A good read.
The fundamental paradox of power— that the last people who should hold it are the people who want it, suggests that picking around the edges of Party politics is a low probability method of affecting meaningful political outcomes. This isn’t an argument against doing so. Those who heed the call should work away on Supreme Court choices and opportunities to shift budgets this way or that. Rumor had it that Hillary Clinton’s Supreme Court pick to replace Antonin Scalia, had she won the 2016 election, was Texas Republican Wallace Jefferson. Hell, even Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, found his way onto the payroll of the U.S. military. So there is good work to be done close to power.
The point regarding Mr. Barbie isn’t just a cheap shot. It is that and so much more. The neoliberal program that arose in the aftermath of WWII, which produced the Chicago School of economics, a tortured and implausible, but ‘American,’ philosophy of science, and an anti-communist liberalism that formed the institutional core of the American Left, was intended to produce an historical break with American slavery, genocide and eugenics, which had also been the racialized center of the Nazi program. As irony had it, it was combined with realpolitik that brought much of the senior Nazi leadership to work in leadership roles in the American project from that point forward.
The sources for these charges are the CIA, CIA, the New York Times and DemocracyNow!
Operation Paperclip brought 1,600 Nazi scientists to the U.S. to work in defense and commerce. Other programs run by the OSS, which became the CIA, and the CIC, placed hundreds, probably thousands, of former Nazi leaders in American political and spy operations in South America and Europe. Klaus Barbie was reportedly working for the CIA in Bolivia when Che Guevara was captured, and later killed. And the Americans took over the Nazi Concentration Camp system and kept it running, filled with ‘communists,’ for years after the end of WWII. The point: it wasn’t just realpolitik— an alliance of convenience, that made the integration of the Nazi leadership into American politics, science, and culture a successful fit. This is what America is.
So, when Joe Biden mumbles less-than-well-considered-cow-manure about ‘restoring the soul of America,’ it is important to understand that he was a key architect of George W. Bush’s war against Iraq that killed somewhere between 500,000 – three million Iraqis. He signed off on counterinsurgency operations that came (factually) straight from the Nazi SS playbook. Mr. Biden gladly and willfully wrote and enacted laws that put several million poor people through the mass incarceration system. And Mr. Biden commissioned the writing of the Patriot Act that is being used to shut down dissenting views on the internet. To the extent that the term has descriptive value, Joe Biden is a fascist.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/12/18/what-does-the-left-owe-party-politics/
with citations
