Global
“I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the ocean. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”
This racist pseudo-joke, uttered by Tony Hinchecliffe at the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 27, has been virally shamed. It’s even been denounced by Team Trump itself. But I bring it back into the limelight for a moment for several eerily linked reasons.
In two dozen words, followed by a snort of guilty laughter, this “joke” describes, indeed, encompasses, a serious slice of how humanity is destroying Planet Earth. To begin with, Hinchecliffe is right about the “floating Island of garbage.” There is such a phenomenon, the presence of which no doubt deserves far more concern and attention than it gets.
The first Germans Hitler sent to the Dachau concentration camp near Munich were labor organizers and social activists. If you think you are immune from a similar fate at a concentration camp established by Donald Trump, you are deluding yourself.
Dachau’s ovens mass-burned the corpses of countless political prisoners. Many were Jews, but many were not… including gays, non-Christians, cultural “sub-humans,” feminists, gypsies, Jehovah Witnesses, Social Democrats, Communists, democracy activists and “others” very possibly similar in some ways to you yourself. Likewise, Bergen-Belsen, where over 35,000+ dissident bodies lay lifeless (including that of Anne Frank).
In case you were wondering these are the camps where Hitler exterminated people:
Major Extermination Camps (Primarily for Systematic Killing)
Auschwitz-Birkenau (Poland)
Estimated Death Toll: 1.1 million (mainly Jews, as well as Poles, Romani, Soviet POWs, and others)
reblinka (Poland)
Estimated Death Toll: 800,000 (primarily Jews and a smaller number of Romani)
Maybe you’ve heard some of the buzz about “Project 2025.” What is it — and what would it mean for you and your family?
Project 2025 is a proposed “transition plan for a new Republican administration” put together by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank. It’s an in-depth list of what conservative groups will push for in the event of a Trump victory in the fall.
https://davidswanson.org/hes-a-senile-demented-fascistic-buffoonish-sadistic-thug/
He’s a wealthy scam artist snake oil salesman who’s cheated and stolen his whole life and conned his way into being president just a few years ago, and while president did pretty much whatever the establishment told him to do, even while giving speeches like an angry narcissist with a third-grade vocabulary. Then he tried to stay president, but his brownshirts turned out to be mostly brownnosers. Now you think he should get your “anti-establishment” vote?
He’s a serial rapist, abuser, and convicted felon who promises to use courts, police, and military to target his enemies, and you think he should get your “law and order” vote?
[This important and delayed compilation is a bit longer than usual but it
takes 7 minutes to read if you do not open links. Please forward to others
at least sections you think they need to see. This post is also at my blog
for easy share:
https://popular-resistance.blogspot.com/2024/10/olives-hope-and-more.html ]
Today is the last day we work on our olive trees at the museum gardens in
Bethlehem (80 trees). Earlier last week we picked olives in our own home
garden in Beit Sahour. This is a form of resistance but it is also
physically and mentally healthy exercise that gets us to understand both
the blessings and the challenges of life. As a communal event, we receive
help from volunteers (local and international) and we get to feel
camaraderie and friendship while we also discuss the horrors of starving
I hate elections in the same way that I hate dining in a cafeteria with lots of options, every single one of them disgusting and overpriced. But I don’t mind taking 30 seconds to fill out a few ovals with a pen. I can’t think of anything I do that’s easier. It’s harder to get back into a website that wants a new password than it is to vote. I’m a little sick, in fact, of hearing from former presidents who launched goddamned wars without the hint of any concepts of any plan but who now demand that I make a “plan” for my voting. Stop spamming me with texts and emails, both of you monstrous gangs of con-artist slimeballs! Please? I voted long ago, by mail. I was done in under 30 seconds. I didn’t vote for either of you. I don’t live in one of the handful of states where it could possibly matter if I did.
The conclusion that Donald Trump is a fascist has gone mainstream, gaining wide publicity and affirmation in recent weeks. Such understanding is a problem for Trump and his boosters. At the same time, potentially pivotal in this close election, a small proportion of people who consider themselves to be progressive still assert that any differences between Trump and Kamala Harris are not significant enough to vote for Harris in swing states.
Opposition to fascism has long been a guiding light in movements against racism and for social justice.
Speaking to a conference of the African National Congress in 1951, Nelson Mandela warned that “South African capitalism has developed [into] monopolism and is now reaching the final stage of monopoly capitalism gone mad, namely, fascism.”