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| Breitbart Social Club in D.C. |
"My comments were aimed at Paul Manafort, a seasoned campaign professional with experience and knowledge of how the Russians operate. He should have known they are duplicitous, cunning and not our friends. To reiterate, those comments were not aimed at Don Jr."
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| Paulie Laundry (R) with bag-man Konstantin Kilimnik |
"My family and I, we doan know 'bout this Bannon guy no more. Not in many months anyway. My family, we like to help people out. But this guy? This frickin' guy. He's a degenerate gambler. He reaches out a while back and we try to help him out - he thinks he's a big earner, see - and he goes and puts all his money on some broke down nutso hillbilly gimp horse in Alabama and looses both his fuckin' shirts. Pazzo! The stupid bastard. And now we find out he's been sharing a table with some stranger and running his mouth... he's got a beef with this guy, gotta beef with that guy... who knows what else he's telling people. So do we support this gavone? What do you think?"
By now there was a widespread opinion that the only way to have a "moderate" Fascism, envisaged as an alternative to the extremism of men like Farinacci and the ras, was to place power entirely in Mussolini's hands and follow on behind - wherever his impulses and decisions and extravagant behavior led. ~ (Il Duce and his Women; Mussolini's Rise to Power, by Roberto Olla)
"The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over." - Stephen BannonWhat he means is that the Steve Bannon presidency is over. The Trump presidency, whatever that is, will now emerge from the twisted steaming wreckage that it has become and stumble dumbstruck and half-ass backwards right into the path of a speeding tractor trailer... driven by Steve Bannon.
[Pages 62 - 63]
Despite all his diplomacy and hospitality, a number of sultans in the lake region refused to come in and parley with Pershing. The sultans of Maciu, of Bacolod, of Bayabao, and of Calabui, and the lesser datus and panglimas who sympathized with them, now saw quite clearly that their authority over the tribes would be sharply reduced if they submitted to the Sultan of Camp Vicars. They had no intention of sharing their ancient powers with an American officer. It was time to discourage his attempts to pacify the lake country.
He was not easily dissuaded that peaceful methods would work and even used what must have seemed like white witchcraft to impress the natives. A number of Moro chiefs, on the verge of warring among themselves, were summoned to a peace conference but balked at signing a treaty. Pershing ordered his aides to bring in an Edison "talking machine," which had just been developed and put on the market back in the States. Helen Gould, the daughter of financier Jay Gould, had purchased ten of the machines and presented them to the Army for recreational purposes. One of these had been sent to the Philippines and was passed along, by coastal steamer and pack train, to Camp Vicars.
Pershing played a musical selection, which only bored the Moros, who regarded tjieir own gong, cymbal, and bamboo flute music as superior. Then he put a cylinder titled "A Day at the Farm" on the machine. The sounds of an American barnyard delighted his guests, but they still refused to sign the treaty.
Pershing nodded to another officer, and a moment later two order- lies appeared. One carried a dead pig, the other a bucket of pig's blood. More than anything else, the Moros feared contamination by a pig, which would bar them from the Mohammedan heaven. Pershing scooped up a dipper of the blood, enough to spatter the whole assemblage, then pointed to the treaty. There was no further argument from the chiefs. One by one they stepped forward and agreed to the treaty.
These various techniques, friendly and forcible, proved their value in the hard campaigning ahead. Pershing had only 700 men under his command and could have been wiped out in the coming year of marching and fighting if the thousands of Malanaos in the lake districts decided to rise up against him.
Accompanied by an escort of infantry and a battery of artillery, Pershing smilingly presented himself at the Sultan of Bayan's craggy headquarters. Since there was no gate in the fort, he and his companions had to climb over the walls on ladders. Once there, he raised the United States flag over the fort and fired a twenty-one gun salute. The Moros were especially impressed with the booming artillery, as Pershing had intended. The sultan, no less impressed, asked Pershing to become the adopted father of his wife. Pershing also adopted four children of the tribe, one of whom he described as "a bright, clean little fellow who has the airs of a Prince of Wales."
Before the visit ended, the sultan and his court decided that an unprecedented honor should be conferred upon Pershing. He was to be consecrated a datu "by the law and rites of the Koran," making him a tribal chieftain, blood relative, and counselor of the Moros of Bayan. Never before and never again would a Christian be made a Moslem prince. With a grave, Moro-like dignity, he submitted himself to the consecration ceremony, possibly wondering what his old Sundayschool teacher in Laclede would have thought of him in that heathen circle.
Pershing, as one of his officers observed, "unflinchingly returned the embrace and kiss on each cheek of the Datu Sadji," even though the datu "had a thick black beard and chewed betel nut . . . and some of the juice thereof had trickled into his beard." There were no comic overtones, however, in Pershing's own account of the Moslem ceremony:
"Each sultan and datu, with his prominent followers in his rear, sat on his heels, the whole forming a circle. The sacred Koran was placed on a mat of native fiber in the center of this circle, guarded by an aged Mohammedan priest, gorgeous in trousers of all colors and a yellow silk upper garment, over whose head a slave held a beautiful silk sunshade. Silver boxes, beautifully engraved, containing betel nut were passed around the circle and then the speechmaking began, each chief in turn giving his opinion. ... At the conclusion, all the rulers
and myself, placing our hands upon the Koran, registered a vow of eternal friendship, allegiance to the United States, and agreed upon a cessation of warfare against each other."
On his return to Camp Vicars, Pershing was so exhilarated by his bloodless victory at Bayan, and more especially by his new rank of datu, that he wrote of his many Moro friendships, "If I should say: 'Go and kill this man or that,' the next day they would appear in camp with his head." From the Manila Times he clipped an editorial praising him for "having won the submission of Bayan through diplomacy" and having acquired a "distinction never before enjoyed by an American."
General Bliss, commanding the Philippine Division, suggested to Pershing on May 23, 1911, that he adopt the methods used by the British in India to deal with Mohammedan fanaticism. Juramentados, Bliss recommended, should be buried with the carcass of a pig or encased in a pigskin, which meant to any Mohammedan that he would spend eternity in a state of contamination. "This I think a good plan, for if anything will discourage the juramentado it is the prospect of going to hell instead of heaven," Bliss wrote. He recognized that there
might be an outcry of protest from humanitarians over such a measure, but "you can rely on me to stand by you in maintaining this custom. It is the only possible thing we can do to discourage crazy fanatics."
Pershing, however, realized that General Bliss's suggestion, while ingenious, might arouse an enduring bitterness among the whole Moro population. The British in India, for all their condign punishments, including the practice of shooting natives out of cannon, had never managed to rule except by the exercise of force, and he was intent on conciliating the Moros to the extent that they could soon be handed over to civilian administrators.
His approach was paternalistic and would probably have seemed to verge on the maudlin to any proper British colonial officer. It was exemplified by a letter he wrote the Moros of the Taglibi district on Jolo: "I am writing this letter that you may know that I want my children to come in and stop fighting. We do not want any more fighting. Too many Moros and their women may be killed. . . . These guns are not worth fighting for. . . . Your people are better off not to have these guns as we can then have peace in the island. The government will pay for all guns. ... If your people need rice to eat, the government will give it to them. . . . I want to see all of my people and speak to them so that we may forever be friends."
The letter was one of several he collected years later for the memoir of his early career that was never published. "This letter," he later wrote on the top of it, "might be interesting to quote to show simplicity required."
ENTER: BLACK JACK
It was into such a situation as [unreadable] then, that Gen. Pershing, then known to the army as "Black Jack" Pershing stepped when he was sent down to subdue the Moros. The story of how he stopped the Juramentados from running amuck [sic], with knives strapped to their hands, and killing as many Christians as possible before they themselves were slain, is well known.
For each Christian they killed they believed they received higher rewards in the after life. By the same token they thought that if they ever were sprinkled with pig's blood they were doomed forever to their own particular hell. With much ceremony Pershing sprinkled some with pig's blood and let them go. Then he announced that any Juramentado thereafter would be sprinkled with pig's blood. And those drops of porcine gore proved more powerful than bullets.
If asked what manner of beast fascism is, most people would answer, without hesitation, "fascism is an ideology." The fascist leaders themselves never stopped saying that they were prophets of an idea, unlike the materialist liberals and socialists.
[...]
Fascism, by contrast, was a new invention created afresh for the era of mass politics. It sought to appeal mainly to the emotions by the use of ritual, carefully stage-managed ceremonies, and intensely charged rhetoric. The role programs and doctrine play in it is, on closer inspection, fundamentally unlike the role they play in conservatism, liberalism, and socialism. Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior peoples. It has not been given intellectual underpinnings by any system builder, like Marx, or by any major critical intelligence, like Mill, Burke, or Tocqueville.
In a way utterly unlike the classical "isms," the rightness of fascism does not depend on the truth of any of the propositions advanced in its name. Fascism is "true" insofar as it helps fulfill the destiny of a chosen race or people or blood, locked with other peoples in a Darwinian struggle, and not in the light of some abstract and universal reason. The first fascists were entirely frank about this.
We [Fascists] don't think ideology is a problem that is resolved in such a way that truth is seated on a throne. But, in that case, does fighting for an ideology mean fighting for mere appearance? No doubt, unless one considers it according to its unique and efficacious psychological-historical value. The truth of an ideology lies in its capacity to set in motion our capacity for ideals and action. Its truth is absolute insofar as, living within us, it suffices to exhaust those capacities.The truth was whatever permitted the fascist man (and woman) to dominate others, and whatever made the chosen people triumph.
Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader's mystical union with the historic destiny of his people, a notion related to romanticist ideas of national historic flowering and of individual artistic or spiritual genius, though fascism otherwise denied romanticism's exaltation of unfettered personal creativity. The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually: the warmth of belonging to a new race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a vast collective enterprise; the gratification of submerging oneself in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one's petty concerns for the group's good; and the dull thrill of domination. Fascism's deliberate replacement of reasoned debate with immediate sensual experience transformed politics, as the exiled German cultural critic Walter Benjamin was first to point out, into aesthetics. And the ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, Benjamin warned in 1936, was war.
Fascist leaders made no secret of having no programs. Mussolini exulted in that absence. "The Fasci di Combattimento," Mussolini wrote in the "Postulates of the Fascist Program" of May 1920, "... do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form." A few months before he became prime minister of Italy, he replied truculently to a critic who demanded to know what his program was: "The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better." "The fist," asserted a fascist militant in 1920, "is the synthesis of our theory." Mussolini liked to declare that he himself was the definition of Fascism. The will and leadership of a Duce was what a modern people needed, not a doctrine. Only in 1932, after he had been in power for ten years, and when he wanted to "normalize" his regime, did Mussolini expound Fascist doctrine, in an article (partly ghostwritten by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile) for the new Enciclopedia Italiana. Power came first, then doctrine. Hannah Arendt observed that Mussolini "was probably the first party leader who consciously rejected a formal program and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone."
“I’m excited to see him blow the place up. He stands on his own, so he can throw the middle finger up.”
[...]
In interviews on Wednesday, again and again, voters in Kenosha said that they had gotten behind Donald Trump. Often, they had not cast a vote for a Republican presidential nominee before. More often, they said that the past eight years had gone well for them — although, tellingly, the city had been better in the times they dimly remembered.
“It was just that ‘Make America Great Again’ turned out to be genius,” said Karen Kempinen, 67, a retired teacher. “That resonated. They didn’t need to think any further than those words.”
[Ivanka Trump] Over the years, on too many occasions to count, I saw my father tear stories out of the newspaper about people whom he had never met, who were facing some injustice or hardship.
He’d write a note to his assistant, in a signature black felt tip pen, and request that the person be found and invited to Trump Tower to meet with him. He would talk to them and then draw upon his extensive network to find them a job or get them a break. And they would leave his office, as people so often do after having been with Donald Trump, feeling that life could be great again.
As the writer Corrado Alvaro observed in 1934, much of the extraordinary appeal of Mussolini to the masses lay in a widespread view that he was in some sense omniscient and could intervene to rectify their wrongs in accordance with an 'old ideal of justice'. And even when he was not aware of a specific grievance, it was commonly felt that he would act to remedy it just as soon as it came to his attention. Mussolini assiduously played up to such beliefs. The editor of il Popolo d'Italia recalled how the Duce telephoned him on one occasion after reading in a newspaper of a mother who was living with triplets, seven other children and a sick husband in a single room, telling him to send someone to the poor woman 'immediately' ('because we must not lose time with the usual bureaucratic headaches') with a gift of 3,000 lire in his name. In reporting the charitable gesture in il Popolo d' Italia the next day, the editor was told to emphasise how Mussolini had spotted the story tucked away in a corner of 'one of the many newspapers that he reads and notwithstanding the huge burden of work that he was saddled with'.
[...]
In his 1928 book Mussolini da vicino ('Mussolini close up') the well-known writer Paolo Orano described coming across the Duce surrounded by papers, and being asked for his opinion about an author who had just written to request assistance. Orano confirmed that the man in question had indeed had a hard life and was weighed down with debts, and Mussolini promptly declared that he needed to be 'saved' and wrote out a cheque for 10,000 lire...
Many of those who appealed to the Duce for financial or other help did so from a belief that he occupied a position of absolute power and also from a sense that he would view supplicants with the kindness of a father and the charity of a man blessed by God. [...]
[...]
After being received in Rome, a letter would normally be forwarded by the Segreteria Particolare to the local prefect, who would check up on the supplicant's political and moral credentials, make sure that genuine hardship was involved, and ascertain if any assistance had already been given. If he advised that the case had merit, then an appropriate sum might be awarded ("The Duce has deigned to concede to you...'). [...]
[...]
The precise sums in question are hard to ascertain, but each year tens of millions of lire were available for the Duce's own personal distribution from the secret funds of ministries, the police, the Bank of Italy and various other sources. [...]
[...]
The impact of Mussolini's personal beneficence on individuals or communities was often considerable, not least because a sense of impovershment might be bound up closely with ideas of inveterate neglect by the state. The files of the Segreteria Particolare are full of letters from grateful recipients eager to capitalise on the feeling of having been singled out with a further communication with the Duce.
[...]
As so often it was the Duce's extraordinary omniscience as much as his generosity that was deemed to be remarkable:
... You, DUCE, though beset by the most pressing work, have seen and have thought even of us. We feel so proud of his gaze, more than if the eyes of all the world had been fixed on us. [Fascist Voices, pages 241-243]
[Huffington Post] "Someone Was Actually Arrested For In-Person Voter Fraud. She’s A Trump Supporter.
Police in Des Moines, Iowa, said Friday that they had arrested Terri Lynn Rote, 55, on suspicion of voting twice in the general election.
Rote, a registered Republican, allegedly submitted ballots at two different early-voting locations in Polk County, Iowa, according to local media reports. She has been charged with first-degree election misconduct, a felony.
“I wasn’t planning on doing it twice. It was a spur of the moment,” Rote told Iowa Public Radio. “The polls are rigged.” She said she feared her first vote for Trump would be changed to a vote for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
[...]
The Polk County auditor said this was the first instance of alleged voter fraud he could remember in 12 years, while the county prosecutor called it one of the few examples he’d seen in his 25 years of work." [ Huffington Post ]
A pair of the self-claimed billionaire’s backers were caught on video at a campaign rally in Cleveland, Ohio, channeling the Nazi dictator.
One, holding a sign bearing Trump’s slogan, angrily brandished at TV cameras, telling the journalists operating them: “That’s what you are: Lugenpresse.”
His companion then joined in, shouting the same before adding: “You said it right.”
[ Huffington Post ]
The ugly history of ‘Lügenpresse,’ a Nazi slur shouted at a Trump rally - By Rick Noack
BERLIN — When a video of two Donald Trump supporters shouting “Lügenpresse” (lying press) started to circulate Sunday, viewers from Germany soon noted its explosive nature. The defamatory word was most frequently used in Nazi Germany. Today, it is a common slogan among those branded as representing the “ugly Germany”: members of xenophobic, right-wing groups.
Its use across the Atlantic Ocean at a Trump rally has worried Germans who know about its origins all too well. Both the Nazi regime and the East German government made use of it, turning it into an anti-democracy slogan. [ Washington Post ]
