After Puerto Rico Can We NOW Agree That Dotard Is A Degenerate Narcissist?

"Them Puerto Ricans are lazy bums! They need to help themselves!"

After Dotard's tweets, castigating San Juan's Mayor on her handling of the post-Hurricane Maria crisis, we now know exactly the nature of this reprobate: a despicable narcissist who's prepared to let millions of brown people suffer because he believes it's all about him.  We knew Donald Dotard was a piece of garbage but his latest outbursts over the weekend indicate he's even lower on the dumpster chain than toxic waste.

On Sunday this loathsome lunatic continued his Twitter rants on "politically motivated ingrates:" when this sickening turd was lollygagging at his golf course with billionaire pals. This as the people of Puerto Rico fought for their survival, something the entitled Dotard has never done in his silver spoon life.

Anyone who's seen the scenes of devastation on the island - a territory of the U.S. with 3.5 million  American CITIZENs, would know the level of need:  95 percent with no electricity, 50 percent without potable water, hospitals having to shut doors because life -sustaining resources are no longer available including ice to preserve critical meds.  And Dotard believes a thousand or so federal troops are enough?  He's insane.

Out of Dotard's own tweety "mouth" we beheld:

"The Mayor was complimentary to me a few days ago but now the Democrats told her she must be nasty to Trump"

No, asshole, this is not about "Trump" or being "nasty" to your miserable ass, this is about accepting your responsibility as the president of the Puerto Rican commonwealth too  - like you did for white  people of Houston, TX. It is not about abandoning them to their own hours and days of need because there are too many brown, Spanish speakers.

Dotard, degenerate narcissist that he is,  makes this about himself when it's about getting critical resources to the people of this island. That means at least 50,000 soldiers (according to Gen. Russell Honore(Ret.)) to get all the needed supplies to the people scattered across the   square miles - including using chopper drops as was done (finally) after Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005


Asked on Meet the Press on NBC whether she felt personally attacked by Trump, mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz. said: “I don’t care. He can attack me all he wants, you know, bring it on, I’m here, if it saves lives. If it gets the message in the right place, frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

This, spoken like a true leader of steel and grit and understands what's on the line for her 400,000 people as well as the population of the island. She knows Trump's tweets don't mean diddly or squat and exposing him as the clown prince of ego he is may be her only play left to get the attention the island needs - and the resources. It if means shaming Do-turd, so be it.

Trump and senior administration figures are set to visit Puerto Rico on Tuesday, at which point they will come face to face with the ongoing hardship on an island that is home to 3.5 million American citizens. There have been some signs of tentative progress made but it simply isn't enough, not in terms of the sheer magnitude of the catastrophe..

As of Sunday morning, nearly 65% of gas stations, 11% of cell phone towers and 49% of supermarkets were open, according to the Puerto Rican government. But on Saturday the governor’s office said 53% of the country still did not have water service, and although large quantities of supplies have started to arrive at the ports the distribution of the goods to outlying regions continues to prove difficult as a result of damage to roads and bridges.

The Trump administration has clearly been rattled by the searing criticism from the San Juan mayor, and by a growing theme on social media and cable news comparing the apparently sluggish response to the Puerto Rican disaster to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005.
Chief economics adviser Gary Cohn interrupted an interview on the new tax plan with Fox News Sunday to make a statement on Puerto Rico. He insisted the US had gone through “extraordinary efforts to deliver goods to the island”.

“We are working full steam ahead,” he said. To which I call 'Bullshit!' You're not even working at quarter speed. On the other hand,  Puerto Ricans  themselves have risked life and limb to get fuel, food, water and ice to their fellows. Yet Donald Dotard has the nerve to say  they are "too lazy" to help themselves. No, Dotard, YOU are the laziest guy to ever become president - racking up more golf and vacay days than any other in history.

Meanwhile Trump's budget cutting sidekick Mick Mulvaney, director of the federal Office of Management and Budget, told CNN’s State of the Union blabbed :  "It’s unfair to say we haven’t done everything we can, because we have. It’s unfortunate that the San Juan mayor wants to go against the grain – we’d love to have her on the team.”

How can she be on your useless "team" when she's trying her best to triage the situation in San Juan?

Mulvaney added: “Judge us by the actions please. Judge us by what’s happening on the island, judge us by the men and the women who have worked tirelessly.”

A nice patter full of PR but all phony because you nitwits underestimated the severity and the need. If you hadn't you'd have had hospital ships off the island and ferrying the most compromised patients on board. You didn't, so STFU.

Trump, who was spending the weekend at his property in Bedminster, New Jersey, also faced a barrage of outrage over his assault of Cruz by Twitter. Bernie Sanders put it most caustically on CNN.
                

“Speaking from his fancy golf club, playing golf with his billionaire friends, attacking the mayor of San Juan who is struggling to bring electricitiy to the island, it is unspeakable.  I don’t know what world Trump is living in.”

Well, Bernie, this  "presidential" POS is living in his own fantasy world where millions can suffer without food, water or fuel yet he is above any criticism at all - merely because he wants to play some golf with his rich cronies - to whom he's promised mammoth tax cuts, by the way.
 

In an update to his schedule on Sunday, Trump was due to attend the Presidents Cup golf tournament at Liberty National in Jersey City. The White House said he would participate in the trophy presentation.  As  for the millions of brown skinned Puerto Ricans, they were left to their own devices to fish or cut bait while the pompous one gratified his  enormous egomania.
Trump also faced criticism from within his own party. John Kasich, the governor of Ohio who ran against Trump in the Republican presidential primaries, accused him of acting inappropriately in a
 disaster situation.

“It’s just not the way that I think it ought to be handled,” Kasich said of Trump’s attack on the mayor. “No matter what they say you have to be bigger than the nonsense.”

Correction, the only "nonsense" is emanating from Dotard Trump.  That means those like the people of Puerto Rico, the. Governor and San Juan Mayor Cruz are the ones who are having to be bigger than HIM, attending to the needs of the people there. Sen. Chuck Schumer on 'Face the Nation' castigated Trump the Dotard for the "slow footed,  disorganized and inadequate " response,  which is exactly true.  It was too slow to help millions -  putting resources in the wrong areas and in the most inefficient ways.  It was also too feeble, requiring five times as many federal officials and deployed vastly more widely than in Houston or New Orleans after Katrina.   Massive military support was needed from the outset which this turkey, errrr "commander -in-chief" didn't process.

Yale professor Timothy Snyder in his book, 'On Tyranny', has written (p. 113):

"The president is a nationalist which is not at all the same thing as being a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best.  A nationalist "though endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge" wrote Orwell "tends to be uninterested  in what happens in the real world".


This is exactly what defines Dotard.  Every waking breath or rudimentary thought is contingent on who has power and who doesn't or who is victor and who is vanquished. Who merits revenge and who deserves reward.  Within his closed bubble of narcissism all Dotard could see in the wake of Maria's devastation is who would adulate him and who wouldn't.  San Juan's mayor Cruz merely called for needed assistance and she was seen as an enemy who needed to be defeated - as opposed to a leader of a U.S. territory with people every bit as much citizens as the white folk of Houston.


God forbid any major U.S. city with a majority black or brown population experience another natural disaster - or even man-made one.

Prof. Timothy Snyder Warns Of Potential Trump Fascist Coup Attempt In 1 Year

Trump bloviating idiocy in another interview on Monday. Even his aides have been appalled at his nonsense including praising Philippine strongman Duterte.

In a post from two years ago I'd criticized Yale Prof. Timothy Snyder for his book, 'The Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning', e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/10/exposing-holocaust-revisionism-of.html

I took issue with his particular hypothesis of how the holocaust was engendered and cited the works of German journalist Konrad Heiden to show the strong eugenic basis, and pure bloodthirsty motives driven by the Volkisch movement.

However, in his new work he's come through with a timely warning on Donald Trump and an approaching fascist takeover of the country, According to Snyder, in an interview with salon.com: 

"The whole point of my new book, 'On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,' is that we have a century of wisdom and very smart people who confronted situations like our own — but usually more demanding — and that wisdom can be condensed. What my book does is it goes across the arc of regime change, from the beginning to the end, and it provides things ranging from simpler to harder that people can literally do every day."

This is timely, because in that interview Snyder warns we may only have a year before Trump, emboldened by his crazy followers and also the limits of gaining approval from the general population, will try another route. That is, foment a fascist coup using a 9/11  -style incident which may or may not be planned.  Given the extensive parts of the Patriot Act that remain in force, Trump could enact everything from martial law to instant arrest of any protesters - based on any and all forms of protest, from environmental to political. (Those interested in what basis Trump could use need to Google "continuity of government" ASAP.)

Let's also be clear sustaining outrage against Trump and his incessant yapping, tweeting, and BS is not for the faint of heart. The inclination of too many is to turn attention to other matters because as Janice put it, "Your head feels as if it will explode from the sheer volume of crap you're hearing and seeing every day. Of course, she follows the Rachel Maddow show each and every day and her histrionics and rapid, hysterical speech would be enough to have anyone on emotional overdose.  (Truth be told I can only take a little of Maddow at a time, but that's me.)

When pressed on this "outrage deficit"  score by the salon interviewer, Snyder noted that a part of this has to do with  attention span.  In his words:

"It’s not so much a lack of outrage; people are in fact outraged. But in order for a scandal to have political logic, the outrage has to be followed by the research. It has to be followed by the investigation. It has to be followed by an official finding"

And this is not happening because the GOP is in charge of both Houses of congress and they are not too interested in prosecuting Trump on any dereliction. Why would they? He represents their gravy train, their primary vehicle to ram through programs and destroy others (e.g. repeal of Obamacare) - as in aspirations that had given them wet dreams the past 7 years.

So there is never any 'reward' - emotional or psychological - when one even learns of some new aspect of investigation (as Janice constantly learns from Maddow) because it never seems to be followed up. True, former AG sally Yates is to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee on 8th May, but what will come of it? Anything? I'm not holding my breath but Janice believes something will finally "break loose" and Trump will be toppled. Don't hold your breath!

Salon's interviewer went on to ask Prof. Snyder:

In your book you discuss the idea that Donald Trump will have his own version of Hitler’s Reichstag fire to expand his power and take full control of the government by declaring a state of emergency. How do you think that would play out?

And he replied:

"Let me make just two points. The first is that I think it’s pretty much inevitable that they will try. The reason I think that is that the conventional ways of being popular are not working out for them. The conventional way to be popular or to be legitimate in this country is to have some policies, to grow your popularity ratings and to win some elections. I don’t think 2018 is looking very good for the Republicans along those conventional lines — not just because the president is historically unpopular. It’s also because neither the White House nor Congress have any policies which the majority of the public like.

This means they could be seduced by the notion of getting into a new rhythm of politics, one that does not depend upon popular policies and electoral cycles. Whether it works or not depends upon whether when something terrible happens to this country, we are aware that the main significance of it is whether or not we are going to be more or less free citizens in the future.

My gut feeling is that Trump and his administration will try and that it won’t work. Not so much because we are so great but because we have a little bit of time to prepare. I also think that there are enough people and enough agencies of the government who have also thought about this and would not necessarily go along."

The above ought to be required reading for every citizen alarmed about Trump's recent moves and concerned over the future path of the nation.  Above all, no citizen should become complacent or reach a saturation point that dismisses further Trump warning signs. Even if you watch 'Rachel Maddow'.  At this point the next interview question perhaps has the most import:

What can citizens do? What would your call to action be?

Whereupon Prof. Snyder answers:

"The thing that matters the most is to realize that in moments like this your actions really do matter. It is ironic but in an authoritarian regime-change situation, the individual matters more than [in] a democracy. In an authoritarian regime change, at the beginning the individual has a special kind of power because the authoritarian regime depends on a certain kind of consent. Which means that if you are conscious of the moment that you are in, you can find the ways not to express your consent and you can also find the little ways to be a barrier. If enough people do that, it really can make a difference — but again only at the beginning.

The last lesson in “On Tyranny” is to be as courageous as you can. Do you actually care enough about freedom that you would take risks? Do individuals actually care about freedom? Think that through. I think if enough of us take the little risks at the beginning, which aren’t really that significant, this will prevent us from having to take bigger risks down the line.

We are still at a stage where protest is not illegal. We’re still at a stage where protest is not lethal. Those are the two big thresholds. We are still on the good side of both of those thresholds and so now is the time you want to pack in as much as you can because you could actually divert things. Once you get into a world where protest is illegal, then the things that I recommend like corporeal politics, getting out on the streets — they have to happen but they are much riskier. It’s a much different kind of decision."

In other words, when the Trump goons start shooting and killing protesters like his hero Duterte is doing, it's time to buckle up and realize the war is on. Call it the "Second American Revolution".

Exposing the Holocaust Revisionism Of Timothy Snyder

Scene at Mauthausen concentration camp in May, 1945. Yale prof Timothy Snyder claims Hitler launched his Final solution to protect European ecological sustainability.


The origins of the Holocaust and global warming are complex but should not be controversial given the historical consensus for the first, and the scientific consensus for anthropogenic origin for the second. Yet time and time again controversies and even pseudo-skepticism have arisen given hard core enclaves of deniers that interject themselves in each case.

Can we not agree that any book, irrespective of its presumed academic cachet, must be considered flawed and egregious if its conclusions upset the Right as well as the Left - while steering a course into nuanced Holocaust revisionism and eliciting Godwin's Law?  Such a work is Timothy Snyder’s new book—Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning— a reference to the fertile soil of Ukraine, where Adolf Hitler (in Snyder's mind)  hoped to establish lebensraum, or “living space,” for the German race.

Snyder argues, however, that Hitler's yen for living space is predicated not on brute conquest for its own sake  as much as the importance of planning for a future quality European ecology. Snyder claims Hitler's fretful concern over adequate space for an enhanced  life quality in Europe is therefore what drove his  quest for lebensraum.  Snyder, for example, asserts that Hitler was inspired in part by the wide-open spaces of the American West, quoting the German leader as complaining, “Neither the current living space nor that achieved through the restoration of the borders of 1914 permits us to lead a life comparable to that of the American people.”

This is a correct paraphrasing of Hitler's words but it misconstrues Hitler's emphasis, which is clearly brought out by German journalist (and Hitler contemporary)  Konrad Heiden in his remarkable book, 'Hitler- Das Leben Eines Diktators' (1936). What struck Hitler then, wasn't so much the living space available to Americans (by a fortuitous arc of history) but rather the rigorous application of eugenics in sifting a population  to thereby extract the most "superior blood" - the ultimate strength of a nation.  Heiden also describes Hitler's thinking in his book, The Fuehrer, p. 257:

"If Germany should get a million children each year and eliminate seven to eight hundred thousand  of the weakest, in the end the result would be an increase in power."

Heiden then refers to Hitler's citation of Sparta as the "clearest racial state in history...carrying out these laws systematically"

While Snyder insists the Holocaust was a product of the Reich's need for ecological space, and Jews had to be eliminated to provide it (those in the stateless places of eastern Europe being the primary expendable ones) Heiden's point is that Hitler believed he could attain the "American" eugenic ideal by brutally murdering those he regarded as the weakest, including those seen as a human sub-species: the Jews.  Hence, there was no a priori selection of one region's Jews over any others, rather the diffusion of genocide proceeded from Germany itself (beginning with Kristall Nacht) to the progressively conquered nations, starting with the Sudetenland, to Poland, to France, etc. In each newly conquered nation, then, the resident Jews were marginalized, identified and dispatched to camps - their property seized for the Reich's use.

Snyder claims that. "where states were destroyed, Jews were murdered; where the state remained intact, Jews could find some protection in bureaucracies and passports". But this inverts Hitler's actual logic and the basis of the Final Solution via the Sparta model.. In fact, it was the right of Germanic self-determination that Hitler invoked for lebensraum and this led to first identifying where Jews lived, then demolishing the states and all state supports replacing these with Reich laws. As for passports and bureaucracies - these were only feasible if Jews could foresee the Nazi expansion in advance and vacate those soon-to-be conquered states before the Reich subsumed them.

Konrad Heiden, in his book, The Fuehrer, pp. 80-81, explains:

"The idea of self-determination originated in old Austria, where Germans, Hungarians, Italians and Slavs, of different language and nationality, lived under one crown and fought one another bitterly. After the war it became a world slogan. Woodrow Wilson had taken it up, it served as a yardstick for the Peace Of Versailles.  To all European nations the same right to self-determination had been granted - except to defeated Germany. Regions inhabited by Germans had been given to other countries by plebiscite, consequently without self-determination - German South Tyrol to Italy, the so-called Sudeten Germans to Czechoslovakia  .....and even German-speaking parts of Austria...had been coldly rebuffed.

From the democratic right of self-determination, Hitler forged one of his sharpest and most effective weapons in a struggle for power, whose ultimate aims went for beyond any self-determination. "

Thus did Hitler demand  rights of self-determination for the broad "German nation". That is, all those nations stripped of self-determination by the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler also magnified this theme by appeal to the Volkisch movement extant in Germany since the Middle Ages. It extolled a eugenic Aryanism and invested much of it in myths traced back to ancient Nordic origins. It also incorporated Christian rituals, such as the Passion Play at Oberammagau, in which the Jews were featured as "Christ killers". In other words, it was the Volkisch movement  - embodied in a cultural anti-Semitism  that had gone on for centuries, which Hitler then applied as justification for the Final Solution. (And which he crudely described in Mein Kampf)

Hence, Snyder's claim that the Final Solution was hatched and calibrated "in the stateless regions of Eastern Europe"  is pure unadulterated revisionist bunkum. This is a point even emphasized by my late German friend Kurt Braun - also a former Hitler Youth - who had amassed a vast trove of documents on the Third Reich, including films, as well as books on the history of the Volkisch tradition. (Below - Kurt shows a documentary film on the Reichstag fire to us in his Frankfurt, Germany home, in July 1978:


One of the most revelatory parts of the book is Snyder’s diagnosis of Hitler’s warped worldview.  In an op-ed for the New York Times on September 12, he writes:

The war that brought Jews under German control was fought because Hitler believed that Germany needed more land and food to survive and maintain its standard of living — and that Jews, and their ideas, posed a threat to his violent expansionist program.

While it is true that Hitler had a rabid hatred of Bolshevism, which he tied to Jews (Karl Marx in particular) this in itself would not have made Jews a "threat" to his expansion demands for Lebensraum. Indeed, he saw the Jews as no "threats" at all but as inconvenient impediments or better, vermin, to be exterminated in line with the Volkisch mindset. It was in fact the western Allies that Hitler really saw as threats to his expansion which is why he sought to conquer as much territory as possible before the U.S. entered the war,

Snyder also claims Hitler wanted Ukraine farmland to feed Germany and distrusted Jewish scientists.  Snyder explained (ibid.)

The quest for German domintion was premised on the denial of science. … In Hitler’s “Second Book,” which was composed in 1928 and not published until after his death, he insisted that hunger would outstrip crop improvements and that all “the scientific methods of land management” had already failed. No conceivable improvement would allow Germans to be fed “from their own land and territory,” he claimed. Hitler specifically — and wrongly — denied that irrigation, hybrids and fertilizers could change the relationship between people and land.

But Konrad Heiden, also privy to this "second book" doesn't come to that conclusion at all. In fact, Hitler in his existing conquered lands (Holland, Poland, France etc. ) already had more than ample arable land and didn't need that much from the east. Indeed, at the rate he was depopulating Germany of "undesirables" he needed less than before his invasion of Poland.

 Another Snyder aberration is his claim that the depiction of Hitler as a supreme German nationalist and prototypical totalitarian  is "deeply flawed". Rather, Hitler was a “racial anarchist”—a man for whom states were transitory, laws meaningless, ethics a facade. As Snyder sees it, Hitler believed the only way for the world to revert to its natural order—that of brutal racial competition—was to eradicate the Jews.

Again, Snyder has it backwards. It was Hitler's brutal eugenics program (described by Heiden as modeled after Sparta) that directly led to the eradication of the Jews as UnterMenschen -in the Final Solution. This brutal eugenics  based on vigorous racial competition was already regarded by Hitler as part of the Germanic natural (and national) order. Thus, the Volkisch movement was intimately bound up with German self-determination. If indeed, "laws were meaningless" as Snyder claims, Hitler would never have extolled a Spartan-model eugenics state or indeed, a democratic right to self determination or governance, as reflected in the Reich laws - nor used those laws to systematically emulate a "Sparta-type" eugenics state.

Before ending, let me again reference Godwin's Law, which may be paraphrased thus: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” What does global warming have to do with Hitler and Snyder's book? Well, the Right wingers have now got it into their heads that Snyder is saying a Hitlerian-style "clearing out" may be due for global warming deniers in the same way Hitler sought to eliminate Jews in the east for more farmland and living space.. See e.g.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/09/15/climate-change-deniers-bad-hitler-yale-history-professor-goes-full-godwin/

The Rightist author goes off half-cocked to bloviate:

There’s only one side of this debate which believes its cause is so just and urgent that it relieves them of the need to observe any standards of decency. There’s only one side which thinks it’s OK to: rig public inquiries, hound blameless people out of their jobs, breach Freedom of Information laws, abuse the scientific method, lie, threaten, bribe, cheat, adopt nakedly political positions in taxpayer-funded academic and advisory posts that ought to be strictly neutral, trample on property rights, destroy rainforests, drive up food prices (causing unrest in the Middle East and starvation in the Third World), raise taxes, remove personal freedoms, artificially raise energy prices, featherbed rent-seekers, blight landscapes, deceive voters, twist evidence, force everyone to use expensive, dim light bulbs, frighten schoolchildren, bully adults, increase unemployment, destroy democratic accountability, take control of global governance and impose a New World Order.

Thereby using Snyder's work as a basis to hysterically extrapolate to what? Well,  in the link above an analogy to "Hitler"  - though this is difficult to reconcile within the context of Snyder's arguments. Thus, if one is aggressively seeking ecological sustainability he'd more be inclined to remove the impediments to it - in 'Black Earth' it's the Jews, but in the modern case it would possibly be the climate deniers. (Who are  inhibiting any action on behalf of the rational protection of the planetary ecology by their propaganda and denial.)  Interestingly, like many Right conspiracists, he has the "New World Order" mixed up with environmentalism when the NWO actually underscores market Neoliberalism- which is the REAL culprit destroying the planetary ecology. (Climate deniers are more passive culprits.)

My point is the very fact Right wingers can invoke Snyder's  work to go ballistic on global warming and climate science itself shows that Snyder has missed the mark by a mile. Because the origin of the Holocaust should not also elicit more huff and puff about global warming! An excerpt from a letter by a Professor of Jewish studies at Marymount University perhaps provides the best insight here, responding to a Snyder WSJ piece distilling his book's content::

"Timothy Snyder's article should be placed alongside of the emerging literature on climate change migration. To conflate this topic with the Holocaust, however, distracts from the topic at hand and does a disservice not only to those who perished in the Holocaust but also to the scholarship on anti-Semitism....Concern for economic scarcity and ecological sustainability do not explain the institutional heinousness to completely eliminate the Jewish population of all of Europe by Nazi Germany."

To that comment I would only add that Snyder's book discloses the danger of selection bias, in this case his preferential eastern European emphasis reflected in his material. (As it was in his earlier work, Blood lands). There seems to be little academics can do to disinfect their treatises in advance of such selection bias, so it is left to the rest of us to call attention to it.

An Unsettling World War II Tour In Prague

Our last stop on our eastern European trip was Prague, Czech Republic. While most tourists would choose the normal day tours we chose one focusing on Prague's history during World War II.  Janice was unsure at first whether it would be her 'cup of tea', but by the end she had no regrets at all, none, and praised it as perhaps the best tour in our trek.

The tour leader was a Czech WWII specialist named Marek, who was as articulate in his English as he was well read in the history of World War II especially as it pertained to Prague. According to the tour flyer available at our hotel, one joined the tour by seeking Marek out according to his display of a black umbrella near the Powder Tower in Republic Square. Deadline: 2 p.m. 

Tourists gawk at Astronomical Clock

We decided to join the tour, as we were already in the Old Town Square:

And taken the time to see the famous Astronomical clock, amidst hundreds of touristas, e.g.
 and so decided to walk to the Powder Tower in Republic Square where Marek would be standing. The photo below is of yours truly on the way there, with the Powder Tower in the background:



The walk (from the astronomical clock in Old Town Square) took about half an hour but we took our time, arriving by 1:55. (After stopping 20 mins. at an outdoor cafe for drinks.) It was also great to escape the pressing crowds (mostly composed of Americans) in Old Town Square!


One of the first sights, pointed out to us (now 16 in all) by Marek using his same black umbrella was the Nazi S.S. headquarters in Prague:

From this once disreputable place (now a trading emporium) the orders of Reinhardt Heydrich were carried out, especially in rounding up all Jews present in the city  - for shipment to one of the camps. (After the War, only about 1,600 Jews have remained in Prague and Marek showed us one of their only standing Synagogues and one of the oldest in Europe).

 Heydrich also presided over multiple forays against Czech resistance fighters, at least until two of them assassinated him. (Described in minute detail by Marek as if he was actually present)

The Czech resistance itself depended on an extensive underground - once the catacombs used by early Christians. We were given special permission to enter these tunnels, and Janice got a photo of me below:

After the Nazis routed the resistance and took over their underground network, they used a deep pit (below) to throw prisoners and starve them to death. Marek noted they deliberately set up a kitchen nearby so that the aroma of freshly cooked food would waft toward the forlorn Czechs - forced to smell foods they were unable to eat as they wasted away.

Pit in underground used to starve Nazi prisoners.

The Czech resistance finally got some revenge when two Czech nationals - Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš - were airlifted along with seven soldiers from Czechoslovakia’s army-in-exile in the United Kingdom. The pair succeeded in assassinating S.S. Obergruppenführer Reinhardt Heydrich using a bomb in "Operation Anthropoid". Sparing no detail, Marek described how they bombed Heydrich's open-topped Mercedes 320 Convertible B - succeeding in part because Heydrich was brash and arrogant and didn't believe his vehicle needed any shielding, or protection. Heydrich himself didn't die until several days later from septicemia due to "foreign objects" left inside the wounds.

Our tour ended in the Jewish cemetery in the Old Town Square which apparently survived Prague's turmoil only to subsequently be seized and used as a site to try to advance Hitler's perverse plan to establish a local "museum of an extinct race."

Earlier, Marek had been asked by one of our group about a controversial new book on the Holocaust.

Marek (right) seen as he knocks down a crazy theory propounded by Yale prof Timothy Snyder in his recent book, 'The Black Earth', claiming the Holocaust was really based on a "population control" agenda to protect the European ecology. Snyder claimed the preponderance of lives lost were in "non-state controlled" areas of the Reich. Marek dismissed it as "whole cloth nonsense" written by an ivory tower academic who really knew nothing of the War or the Holocaust.

In a soon to appear post I will show how and why Marek (and other critics of Snyder's revisionist pseudo- ecological codswallop) are totally correct.

Stay tuned!

"Shattered Consensus" - Another Prime Delusion of James Piereson

The ideological delusions of conservative "scholars" and wealthy philanthropists are responsible for generating more BS and historical nonsense in this country than all the oddball conspiracy books that have ever been published. A case in point is the crypto-revisionist Yale University historian Timothy Snyder in his latest book, 'Black Earth' - wherein he arrives at a totally cockamamie theory of the Holocaust - about which I will have more to write in a future post.


Sadly, these conservative schmuck revisionists like Snyder aren't even aware of their transgressions half the time, so caught up are they in their codswallop. Enter now James Piereson whose conservo bona fides are there for all to see in this Wikipedia bio:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Piereson

Piereson is best known for his earlier wacked out biopic on John F. Kennedy:  "Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism"

Like Snyder with the Holocaust, Piereson gets nearly everything wrong, from misreading JFK's early cold warrior pose as a permanent marker, to misinterpreting his tax policies (as "supply side")  to flippantly dismissing the assassination as part of a conspiracy.. It's important to start with this if we are to examine his latest work: Shattered Consensus: The Rise and Decline of America's Postwar Political Order.  Hence, my contention is that if he could get so much wrong and the perceptions skewed on Kennedy, there is really no end to how badly he'd muck it up on the postwar political order.

For example, let me deal with two statements made by Piereson in his Ch. 5. One, on p. 125, is that the "Warren Report was a giant cover up" said to be a "standard view among members of the New Left". But what exactly is required to define a "cover up"? What specific criteria must be met? Would it be the omission of two hundred material witnesses? Would that qualify? Former Justice Dept. special agent Walt Brown, in his 1995 book, 'Treachery in Dallas',  documents all of these, including Aquilla Clemmons - who saw another shooter, not Oswald, kill Officer Tippet, Mary Moorman -who took the Moorman photo at the instant of the head shot, and Parkland surgeon Charles A. Crenshaw who observed the gaping rear head wound. Add in the missing testimony of Tom Alyea (who allegedly first filmed the sniper's 'nest') and Julia Ann Mercer - who spotted a truck on the triple underpass with a rifle inside and you have more than the makings of cover up.

Does omission of critical witnesses not qualify as a giant cover up, then? What about producing fraudulent exhibits? Does that not qualify? This would include a bogus set of FPCC handbills putatively handed out by Oswald on Canal St., but which military science professor John Newman ('Oswald and the CIA',  1995 p. 307) referred to as "evidence that was deliberately falsified". Then there were the autopsy photos, x-rays and images which the original Parkland doctors described and which were shown in the book, 'Killing of a President',  all depicted as bogus.

The errors that betray Ch. 5 as revisionist bunkum carry over into Ch. 6 ('Assassin'), which even as I read it seemed to echo Gerald R. Ford's 'Portrait of the Assassin' from 1964. Ford's was probably the first book to emerge to try to reinforce the lone nut version of history. All the usual errors made by earlier WC apologists like Posner are repeated in Piereson's Chapter, including that Oswald shot at Gen. Walker, and that he went on an excursion to Mexico. (Belied by an actual photo of the actual person - presented in Newman's 'Oswald and the CIA') who bears absolutely no resemblance to Oswald and indeed, Newman presents a supplemental CIA cable from the Mexico City station to support that ('NO! Not OSWALD! NO!')

My point in this brief diversion is that if Piereson could get so many facts wrong or skewed in his Kennedy-Camelot hit effort, you know he'd be likely to do as much or more in his current work.

In 'Shattered Consensus' Piereson argues that the U.S. has undergone three "earthquakes" in its history: the Jeffersonian revolution, the Civil War and the New Deal.  In the first, one beheld the dominance of a new "anti-Federalist" party. In the second, one saw the banishment of slavery and the rise of northern Republicanism and in the last, the size and "intrusiveness" of the federal government was expanded.

Of course, the last is nonsense, and most serious historians now agree FDR's New Deal, including his federal work programs and the social insurance milestone of Social Security, actually rescued capitalists from themselves. Recall scurvy capitalists had set the stage for the Great Depression and economic collapse by fueling an asset bubble between 1922 and 1929 based on juiced up stocks and especially the invention of the "investment trusts" which lured ordinary people into the (then) rigged stock market. When those investment trusts collapsed they lost everything.

All conservative extremists, make no mistake, have had a problem with the New Deal - but having just watched  the last two instalments of PBS' excellent series,  'The Roosevelts' one sees how there'd have been little obstructionists could have done at the time to stop it. There was too much need, too much desperation, too many people needing a helping hand which no capitalist could provide.

The organized effort to try to repeal the New Deal actually only came after World War II with the start of the conservative movement, most of which credit is given to William F. Buckley. The GI Bill was the immediate stimulus for this, given it was one of the last spinoffs of the New Deal. Many conservatives at the time, indeed, believed it gave "too much to GIs" and instead preferred the vets to have gone to companies themselves and been judged based on their war records. Those who did more would then get more, housing, education paid for and so forth. But the conservos don't believe in giving anything away gratis.

The most obnoxious claim in Piereson's 19 chapter flight from reality (most of which are retread pieces from two extremist Right rags: The Weekly Standard and New Criterion, is that in the wake of Obama's election we are facing an epic crisis of "debt, demography and slowing economic growth, compounded by political polarization and inertia". None of which he blames on his little Right wing darlings, like William F. Buckley, or Ronnie Reagan.

Like the typical Right simpleton he attributes the perceived national demise to the "collapse of an 80 year consensus forged in the post-War years. According to this fable, the consensus "assigned the national government responsibility for maintaining full employment, and for policing the world in the interests of democracy, trade and national security".  By this time, one has to wonder what Piereson drops in his Earl Grey tea at night.

Of course, most sane liberals would vehemently disagree with his fulsome bollocks, noting that in fact the global policing dikta can be traced to Paul Nitzke's document NCS-68 which provided the template for empire building. But see, most liberals don't see the U.S. as this empire that Piereson does, but rather a Republic  - which as Ben Franklin once jibed "Is yours if you can keep it!"

But with Piereson's prescriptions for a full war and police state, there's little chance of keeping it - but that is what he's bawling about. As he whines, the 80 year consensus (more an artifact in his brain than a reality) "was required for a polity to meet its challenges but ....no longer exists in the United States".

Of course, given this it's a sure bet Piereson would rail hardest against those he believes helped destroy this magical consensus. Thus, we behold the anti-Vietnam student protest movements of the 1960s, 1970s. Indeed, he pinpoints that  whole era as when the "collapse" in his febrile imagination commenced. Oh, that along with the "discarding of traditional moral and social values among key elements of the Democratic coalition."  

Oh, Jeezus Christ, yes! God forbid we "key liberal elements" fight for social justice, to ensure every kid has a full belly before he goes to bed at night, and his parents have work that pays enough to live on. Or that even the most  menial workers at least have health care, the better to ensure that glorious aspiration set out in the Declaration of Independence "the pursuit of happiness".  Even if for many that "happiness" doesn't exceed getting to eat a Twinkie before bedtime.

But see, in Piereson's elitist and entitled world all of these things, since they emanate from government, are anathema.  And, of course, what do we find occupying one of Pierson's chapters? Well, by gosh a mini redux of his earlier attempt (in the book cited earlier) to take down the Kennedy-Camelot myth. Trouble is, as with his sorry earlier effort, all that comes through is the same failure to understand what Kennedy did - never mind getting 99 percent of the history of his administration wrong. (Which fits in with the desire to weave Right wing fables about him, i.e. that he was this 'cold warrior" -never mind he evolved and fast after the Cuban Missile Crisis!)

All  I can say is spare us from the likes of chumps like James Piereson.

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/henry-giroux/63521/the-plague-of-american-authoritarianism


Excerpt:

Rather than forcing a populace to adhere to a particular state ideology, the general public in the United States is largely depoliticized through the influence of corporations over schools, higher education, and other cultural apparatuses. The deadening of public values, civic consciousness, and critical citizenship are also the result of the work of anti-public intellectuals representing right-wing ideological and financial interests