SoylentNews

Fictions of fascism: what twentieth century dystopia can (and can't) teach us about Trump by John Gray

Dystopian novels of the 1930s and 1940s feel topical once again – but how much do they tell us about Trump and today’s populist upheavals?

A 20th century novelist pictured a Nazi diplomat ruminating over the grand objectives of the regime he served:
"D“Don’t you realise that what we are doing is a real revolution and more internationalist in its effects than the storming of the Bastille or of the Winter Palace in Petrograd? . . . Wipe out those ridiculous winding boundaries . . . wipe out . . . the influence of the churches, of overseas capital, of any philosophy, religion, ethical or aesthetical system

of the past . . . There are no more impossibilities for man now. For the first time we are attacking the biological structure of the race. We have started to breed a new species of Homo sapiens. We are weeding out its streaks of bad heredity. We have practically finished the task of exterminating or sterilising the gypsies in Europe; the liquidation of the Jews will be completed in a year or two . . . We are the first to make use of the hypodermic syringe, the lancet and the sterilising apparatus in our revolution.”

The writer was Arthur Koestler, and the book Arrival and Departure (Vintage Classics), first published in 1943. We are living in a time when many believe we are seeing a resurgence of fascism, yet so far Koestler’s semi-autobiographical novel has been neglected. This is a pity, as he did not invent the type of Nazi whose terrifying visions he put into the mouth of Bernard, the fictional diplomat. Travelling across Europe as a journalist and undercover communist in the 1930s, Koestler must have encountered many who shared this view of the world – one that departs in a number of ways from the view of fascism that most modern liberals have today.

Under the impact of the rise of Donald Trump and with the growing strength of European anti-immigrant parties, fascism is equated nowadays with extreme versions of nationalism. However, as Koestler shows, many Nazis and fascists regarded nation states as relics that would be subsumed into a new, pan-European order – a project that was revived by Oswald Mosley after the Second World War under the rubric “Europe a Nation”.

Fascism is now being seen as an ideology of irrationalism that was hostile to science and reason. But while some fascists preached “thinking with the blood”, others, like Koestler’s diplomat, gloried in the new powers conferred by modern science. As the historian Lewis Bernstein Namier wrote in 1958: “Hitler and the Third Reich were the gruesome and incongruous consummation of an age which, as none other, believed in progress and felt assured it was being achieved.”

In some ways interwar fascism was a parody of the progressive thinking of the time. In Spain and Portugal, the Balkans and Vichy France, many fascists wanted to roll back the modern world – a project that appealed to figures such as T S Eliot and G K Chesterton, who hankered after the cultural homogeneity of medieval Christendom. Yet many others were at one with Koestler’s diplomat in believing that modern technology opened up the prospect of remaking humankind on a “more advanced” model.

Such views were not confined to the far right. The “evolutionary humanist” Julian Huxley, for many years a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society, advocated “preventing the deterioration of quality in racial stock” throughout the 1920s into the early 1930s. “Racial science” was not a Nazi aberration.

Attitudes that many have seen as defining features of fascism can appear at many points on the political spectrum. Anti-Semitism has been a feature of fascist movements everywhere, and hatred of Jews was the core of Nazism. But anti-Semitic attitudes are not the exclusive property of the far right. After its foundation, the state of Israel was attacked by the left under the banner of anti-colonialism. Clearly, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are analytically distinct positions; but when criticism of Israel’s policies occurs in the context of talk about “Zio media conspiracies” – as has been the case recently among certain sections of the left in Britain – the two become functionally equivalent. The emergence of a left-liberal anti-Semitism is a defining fact of our age.

The rest of this "long read":

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/03/fictions-fascism-what-twentieth-century-dystopia-can-and-cant-teach-us-about

Why on EARTH do financial institution's sites load so SLOWLY in a web browser?

I've dealt with 5 different institutions, that maintain web sites. (believe it or not, there are some that still do not have websites!)

The bank that I am currently with generally takes 30 to 45 seconds to load their pages. Granted, I'm in the middle of Outback, Nowhere, and my ISP really sucks. But, I can browse the web, and pages load in a couple seconds. On a bad day, pages I visit frequently might take as much as 10 seconds. And, of course, on a really bad day, I just give up and read a book. But, the bank's pages on a good day take as long or longer to load as other pages take on bad days.

Now, I've never made even the slightest attempt to scan or analyze any bank's web page. There are so many horror stories. Customer Helpy Helperton sends an email, "You web site is insecure and misconfigured." and the very same day, the FBI is kicking down his door, hauling him and his computers off to jail and/or impoundment.

How the hell do you even get the message across, without risking prison?

What the hell are they doing wrong? Not enough bandwidth? Not enough memory on the servers? An excess of (probably ineffective) security? Or, do they do this on purpose, to ensure you can't hack them quickly?

Seriously, I've not yet seen a bank or credit union web site that is any more responsive than a tree sloth.

Or, is it me? Does NoScript and other security stuff slow me down when I visit their sites?

I'd sure like to know what's going on, but again, I'm afraid to even try to inspect their web sites. (That presuming that I'm smart enough to learn anything from the analysis.)

Comments?

Guys, I lurve arguing with you lot dearly but when I look at my message box and it says I have 35 messages from comment replies after taking a two hour nap, that's just too many to bother with. Anything over 20 and I'm probably just going to skip replying to any of them. My apologies.

I suppose that I had more than half the bits and pieces of this story, but I never managed to put them together like Caleb T. Martin has done.

http://www.mintpressnews.com/truth-syria-manufactured-war-independent-country-2/216688/

Education, health care and national rebirth
The independent nationalist Syrian government, now being targeted by Western foreign policy, was born in the struggle against colonialism. It took decades of great sacrifice from the people of Syria to break the country free from foreign domination — first by the French empire and later from puppet leaders. For the last several decades, Syria has been a strong, self-reliant country in the oil-rich Middle East region. It has also been relatively peaceful.

Since winning its independence, Syria’s Baathist leadership has done a great deal to improve the living standards of the population. Between 1970 and 2009, the life expectancy in Syria increased by 17 years. During this time period infant mortality dropped dramatically from 132 deaths per 1,000 live births to only 17.9. According to an article published by the Avicenna Journal of Medicine, these notable changes in access to public health came as a result of the Syrian government’s efforts to bring medical care to the country’s rural areas.

A 1987 country study of Syria, published by the U.S. Library of Congress, describes huge achievements in the field of education. During the 1980s, for the first time in Syria’s history, the country achieved “full primary school enrollment of males” with 85 percent of females also enrolled in primary school. In 1981, 42 percent of Syria’s adult population was illiterate. By 1991, illiteracy in Syria had been wiped out by a mass literacy campaign led by the government.

The name of the main political party in Syria is the “Baath Arab Socialist Party.” The Arabic word “Baath” literally translates to “Rebirth” or “Resurrection.” In terms of living standards, the Baathist Party has lived up to its name, forging an entirely new country with an independent, tightly planned and regulated economy. The Library of Congress’ Country Study described the vast construction in Syria during the 1980s: “Massive expenditures for development of irrigation, electricity, water, road building projects, and the expansion of health services and education to rural areas contributed to prosperity.”

Compared to Saudi-dominated Yemen, many parts of Africa, and other corners of the globe that have never established economic and political independence, the achievements of the Syrian Arab Republic look very attractive. Despite over half a century of investment from Shell Oil and other Western corporations, the CIA World Factbook reports that about 60 percent of Nigerians are literate, and access to housing and medical care is very limited. In U.S.-dominated Guatemala, roughly 18 percent of the population is illiterate, and poverty is rampant across the countryside, according to the CIA World Factbook.

What the Western colonizers failed to achieve during centuries of domination, the independent Syrian government achieved rapidly with help from the Soviet Union and other anti-imperialist countries. The Soviet Union provided Syria with a $100 million loan to build the Tabqa dam on the Euphrates River, which was “considered to be the backbone of all economic and social development in Syria.” Nine-hundred Soviet technicians worked on the infrastructure project which brought electricity to many parts of the country. The dam also enabled irrigation throughout the Syrian countryside.

More recently, China has set up many joint ventures with Syrian energy corporations. According to a report from the Jamestown Foundation, in 2007 China had already invested “hundreds of millions of dollars” in Syria in efforts to “modernize the country’s aging oil and gas infrastructure.”

These huge gains for the Syrian population should not be dismissed and written off, as Western commentators routinely do when repeating their narrative of “Assad the Dictator.” For people who have always had access to education and medical care, it is to trivialize such achievements. But for the millions of Syrians, especially in rural areas, who lived in extreme poverty just a few decades ago, things like access to running water, education, electricity, medical care, and university education represent a huge change for the better.

Like almost every other regime in the crosshairs of U.S. foreign policy, Syria has a strong, domestically-controlled economy. Syria is not a “client state” like the Gulf state autocracies surrounding it, and it has often functioned in defiance of the U.S. and Israel. It is this, not altruistic concerns about human rights, that motivate Western attacks on the country.

Mayor Catherine Pugh vetoed legislation Friday that would have raised the minimum wage in Baltimore [state of Maryland, US] to $15 by 2022, leaving the measure's future in question.

The council — which next meets on April 3 — would need 12 of its 15 members to vote to overturn the veto. On Friday, the 12-member coalition that originally backed the higher wage began to disband.

Councilman Edward Reisinger of South Baltimore said although he voted to pass the bill, he would not support a veto override. Over the next seven years, the Pugh administration estimated the bill would cost the city $116 million, including the expense of paying city workers a higher minimum wage.

Reisinger said the cost is especially concerning given the city's outstanding fiscal challenges: a $20 million deficit, a $130 million schools budget shortfall and new spending obligations associated with the U.S. Department of Justice's police consent decree.

"The mayor has some very persuasive arguments," Reisinger said. "Baltimore City doesn't have a money tree."

Pugh also was concerned that requiring employers in the city to pay a higher minimum wage could send them fleeing to surrounding jurisdictions. That would worsen unemployment in the city and make it harder for low-skilled workers and ex-offenders to get jobs, she said.

She emphasized that Baltimore's minimum wage is increasing along side the rate statewide. The rate in Maryland will rise to $9.25 on July 1 and $10.10 a year later.

So here we have all the usual ugly concerns about minimum wage laws on display. It encourages employers to move, it makes more poor people unemployed, and it significant drives up costs for employers who don't or can't move (here, the City of Baltimore - $116 million in additional cost on top of a budget of $2.64 billion).

Got to say, the green look on the site is actually *really* nice. If it was a few shades darker though, we'd be too close that the site that shall not be named.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/26/us/politics/trump-health-care-conservatives-congress.html?_r=0

WASHINGTON — Whenever a major conservative plan in Washington has collapsed, blame has usually been fairly easy to pin on the Republican hard-liners who insist on purity over practicality.

But as Republicans sifted through the detritus of their failed effort to replace the Affordable Care Act, they were finding fault almost everywhere they looked.

President Trump, posting on Twitter on Sunday, saw multiple culprits, including the renegade group of small-government conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus and outside groups like the Club for Growth. Those groups, which do not always work placidly together, had aligned against the president and Speaker Paul D. Ryan, the ultimate symbol of their dismay with the entrenched ways of the capital. At the same time, some saw the president as pointing a finger at Mr. Ryan when Mr. Trump urged his Twitter followers on Saturday to tune in to a Fox News host, Jeanine Pirro, who went on to call for Mr. Ryan’s resignation.

For eight years, those divisions were often masked by Republicans’ shared antipathy toward President Barack Obama. Now, as the party struggles to adjust to the post-Obama political order, it is facing a nagging question: How do you hold together when the man who unified you in opposition is no longer around?

(f) Suspension of entry or imposition of restrictions by President
Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate. Whenever the Attorney General finds that a commercial airline has failed to comply with regulations of the Attorney General relating to requirements of airlines for the detection of fraudulent documents used by passengers traveling to the United States (including the training of personnel in such detection), the Attorney General may suspend the entry of some or all aliens transported to the United States by such airline.

___________________________________

There you have it, boys and girls. Trump has the authority to ban just about anyone from entering the United States, for almost any reason. It's the constitution. It's the law. Section 212(f) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1182(f)

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1182

The court really has no jurisdiction over Trump's executive order. If the court asserts jurisdiction, any judge who find against Trump is acting unconstitutionally. Any judge who finds and acts against Obama's executive order should be disbarred, and removed from the bench. It's really that simple.

Now, you want to know who DOES have authority to dispute and over rule Trump's executive order? Do you need to be told who has that authority? I'm certain that some of you special snowflakes do have to be told. CONGRESS has that authority. CONGRESS can override an executive order. If congress reaches a consensus that the president is acting improperly, then congress can take one of several actions, up to, and including, voting on an act to over rule the president's executive order.

Liberal judges don't want you to understand constitutional law. They don't want you to look up the law. The law supports Trump's executive order. No judge has the authority to over rule an executive order. No citizen or non-citizen of this country has standing to sue Trump's executive order. Only CONGRESS holds the authority to force the president to recall, or rescind, or cancel an executive order.

IF - and I stress IF - congress should pass an act changing the law, and dictating who may and who may not enter the country, and the president should act contrary to the law passed by congress, THEN, congress would have the authority to impeach the president.

Have you noticed? No judge has the authority to impeach the president. Only congress can do that.

Trump can thumb his nose at those judges who have ruled against him. He could conveivably have them arrested, and charged with any number of crimes. Charges of treason may even be justified.

How many people remember that the president appoints federal judges - but no judge can appoint a president?

Of course, it is nothing new for liberal judges to usurp the law of the land.

Discussion, please. Let's see just how far out in left field some of us can get.

That link, again - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1182

It looks like Forecastfox has been sold to spyware vendors as their latest update changes its permissions to "allowed to read and change data on all websites you visit" which for an app that is simply supposed to display data from Accuweather? yeah its been sold to malware vendors.

So I finally got too fedup with the modern breakage that is called desktop environments on Linux, grabbed the source code to CDE, and compiled it. I *finally* have an environment that works with multimonitor without being complete crap. After a bit fiddling with the X defaults database, it's quite usable.

Imgur Proof (warning, high resolution)

Honestly, compared to MOST of the other DEs I've used, this is damn heaven at the moment. With a bit of work to get to support XDG groups, some app fixing, and a little polish, CDE probably could wipe the floor as far as usability goes.