@ukobserver That brings me to another point that's long troubled me: alone out of all the Allies - and Germany itself! - the US culturally invested a huge amt of energy for decades in denying that & saying that 1920s-40s Germans as a whole were innocent pawns of Hitler & his appointees.
@ukobserver There was pushback, songs like 'My Name is Lisa Kalvelage' for one, but until the book 'Hitler's Willing Executioners' opened the door, the received popular view was that 'Nazis' were a breed apart, almost aliens, who had mysteriously conquered 'Good Germans' & brainwashed them.
@ukobserver In recent decades - mostly since the start of the Sixteen-Years-And-Counting War - I've started questioning that, what was the purpose of it and its utility? All right to say 'well the West needed Germany as Cold War allies' but the bombed & occupied bits didn't go that route...
@ukobserver I've come to suspect that the 1950s USA did NOT want the kettle of worms that was American infatuation w fascism & support for Hitler (& Mussolini) brought out from under the rug, still less the material support of IBM & inspiration of US eugenics & Native genocides.
@ukobserver England rugswept its 'fascist-curious' decades as zealously as its colonial abuses, but wasn't as invested in frantically asserting that 'ordinary Germans' had no idea what was going on during the Holocaust.
@ukobserver & Germany understood that for 'Never again!' to have any meaning, a full understanding of how it happened the first time was necessary... Plus harder to ignore Aunt Greta's turning in the neighbours, or Uncle Hans' drunk rantings that Hitler was necessary/had the right idea...
@ukobserver But Americans will insist 'they couldn't have known' - and extend this to the rest of the world, exonerating things like the SS St. Louis, even if shown contemporary news articles talking abt mass murders & concentration camps. The scale wasn't known, perhaps, but the fact? Yes.
@ukobserver And I think that's connected to all the American liberals who are 'shocked, shocked!' that this stuff is going on here, in spite of all the decades of genocide & the internment camps & deportations & wars & torture & the refusals to admit, let alone apologize for any of it.
@ukobserver All of it excruciatingly thoroughly documented & publicly available, all along, even if there were some delays in exposure, like how (white) US police used the same methods they'd used torturing POWs in Vietnam to get false confessions in 1970s. The (black) victims knew!
@ukobserver But 'Operation Wetback' wasn't a secret. Thus there was a song by a famous singer, on those who died in custody and were thrown in a nameless mass grave, after the Plane Crash at Los Gatos - 'Deportee'
@ukobserver And it Never Stopped. Not the exploitation of Mexican migrant workers, nor the mistreatment & demonization of them on national radio in the USA. It ramped up in the 1990s, even in places far from the border, thanks to Sir Rupert Murdoch.
@ukobserver The complaints that stagnant wages and lack of sufficient jobs was the fault of immigrants (never bosses, never capitalist corporations!) was EVERYWHERE on 1990s hate radio - and the lips of those who listened to it during their days.
@ukobserver 'Dirty, lazy, criminal' foreigners was also ALWAYS part of the white supremacist narrative of America, it didn't stop w the Chinese Exclusion Act - BUT everyone pretended that Auntie Peggie and Uncle Jack didn't REALLY mean all those racist, hateful, genocidal things they said.
@ukobserver And the same in England, and in Canada, towards the former colonized citizens of the Commonwealth, and the Indigenous peoples, and yet now everyone is SHOCKED that low-level racists are stabbing 'race traitor' MPs & high-level racists are deporting Windrush families.
@ukobserver 'It's not us!' But nobody forced you to stand by silently as xenophobes cursed foreigners as cockroaches, nobody forced you to 'take the high road' by ignoring your rw family & neighbours spewing Murdoch & pals' own Radio Rwanda broadcasts year after year. That's all on you.
@ukobserver 'Trump changed us!' - No, Trump was a mirror, both reflecting and amplifying the horrible burning glare of hatred in our English-speaking nations. Racist/Sexist/Christianist hate, burning unchanged & undimmed since the days of 'Nits make lice' & 'Rivers of blood!'
@ukobserver Migrants deported w hate, after being -sometimes literally - worked to death in the vineyards of NoCal was discussed often on liberal blogs like @dailykos in the Aughts - & stopped dead in 2008. Rugsweeping our own failings is SO much easier than holding ourselves accountable.
@ukobserver @dailykos And so, 10 years later, here we are - w the consequences of ignoring a burning brushfire of hate, and the galloping dry rot of high-level lawlessness & corruption unpunished in our governments, on full display for ourselves and the world. The Emperor is naked, indeed.
@ukobserver @dailykos In less a week, it will be Bastille Day. Remember what touched off that revolution - people imprisoned for years at the whims of a corrupt plutocracy, with no appeal and no recourse, despite the surface trappings of an elaborate court justice system...
@ukobserver @dailykos 'It is later than WE know'... in spite of autonomous cars and Alexa and all the instant gratification the developed world - aka Omelas - can provide on the backs of poor people around the globe... 
@ukobserver @dailykos So it has always been... & so the tyrants fear to be treated as they treat everyone else - 'shoot a man on 5th Ave' is our 'run over a child in St Antoine', & pit everyone who is not a billionaire against each other, but ESPECIALLY against those lower down on the social pyramid.
@ukobserver @dailykos Because what they fear most is all of us setting aside the pointless differences of race and creed and assigned social roles, to try to bring about equality and freedom for EVERYONE.
But beyond that, the tides & fires are LITERALLY rising, not mere metaphors...
But beyond that, the tides & fires are LITERALLY rising, not mere metaphors...
@ukobserver @dailykos And all Rush's bluster and Frank Luntz's glibness won't turn back the seas or the wildfires... OR protect their followers, and they can't pin those losses on foreigners, or gays, or women, or atheists, or native-born brown people...
@ukobserver @dailykos Unless they - once again - do so by theological appeals, same as in the ancient world: 'The gods are angry at our impiety! Time to sacrifice the unbelievers & blasphemers among us, so they'll stop smiting us & bring back the harvest'...
@ukobserver @dailykos But 'the gods' don't NEED to be literal, to receive sacrifices. Plenty of victims have been killed under the cover of 'rationality' and 'science' - hungry deities like 'Eugenics' or 'Economics' and her handmaids 'Austerity' and 'Fiscal Responsibility'.
@ukobserver @dailykos We have always created new myths, new narratives, and new Higher Powers to 'compel' us to do the horrible things we wanted to do to the weaker among us, all along. Kill the Others for Jupiter, or Jesus, or John Galt, it's all the same to the dead.
@ukobserver @dailykos The mad patriarch always devours his children, the world's future, for the sake of his short-sighted present prosperity...
@ukobserver @dailykos And as for how our nice ordinary neighbours and relatives could imprison babies in conditions of torture? Again, we were WARNED long ago and ever since by our true prophets and poets.
@ukobserver @dailykos '...there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot be easily duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes into work every day and has a job to do,' meaning only that Evil & evildoers are BANAL, aka NORMAL, not fantasy supervillains.
