounds a bit like a proverb “may you live in interesting times”. It certainly seems to apply to us. To many of us, the results of the proximate elections have already been written and, unlike 2016, that script will, in all likelihood, not be subject to evasion, not even temporarily. And even if it were, as Mr. Trump found out during his term in office, the federal bureaucracy and judiciary are so riddled with moles that governance contrary to the interest of the tiny group of powerful elites who rule us as if they possessed Sauron’s ring of power, is virtually impossible. The reality is probably that, even if the election were not rigged by misinformation and electoral fraud, our future would remain bleak as we will, in all probability, continue to be led towards the Armageddon too many see as an essential way-stop on the road to paradise. Tipping points are all but impossible to reverse and we seem to have reached ours as both major presidential campaigns applaud genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid and most of the United States electorate, as German citizens once did, looks the other way; and as antagonizing powers that share our capacity to destroy everything has become a bipartisan ideal.
As a supporter of third party and independent candidates for many decades, no candidate likely to win ever enjoys my support, but that is not as negative as it sounds. Those of us who find ourselves perpetually outside-looking-in tend to attain a clearer vision of political realities, one free of the emotional price associated with passionate advocacy and of a hope to share in the spoils. Thus, from the sidelines, what most matters to me and others like me is to share perspectives concerning the greatest threats to whatever remnants of liberty remain, not many as during the past four years censorship and castigation of deviation from opinions deemed acceptable has become the norm, and of course, it is important to those of us with strong civic consciousness to share information concerning how electoral processes are safeguarded in diverse parts of the world, contrasting such safeguards with trends in the ever more autocratic United States, a country whose people, if not its governments, I love profoundly.
From the fringes, the more decent among the political class, a tiny group led by aspirants to political power like Jill Stein, Cornell West and Dennis Kucinech, look on horrified, desperately fighting against the fatal entropy that has us firmly in its grasp, while the universe, disinterested, spins on its merry way. So, don’t be surprised when this November 6, 2024, at the end of a long evening, the elections of 2020 are once more repeated, their format now become the template with which our subjugation will be made ever more clear. Perhaps, in the future, rather than bother to deceive us, the charade will end and we’ll just assume the posture and accept the inevitable, hoping for the best, knowing that as has almost always been the case: in our own destiny we have little if any say.
So sayeth the realist (that’s what pessimists always call themselves), as from the Global South, where hope still somehow survives, an expat in exile looks North. _____
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
I recently participated in an online Zoom forum presented by the history department of the University of Massachusetts Amherst through its Feinberg Family Distinguished Lecture Series, a series that purports to focuses on “big issues of clear and compelling concern, grounded in historical inquiry, context, analysis and experience”. The event in which I participated (as part of the virtual audience) purported to deal with the dangers being faced in academia as a result of what smells like a dawning dark age where the right to think is shrinking daily and it was supposed to compare the current challenges faced by academia with those faced in the second half of the 1940’s during the tenures of Harry Truman as president and senator Joe McCarthy as hatchet man. Unfortunately, notwithstanding the importance of the topic to me and its timeliness, I was disappointed and confess that I could not get past the introduction and first few minutes of the initial presenter’s discourse. Instead of an objective academic discourse, it seemed a partisan charade reflective only of the nature of so many who today perceive of themselves as historians, people who have spent their lives reading and researching and writing and teaching, but for whom the quest for truth seems an irrelevancy, especially when the quest is undertaken under the shadow of long held political loyalties[1].
The presenters as well as their online audience seemed completely and blindly devoted to the Democratic Party, the party ironically responsible for both the dark days of the McCarthy era (although the senator himself was a Republican) and for today’s expansive wave of censorship and curtailment of liberty, especially liberties pertaining to the right to opine. Their criticism, snide, direct and full of virtue signaling, was reserved for Republicans and the “far right”, there apparently not being a mere right wing, and thus, to anyone not part of the choir to whom they were preaching. Thus, the postures they sought to represent, postures in which for the most part I personally believe, lost rather than garnered credibility. It’s as though they’d never heard of political options like Doctors Jill Stein and Cornell West, or if they had, considered them beneath contempt, just as they consider former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for placing the coronation of Kamala Harris at risk.
Even if their goal was merely political that strategy was not very productive. Unless fund raising is the goal, “preaching to the choir” is almost always counterproductive, especially in an electoral context where attaining the vote of a majority is important. Rather than more fully convincing the already convinced, one needs to reach out to those who have not yet made up their minds. Better yet, one needs to strive to convince those who support one’s opponents that our views have merit. That is very difficult when one has “shot one’s credibility in the foot” by refusing to accept that one’s side is fallible and that sometimes our opponents may be right. Credibility is essential and it is best attained when one at least appears objective, when rather than spewing conclusions one has yet to support with facts, one at least pretends to consider opposing perspectives and examines the reasons why others hold them. And that is best accomplished when one, in fact, has an open mind rather than its mere verisimilitude.
After I logged out of the event I became introspective, examining both my own beliefs and how I expressed them. And that led me to the issues that most perplex me, and to the people I’ve chosen to admire, despite their foibles. The latter are a very mixed group, both historically and during my own lifetime. I am a great admirer of the reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. but accept that sexual fidelity was not his strong point, and if that was true for him, it was also true for John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Bill Clinton and Donald Trump and Joe Biden. A bitter pill but one essential if one hopes to be objective. I love Nelson Mandela and admire him not because of his courage in adversity but because, after he attained the South African presidency, he managed, at least for a brief while, to bring his traumatized racially, economically and culturally divided nation together. And I love Mohandas Gandhi for his absolute dedication to peaceful revolution despite his failure, in the end, to attain it. I love Uruguay’s Pepe Mujica and Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Chile’s Salvador Allende and Pablo Neruda, Cuba’s Jose Marti, Colombia’s Gustavo Rojas Pinilla and now Gustavo Francisco Petro Urrego. None are perfect by any means, but they have all been transformational. Ironically, I am also drawn to ethically complex people like Alexander III of Macedon, Gaivs Ivlivs Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte, leaders who somehow combined good and evil successfully in order to attain transformational change, although I’ve always been curious as to why their military prowess so thoroughly overwhelms their more peaceful accomplishments in areas such as science, philosophy, education, architecture, etc., in their perception by the public.
As a political scientist, historian and researcher, albeit admittedly not a very important one, I’m deeply suspicious of those things on which we are not allowed, either legally or socially, to reflect, and I believed that that would have been one of the topics to be dealt with in the Feinberg lecture I’d been invited to attend, but I was very wrong. Today’s tacit support by so many of genocide on the one hand and the pillorying of Donald Trump on the other, both massively driven by peer pressure, and attitudes towards the current conflicts in the Ukraine and in the Middle East, made me again wonder concerning the “verboten” subject of what World War II, the second war to end all wars, was really about, and just how evil the villains and of just how virtuous the victors really were; the victors responsible for the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the colonization of Africa and the Middle and Far East. There was recent outrage among netizens of the corporate media concerning an admission purportedly made by Donald Trump that Adolf Hitler might have done some good things in Germany, something quickly (and distortedly) interpreted by Trump opponents as praise. More than anything, that reaction to Mr. Trump’s honest observation made me acknowledge (after reflection) that like most others, I lacked the courage to agree with him despite the rarely admitted reality that, excluding his international bellicosity, racism and lack of respect for the sanctity of life (obviously huge faults), domestically, during the period from 1933 through 1939, Hitler in fact accomplished very positive things domestically in Germany, and that in turn made me wonder if we will ever be capable of an objective analysis with respect to that very complex man, a man who in his worst aspects, seems ironically similar to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, a popular hero today not only in Israel, but in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany.
All of the foregoing seem dangerous themes on which to focus, or even to consider, but is it ethically and morally correct to ignore them and to permit what passes for imposed truth to just “lie” (a double entendre) comfortably abed? That observation then led me to reflect on the morally ambiguous issue of issues. There are issues where, to me, every position seems wrong and worse, where most of those who hold a strong position do so incoherently when contrasted with their positions on related issues. For me, one of those involves the profoundly polarizing conjoined issues of abortion and the death penalty.
It seems incoherent to me that the postures of most people with reference to the foregoing seem to involve, on the one hand, a belief in the “right” to an abortion while simultaneously opposing the death penalty, and on the other, the position of their opponents who reject the right to abort unwanted fetuses while concurrently supporting the death penalty. To my mind, one either respects the “right” to life or one doesn’t, both of those postures leading to logical conclusions: If one respects the “right” to life, then both abortion and the death penalty should be anathema. If one does not respect that “right”, then both abortion and the death penalty are acceptable options. However, the topic involved is deemed so “existential”, that most of us have a very strong opinion in one direction or the other while strenuously opposing the “right” of others to have an opposing position, something that to me seems to require amazing moral ambivalence and hubris. The issue is fraught with irreconcilable moral quandaries and yet, most people have no problem in taking one side or the other, and make it the principal basis on which they select whom they will support politically. To top it off, most of the people who presents themselves as electoral options, loudly championing one side or the other, tend to be pure pragmatists for whom the only importance of the issue involves how it will mobilize their political bases.
The right to bear arms is another issue that strikes me as ludicrous, if not as existentially and morally problematic as the right to life. I understand the second amendment to the United States constitution and the context under which it seemed essential. It reads: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” It is absolute in its prohibition, unless one examines its premise, “a well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”. However, the philosophical context in which that statement was drafted was centered, not on defense from foreign aggression but on the importance of avoiding domestic tyranny and that in turn was premised on three important assumptions: first, that instead of standing armed forces, the “free State” anticipated would have a citizen army comprised of state militias in which most adult males would serve; second, that the armed citizenry would hold a preponderance of the power necessary to avoid tyranny and sustain its “free” status; and, third, that “freedom”, rather than mere security, would remain the priority. None of those premises hold true today. The state controls the overwhelming balance of power, both internally through its police forces and externally though its professional armed forces (and the military industrial complex against which Ike warned during November of 1960). If the right to bear arms were to be effective today, citizens would have to enjoy the right to own and operate nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, air forces, etc., and, as importantly, the ability to financially afford to obtain and maintain them. We don’t and we shouldn’t and we couldn’t. As to the importance of “freedom”, today it’s mainly an illusion bound in red tape with the state in control of most of our actions, a state not controlled by the citizenry but through bureaucrats imbedded throughout our bloated governmental systems by a tightly knit group of selfish billionaires, with the assistance of their tools in the megalithic media-sports-and-entertainment industries, industries whose job it is to keep us polarized and distracted while our pockets are picked. So at best, “freedom is an illusion, an opiate in the same sense that Karl Marx described religion.
Of course, we’ve deluded ourselves with the concept of “rights”. A concept ideal for “virtue-signaling” if little else. Purportedly, “rights are inherent, universal and eternal, not granted, rather, at best discovered. As purportedly eternal, they have supposedly always existed and will always continue to exist. They are supposedly the emanations of the individual sovereignty and autonomy to which every human being is entitled. Given the foregoing definition, rights may not be conditioned by others, even where those conditions are eminently sensible and indeed, essential for life in the collectives in which we live, collectives which range from the family, with or without children, through our diverse polities and eventually, encompassing the human species and perhaps, even every species and the planet as a whole. If “rights” are inherent and unconditional, they must be impossible to violate. However, no human interaction encompasses those requirements and further, as more and more rights are discovered on a purportedly generational basis, they become diluted in the sense that they are more and more impossible to attain. Instead, today’s purported rights are, at best, aspirations as to how we should prioritize our resources and organize the diverse aspects of governance by others in our lives, but with no ability to enforce any such aspirations, however laudable they may seem. They are promises impossible to keep and those who make them and most vigorously proclaim them are at best self-deluded, albeit in most instances they are merely frauds. And yet, we willingly sacrifice our lives and the lives of those whom we most cherish, we sacrifice our honor, our morality and our ethics in their purported defense. Thus abortion and the bearing of arms are but irrelevancies useful in keeping us divided and thus, easy to manipulate and control.
Not that “rights” would not be awesome if they could be attained, maintained and enforced, but they can’t, at least not while we remain a deluded species, one which on the one hand abhors the purported Nazi holocaust while on the other, applauds, supports and makes possible the holocaust perpetrated by the descendants of the Nazis’ victims against Palestinians and other Muslims (the only people who ever actually treated them with real compassion and respect). Not while we accept the accumulation of massive wealth by actors and singers and sports stars as well as by corporate executives, directors, and, most of all, by the heirs of those who illicitly accumulated huge fortunes, while children, indeed while anyone starves to death, bereft of shelter and health care. But we do. And it seems that, at least for the foreseeable future, we’ll continue to do so.
Our moral ambiguities make that not only possible, but probable. _____
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
[1] Contextualizing the foregoing, I am a political independent although during my lifetime I have been a Republican, a Democrat, a Liberal, a Conservative, a Libertarian, a Democratic Socialist and a Green Party supporter. However, I was always uncomfortable pledging my allegiance and my sacred honor to any political party, especially with respect to supporting policies with which I was either not familiar or with which I was not in total accord. During the past decades I’ve taken to criticizing the United States duopolous political system and both principal political parties and my electoral activities have revolved around doing what I could to let voters know that there were more than two choices, more than two political parties, and that a lesser evil is always evil. I am also an academic and the former chair of a university political and juridical science department as well as of political science, government and international relations programs in the Republic of Colombia. In my youth, I taught history and chaired the social studies and, for a brief time, the foreign language departments at a military high school in the state of New York.
Is renewal of antisemitism the best way to resolve today’s geopolitical crisis, perhaps an existential crises? If that’s true it’s an incredibly disturbing rejection of the ethics and morality that finally evolved during the past century.
But is it true nonetheless?
The answer depends on how one defines (or rather, re-defines) antisemitism, something that has become an accelerating trend led by Zionists, both Jewish and Christian. The “re-definers” insist on defining “antisemitism” as any criticism of the Zionist anti-Islamic agenda thus, opposition to ethnic cleansing, apartheid, mass-murder, property theft and genocide when practiced by Jews or Jewish allies, is now defined according to them as “antisemitism” and such definition is more and more frequently being codified into law, especially in the United Kingdom and now in the United States and the European Union. If one accepts that definition as valid, then the corollary is that antisemitism is morally and ethically a positive rather than a horrible trait, and antisemitism thus becomes, not a ludicrously unjustifiable prejudice but an essential trait necessary to promote equity, justice and world peace.
How strange is that?
Given such re-definition, the law of unintended consequences comes into play, something of which many thoughtful and conscientious Jews are only too aware and, consequently, reject, insisting that such Zionist actions must not be made in their names. They’re aware not only of the ethical and moral quagmire involved but of the eventual re-evaluative reaction, one that may well prove all too similar to reactions from which Jews have suffered throughout their history. Reactions that have treated all Jews as responsible for the actions of a few and consequently eventually labeled Jews generically as selfish and morally repugnant “others”. Reactions in which Jews, in a generalized sense, are first admired, respected and permitted to attain substantial political and economic power only to lose it all, and to all too frequently, lose their lives as well.
The cycles of Jewish power and then despair are seemingly tied to the concept of genocide, something with which notwithstanding perceptions, Judaism has been historically linked, more often, as is the case today, as victimizer than as victim. Current Zionist leaders in Israel have recently expressed admiration for historical incidents involving genocide engaged in by the ancient Hebrews and avocate for the morality of engaging in similar conduct today notwithstanding its classification since the second war to end all wars as involving crimes of lesse humanidad and thus, purportedly anathema. The actions that Israeli leaders have recently defended as appropriate include the use of rape, torture, collective punishment and mass extermination as legitimate military tactics.
Unfortunately, examples of Jewish orchestrated genocide lauded by Israel’s current leaders abound in the Tanakh as they do the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. Both record in positive terms numerous instances of genocide, sometime engaged in directly by the Abrahamic divinity (e.g., the destruction of the so called cities of the plain, Sodom and Gomorrah, etc.; the Great Flood, the murder of the Egyptian first borns, etc.), but all too frequently genocide directly perpetrated by Jews themselves, as in the slaughter of all the men, women and children of ancient Jericho and in a large number of other Canaanite cities by Joshua, Saul, David, etc.; and the genocide visited on Christians in Jerusalem in the seventh century during the Sasanian conquest in the year 614 of the Common Era. The unfortunate corollary has been that the Jews themselves have subsequently suffered calamities all too similar to those that they inflicted on others, e.g., the Babylonian conquest, the Roman conquest, the millennia of antisemitism which followed the purported torture and execution of Yešu the Nazarene by the Jerusalem Sanhedrin and finally, the so called Nazi Holocaust.
We now find ourselves once more in what seems a new cycle.
Starting in the nineteenth century, instigated by fundamentalist Christians in the United States who hoped to accelerate the end of the world and the so called “second coming”, Jews who’d attained economic power in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and elsewhere sought to reverse the tide of European and American antisemitism by creating a homeland for the Jewish people, eventually settling on the part of the Ottoman Empire referred to as Palestine. The fact that Palestine had been inhabited for millennia by the descendants of historical Jews who’d converted, first to Christianity and then to Islam, and by others, especially Arabs who’d wandered in over the centuries, was deemed of no importance to this new movement which its adherents referred to as “Zionism”. Nor was the fact that such plans were anathema to Orthodox Jews who viewed them as contrary to the dictates and plans of the Hebrew divinity. In implementing their plan, the Zionists were ruthless from the beginning, eventually exposing their brethren in Germany and Eastern Europe to the tragedy commonly referred to as the Nazi Holocaust, a disaster essential to the success of the Zionist goal as, following that calamity, the victorious powers in the second war to end all wars finally complied with their commitments to Zionists for their purported help in persuading the United States to enter the first war to end all wars on the side of the victors. Thus, despite the supposed right of popular self-determination, Zionists were awarded sovereignty over most of Palestine in 1947 despite being a small minority of Palestine’s total population and since then have sought continuous expansion through ethnic cleansing, theft of land and genocide. As in the case of ancient Sparta (which Zionists seem to revere), since 1948 Zionists and other Jews have found themselves a minority in a sea of virtual slaves they were prepared to dominate by whatever means seem useful, the decisions of the Nuremberg tribunals (which Zionists had largely crafted) be damned.
Which is where we find ourselves today. Pretty much damned.
Semitism has now been re-defined by Zionists as a Spartan-like creed that insists that anything done to maintain power over a subjugated population, including its elimination, is proper and defensible regardless of the hypocrisy involved, and, conversely, that anything which stands in the way of such “Semitism” is obviously antisemitic and must be destroyed.
That attitude mortgages the future in favor of the greed of the moment in much the same way that, according to traditional Christians, the leaders of the Jerusalem Sanhedrin did two millennia ago when, addressing Roman concerns over the crucifixion of what to them seemed an innocent man, they purportedly told the Roman procurator in Palestine that any sins involved would be on their heads and on those of their descendants. So very much like Luis XV’s purported refrain, “après moi le déluge”.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
In terms of political organizations, the concepts of “conservative”, “liberal”, “progressive”, “left”, right” and “center” no longer have any real meaning. Their meaning and context have been vacuumed, distorted and destroyed by those in charge of perpetrating and perpetuating lies and disinformation, the corporate media, faux historians, controlled academia and those who control the Internet (including both social media and search engines where algorithms rule). Such terms are now merely tools to polarize us, to divide us and to make us easier to control.
Two relevant opposing concepts do however exist: state-ism and populism.
Statists include an ironic amalgam of those who honestly believe that current governments are beneficent and the answer to all our social, economic and political problems with cynical deep state operatives who see the state as the ideal tool to control us and through such control, to extract ever increasing profits for the billionaire class. The latter is comprised of moles buried throughout the bureaucracy, the judiciary and the media who assure that government works to perpetuate the worst among us in power while keeping the bulk of us safely divided.
Populists are an amalgam from diverse, frequently opposing sociopolitical perspectives who share a belief that the institutions of government have been perverted and thus oppose them. In general, they share beliefs in real democracy and real liberty but acknowledge that such concepts do not currently exist. Populists comprise the vast majority but have permitted statist to maintain them divided into opposing camps based on the fake labels listed above, i.e.: “conservative”, “liberal”, “progressive”, “left”, right” and “center”, which populists take seriously. The labels are institutionally fake but contextually relevant. The differences exist for populists but the reality is that far more unites each sector of the populist political spectrum than that which divides them. Something that statists seek to obfuscate at all costs because, should populists attain their common interests and often complimentary goals, the statist empire could be destroyed and the dreams of equity, relative equality, justice and peaceful coexistence might become realities.
Statists use divisive emotions to maintain dictatorial control: what were once known as “wedge issues” which keep populists at each others’ throats. Issues like abortion and gun control and immigration, and they distort sociocultural divisions like gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality and religion keeping real problems festering because as long as they remain unresolved, populists can be kept from uniting. And, of course, the most cynical and thus most effective statists in the United States are today found in the Democratic Party and among the traditionalist wing of the Republican Party, and in the United Kingdom, in the once populist Labour Party and in the Conservative Party, in each case, merely virtually identical two-headed-Hydrae.
In the meantime, Hillary Clinton and her groupies try to re-seize control of the Democratic Party from a dazed and confused Joe Biden so that she can have one more chance to be the first female president while the Obama camp keeps pulling tangled strings behind the scenes to deflect her aspirations but is itself confused as to whether Michele or “AG” (his real name is Eric but he can’t let us forget he was once the Attorney General) Holder should replace their inept current figurehead, and Donald Trump keeps smirking and holding massive rallies while we ignore that three decent people are seeking to lead us out of the Deep State wilderness: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Jill Stein and Cornell West, PhD.
And the rich keep getting richer, the poor, poorer, the economic center keeps shrinking and people keep dying massively in elective and genocidal wars while defense industry dividends soar and the corporate media shouts:
“Nothing here to see! Move along!!! Turn the page!!! Or else!!!”
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
African Americans were brought in chains to the Americas where for centuries they were forced to serve as slaves and, in a political sense that has not changed. After the purported emancipation of American slaves they’ve permitted themselves to remain in political slavery, first to the Grand Old Party and now, for almost a century, to the party that sought to keep them enslaved, the Democratic Party. In part that’s because American slaves, unlike the slaves in Haiti, did not free themselves. Haiti can hardly be qualified as a success but it’s version of Simon Bolívar and José Francisco de San Martín y Matorras and yes, George Washington, Toussaint Louverture should be an inspiration to all descendants of Africans stolen from their own lands and forced into slavery. Abraham Lincoln should not.
American slaves were emancipated only through a cynical ploy by Abraham Lincoln, a racist who believed African Americans could never coexist with whites and should all be expelled from the Union he loved. A cynical racist who believed that African Americans should never have political rights in the United States of America. American slaves were emancipated, not to enjoy the fruits of freedom and the ability to attain their highest potential, as individuals and as a race, but rather, to preserve the Union and to lower the cost of labor for Northern factory owners thriving as the industrial revolution permitted the evolution of what became known as the “gilded age” in the United States.
Slaves in the United States were emancipated, not because slavery was considered an intolerable evil, but because victory in the Civil War was essential for Northern industrialists to realize their dream of an American Empire. They were emancipated only to dissuade the United Kingdom and France from supporting the Confederacy’s aspirations for independence. In fact, when they were initially purportedly emancipated during the Civil War, they were emancipated only in the Confederacy over which the Union lacked legal jurisdiction but remained enslaved in the Union itself. That seems ironic based on how history has been taught in the United States for the past century but anyone can read Lincoln’s initial inaugural address where he said (and anyone can verify it on Google): “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”
The fact that Americans of African descent were emancipated by cynical whites by no means implies that there have not been brilliant, ethical and visionary leaders of African descent in the United States, leaders, for example, like Frederick Douglas or Marcus Garvey or Malcolm Little (later known as el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz and finally as Malcolm X) or Martin Luther King, Jr., leaders who believed that Americans of African descent should break the bonds of political slavery that prevented them from attaining the role in American society to which their numbers and their talents should have entitled them. Indeed, as of 2019, there were a total of 255 different African American led groups in the United States that avocated for African American political independence. But the old overseer system that controlled African Americans during their days as slaves, the system of treacherous African American overseers who betrayed their brothers and sisters, never ended. It just morphed into a system controlled and funded by people of all races that sees African Americans as a commodity to be controlled and used, especially in the political arena where African Americans can be herded into a monolithic voting bloc that serves its masters rather than its members just as slaves enriched plantation owners while they were maintained at barely subsistence levels. A system run by modern overseers like Barack Obama and Kamala Harris and Hakeem Sekou Jeffries and Charles Diggs and Charley Rangel and Kweisi Mfume and Shirley Chisholm and Louis Stokes and William L. Clay. Heroes to African Americans because some among them participated in apparently successful battles for desegregation and civil rights but whose principal loyalties were and are to the white led, power mad, ill-named Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party is a strange amalgam of disenfranchised minorities and fringe groups without common bonds other than their deluded acquiescence in their own continuous betrayal, especially since the ascension of the Clintons to political power in 1992. The party’s principal strategy is the use of polarization to goad their betrayed supporters to maintain them in power so that the party can, in turn, serve its real masters: the billionaire class, Wall Street, trial lawyers, but most of all, the military industrial complex. It seems amazing, especially with reference to African Americans, how successful condescending platitudes, backslapping and utter hypocrisy have been in keeping their voters in line even when, as in case of the Clintons, they are devastatingly betrayed. Witness the Clintons (two for the price of one) deformations of the criminal justice and welfare systems that devastated the African American community. But that’s exactly what overseers are for. What they’ve always been for.
The reality is that Black Power is an inchoate reality, as is the power of each and every component of the incoherent alliance that conforms the modern Democratic Party, but a reality that will only be realized when such groups are emancipated from political slavery and attain their own political power through their own political parties under leaders loyal to their constituencies rather than to the hidden leaders of what has come to be known as the Deep State. Shifting from one component of the political duopoly that has ruled the United States since the Civil War to the other is meaningless. Only a multiparty system embracing real democracy rather than its verisimilitude can bring about a real American Dream, a society where every American citizen can attain his or her own greatest personal potential, for their own benefit, and where overseers are consigned to the Hell they deserve.
Of course, the United States constitutional system at all levels, as implemented by legislation, regulations, rules, ordinances, decree and judicial decisions, poses a huge impediment to political emancipation and democracy. It was designed by slaveholders precisely for such purpose, with the seductive illusions of democracy, liberty and opportunity for all held out like a carrot, but the carrot has always been a mere mirage and only the stick has been real.
It’s not as though African American political parties don’t exist. Cornell West, PhD, a brilliant American philosopher of African descent is running for president during this electoral cycle, although the Democratic Party is doing all it can to keep him off the ballot in November, and the following are an illustrative listing of current African American political parties in the United States: the African People’s Socialist Party, the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, the Black Hammer Party, the Black Panther Party, the Black Riders Liberation Party, the Freedom Now Party, the Harold Washington Party, the New Afrikan Black Panther Party, the New Black Panther Party, the Progressive Democratic Party, the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Revolutionary Black Panther Party, the Umoja Party and the United Citizens Party. However, they are singularly unsuccessful because the overseers appointed by the Democratic Party (and its allies in the corporate media) keep them virtually unknown.
African American voters bear a terrible stigma as a result of the homogeneous manner in which a majority have voted over the decades. They tend to be the balance of power in American politics and have been so since they were formally granted the rights of citizens pursuant to the thirteenth fourteenth and fifteen amendments to the United States Constitution following the Civil War. In reality, although they’ve derived few tangible benefits as a result of their political subservience, they’ve been responsible for the election of the administrations responsible for World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the wars on Serbia and Kosovo, the destruction of Libya (Africa’s most economically successful state), the promotion of civil war in Syria, the Ukrainian conflict, and, for Israeli genocide, ethnic cleansing and Apartheid in Palestine. Those are intolerable moral burdens for a people to bear. For any people. But especially for a people who have been so utterly abused for over half a millennium.
What Americans of African descent really need if real freedom and real independence and real emancipation and real personal realization are their goals, rather than fourth class illusory citizenship, is their very own “Toussaint Louverture”.
If you’re an American of African descent and don’t know who he is, look him up.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
United States president Joseph Robinette Biden was a disaster in his initial 2024 presidential debate against Donald Trump, the truncated affair orchestrated by CNN which, at the demand of the Biden administration, excluded presidential candidates Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Jill Stein and Cornell West, PhD, each of whom would also have trounced the inept Mr. Biden. Mr. Trump performed well, to an extent curbing his impulsive nature and was the clear winner. However, the fear of accountability should Donald Trump return to the Whitehouse will increase rather than decrease abuse of the corporate media and the legal system by the Deep State, possibly leading it to panic and take ever more drastic actions to prevent the American electorate from exercising its political rights.
So, what to expect?
Well, the potential for an assassination of Mr. Trump orchestrated by the Deep State is higher than ever. The potential for adverse judgments against Mr. Trump in the pending wave of “lawfare against him orchestrated by the Deep State, the Biden administration and their supporters at the state level, including private citizens, will increase. And the Supreme Court will experience massive pressure from mortified traditional Republicans, especially on the Chief Justice, to rule in favor of Mr. Trump’s opponents. It seems clear that the law of unanticipated if not unintended consequences is merrily at work.
If Mr. Trump nonetheless survives and prevails, assuming massive electoral fraud is unsuccessful, no sure thing, Deep State moles will once again seek to obstruct not so much Mr. Trump’s policies as his ability to govern. There is really very little difference in the policies of the modern Democratic Party and the GOP, other than with respect to abortion and the Second Amendment. If Mr. Trump is artfully defeated and the electoral fraud is more obvious this time than it was in 2020, then ever increasing civil strife is possible, although the Deep State is so well armed that a civil war would probably prove futile. At any rate, regardless of the results, the electorate, already utterly polarized may fragment from bipolar to multipolar which would be the only positive thing.
The one sure thing seems to be that whoever eventually wins:
• The ensuing administration will continue to support genocide in the Middle East, probably expanded from just the Palestinians to the Lebanese and the Syrians as Nazis in Hell smile and say, we told you so and welcome aboard to their former non-Soviet adversaries in World War II.
• In Europe, confusion may reign. A Trump victory should surely generate much needed introspection and a settlement of the Deep State orchestrated Ukrainian quagmire may result. But it’s also possible that a creeping advance to a third world war, initially conventional but eventually nuclear, will continue. Still, the corruption of the ideal of European unity by NATO may finally be perceived by the electorates in France and Germany and in the flotsam that echoes the posture of those two subservient polities throughout Europe.
• The de facto Sino-Russian alliance is likely to strengthen, as is the growing closeness of Iran, North Korea and Syria with that group, but that would be true regardless of the results of the United States’ election and Global North hegemony will continue its decline as the Global South continues to evolve politically and economically. The demise of the United States dollar will continue as faith in its ability to function as a neutral reserve currency has already been shattered by the abusive United States international economic sanctions regime.
It is unfortunate that with three decent alternative candidates, the Deep State and its corporate media will exclude them from consideration by voters this November but that has been the case since the unexpected Republican victory in 1860, 164 years ago. The echoes of Cassandric warnings are loud and clear but the three monkeys that represent the so-called Western World continue to plug their ears, shut their eyes and cover their mouths.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
At long last Julian Assange has been released by the vile government of the United Kingdom after a guilty plea was extorted by the equally vile Biden administration in the United States. It is not only way past time, but the imprisonment and indictments of Julian Assange should never have happened nor should the traitorous actions of Lenin Moreno, then president of Ecuador, or the betrayal of all standards of journalism by what passes for journalism throughout the NATO bloc, ever occurred.
The extorted release of Julian Assange by the ill-named United States Department of Justice highlights the putrid nature of what passes for justice in the United States and the United Kingdom, legal systems that punish the innocent and reward the guilty through “plea bargains”, really a system for extorting the innocent by threatening them with draconian punishment if they do not agree to accept often unfounded prosecutorial accusations while conversely rewarding the guilty through sentences (if that) much more lenient than they deserve for their wrongs. The former is certainly what happened in the case of Julian Assange but it is so obvious that prosecutors just wanted cover for their own crimes of lesse humanidad that it highlights the plight of millions of Americans and others subjected to this ludicrous travesty. Plea bargaining is capitalism imposed on the justice system, a “let’s make a deal or else” concept identical to that used by extortionists in organized crime, an obvious form of state sponsored racketeering.
I’m thrilled that Julian Assange is free but it’s analogous to a situation where after having murdered millions, the Nazis (or Zionists) let one of their victims survive after torturing him or her into confessing that he or she was a traitor to the master race. No punishment could be too severe for those responsible, not only for prosecuting the Assange case but all other plea bargains where innocent people are coerced into admitting guilt in order to escape from continuing torture. Had the Biden administration any trace, any semblance of decency it would have released Julian Assange with profound apologies and just compensation for the torture inflicted upon him for having dared to seek and share the truth concerning terrible state sponsored crimes. But that was not the case and the Biden administration needs to be held accountable rather than given credit.
The governments of the United States and the United Kingdom are not the only villains. The purported profession of journalism finds itself indelibly stained by its conduct throughout the Assange saga, especially media such as the United Kingdom’s Guardian or the United States’ Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. Decent people should boycott every enterprise that supports them through advertising or grants or just plain bribes.
It is unlikely that Julian Assange will ever be able to return to the brave brand of real journalism we all so desperately need. Well, all but the very worst among us, our political and military leaders. A decade of torture will have, if not broken him, seriously debilitated him, and worse, set an example for anyone who might otherwise dare to cooperate in exposing inconvenient truths involving the travesties of the NATO bloc of purported libertarian democracies. And that was the goal of the Biden administration. As George W. Bush once falsely proclaimed on the deck of a United States aircraft career, “mission accomplished”. But at least Julian Assange is free and will soon be in the bosom of his wonderful family who will do all they can to make him whole again.
As for us, all we can do is do our best to hold the real villains accountable, those who have totally perverted the concepts of justice, of legality, of ethics and of morality; those for whom perpetual war is the worthiest and most profitable goal and who have politicized and destroyed what pass for legal systems. And to fearlessly emulate Julian’s quest for truth, a torch he has probably now passed to us.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
For most of this millennium, candidates for the United States presidency have been absolute horrors, recognized as such by the majority of the voters, but, what passes for democracy in the United States is really a multilevel filtering system that leaves the candidate selection process virtually free of public participation, thus, only candidates acceptable to the oligarchy that actually rules us ever obtain the major party nominations essential for electoral participation. Indeed, the process has failed only three times during the past century, the election of Richard Millhouse Nixon in 1968, the election of James Earl Carter, Jr. in 1976, and the election of Donald John Trump in 2016. In each case, the furious traditional political apparatus quickly destroyed the successful candidates. The latter case is the most interesting however, especially, as it was undone by electoral machinations during the 2020 election, and because a possible replay is in process right now, and it is carefully tied to the concept of a “straw man”.
The concept of “straw men” and, in today’s egalitarian atmosphere, “straw women” is essential in today’s sociopolitical context where manipulation and hypocrisy are the rule and truth an irrelevancy to be avoided at all costs. In that context, the Democratic Party, a once essential ideologically-leftist political force (now bereft of any ideology except a quest for permanent dictatorial power dedicated to the profits possible in the antithesis of Kant’s “perpetual peace”), crafted the ultimate “straw” man”, a sort of golem, one essential to the modern ill-named Democratic Party (given its vacuity of principles). That is, given the reality that the principle candidates offered for the highest office by the Democratic Party generate little if any public support on their own and thus, it has become essential for that Deep State pillar to “create” a vilifiable figure against whom to run; a boogey man to frighten voters, one apparently as evil in every way as it is possible to portray so that the even more horrible candidates offered to the electorate by the Democratic Party seem the better option, a concept known as lesser evil politics. Of course, that also requires that other available options offered by non-traditional political parties and movements such as Jill Stein, Cornel West, PhD, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., etc., be hidden and silenced, but with a subservient mass media, that has never proven difficult.
Thus, enter “Donald John Trump”, a former Democrat and former best friend of the modern Democratic Party’s founders, Bill and Hillary Clinton, the “straw man” extraordinaire, particularly given the shade of his hair which so nearly matches that of Hillary. The perfect foil for first, Hillary Clinton and then, Joseph Robinette Biden, … at least, so it seemed. However, despite the best efforts of the Democratic Party and its puppet masters in the Deep State as well as of the mass media, things did not go according to script in 2016 and possibly, during 2020. 2024 remains to be seen. However, lessons were learned as a result of the 2016 fiasco, and with the elimination of anti-electoral fraud mechanisms through mass mailing of electoral ballots and their collection through indirect means without required verification, the ability of voters to make incorrect electoral decisions has been severely limited. Additionally, the criminalization of challenges to electoral results, regardless of how suspicious such results seemed, have made unacceptable results improbable.
The Democrat’s “straw man” for 2016, Donald Trump, proved enigmatic. He apparently started out with all the attributes Democrats had hoped for when Bill Clinton urged him to run for the presidency in opposition to his own wife. “The Donald” (as he likes to style himself) was and is an arrogant egocentric, egomaniac with a propensity for ludicrous superlatives for purposes of self-promotion, coupled with childish bullying tactics and a proclivity for name calling. Obviously, at least initially, he was the ideal opponent for the most polarizing and disliked political figure in United States at the time, Mrs. Clinton. Of course, he’d have to first defeat a host of Republicans eager to go head to head against Mrs. Clinton who, with respect to them, was bound to lose, so, the Donald had to be positioned, with the help of the docile mass media, for maximum exposure. After all, who, seeing the Donald’s ludicrous posturing, linguistic vulgarity and pomposity would not, in the end, consider Hillary the lesser evil and, holding their noses, covering their eyes, plugging their ears and covering their mouths, vote for her in preference to the Donald?
The first part of the plan worked, albeit perhaps too well. The Donald steamrolled his Republican opponents and became a darling of the populist segment of the Republican Party. A strange political bloc which had, in large part, rejected the corruption inherent in all major United States political institutions. It involved an informal hodgepodge of diverse political groupings ranging from libertarian to extreme conservative but, its largest segment involved a disorganized, leaderless group that described itself as the “Tea Party”. While not formally organized or led, people who self-identified as members of the Tea Party tended to vote in concert and, to the shocked surprise of the traditional segment of the GOP, they soon constituted a majority of the Republican Party’s electorate. The Democratic Party experienced a populist wave itself in the form of backers of purportedly independent and progressive Senator Bernie Sanders, but he quickly sold out his Sanderistas, leaving them sucking their thumbs and wondering what happened. That left only the Donald for those sick of traditional politics as usual, and lightning struck via the law of unintended consequences, leaving both Machiavellian Democrats and traditional Republicans flabbergasted.
The “Deep State” (an informal alliance of billionaires, intelligence agencies, the mass media and moles planted throughout the federal bureaucracy by the Obama administration), was especially flabbergasted but not totally unprepared. The Deep State, which had enjoyed an unbreakable grip on both major parties since the Clintons’ victory in 1992, was faced with the ultimate “loose cannon” in the Donald, a billionaire who was beholden to no one and whose megalomania knew no bounds. Indeed, the Donald seemed a sort of Mussolini who perceived that he was worthy of deification. Unfortunately for the Deep State, the Democratic Party and traditionalist Republicans, a major segment of the electorate agreed with him and still does, that despite the massive attacks to which he has been subjected since he was surprisingly elected president in 2016 and much more so since he refused to accept the obvious electoral manipulation and possible electoral fraud that led to his defeat in the 2020 re-run.
The Donald’s policies mainly dealt with treating symptoms fairly well, while ignoring underlying causes and his administration did unexpectedly well during its first three years, but John Fauci, MD, the federal Centers for Disease Control and the corporate media came to the Democratic Party’s rescue during the fourth year of the Trump administration, successfully leveraging a global virus into an international economic disaster and blaming it all on the hapless Donald. It took a major Deep State managed misinformation campaign, a fake foreign political interference scandal and a gullible public, especially among African Americans to undo the 2016 debacle, but, with the help of a mole ridden federal bureaucracy, by January 20, 2021, the Donald was out of the picture, at least temporarily.
But the Clintons had created a political version of the Frankenstein monster, a golem who went on to crush them, and seems ready to do so again despite the Deep State’s new massive campaign against him, one pitting the subverted United States Justice Department and Democratic Party controlled state and local chief legal officers and tame judges and juries bringing deeply flawed legal and criminal actions against him. The Donald though, like a good golem, just refuses to die.
So, what happens if he wins again? He’s been leading in most polls, most of the time?
Well, there is a significant possibility that he would be prevented from assuming his office by a real “insurrection”, you know, like the ones foreseen in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, not like the limited protests that took place on January 6, 2021 (and which seemed to have been infiltrated by Deep State agents whose goal was to use them as a means of preventing more meaningful protests from taking place, a sort of “straw protest” strategy). If that takes place, all bets are off. The Deep State, which would have been responsible for orchestrating the insurrection, would immediately label opponents to that de facto coup d’état as “insurrections and, since it controls the armed forces, intelligence agencies, police forces, prosecutorial agencies and the judiciary, as well as the mass media, the real insurrectionists would continue to govern, and those seeking to defend the Constitution would promptly be imprisoned or, perhaps, even disappeared (as happens in so many countries that experience United States intelligence agency orchestrated coups d’état). And then what?
Good question.
There are of course, other options. “Non-straw person” options. At least three. There is African American philosopher, Cornel West, PhD, a brilliant civic leader who, unfortunately is running a terrible campaign; there’s traditional Green Party candidate Jill Stein, a brilliant Jewish woman opposed to Israeli genocide and military opportunism in favor of liberal domestic programs; and, then there’s Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (RFK, Jr.), a courageous liberal anticorruption crusader with a lifetime of real achievements but who, unfortunately, is tied to Israel because a Palestinian assassinated his father in 1968. Of the three, the Israeli backing Zionists who control so much of the mass media (not Jews, Zionists) and the political bribery process known as campaign contributions will assure that only pro-Israeli RFK, Jr., has any chance, although his opposition to other Deep State military projects like the Ukrainian adventure designed to overthrow Vladimir Putin in the Russian Federation and the series of provocations designed to incite a hot war between the United States (or its proxies) and the Peoples’ Republic of China over the Chinese province of Taiwan make him anathema to the billionaire class that rules us. However, RFK, Jr.’s poll numbers keep going up, so much so that now, not only the Democratic Party is “dead” set on preventing his candidacy (I use the term dead because, notwithstanding the assassination of his father and uncle, the Biden administration refuses to provide RFK, Jr., with secret service protection), but so is the Trump campaign and a magnificent recently released video narrated by Woody Harrelson presenting the real RFK, Jr., rather than the parody portrayed by the mass media, is making so many waves, that the oligarchs of the Internet have started a campaign to block its distribution (his campaign just filed a related law suit against META). A campaign identical to the one waged by them against Mr. Trump in 2020. The link to the video, as of right now, is https://www.kennedy24.com/who-is-bobby-video-donate?utm_campaign=elon_musk&utm_medium=email1&utm_source=joinkennedy. Who knows how long it will be permitted to function. Watch it if you can.
Anyway, as we see the United States government, along with that of the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia defend Israeli genocide with all the armaments they can supply, even diverting armaments from the Ukraine, making a sick mockery over the claims made to justify military adventurism since World War I, we can sit by, glued to our television screens (if we’re older) or to our computers and cell phones (if we’re younger), being spoon fed deceptive propaganda and assured that everything is and will continue to be just fine, as long as we vote the way we’re supposed to or even, if we don’t. It may not make a difference how we vote anymore.
So, how about those Yankees? Or Dodgers, or whatever will distract us from the issues that will mold our future and that of our children for generations to come.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, an intermittent commentator on radio and television, and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
The Deep State is an informal but profound alliance between the military industrial complex (against which president Dwight David Eisenhower warned us in November of 1960); the intelligence agencies of the United States, the United Kingdom and the State of Israel, plus their counterparts in diverse NATO member states; the traditional mass media in the United States and in US allies; the Democratic Party; and, traditionalist members of the Republican Party such as the Bush Family, the Cheney family, the McCain family and their political allies. The Deep State has riddled the federal government at all levels with moles, i.e. unelected bureaucrats, especially in the Department of Justice and its state and local level analogues, and throughout the federal judiciary; moles who carry out the orders of their billionaire masters rather than those of the people we elect to run our government, unless, of course, those interests coincide. Populists, from both the left and the right wings of the political spectrum, are individuals and organizations who believe deeply in democracy and liberty, but believe that the formal governmental institutions responsible for guaranteeing such concepts are inept and corrupt, and thus, they have little faith in the traditional political castes.
The Deep State manages to hold unto dictatorial power (i.e., control of legislative, executive, judicial, police and electoral functions) by keeping the populists divided based on fringe issues, most notably abortion and the right to bear arms, and by focusing attention on polarizing issues such as race, gender, sexual preferences, national origins, religion (and its absence) and the fake war on terror. Under the Biden administration, the Deep State has criminalized the right to protest, unless, as in the case of the Black Lives Matter rights, the protests serve their domestic political aspirations.
It is obvious that the Deep state profoundly manipulated the 2018 congressional elections and the 2020 presidential elections and that such manipulation had a profound impacts on the results. It is also at least possible and possibly likely, that the use of mass mail-in ballots without requiring the voters themselves to turn them in facilitated electoral fraud, possibly enough to have impacted the 2020 presidential election. Many of those who protested those results, whether violently, peacefully or through the legal process have been subjected to the full weight of federal and state penal systems in clear violation of the most fundamental principles of what used to pass for democracy in the United States, and that includes not only Republicans, but independents and members of smaller political parties. Many people who despised the GOP candidate in that election had no problem with the subversion of the civic rights involved as it helped their “team” to win, despite that such victory proved utterly hollow (where is health care for all, world peace, economic wellbeing, equity, equality, etc.?). But now, in a sense, the precedents they applauded have come back to haunt at least some of them, actually, the very best among them. I refer to the current police and legal attacks against students, faculty members and others who dare to protest against Israeli genocide.
As in the case of the Deep State machinations in the 2020 presidential elections, it is clear that the students, faculty members and others protesting against Israeli genocide have an existentially valid point. Everything they demand involves what the Nuremburg trials following the second war to end all wars prohibited and sought to punish by invoking the death penalty against the leaders involved and forever outlawing their political movements, outlawing them everywhere, but that has not proved to be the case as neo-Nazis rule the Ukraine, with full Deep State support, as well as Israel. And those who dare to point that out, to protest against it either violently, peacefully or through legal actions, find themselves persecuted, both civically and legally, with their futures placed in serious jeopardy, as is the case in the series of trials against protesters and critics of the results of the 2020 presidentai election.
It is profoundly ironic that the issues involved in both cases are so similar, while those involved feel that the two principle issues are completely different, and that the members of each group have nothing in common, when in reality, they are, in fact, so similar. Each group is comprised of deeply committed individuals who profoundly believe in truth, justice and equity, and who are willing to risk their “lives, property and sacred honor”, a phrase once attributed to United States founding father Patrick Henry”, to see justice done. They have a common enemy, the Deep State which adroitly manipulates them and uses each of the groups against the other in order to maintain the dictatorial power that permits it to abuse police at all levels and the penal laws such police and departments of justice are sworn to uphold, in order to continue the very profitable state of perpetual war, to continue to overthrow governments and to keep the truth under wraps, as it does, for example, though the imprisonment of one of the world’s only real journalist, Julian Assange. All actions which maximize the profits and minimize the risks of the wealthiest and least honorable among us.
How ironic that Trump supporters, to whom it is obvious that he is being persecuted through abuse of power in order to prevent his return to power, and that the corporate media has made a mockery of the truth in order to assist in that process, trust that same media when it calumnies against those who oppose genocide, apartheid and ethnic cleansing, deeming them domestic terrorists, the same label it applies to those who expressed their outrage at what they perceived to be massive electoral fraud, in their protests at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. And how ironic that the students, faculty members and their supporters who are being subjected to high handed mass media and police abuse and abuse of legal processes to stifle their protests against obvious genocide, with tactics all too similar to those used against the s called January 6 terrorists, don’t realize that they not only have a commonality of interests in the legal process, but that many of their goals are compatible rather than antagonistic.
It is irony such as this, it is our own civic incoherence, which permits the worst among us to attain and maintain power, while the lives of the best and most courageous among us are destroyed. Something for all of us to consider as we vote this November and to consider that there are at least five candidates running for president, not just two, and that many political parties and movements are fielding candidates for the Senate and the House of Representatives, not just two. And that the same is true at the state and local levels. And that the only wasted votes are those we decline to cast for the things in which we believe and which we instead cast based on induced fears and in support of purportedly lesser evils. _______
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, an intermittent commentator on radio and television, and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
Guillermo Calvo Mahé 