Fascism Begets Fascism

First, they came for the immigrants.....

We have seen this movie before, and it does NOT end well at all!  And remember, every time, the road to fascism is literally always paved with, "you're overreacting".

Trump's increasingly fascist agenda is currently picking up warp speed as we speak.  Mass roundups and deportations of immigrants (and not only "illegals", by the way!), literal concentration camps (this time with crass merchandising too!), no due process, stifling dissent, unitary rule by decree, and so on, is bad enough as it is, and it will NOT stop there.  And his gutting of Medicaid and SNAP, especially the part about the "work requirements", is clearly not only a classist agenda against poor people, but also a eugenicist agenda against disabled people as well.  (From that very first time when we saw him openly mock that disabled reporter, we all should have known exactly what Trump was really all about.)  Fascism and eugenics have always gone hand in hand, as we have infamously seen throughout history, just as much as it is aligned with misogyny and racism.

And now he has brazenly signed a sweeping and very disturbing executive order targeting homeless people, especially those with mental disabilities.  They, along with disabled people in general, are the "canaries in the coal mine" of every fascist oppression and genocide.  This, dear reader, is how it escalates even further.  You were warned.

And the Democrats as a group, with a few exceptions here and there, have been pretty spineless throughout this whole ordeal.  And even before the election, they were pretty lackluster and neoliberal too.  Not only did they fail to implement a genuine, economically progressive agenda, but their divisive identity politics really seemed to get the better of them, and the asinine "catch and release" and "defund the police" approach to crime that some of them had regrettably supported, has served only to bait voters into voting for the self-proclaimed "law and order" (lol) strongman dictator.

For years, at least since his first successful campaign began in 2015, Trump has been proudly waving his red flags like a matador in front of a bull, while the majority of Americans responded with a collective shrug (that is, if they don't support him even more as a result).  Though now, hopefully the tide is finally, if belatedly, turning against him.

(For the EPSTEINTH time, RELEASE THE FILES!)

That said, some activists on social media (Bluesky, of course, but also a bit on X and Substack too) recently seem to have missed the mark about exactly how we got here.  Some have claimed that because we "rushed back to normal" from the pandemic and therefore somehow in doing so "threw disabled people by the wayside" when we ended the COVID "mitigation" measures, that was eugenicist and has thus led to the latest fascist and eugenicist tendencies.  Sigh.  Normally, I would not even dignify such a wild assertion with a response, but it has been said over and over again so many times that now I think I should address it.

First, the specious claim that we somehow "rushed" (lol) back to normal can be debunked right out the gate:  waiting two years is NOT exactly "rushing"!  It was more like taking the very, very scenic route back to normal.  Remember, these so-called "mitigation" measures (lockdowns, mask mandates, antisocial distancing, school and business closures, and so on) were originally supposed to be for "just two weeks".  Riiiiiight.  How quickly we forget!  And it's not like these illiberal and authoritarian measures were really effective, as the best evidence shows that these measures were worse than useless overall.  So two years of rolling mandates of various flavors, was two years too long.  The only way out of a pandemic is through, and "flattening the curve" only drags it out longer than it would otherwise be.

Of course, this is speaking in generalities.  What about disabled people more specifically?  Well, disabled people are NOT a monolith, so we need to get even more specific still:  immunocompromised, medically fragile, or otherwise severely and disproportionately vulnerable to the specific virus in question.  Again, there is zero evidence that these illiberal "mitigation" measures actually protected them one iota, and to the extent that they delayed the inevitable, such vulnerable people were essentially forced to isolate even longer until at least the very worst of the pandemic was over.  And in the long run, doing so only increased their odds of exposure, while decreasing whatever natural immunity they would have had otherwise.

Meanwhile, plenty of people with various disabilities were directly and indirectly harmed by the measures themselves, the same or more so than the general population.  This was true for all ages, of course, but a fortiori for children.

Thus, it would have been far better on balance had we simply adopted the "flu strategy", let natural "herd immunity" develop as a wall of protection around the truly vulnerable people, and kept society and the economy functioning as normally as humanly possibly throughout the entire pandemic, all while making an earnest effort to actually treat the disease.  Forcing everyone to live as if they are medically fragile or immunocompromised doesn't actually help those who really are. And revoking civil rights and liberties ultimately helps no one except the oligarchs.

It should go without saying, but it still needs to be said.  Liberty is NOT a zero-sum game!  My liberty protects you, and your liberty protects me.  And as fellow Americans, we should thus protect each other.  See what I did there?

So, long story short, no one was actually "thrown by the wayside" in the name of "back to normal".  And in any case, the pandemic is long over now:  even though the virus still exists to this day, by 2023 (or earlier) it has mutated down to become far less dangerous, and practically everyone has already had it, often multiple times.  It's basically the new common cold or seasonal flu now.  So get that specious narrative out of your heads.  And furthermore, if anything, these illiberal and undemocratic measures (and worse, the jab mandates) only paved the way for full-blown fascism by shifting the Overton Window in the direction of authoritarianism, while also at the same time angering the "silent majority" into being more likely to vote for the party that (ironically) did these things the least during the pandemic, and were much sooner to go back to normal.  The Branch Covidians really have a LOT to answer for!

(No wonder the MAGA-aligned crypto-fascists were able to pose themselves as the "reasonable" or "based" ones, until they got (re-)elected and the masks came off once again.  And the Dems lost a lot of credibility by stubbornly waiting so long to pivot on Covid, and then doing so abruptly.)

And when some people on the fringes argue that such illiberal "mitigation" should never have ended at all, well, they are literally giving ammunition to the fascists to not only reify and reinforce authoritarianism in general, but also to unwittingly bait them and even the fence-sitters into even more eugenics as well.  You can just hear the fascists whipping up an even bigger eugenicist scapegoating frenzy now:  "Those people over there are costing you, not only your hard-earned money, but your civil rights and liberties as well!", and people not being able to see the irony of it all.

Fascism begets fascism.  Every single time.

(Mic drop)

P.S.  Masks are still useless (or worse) for the most part against airborne viruses.  See the 2023 Cochrane Review, for example.  And as long as we are on the general subject of covering one's faces, albeit in a very different, non-medical context, there is NO good reason why any law enforcement agents (including ICE) should be covering their faces while making arrests.  NONE.  Seriously, if you really are so sure you are doing the right thing, then show your faces!

Don't Forget Rasa's "Embodiment Of God" Website Is Back

Reminder, the legendary Guru Rasa Von Werder's "Embodiment of God" website is back up and running.  Please be sure to check it out.  And here is her latest article today:

http://embodimentofgod.com/college-of-matriarchal-love/the-road-to-fame-fortune-the-kingdoms-of-the-world-their-glory/

Enjoy 😊 

ICYMI, Don't Forget To Check Out Rasa's Latest Magnum Opus!

 ICYMI, be sure to check out the legendary Guru Rasa Von Werder's latest book now published and available on Lulu (as well as on Amazon, etc.): The Man Whisperer:  How an Old Lady Snags Young Men for Sex.  With its self-explanatory title, she chronicles and discusses in depth her experiences as a Cougar in the college town of Binghamton, New York, and shares some very important wisdom and lessons she has learned along the way as well.

Enjoy! 😊

P.S.  Not to toot my own horn, but the book also features a little bit of William Bond and myself as well. 😊

Friendly Reminder: War Is STILL A Racket!

 

(Updated for 2025, in light of current events.  See also this article and these articles as well.)

WAR.  It seems to be as old as time itself.  And so many people seem to think it is inevitable.  However, it turns out that is not really true. War is neither timeless nor inevitable.  It has a beginning, and it has an end.  The beginning was about 7000 years ago (with the advent of patriarchy), while the end will be coming very soon (with the inevitable fall of patriarchy and rise of Matriarchy in the not-too-distant future).  And the end can't come soon enough!

(Especially now with the world being at 89 seconds to midnight (!) on the Doomsday Clock. That is, the risk of nuclear war is the highest it has been in quite a while now.  If, God forbid, a "hot" war between the USA and Russia and/or China or North Korea were to occur, the odds of it going nuclear are practically certain.  Even a hot war with Iran is an extremely risky move to say the least, and thus very ill-advised for the USA to join!  The best that one could hope for in that scenario is an even more destabilized Middle East, and it goes downhill from there.)

Patriarchy inherently rewards aggression and violence, no doubt about that.  And it messes with our heads so as to condition us to accept such violence as normal.  And of course there is men's tendency to think that war and scarcity are inevitable, which become self-fulfilling prophecies.  Women, on the other hand, would tend to reject such backwards thinking if they were in charge.  The late, great Buckminster Fuller himself said as much.

But there is also another reason why war is likely to occur under patriarchy, and that reason is discussed in depth by Major General Smedley Butler in his 1935 book, War Is A Racket.  Put simply, war is indeed a racket that is designed to further enrich the already ultra-rich oligarchs.  In other words, its genesis is none other than evil and powerful men who are willing to lie, cheat, steal, and kill for filthy lucre, and those sycophantic lackeys and ignorant masses who are brainwashed and duped to go along with it.   And of course, we know that patriarchy itself inevitably leads to oligarchy in the first place due to its "might makes right" and "winner take all" paradigm (that is nowadays most often cleverly disguised by the persistent and utterly hollow myth of "meritocracy").

Indeed, patriarchy itself can be thought of as a gender war writ large, and the only way to end it once and for all--and all other wars that come from it--is for men to surrender to Women.  It's a war men have lost before the war even began, despite winning nearly every battle--men just don't realize it yet.

That said, General Butler's book is more about how the perennial racket of war actually works in practice, and how to smash it for good (as opposed to the why the oligarchy exists in the first place).  But it goes a very long way towards explaining it, and he would be spinning in his grave if he were to see today's massive, imperialistic war machine.

From the Wikipedia article:

In War Is a Racket, Butler points to a variety of examples, mostly from World War I, where industrialists, whose operations were subsidized by public funding, were able to generate substantial profits, making money from mass human suffering.

The work is divided into five chapters:

1. War is a racket
2. Who makes the profits?
3. Who pays the bills?
4. How to smash this racket!
5. To hell with war!

It contains this summary:

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

Then he goes on to discuss who exactly profits from it and how.  It turns out it is not just weapons manufacturers, but also the big banks and other businesses that directly or indirectly deal with it as well.  In fact, the banksters are probably the biggest beneficiaries of war, since they lend money to finance it and then claw back so much in interest.  And manufacturers of non-weapons goods also have a market to sell their wares to in the military.  And of course, let's not forget all the resources plundered from the other countries as "spoils of war".

(And now we can add "defense contractors", aka mercenary corporations, such as DynCorp, Blackwater, Halliburton, KBR, Raytheon, et al. to the list of war profiteers as well.)

War is, of course, a negative-sum game overall.  It does not really create wealth on balance, it actually destroys far more than it creates.  But it certainly brings in a ludicrous amount of ill-gotten wealth in the form of profit, plunder, and usury for the oligarchy.  As for the idea that it "stimulates the economy" in the short run, that is technically true, but as neo-Keynesian economist Dr. Paul Krugman has famously noted years ago, a faked alien invasion would be every bit as stimulating, but without all of the serious side effects such as countless deaths, injuries, PTSD, family breakdown, resource depletion, pollution, ecological damage, and property damage.

In other words, it steals, kills, and destroys.  Kinda like....SATAN. 

And guess who foots the bill for it all?  You guessed it--the taxpayers.  The oligarchs pull the wool over our eyes, while laughing all the way to the bank.  But truly the biggest part of the bill is paid for in blood by the soldiers themselves.  And even for those who survive the horrors of war, it still takes its toll on them regardless, both physically and psychologically.  And these soldiers generally hail not from the ranks of the wealthy, but rather from the poor and broader working class.  Not much has changed in that regard today, it seems.

(Note that since the gold standard was abolished in 1971, our Monetarily Sovereign federal government does not actually need taxes to fund anything, since they can just "print" (create) the money now if they wanted.  But since wars inherently chew through ludicrous amounts of non-monetary resources, all wars are thus inflationary regardless, so We the People still pay for it in the form of higher prices.)

And that's to say nothing of the human toll of civilians in the other countries as well, who bear the brunt of it.

Then, General Butler discusses how to smash this evil racket once and for all.  To summarize, the three steps are as follows:  1) Take the profit out of war, 2) Put it up to a vote (limited to those who would be eligible for the draft) as to whether or not a war should be declared, and 3) Limit our military forces to home defense purposes.  Otherwise, nothing will stop the racket.

Again, as noted on Wikipedia:

In the booklet's penultimate chapter, Butler recommended three steps to disrupt the war racket:

1. Making war unprofitable. Butler suggests that the means for war should be "conscripted" before those who would fight the war:

It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war. The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labour before the nation's manhood can be conscripted. […] Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our steel companies and our munitions makers and our ship-builders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted — to get $30 a month [NOTE: that's $667/month in 2024 dollars], the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.

2. Acts of war to be decided by those who fight it. He also suggests a limited referendum to determine if the war is to be fought. Eligible to vote would be those who risk death on the front lines.
3. Limitation of militaries to self-defense. For the United States, Butler recommends that the Navy be limited, by law, to operating within 200 miles of the coastline, and the Army restricted to the territorial limits of the country, ensuring that war, if fought, can never be one of aggression. 

Indeed, the time to end all of this insanity and evil is yesterday.  So what do we do in the meantime while patriarchy still exists?  Thus, inspired by Butler, I propose that a new law be passed that we call the War Pigs Act, named after both the ineffectual and toothless War Powers Resolution of 1973 and the 1970 Black Sabbath song "War Pigs".  The first part of the new law would put some teeth in the War Powers Act by closing the loopholes and holding the President liable for any consequences of a war that is not authorized by Congress and is not during a state of emergency caused by an attack on the USA.  And absent a formal declaration of war by Congress, absolutely NO war may last beyond 90 days (60 days followed by a 30 day withdrawal), save for a temporary authorization of force that expires 90 days after the authorization passes or 180 days after the war began (if it began before the new law went into effect), whichever occurs first.  After that, there must be a formal declaration of war, or the war must end.  Period.

The second part of the law would implement some of General Butler's recommendations from his book, taking into account that we currently have an all-volunteer military.  Take the profit out of war, first of all.  Use the tax code to do so.  And for any war lasting beyond six months (which by definition would now require a formal declaration of war), require an annual limited plebiscite of all citizens that would be eligible for military service.  Make it a non-secret ballot such that those who vote "yes" would be drafted if we run out of volunteers, followed by those who abstain from the vote if necessary.  Those who vote "no" would be exempt from any such draft.  A kind of "consensual conscription", if you will.  We would all have skin in the game.  Women would be included as well, but before they draft the very first Woman, we should draft men in their 40s and 50s first.  That's the demographic group who starts the wars but rarely fights them.  It's only fair, right fellas?  Watch as war becomes a thing of the past, at least for the stupid ones and decade(s) long quagmires like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.

(It would also be a good idea to do like the Iroquois once did:  give Women elders the power to VETO any decision to go to war.  That alone would prevent essentially all wars that are not waged in strict and absolute defense of the homeland.)

For the record, I am personally 100% against the draft on principle.  Unless absolutely necessary, I view it as a form of slavery and involuntary servitude, and if there were ever such a thing as a truly just war (as per St. Augustine's Just War Theory criteria), which is about as rare as a unicorn, conscription would be unnecessary, since volunteers would be plentiful.  And today's technology further makes it largely obsolete to raise such large numbers of boots on the ground.  But since nuance, gray areas, and exceptions that prove every rule do in fact exist in the real world (see WWII and the American Civil War, for example), I will note that if we ever must have a draft, only those who voted yes (or chose not to vote) for such a war should be drafted.

General Butler was a true American hero and patriot.  After his distinguished career in the United States Marine Corps including during WWI (during and after which he eventually found out just how much of a racket it really was), he later quashed an attempted Wall Street fascist coup against FDR's government in 1933-1934.  Yes, there really was a plot by the Rockefellers, Mellon Bank, Standard Oil, General Motors, Goodyear, US Steel, and many others (including pro-Nazi forces!) to overthrow the federal government and install their own fascist dictatorship do their bidding, complete with concentration camps for, in their own words, "Jews and other undesirables".  And the money for the plot bankrolled by the big banks/corporations was funneled through Prescott Bush's companies (yes, THAT Bush, who also did business with the Nazis as well).  They all thought they could use Butler for the plot and he pretended to play along at first, only to foil their plot by telling Congress about it just before it went ahead.  He literally saved America from falling to full-blown fascism, in other words.  He was indeed history's original whistleblower, and then in 1935, he wrote his magnum opus, which unfortunately fell on deaf ears the world over.  

War was a racket then, and still is today.  And it always will be as long as it exists.

As General Butler famously said, 

"TO HELL WITH WAR!"

"Either war is obsolete, or man is."

-- Buckminster Fuller

"War, what is it good for?  Absolutely NOTHING!"

-- Edwin Starr

"Come the war, come the avarice, come the war, come hell...Come attrition, come the reek of bones, come attrition, come hell...This is why, why we fight, why we lie awake...And this is why, this is why we fight..."

-- The Decemberists

"Now the labor leader's screaming when they close the missile plant, United Fruit screams at the Cuban shore. Call it peace or call it treason, call it love or call it reason, but I ain't marching anymore."

-- Phil Ochs

"I declare the war is over, it's over, it's over..."

-- Phil Ochs

"But the hardest thing I'll ask you, if you would only try, is take your children by their hands and look into their eyes.  And there you'll see the answer you should have seen before.  If we win the wars at home, there'll be no fighting anymore"

-- Phil Ochs 

"We share the same biology, regardless of ideology. But what might save us, me and you, Is if the Russians love their children too"

-- Sting and Sergei Prokofiev 

ICYMI, Don't Forget To Check Out Rasa's Latest Magnum Opus!

ICYMI, be sure to check out the legendary Guru Rasa Von Werder's latest book now published and available on Lulu (as well as on Amazon, etc.): The Man Whisperer:  How an Old Lady Snags Young Men for Sex.  With its self-explanatory title, she chronicles and discusses in depth her experiences as a Cougar in the college town of Binghamton, New York, and shares some very important wisdom and lessons she has learned along the way as well.

Enjoy! 😊

P.S.  Not to toot my own horn, but the book also features a little bit of William Bond and myself as well. 😊

ICYMI, Don't Forget Rasa's YouTube Channel!

ICYMI, don't forget to check out the legendary Guru Rasa Von Werder's YouTube Channel.  It has a new name.  And will soon have many new videos too:

https://youtube.com/@gururasavonwerder?si=ZoEcoL7L2Hp7aFP5

Enjoy 😊 

Happy Mother's Day!

 

First, I would like to wish a Happy Mother's Day to all of the wonderful Mothers out there.  You are, after all, literally the reason why the human race even exists at all, despite the fact that the work you do is grossly undervalued in so many way by our twisted capitalistic and patriarchal society.  In other words, your beautiful feminine energy is essentially what keeps the rest of us alive.  

Thank you.

I would also like to note and lament how, for all the shallow platitudes America likes to throw around about "Mothers and apple pie", we are still a nation that perpetually continues to screw over Mothers and pregnant Women in so many ways.  Years ago, the legendary Guru Rasa Von Werder shared with us a poignant and in-depth article from Vox (see here) with us that illustrates the various ways in which that is true.  This article should truly be food for thought indeed.  Our patriarchal and capitalistic society clearly has a "cult of motherhood", in which the "ideal" of motherhood is so highly vaunted, worshipped even, but in practice actual Mothers themselves get about as much genuine respect as Rodney Dangerfield.  Both during and after pregnancy, so many Mothers are routinely discriminated against, overworked, underpaid, and even outright criminalized in many cases.  And meanwhile, there is to this day a powerful faction of mostly male politicians that is doing everything in their power to deny Women their right to choose whether or not to get (or stay) pregnant in the first place.  Indeed, the rank hypocrisy of our utterly misogynistic, hypocritical, and pharisaical system is so thick you could cut it with a knife.

Meanwhile, old Buckminster Fuller (who, not coincidentally, believed that Women should rule the world) must be spinning in his grave right now.  With today's technology and innovation, there is literally no legitimate reason why we as a society need "everybody and their mother" (literally!) to "work for a living" unless they really wanted to.  There are more than enough resources in the world for everyone on this planet to live like a millionaire, but the greedy oligarchs who control such resources apparently don't want to share.  Combined with the outdated scarcity mentality that men tend to favor (as opposed to the abundance mentality that Women tend to favor), those same oligarchs have also done everything in their power to sabotage any alternatives (i.e. free and renewable energy) to their own evil system that they force upon the rest of us.  So why make them even richer?

Additionally, just as we should "dispense with the absolutely specious notion that everybody needs to earn a living" (in Bucky's words), so too should we jettison the equally specious and outdated idea that "everybody must procreate" as though it were a civic duty.  Not only does today's technology make much useful human labor redundant, but the world is grossly overpopulated and will only get more so in the coming decades, and despite the abundance of the world's resources we are chewing through them like there is no tomorrow while destroying the planet.  And the main cause of that overpopulation is--wait for it--MEN.  Because they are the ones who, both historically and today, force, coerce, deceive, and/or brainwash Women to have kids that they otherwise would not want or are not yet ready for.  Men like to "get 'em while they're young" and then use them as serial breeding slaves, essentially, and all the euphemisms in the world do not change that fact.  It is really no coincidence that the two most effective (and ethical) ways to reduce overpopulation and excessively high birthrates are 1) female empowerment and 2) poverty reduction, while everything else is a mere sideshow.  Because when Women actually have a free and genuine choice on when or whether or not to reproduce, they usually make the right choices overall.  After all, they are the ones who have the most "skin in the game".  So let the planetary healing begin!

(And ICYMI, all of this applies a fortiori in the wake of the recent COVID-19 pandemic, which is now fully in the rearview mirror and rapidly fading from view.  Mothers have clearly faced a whopping triple burden thanks to all the lockdowns, school closures, job losses and stuff like that, followed by persistent shortages in, and high prices for, childcare availability after reopening.  Don't ever let the powers that be try to gaslight anyone into thinking otherwise, or memory-hole it.)

MAMASTE