The Anatomy Of Trumpocracy: An Interview With Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky

With its spate of right-wing rulings this week, the Supreme Court has paved the way for Donald Trump and the Republican-dominated Congress to intensify their attacks on human rights, workers and the country’s democratic institutions, dragging the US deeper into the abyss.

US political culture has long been dominated by oligarchical corporate and financial interests, militarism and jingoism, but the current Trumpocracy represents a new level of neoliberal cruelty. Indeed, the United States is turning into a pariah nation, a unique position among Western states in the second decade of the 21st century.

What factors and the forces produced this radical and dangerous shift? How did Trump manage to bring the Republican Party under his total control? Is Trumpocracy a temporary phenomenon, or the future of American politics? Is the Bernie Sanders phenomenon over? In the exclusive Truthout interview below, world-renowned scholar and public intellectual Noam Chomsky, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at MIT and currently Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona, tackles these questions and offers his unique insights.

C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, while many in the country and the world at large watch aghast as Donald Trump’s nightmare of white supremacy continues to unravel the United States, it still remains something of a puzzle as to what propelled Trumpism to political prominence. For starters, why did voters turn to Trump? Who are the people that make up his hard-core base, and how do we explain the fact that he has essentially taken over the Republican Party without any serious opposition?

Noam Chomsky: Part of the solution to the puzzle is Obama’s performance in office. Many were seduced by the rhetoric of “hope” and “change,” and deeply disillusioned by the very early discovery that the words had little substance. I don’t usually agree with Sarah Palin, but she had a point when she ridiculed this hopey-changey stuff. A fair number of Obama voters, mostly working people, switched to Trump. These developments were already clear by the time of the 2010 special election in Massachusetts to fill the seat of Senator Kennedy – the liberal lion. Virtually unknown Scott Brown won the election, the first Republican elected to the Senate in [more than] 40 years in this liberal state. Analysis of the vote showed that even union members hardly supported his liberal opponent because of anger at Obama: the way he handled the housing-financial crisis (bailing out the rich, including the perpetrators, while letting their victims hang out to dry) and much else, including provisions of his health care proposal that working people saw, with justice, as an attack on health programs that they had won in contract negotiations. Read more

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Simon(e) van Saarloos ~ ENZ. Het Wildersproces

Simon(e) van Saarloos Tekening: Joseph Sassoon Semah

“Wie mij wil stoppen, moet mij vermoorden”, zei Geert Wilders toen hij in november 2016 voor de rechtbank stond vanwege zijn ‘minder-minder’ uitspraak op de verkiezingsavond in het Haags café De Tijd. De-islamisering is niet zijn doel, concludeert filosoof en schrijver Simon(e) van Saarloos: doorgaan is zijn doel.
Ze stelt de vraag of Wilders iets verlangt. “Hij wil bepaalde dingen niet (islamisering), maar verlangt hij iets? Ervaart hij het verlangen naar een harmonieuze samenleving, een utopie, een Nobelprijs, de aandacht van één specifiek iemand? Of is hij eigenlijk een blij ei – zou de mogelijkheid om elk maatschappelijk probleem voor het karretje van je eigen agenda te spannen, plus de voortdurende vraag om een respons via twitter of te voor de camera, een bevredigend prikkelparadijs zijn voor Wilders?”

ENZ. uit de titel refereert aan het veelvuldig gebruik van dit woord in het verkiezingsprogramma van de PVV: “Geen geld meer naar ontwikkelingshulp, windmolens, kunst, innovatie, omroep, enz.” Wilders herhaalt zijn standpunten, waardoor de herhaling de waarde van de zinnen bestendigt. “Niet de inhoud van Wilders’ uitspraken veroorzaakt dat hij zichzelf blijft herhalen, maar het feit dat ze niet mogen worden uitgesproken zet hem aan tot herhaling.”
Van Saarloos wil Wilders begrijpen en volgt alle procesdagen vanuit de rechtszaal. Een proces over discriminatie maar dat vooral over vrijheid van meningsuiting gaat.
Simon(e) van Saarloos is geïnspireerd door de filosoof Hannah Arendt en haar boek Eichmann in Jerusalem – A Report on the Banilty of Evil over het proces tegen voormalig SS’er Adolf Eichmann in 1961.

Van de eerste procesdag op 4 maart tot de formele afsluiting op 9 december 2016 geeft Van Saarloos in haar boek ‘ENZ. Het Wildersproces’ een minutieus verslag van dat wat ze ziet en hoort. Op het door Wilders uitgesproken weerwoord (23 november) dat in het geheel is opgenomen, levert ze per alinea stevig commentaar. Tussendoor reist ze op zoek naar Wilders naar de mosjav in Israël waar hij begin jaren tachtig een tijdje heeft gewoond, gaat het toneelstuk Holy F. in première, horen we over haar liefdes en etentjes met de ‘Rechtse Eetclub’, en over de lezingen die ze bezoekt. In het laatste hoofdstuk kruipt ze zelfs in Wilders, als ze verkleed als Wilders naar het carnaval in Limburg gaat. Read more

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Surinaamse slavenregisters online toegankelijk

Wie op zoek is naar meer informatie over zijn Surinaamse voorouders, lessen over slavernij voorbereidt, of onderzoek doet naar het Surinaamse slavernijverleden, kan voortaan een belangrijke online bron raadplegen. Met de gedigitaliseerde en ontsloten slavenregisters is het mogelijk mensen die in slavernij leefden over een periode van bijna 35 jaar te volgen.

De database wordt op 26 juni 2018 feestelijk gelanceerd door Noraly Beyer, ambassadeur van het project  ‘Maak de Surinaamse slavenregisters openbaar’. Iedereen die in Suriname in slavernij leefde werd in het register opgenomen. De slavenregisters zijn uniek: nergens anders in de wereld is zulke gedetailleerde informatie over een complete bevolking van mensen in slavernij bewaard gebleven.

De database is als index gepubliceerd op de collectiewebsite van het Nationaal Archief.

Surinaamse slavenregisters
In de Surinaamse slavenregisters staan naar schatting tachtigduizend mensen geregistreerd die tussen 1830 en de afschaffing van de slavernij in 1863, in Suriname in slavernij leefden. Slaveneigenaren moesten de mensen die in hun bezit waren laten registreren, met vermelding van naam, geboortedatum en de naam van de moeder en informatie over geboorte, overlijden, vrijlating, verkoop en andere informatie die belangrijk was voor de status en waarde van mensen in slavernij. De registers behoren tot de collectie van het Nationaal Archief Suriname maar waren zeer beperkt toegankelijk voor het publiek, omdat ze niet gedigitaliseerd waren en een namenindex ontbrak.

Ga naar: https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/surinaamse-slavenregisters

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Robert B. Reich ~ Our national identity has been our shared ideals

Robert B. Reich is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written fifteen books, including the best sellers “Aftershock”, “The Work of Nations,” and”Beyond Outrage,” and, his most recent, “The Common Good,” which is available in bookstores now. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, “Inequality For All.” He’s co-creator of the Netflix original documentary “Saving Capitalism,” which is streaming now.

Follow: http://robertreich.org/

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Paolo Heywood & Maja Spanu ~ We Need To Talk About How We Talk About Fascism

The word “fascism” has recently reemerged as a key piece of political terminology. The headlines immediately after Donald Trump’s election as president of the US read like a disturbing question and answer session.

“Is Donald Trump a Fascist?” asked Newsweek. The Washington Post had the answer, declaring “Donald Trump is actually a Fascist”, but later sought to quantify things in a bit more detail with “How Fascist is Donald Trump?”. Meanwhile, Salon agreed that “Donald Trump is an actual Fascist”.

That all raises the question: what actually counts as fascism? It’s a question that has its own history, just as Nazism and fascism themselves do. And it’s similarly not without controversy.

Defining what counted as Nazism and fascism in the immediate aftermath of World War II was an urgent task faced by allied administrators and jurists in Germany and Italy. Examining these projects and their effects may help shed some light on how we talk, or perhaps on how we ought to think before talking, about fascism today.

Read morehttps://theconversation.com/we-need-to-talk-about-how-we-talk-about-fascism

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David Kenning ~ States Of Mind

States of Mind (SoM) (Beyond Appearances) is a forum for looking behind the world of appearances. Only by understanding hidden drivers, motives and desires – and seeing through the commonly accepted narratives – can we explain what is really happening in our world.

States of Mind takes a generally pessimistic view of the human condition. Modernity, social-media, celebrity-culture and dumbing-down are making shallow fools of the many and putting democracy itself in danger. At the same time, nation states are increasingly polarising and fragmenting into confrontational groups driven by the grievances of identity politics. We are living through a post-ideological age where conspiracy theories, hashtags, celebrity culture and fake news are replacing thought, conversation and analysis. The democratisation of unfiltered information is leading to the fracturing of social cohesion.

Good things often take time, thought, experience and care to create. Too often today, time-tried-and-tested institutions, humane values and policies are being attacked and destroyed by greedy, ignorant and aggressive individuals, groups and organizations. Most are bent on increasing inequality, exclusion and division. These people are at war with core democratic values and have found a way to use the processes of democracy to attack and diminish social cohesion and the democratic mindset. We have a paradoxical situation where the citizen’s vote has become the single greatest threat to democratic values. States of Mind aims to become a force to help cure democracy of this auto-immune disease. In this sense, democracy is at war with itself and warfare must be re-defined as the ability to know, understand and influence how people think and feel. Our values and analysis of the situation are valid. What we lack in today’s “reality is information” world, is influence.

States of Mind recognizes that we need to become players in this war if we are to defend what is right, what is good and protect the everyday values of fratérnité – pluralism, respect for the other, tolerance and compromise.  States of Mind intends to gather opinions and insights into ways to influence key decision-makers and put some backbone into politicians and policy-makers. In this regard we do not trust governments, elected leaders or politicians to get it right. We recognise that we ourselves must take the fight directly to those who would destroy democratic values. Think about it.

States of Mind will pick-up issues across the spectrum – and spare no individuals, groups, organizations or country practices from deeper scrutiny. But we also aim to entertain and have a good deal of fun. We may be pessimistic but we are bold and cheerful and always enjoy a good laugh.

Our content will be taken from open sources across the media and supported by bespoke think-pieces, weighty references and analysis from insightful contributors. There is a lot out there we need to expose and shame. And in the process, we take a sceptical position towards the prevailing so-called values of the so-called “superpowers” who are inflicting so much material damage and misery on the world. We don’t trust them, period. We aim to expose and share best practice in taking the fight to the darker forces dismantling the human values that make life worth living.

Perhaps it is already too late and the battle is lost, for now. Perhaps not.

Go to: https://www.statesofmind.eu/

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