I see it much the way I see the US. The Right, as they were, are an always existent element in society, and in spite of societal tendencies to recognize thick lines, they are in fact a spectrum of feelings, beliefs, general notions, and ideologies, like the rest of society, all prone to willful blindness and hypocrisy induced by learned identities. More often than not we are not cognizant of the masks we place upon our masks, let alone the masks themselves. So just like all those Trumpeteers, the AfD voters encompass a variation of xenophobic nationalism from latent to overt, unwitting to hardcore to just plain idiotic and/or evil.
The problem as I see it, as I think you know, is that the alternative presented is the same as it always is: a declaration of A or B. The multiparty system here does not avert that, largely because of coalition building (the CDU (read: Republicans) and the SPD (read Democrats) have just built yet another grand coalition that renders real opposition so far to the margins that we may as well just have the Queen). It would appear that this form of false-dichotomous democracy both here & there & everywhere has been enough to stave off a certain kind of extremity — (if we're willing to discount the extremity as it is represented in our militarist policies, which are in spite of all rhetoric anything but partisan, and our rich-favoring policies, as represented by both parties jockeying for financial favor from one or another rent-seeking class of assholes, or as it is represented by the standard American oh-so reasonable respect for law & order in spite of the evidence of its fascist tendencies) — but only for so long.
That is: I believe most people who wouldn't posit this as fact know full well this is where we've been headed. If you do not address the outright exploitation of people around the world and at home, and continue to pretend that the lesser-evil approach to electoral politics can continue unabated, eventually the most odious of the aforementioned spectrum will congeal & coalesce by obligatory scientific cause & effect. While it's true that here the coalition building aspect can keep the storm troopers of a certain kind of uniform from taking over houses of government, it doesn't mean they cannot curry favor. And, as I said, we have storm troopers of a different uniform already, increasingly militarized police forces who are not by my estimation Officer Friendlies, but people who think they are because of their uniform deserving of respect.
The A/B choice currently being forced upon all of us around the globe is nationalism vs. globalism. Neither one of these options as presented is remotely less than awful, but the reasonable anti-globalist factions (to the extent that such exist) are so marginalized by the exclusionary politics, media, and resultant culture that there may as well be no democracy. Indeed, the options, as they were, are not presented so much as dictated.
Here, as there, the only thing that people with their grubby fingers grabbing at the strings of anticipated power care about regarding Poo-tin — to take the Zeitgeist as example — is getting into another country to continue the disasterous policies of toppling the likes of Iraq and Libya. The disaster is by bipartisan design, of course, as indeed is even Don President's new torturer-in-chief of what's portrayed as American intelligence the doing of his predecessor's "looking forward not back". You might as well say that Bo Rama and all of his apologists were looking forward to her tenure. His choice to let these folks who tortured folks off the hook for the ostensible sake of healing and unity was a calculated move on every imaginable level of the eleven dimensional checkerboard. Just like incrementally privatizing schools and prisons and monetizing everything in between including healthcare, while somehow managing to look darling doing it, at least to his class of courtier who swooned at his family's every move and continue to yearn for his yesterday.
None of these putative players give a fuck about you or me, or the danger of Russian influence, or the Syrian population – any more than did the dyed-in-the-wool brutal American murderers for their victims fifty years ago yesterday.
Were that too not the consequence of a bipartisan-based global policy meant to curtail, oddly enough, the same enemy's influence, and dictated as a choice at the ballot box, it could not have led to the no-less heinous slaughter of over a million more Vietnamese victims — a number any neo-fascist newcomer political party would be proud to quibble with.
The problem as I see it, as I think you know, is that the alternative presented is the same as it always is: a declaration of A or B. The multiparty system here does not avert that, largely because of coalition building (the CDU (read: Republicans) and the SPD (read Democrats) have just built yet another grand coalition that renders real opposition so far to the margins that we may as well just have the Queen). It would appear that this form of false-dichotomous democracy both here & there & everywhere has been enough to stave off a certain kind of extremity — (if we're willing to discount the extremity as it is represented in our militarist policies, which are in spite of all rhetoric anything but partisan, and our rich-favoring policies, as represented by both parties jockeying for financial favor from one or another rent-seeking class of assholes, or as it is represented by the standard American oh-so reasonable respect for law & order in spite of the evidence of its fascist tendencies) — but only for so long.
That is: I believe most people who wouldn't posit this as fact know full well this is where we've been headed. If you do not address the outright exploitation of people around the world and at home, and continue to pretend that the lesser-evil approach to electoral politics can continue unabated, eventually the most odious of the aforementioned spectrum will congeal & coalesce by obligatory scientific cause & effect. While it's true that here the coalition building aspect can keep the storm troopers of a certain kind of uniform from taking over houses of government, it doesn't mean they cannot curry favor. And, as I said, we have storm troopers of a different uniform already, increasingly militarized police forces who are not by my estimation Officer Friendlies, but people who think they are because of their uniform deserving of respect.
The A/B choice currently being forced upon all of us around the globe is nationalism vs. globalism. Neither one of these options as presented is remotely less than awful, but the reasonable anti-globalist factions (to the extent that such exist) are so marginalized by the exclusionary politics, media, and resultant culture that there may as well be no democracy. Indeed, the options, as they were, are not presented so much as dictated.
Here, as there, the only thing that people with their grubby fingers grabbing at the strings of anticipated power care about regarding Poo-tin — to take the Zeitgeist as example — is getting into another country to continue the disasterous policies of toppling the likes of Iraq and Libya. The disaster is by bipartisan design, of course, as indeed is even Don President's new torturer-in-chief of what's portrayed as American intelligence the doing of his predecessor's "looking forward not back". You might as well say that Bo Rama and all of his apologists were looking forward to her tenure. His choice to let these folks who tortured folks off the hook for the ostensible sake of healing and unity was a calculated move on every imaginable level of the eleven dimensional checkerboard. Just like incrementally privatizing schools and prisons and monetizing everything in between including healthcare, while somehow managing to look darling doing it, at least to his class of courtier who swooned at his family's every move and continue to yearn for his yesterday.
None of these putative players give a fuck about you or me, or the danger of Russian influence, or the Syrian population – any more than did the dyed-in-the-wool brutal American murderers for their victims fifty years ago yesterday.
Were that too not the consequence of a bipartisan-based global policy meant to curtail, oddly enough, the same enemy's influence, and dictated as a choice at the ballot box, it could not have led to the no-less heinous slaughter of over a million more Vietnamese victims — a number any neo-fascist newcomer political party would be proud to quibble with.
