Saving The Village (American Revelation XI, Eight.)

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan

...

It became necessary to destroy the town to save it', a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong. ~Peter Arnett, Associated Press war correspondent.

I saw this last night.

Evidently, over 64,000 people have been arrested in a national gang crackdown in El Salvador. Many of them were arrested without warrants, have no right to legal representation, and no confidential communications...and these are mostly suspects, not convicted criminals. They have for the most part not had proper trials. A giant prison, called the "Terrorism Confinement Center" with a capacity of 40,000 has been built to house them.

Does any of this seem Orwellian and wrong to you, or is it just me? Mind you, El Salvador is a country that doesn't even have its own currency (They use the US Dollar) anymore...but the government can afford to build a giant prison?? 

And mind you, while I'm at it I'll just point out that at least one Cold War-era right-wing death squad has already been active killing alleged gang members. I say "alleged" because you can't really prove anything if they're dead.

If I had to put money on it, I'd say that it'll eventually come out in the wash that a majority of those incarcerated or killed were not actual hard-core criminals, but drug mules, people who were forced to join on pain of death, hangers-on and wannabes, and one hell of a lot of innocent goddamn bystanders.

This is basically the house that Populism built, though, so too goddamned many people won't give a shit. If the US military was doing this type of shit, We The People would be demanding blood, people would go to prison, shit would have to change despite the fact that a third of us would be demanding that it not.

Some places in the world actually don't have that level of civil society, though.

 El Salvador's President, Nayib Bukele, a former FMLN Leftist who switched to the conservative ARENA party after being shitcanned by FMLN for bad behavior, but then left ARENA and founded his own once he got elected, has done stuff like legalize Bitcoin as the country's second currency and send soldiers to threaten the legislative assembly (until the Supreme Court ordered them to desist and they stood down.)

His own party, Nuevas Ideas, appears to be neither Left nor Right, but straight-up populist. 

I used to be a conservative. That ain't a good sign.

 More to the point all this crazy shit has a 90% or so approval rating in the country. Populism is the politics of the mob. The thought that "There but for the grace of God go we" has very much occurred to me this morning.

This is exactly the kind of situation Trump wanted for himself, but didn't get despite every effort by too many of those lazy assholes charged with making the system work to just let it happen.

And goddamn, are some people still mad about all that, mad enough to deny obvious reality.

But the darker truth is that if they can't get the State to do their killing and repression for them, sooner or later they're just going to take it upon themselves to try exactly that their own selves. What do you think all this crazy talk about "National Divorce" and secession even is?

It seems very, very likely to me that if these idiots got their own shitty little banana republic, it would end up a Cold War style Russian satellite state, and a lot of the people who think they'd be in charge of it would end up dead or shipped off to Siberian gulags. But sure, those people think Putin is "Based" and the West is "Sick" right now.

Sure enough, something's sick, alright.

Sick enough to try and bring back child labor, especially using all those unaccompanied minors from places like El Salvador who are fleeing crime, repression, and cycles of violence that...believe it or not...mainly started with us. We're the ones who supported the right-wing Junta that spent a decade wrecking the country and perpetrating violence against their own civilian population. The two main gangs in El Salvador both got their start here, specifically in Los Angeles.

Shit, American "Chicago Boys" style economics created a lot of the goddamn mess in Russia that enabled the rise of people like Putin in the first place!

And a hell of a lot of Americans don't notice, much less care.

And people don't seem to get that the Chicago Boys mentality that created that whole situation, using "fear" of "Communism" to gain government and military support and political justifications for rich corporations and the wealthy to rape whole damn countries is swinging back around to target us, and these motherfuckers are hoping to use Putin as a hammer to break America into a bunch of little countries to make it easier.

And they'll do this flagged under the very Hammer and Sickle that they preached rabid pants-shitting fear of 40 years ago to justify mass murder in Central America.

Well, they don't get it...right up until the new CEO with all the social consciousness of an Apartheid-era South African emerald mine lays them off, despite their having literally preached the value of sleeping on the floor at work.

And make no mistake about it, there is no such thing as "Conservative enough" for these fucking people. Ukraine is a majority-Christian, majority-conservative country. The Ukrainians decided they believed in Democracy, freedom, and individual rights, though. 

That was enough to make a lot of right-wing global elites (Like Elon Musk) perfectly fine with Putin's decision to attempt to put an entire nation to the sword. If you think it'll stop with the attempted genocide of Ukrainians, you're wrong.

The Ukrainians said no, and fought back, and we're going to have to do the same damned thing.

Bet on it.

Seven

Слава Україна!

[A group of new prisoners is being processed into Shawshank State Prison.]

Norton: This is Mr. Hadley, he's captain of the guards. I'm Mr. Norton, the Warden. You are convicted felons. That's why they've sent you to me. Rule Number One: no blasphemy. I'll not have the Lord's name taken in vain in my prison. The other rules, you'll figure as you go along. Any questions?

Inmate: When do we eat? [Norton nods to Captain Hadley, who gets right in the new inmate's face]

Byron Hadley: You eat when we say you eat! You shit when we say you shit, and you piss when we say you piss! You got that, you maggot-dick motherfucker?! [slams his baton into the new inmate's stomach, causing the man to fall to his knees, gasping for breath] On your feet!

Norton: I believe in two things: Discipline and the Bible. Here, you'll receive both. Put your trust in the Lord. Your ass belongs to me. [smiles] Welcome to Shawshank.

~From the film The Shawshank Redemption.