[Peace] [Peace-discuss] The US replaces the War on Terror with the War on Populism

Sat Jan 12 23:39:28 UTC 2019

On Sat, Jan 12, 2019 at 2:55 PM David Johnson via Peace <
peace at lists.chambana.net> wrote:

Carl,
>
> Who is C.J. Hopkins, the author of this article ?
>
> Quite a good parody and fairly accurate.
>

It's clever.  It's facile.  Some of it is quite incisive, some of it is
absolutely stupid.

Whatever "populism" actually is in its current incarnation, Donald tRump
and his minions are precisely the WRONG people to whom one should ever in a
million years affix the label.

I'll bet anything that Hopkins is a libertarian.  The thing could have been
written by one person on THIS list, whose name escapes me at the moment.
The guy at pigs.org.

> David J.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On
> Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss
> Sent: Saturday, January 12, 2019 5:04 AM
> To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net
> Cc: Peace
> Subject: [Peace-discuss] The US replaces the War on Terror with the War on
> Populism
>
> Remember when the War on Terror ended and the War on Populism began?
> That’s OK, no one else does.
>
> It happened in the Summer of 2016, also known as “the Summer of Fear.” The
> War on Terror was going splendidly. There had been a series of “terrorist
> attacks,” in Orlando, Nice, Würzberg, Munich, Reutlingen, Ansbach, and
> Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, each of them perpetrated by suddenly
> “self-radicalized” “lone wolf terrorists” (or “non-terrorist terrorists“)
> who had absolutely no connection to any type of organized terrorist groups
> prior to suddenly “self- radicalizing” themselves by consuming “terrorist
> content” on the Internet. It seemed we were entering a new and even more
> terrifying phase of the Global War on Terror, a phase in which anyone could
> be a “terrorist” and “terrorism” could mean almost anything.
>
> This broadening of the already virtually meaningless definition of
> “terrorism” was transpiring just in time for Obama to hand off the reins to
> Hillary Clinton, who everyone knew was going to be the next president, and
> who was going to have to bomb the crap out of Syria in response to the
> non-terrorist terrorist threat. The War on Terror (or, rather, “the series
> of persistent targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent
> extremists that threaten America,” as Obama rebranded it) was going to
> continue, probably forever. The Brexit referendum had just taken place, but
> no one had really digested that yet … and then Trump won the nomination.
>
> Like that scene in Orwell’s 1984 where the Party switches official enemies
> right in the middle of the Hate Week rally, the War on Terror was
> officially canceled and replaced by the War on Populism. Or … all right, it
> wasn’t quite that abrupt. But seriously, go back and scan the news. Note
> how the “Islamic terrorist threat” we had been conditioned to live in fear
> of on a daily basis since 2001 seemed to just vanish into thin air.
> Suddenly, the “existential threat” we were facing was “neo-nationalism,”
> “illiberalism,” or the pejorative designator du jour, “populism.”
>
> Here we are, two and a half years later, and “democracy” is under constant
> attack by a host of malevolent “populist” forces …. Russo-fascist Black
> vote suppressors, debaucherous eau de Novichok assassins, Bernie Sanders,
> the yellow-vested French, emboldened non-exploding mail bomb bombers,
> Jeremy Corbyn’s Nazi Death Cult, and brain-devouring Russian-Cubano
> crickets. The President of the United States is apparently both a Russian
> intelligence operative and literally the resurrection of Hitler. NBC and
> MSNBC have been officially merged with the CIA. The Guardian has dispensed
> with any pretense of journalism and is just making stories up out of whole
> cloth. Anyone who has ever visited Russia, or met with a Russian, or read a
> Russian novel, is on an “Enemies of Democracy” watch list (as is anyone
> refusing to vacation in Israel, which the Senate is now in the process of
> making mandatory for all U.S. citizens). Meanwhile, the “terrorists” are
> nowhere to be found, except for the terrorists we’ve been using to attempt
> to overthrow the government of Bashar al Assad, the sadistic nerve-gassing
> Monster of Syria, who illegally invaded and conquered his own country in
> defiance of the “international community.”
>
> All this madness has something to do with “populism,” although it isn’t
> clear what. The leading theory is that the Russians are behind it. They’ve
> got some sort of hypno-technology (not to be confused with those
> brain-eating crickets) capable of manipulating the minds of … well, Black
> people, mostly, but not just Black people. Obviously, they are also
> controlling the French, who they have transformed into “racist, hate-filled
> liars” who are “attacking elected representatives, journalists, Jews,
> foreigners, and homosexuals,” according to French President Emmanuel
> Macron, the anointed “Golden Boy of Europe.” More terrifying still, Putin
> is now able to project words out of Trump’s mouth in real-time, literally
> using Trump’s head as a puppet, or like one of those Mission Impossible
> masks. (Rachel Maddow conclusively proved this by spending a couple of
> hours on Google comparing the words coming out of Trump’s mouth to words
> that had come out of Russian mouths, but had never come out of American
> mouths, which they turned out to be the exact same words, or pretty close
> to the exact same words!) Apparently, Putin’s master plan for Total
> Populist World Domination and Establishment of the Thousand Year Duginist
> Reich was to provoke the global capitalist ruling classes, the corporate
> media, and their credulous disciples into devolving into stark raving
> lunatics, or blithering idiots, or a combination of both.
>
> But, seriously, all that actually happened back in the Summer of 2016 was
> the global capitalist ruling classes recognized that they had a problem.
> The problem that they recognized they had (and continue to have, and are
> now acutely aware of) is that no one is enjoying global capitalism … except
> the global capitalist ruling classes. The whole smiley-happy,
> supranational, neo-feudal corporate empire concept is not going over very
> well with the masses, or at least not with the unwashed masses. People
> started voting for right-wing parties, and Brexit, and other “populist”
> measures (not because they had suddenly transformed into Nazis, but because
> the Right was acknowledging and exploiting their anger with the advance of
> global neoliberalism, while liberals and the Identity Politics Left were
> slow jamming the TPP with Obama and babbling about transgender bathrooms,
> and such).
>
> The global capitalist ruling classes needed to put a stop to that (i.e,
> the  “populist” revolt, not the bathroom debate). So they suspended the
> Global War on Terror and launched the War on Populism. It was originally
> only meant to last until Hillary Clinton’s coronation, or the second Brexit
> referendum, then switch back to the War on Terror, but … well, weird things
> happen, and here we are.
>
> We’ll get back to the War on Terror, eventually … as the War on Populism
> is essentially just a temporary rebranding of it. In the end, it’s all the
> same counter-insurgency. When a system is globally hegemonic, as our
> current model of capitalism is, every war is a counter-insurgency (i.e., a
> campaign waged against an internal enemy), as there are no external enemies
> to fight. The “character” of the internal enemies might change (e.g.,
> “Islamic terrorism,” “extremism,” “fascism,” “populism,” “Trumpism,”
> “Corbynism,” et cetera) but they are all insurgencies against the hegemonic
> system … which, in our case, is global capitalism, not the United States of
> America.
>
> The way I see it, the global capitalist ruling classes now have less than
> two years to put down this current “populist” insurgency. First and
> foremost, they need to get rid of Trump, who despite his bombastic nativist
> rhetoric is clearly no “hero of the common people,” nor any real threat to
> global capitalism, but who has become an anti-establishment symbol, like a
> walking, talking “fuck you” to both the American and global neoliberal
> elites. Then, they need to get a handle on Europe, which isn’t going to be
> particularly easy. What happens next in France will be telling, as will
> whatever becomes of Brexit … which I continue to believe will never
> actually happen, except perhaps in some purely nominal sense.
>
> And then there’s the battle for hearts and minds, which they’ve been
> furiously waging for the last two years, and which is only going to
> intensify. If you think things are batshit crazy now (which, clearly, they
> are), strap yourself in. What is coming is going to make COINTELPRO look
> like the work of some amateur meme-freak. The neoliberal corporate media,
> psy-ops like Integrity Initiative, Internet-censoring apps like NewsGuard,
> ShareBlue and other David Brock outfits, and a legion of mass hysteria
> generators will be relentlessly barraging our brains with absurdity,
> disinformation, and just outright lies (as will their counterparts on the
> Right, of course, in case you thought that they were any alternative). It’s
> going to get extremely zany.
>
> The good news is, by the time it’s all over and Trump has been dealt with,
> and normality restored, and the working classes put back in their places,
> we probably won’t remember that any of this happened. We’ll finally be able
> to sort out those bathrooms, and get back to paying the interest on our
> debts, and to living in more or less constant fear of an imminent
> devastating terrorist attack … and won’t that be an enormous relief?
>
> —CJ Hopkins
> January 10, 2018
>
>  ###
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