An Unexpected Age of Wonders: The blessing of the Great Disruptor.
So Catiline was this patrician, a decadent SOB who, when mistreated and challenged by the Roman establishment, organized the Roman deplorables and started a rebellion.
It was squashed of course, but for Blok, he remained a hero. Blok calls Catiline the Roman Bolshevik, and insists on approaching him not from Cicero's moralizing NYT-like perspective, but from the perspective of World Revolution.
For Blok, as he puts it, the heart of the Roman Empire stopped when Christ was born. It continued for another few hundred years, but in a zombie-like state until its petty, militaristic, provincial, materialistic character was finally exposed as the bluff it always was, and it collapsed under the weight of its own corruption. And here is Blok's paradoxical view: Catiline's rebellion makes sense only from this perspective.
Catiline might have been corrupt, decadent, debauched and what have you. Yet, he did expose how rotten Rome was. For that, both Blok and Ibsen (another rebel against stifling bourgeois order) place Catiline in heaven. Which takes me to Trump. Whatever his critics say, he has it, and then some, but like Catiline, he fully exposes how corrupt, venal, and petty the established order is.
The genie cannot be put back into the bottle. Mass media is exposed for what it is: a spinning machine for the militaristic oppressive order, a purveyor of fake news. And this is not the view of some obscure academic like Chomsky. It is the view of the President of the United States.
Isn't it liberating?! No more butchery, bombing, and destruction, while the press conducts its cheer-leading campaign in support of another "humanitarian intervention", be it Serbia, Iraq, or Libya. The genie is out of the bottle. People are not buying it anymore.
Politicians are corrupt! Trump exposes it. Mass media lies and spins! He exposes it. Mass media is in obvious disarray. The only thing the Establishment learned to do during the 'End of History' period was to spin and promote government policies. Now, with their insane hatred of Trump, they can't do it any longer. And because they also became so lazy and corrupt as they suckled at the teat of the Establishment, they can't bring themselves to expose political or military corruption either.
The only thing left to them is "Russia-gate". How pathetic. So let them expose that Trump, 'the Emperor', is naked. He merely laughs back at them, and wiggles his naked derrière in their faces. And not just his, but their own. Their naked cowardliness, their naked corruption, their naked immaturity and lack of civic honor. The only thing they know how to do is to be sycophantic and sing 'Hail to the Chief'. And now they can't even do that because... #NotMyPresident! What a glorious scandal! The empire built on lies, corruption, militarism, and petty materialism no longer can pretend to be anything else. And we should all be grateful to Trump for that. And to Americans who voted for him.
The French had their chance, yet they voted for their version of Obama, a petty little banker in cahoots with their corrupt media. In other words, they decided to act like ostriches, keeping their heads in the sand, and thinking that if they sign the Paris accord, all will be fine, 'Rome will continue unopposed'.
Except that it won't. The heart of today's Roman Empire has stopped, the wailing and gnashing of teeth has begun, and yet the ostriches march on.
Source: SOTT (A fraternal site)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
6 comments
An image from the article has definitely stuck to my brain: Mass Media, grownups, suckling at the breast of the establishment. What a disgusting true picture! To win the battle against totalitarian government and oligarchy control
requires us to defend the commons of information such as this site. The ‘Establishment’ has lost the battle of information. As a former CIA Operative said, we will not have done our job until all the people believe is what we tell them. Their job is now imperiled by mass of alternative information they do not control. A refreshing thought compared to ‘suckling mass media’.
Like yapping small lap dogs, the media and lefties snap at the heels of the Large Black Trump Bear. But it takes more than that to bring him down and in the interim, he says the darndest things (Art Linkletter would have a field day with him on television). But with African nations stick and stones will break their bones, but his words ‘shitholes’ can hardly harm them. Because their exploitation and domination go on regardless and they know it.
sorry but i see very little sign whatsoever of his “draining the swamp”….it began with his failing to support Flynn or possibly even before with many inappropriate appointments but was clear when to silence the baying hounds and to impress the Chinese President he attacked a Syrian airbase on no real evidence in complete breach of international law,to much praise and acclaim by all the assorted blood-letters,where he murdered numbers of Syrian civilians including children as “collateral damage”.As an ardent Zionist his ravings against Iran and his failure to withdraw the many illegal bases from Syria-indeed many more have been built under his watch-Trump now follows the Neocons even up to the point of highly profitable war with N Korea. That folk have begun to mistrust the MSM more because of his outbursts is a matter of pure conjecture and even if true will evaporate altogether as he falls headlong into their trap of exposing himself as unstable and inconsistent;meanwhile the US economy will continue to strip the poor and suffocate and drag down the long- declining Middle Class as life expectancy falls and 10,000s or more likely 100,000s die prematurely through inadequate healthcare and under these pressures as the internet is censored ,in public ignorance, the MSM will reassert itself………. Trump is and maybe always was just another puppet.
I agree at this point Trump is a puppet, I don’t think this article would necessarily disagree. In Trumps loud mouth way he is making it very clear to every country in the world that America is a corrupt violent nut house. He is also making more Americans aware that we are a country in failure. There are still more people who think it is just Trump or the Republicans, but I talk to more and more people who realize that the Clinton and Obamas of the world are worse in that their normal behavior made is easier to steal everything from it’s own citizens as well as ever other country in the world.
William: “sorry but i see very little sign whatsoever of his ‘draining the swamp'”. Exactly, Trump was never going to drain the swamp. He is a crude businessman whose sole objective is turning a profit. What the author is lauding Trump for is exposing the swamp to those many US citizens who have always blindly believed that our so-called “democracy” operated for the benefit of the people. The ordinary Republican and Democratic politicians advance their schemes with high-sounding platitudes and outright lies, or veiled in secrecy. Trump, in his crude, bombastic manner and by his actions, reveals the cesspool that is our government. Just one example: if Hillary had been elected, the response to the racist police murders of unarmed Blacks would have been “let’s have a commission investigate and recommend reforms, police sensitivity trainings, etc.” In other words, the issue would have been buried and nothing changed, people go back to their Facebook or football. Contrast The Donald, talking to a convention of policemen: “take them out and beat them up”. Well, that will not result in any change either, but now people will know it and maybe they go out into the street a little wiser.
Trump is neither a puppet, nor dumb or unstable. He is a wealthy proletarian whose mouth is where his thoughts are. Instead of the usual conventionally sanctimonious leaders, whose hypocrisy and treachery are repeatedly believed in despite all clear signs to the contrary, he openly takes chances with the truth and dares to gallop in where mere mortals would not dare to tread, is loud and offensive and therefore very hated because his behavior brings out all the shortcomings of this self-hypnotizing nation. His very deleterious policies are ignored while puerile accusations are directed against him, in fact encouraged by him as a foil to hide his true intents. In short, a fine upstanding citizen and a model for this nation.