By Ramin Mazaheri for the Saker Blog
There isn’t a news event this year which reveals the US left’s ability to continually aggravate the urban/rural divide more than the case of Kyle Rittenhouse. Their problem is that they cannot understand, or often merely just consider, that positive socio-political impulses may have been his actual motivation.
Rittenhouse is the 17-year old who shot three people during the Jacob Blake protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and let’s start off by stating a near-certainty: the kid is not going to be convicted.
Amid public chaos one guy chases you and grabs your gun, another beats you with a skateboard while you’re on the ground and grabs your gun, and another points a gun at you – there’s not a jury in America which won’t say shooting these three people wasn’t self-defense, I predict.
You wouldn’t even need a video of yourself saying you are in Kenosha with a gun and, crucially, a medical kit to “help people” – this will be an American jury which accepts violence as an everyday fact, and which esteems “stand your ground” self-defense. Even a video of what appears to be you cowardly punching a fellow teenage girl in the back won’t be enough to get 12 Americans to say that you weren’t justified to defend your life and property. I’m no lawyer, but this seems like an open and shut case… at least in America; and in states like Wisconsin, where openly carrying semi-automatic weapons is – incredibly – legal.
Rittenhouse’s likely exoneration thus has everything to do with international norm-defying United States culture and very little to do with ethnicity, but the US left – of course – obsessively sees ethnicity, race and identity everywhere. Could a “Black Kyle Rittenhouse” get off? You mean, would “Black Kyle Rittenhouse” also establish a personal relationship with local cops by talking to them beforehand and saying that he was on their side, like the White one did? To use an American legal term, there’s plenty of “reasonable doubt” that if he would do that a similar exoneration for “Black Kyle Rittenhouse” would not be so unreasonable.
That’s the legal aspect. The Rittenhouse story really rather pulled at my heartstrings, as it likely did for people worldwide, because there were just so many levels of tragedy to this historic event: How can Jacob Blake be shot seven times in the back by a cop in front of his three sons? How can protesters be killed? How can this 17-year old ruin his life so quickly? How can a 17-year old who goes to prison for these infamous shootings possibly survive in the prison yard? Above all, why are things so bad that this kid has to be out there at all?
How can a government claim to be the global leader of freedom and modernity when they cannot even fulfil the basic function of any sort of government – to provide physical security to all its citizens? This was the first question everyone should have asked, but nobody in the US asks it because they assume it is impossible to achieve. I asked the Blake family about this first rule of government and Jacob Blake’s uncle answered “security” before I even finished the question.
But unlike many on the left I immediately understood where Kyle Rittenhouse was coming from, at least partially – I have seen these types before.
Leftist love for Blake, but why not leftist understanding for Rittenhouse?
Because he was raised in reactionary America Rittenhouse likely does not have the proper, modern and progressive education of these groups I’m about to list, but I immediately saw the possibility of similarities between him and members of the Iranian Basij, the Cuban members of Committees for the Defense of the Revolution and members of the Chinese Communist Party. I immediately perceived a possibility that Rittenhouse was not motivated by only evil, racism and rage, but by a desire to help and serve, patriotic love, self-sacrifice and other worthy impulses.
The US left is mostly “fake-leftist” not because they know essentially nothing about those aforementioned groups, but because they don’t even want to learn non-propaganda about them. Like all American evangelists: they have all the answers already.
And so the knives came out immediately for this kid.
I heard on CNN analysts immediately declaring that Rittenhouse was affiliated with White supremacist groups – no such proof was ever found. The young man was rather clearly preparing for a job in law enforcement and was a big fan of groups like Blue Lives Matter, but that doesn’t make him a White supremacist. Terrible, yellow journalism.…
Everywhere you looked US (fake) leftists were demanding they throw the book at Rittenhouse, make an example of him, use the death penalty. The lack of empathy and bloodlust was quite shocking – 17 years old is a minor in most of the US. How can you say that a 17-year old is already beyond redemption? Answer: Be a secular/faux-spiritual US fake-leftist, I guess….
Jacob Blake was no angel – he had a warrant out for his arrest – and neither was Kyle Rittenhouse. However, making their personal lives the story here is only a way to guarantee that the structural failures they now personify never get resolved. Blake should never have been shot in the back seven times like that and Rittenhouse should have never felt forced to get on the street due to governmental abandon – and yet in the US the approach to such events is to personalise the participants as if they had willingly done so like Kim Kardashian. Such is the shallow depth of Anglo-American journalism, sadly – the only difference is that in the UK the blood runs cold and in the US the blood runs hot.
Fake-leftists won’t even have read this far (again, proselytisers already know what is “important”) and yet I must be on the right track because Rittenhouse immediately had so very, very many supporters – such persons grasped that Rittenhouse might have been partially misguided, but that he was also likely motivated by some positive socio-political things.
The reality is that the intellectual foundation of this “never Rittenhouse” group is the assertion that Rittenhouse and his supporters are all driven by purely reactionary intentions, such as White supremacism. That is totally absurd to anyone who knows America: half of all White Americans simply don’t have the time or inclination to sit around at home and meditate on White supremacism and plot its victory – they used to, but they stopped. Such a theory incorrectly assumes that roughly 30 years of applying the political correctness lens has had zero positive effect on White Americans.
Also: in the unique United States owning a semi-automatic rifle is so widespread that it cannot possibly make one crazy, but the fake-leftist desire to continually deny this obvious reality provided another reason for all the yellow journalism. I’m not going to waste my time on this issue other than: gun control is a huge waste of time for the US left – it is a lost cause and only serves to alienate the left from huge segments of society. This is just how the Western hemisphere is (except Cuba) – you are blowing your political capital! Leftists and centrists don’t have to own semi-automatics, but vilifying those who do is as politically useful as vilifying those who own pets in America.
Who and what values does the US left truly admire?
I have to pass on an unfortunate reality: not all gun-toting heroes are as handsome and dashing as Che Guevara.
Your average male Basiji buttons his shirt all the way to the top, wouldn’t be caught dead in public in shorts and would likely pause and reflect if you asked him whether he was “dashing”. Basiji women can be similarly blasé about being perceived as chic.
But I guarantee you that if they protected your house from being burnt down, or prevented your getting thrown into poverty due to your store’s stock being looted, you would think these nerds were the coolest people in the world.
What on earth was cool about listening to Fidel preach for four hours? In smaller groups he would do that as a way to test people – to see if they had nerdy levels of political endurance and interest. Progressive revolutions need nerdy, order-concerned people, and also people willing to follow orders.
There is no real doubt that Rittenhouse saw his actions as trying to embody the ideals of a genuine political revolution – it was an aristocratic, now-outdated revolution, but US fake-leftists appear to think he was on the streets to protect King George III?
I have learned not to bother asking US fake-leftists about their opinion of the 17-year old Basiji who in 1980 went to face the Iraqi invader (and the soldiers of many Western nations) totally, totally outgunned and died to protect his family and home. Asking an American Democrat to comment on the still-living reality of these enormous sacrifices is like asking them to comment about life on a distant planet.
Rittenhouse is not a hero such as they, of course, but the US left cannot even perceive the world in these very real, life and death terms – Rittenhouse and his supporters grasp this reality much better.
The American fake-left instead are consumed with identity politics and transgender bathrooms – they have no real concept of what leftism is for countries which have actually seen war and colonisation. Nor do they have the imagination or the empathy to understand that many readers were actually just thinking, “No, Rittenhouse is indeed just such a hero as they – our revolution mattered, too.” Well, I disagree, but such persons must be understood and their revolutionary potential must be updated with the global knowledge learned after 1776 – they should not be locked up, ignored or vilified.
I simply don’t know who the US left’s hero or model for behavior is? I know it’s not Che or Mao or Fidel or Khamenei, and those are big ones, so forget about the less famous leftist heroes. I know it is not a 17-year old who threw himself on an Iraqi grenade to save some of his fellow citizens because the US can’t do anything but demonise the Rittenhouse young man and say “vote Biden”, instead of saying, “A system which demands Rittenhouse play cop is a bad system which must be drastically changed.”
Frankly, I think it’s people like Beyonce, who was deemed to be the equivalent of Malcolm X, that truth-telling exemplar of political courage, because she ambiguously danced in an X-shape at the Superbowl in 2016. (She also danced in arrow, straight lines and a triangle, LOL.) In the US what seems to be most admired is the ability to mix the lowest common denominator of both politics and pop culture with outer good looks – of course, in this manner the present status quo is affirmed and beautified. The US left is, of course, not revolutionary in the slightest, nor is Beyonce. Their real left has no chance, sadly, amid a 150-year party duopoly.
Iran or Kenosha, 17-year olds shouldn’t have to step in to stop chaos, but sometimes they have to
In 1980 armed chaos was not the fault of Iran’s new republican government, which was all of one year old: they inherited an army which was purposely rendered weak and divided by the shah – that was his long-running strategy to avoid an armed coup. Eight long years of armed chaos was provoked by the Western-backed and armed Saddam Hussein, of course – Iran was victimised, and the Western goal obviously was to create armed chaos to upend the nascent popular revolution.
So what’s the similar excuse for the US government’s inability to prevent armed chaos in Kenosha? There is none. The US left can’t see that Rittenhouse is a partial hero to many Americans precisely because he was victimised by the US system because he got forced into the role of defender.
The US fake-left also cannot grasp that revolution is not primarily motivated Schumpeterian/anarchic “creative destruction” aimed to get likes on Instagram, but by defense of home, country and the well-being of your fellow citizen. Indeed, the conservative American’s view of political revolution appears far more advanced than the liberal American’s view of it.
On that fateful night, why did they choose to grab the gun of Rittenhouse, and not some other grizzled, bearded AR-15 toter? Simple – because he looked like the easiest prey.
The whole affair reminds me of Richard Jewell, the hero-terrorist-hero 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing: back then the media rushed to assume the worst about another chubby, security-loving White nerd who lived with his mother, and were totally, totally wrong. It’s amazing to see how few in the media and the public have made the same seeming mistake with Rittenhouse. Clint Eastwood’s 2019 movie Richard Jewell is a very fine flick – he correctly lambasts the media, but our problem in 2020 is that thanks to computers everyone is a journalist, thus the outpouring of unjournalistic unfairness towards Rittenhouse.
That result comes down to the US left’s demand to demonise – everything is black and white, us vs. them – but this is a problem resulting from the entire, fundamentally evangelical US culture. (Muslim countries, of course, cannot be evangelical like Christian ones because Islam forbids forced conversion – there are no Muslim monk proselytisers.) I could write this a million times and still not get it across to them: US leftists can be as self-righteously evangelical as a Pentagon employee – it’s just imbued in American culture.
The US left doesn’t have to embrace Rittenhouse, of course, but it’s a thick-headed leftist who doesn’t possess the imagination, empathy and experience to at least consider that the kid may not have been the personification of Satan.
People were initially incensed because Rittenhouse was from out of town, but that’s not really true: he worked as lifeguard in Kenosha. Anyway, he lived just 21 miles away. It’s not like Rittenhouse was travelling from a different country. Internationalism is the hallmark of modern leftism, so it’s very telling that US fake-leftists are so riven with tribalism that Rittenhouse was so roundly criticised for “invading” the tribe of Kenosha.
Rittenhouse was not alone in violating this “closed border” view: the Kenosha newspaper I read on September 2 the local tally they gave was 145 arrests – only two were from places far away such as Minnesota and California. Only a handful of US urbanites live in a city which is 21 miles north to south; 21 miles is a major trek to a Frenchman but it’s nothing to car-loving Americans in both suburbs and rural areas.
One’s sense of space and the land’s reach, gun control, a desire to protect life and property due to governmental abandon, feelings of patriotic duty and self-sacrifice – the Rittenhouse affair shows us so many gulfs between the US left and socio-political success. These gulfs are largely due to an urban/rural separation – they must be bridged, as they will never be eliminated, if the US left ever hopes to unite the country.
The rural/urban divide is the most pernicious divide across the West today, and that’s why I’ve written so much about the Yellow Vests (who were back on the streets last weekend!) and their intersection with the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which was the greatest single attempt to bring together town and country in modern times. It seems about as many Western leftists understand either phenomenon as much as they are willing to understand Kyle Rittenhouse….
Resolving the structural issues which produced the state’s attempted assassination of Jacob Blake is hugely important, but so are the structural failures which forced a 17-year old to patrol the streets. It’s quite telling about an American, leftist or not, if they only care about one and not the other.
Ramin Mazaheri is currently covering the US elections. He is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.
Ramin,
I was quite pleased to see this story since we discussed it a few days ago on my podcast. You are so right to atttack the fake-Leftists in the US. The current protests were triggered by police murders of Black men in situations where it is obvious to everyone in the US that they would not have even been roughed up had they been white. The spontaneous protests to respond to these murders are certainly justified, but as you point out, the US fake-Left has no place to take this. Rather than look at the neoliberal capitalist system that has imprisoned young men, both Black and White, in a cycle of poverty without hope, they make demands like ‘Defund the Police’, that don’t really address the systemic problem and frighten the daylights out of their fellow citizens.
At this point, the fake-Left is fighting over whether some statement by some famous person is just so horribly racist that he/she must be fired and forever banned from society. They’re fighting about which pronoun to use to describe someone who identifies themself by their sexual inclinations. They are fighting about whether their fellow fake-Leftists are sufficiently enthusiastic about the candidacy of Joe Biden, who opposes everything they claim to stand for.
There will be no empathy for Kyle Rittenhouse on the fake-Left just as there is no empathy for the BLM protesters on the Right. As Lincoln once said, a house divided against itself cannot stand. It can create one hell of a mess when it falls though.
“would not have even been roughed up had they been white” : that is demonstrably false. White men or women have been killed while doing everything they can to comply with US police instructions, others have been killed while attacking police. As you should know by now more whites than blacks are killed by police, armed or unarmed. The vast majority of Black homicides are by Blacks.
What you need to understand is that many Black men or women have a hard time following police instructions, be it drugs, or a media climate of black de facto privilege. If you are uncooperative with the police and reach in to grab something from your car you will get shot. You cannot fault the police with that – the human reaction time does not allow to correctly identify an object and take correct action. What you do is that you politely ask the police for permission to get something in your car and that way you can both walk away from the situation.
And yes I have been pulled over by US police a number of times and I am calm and courteous and I keep my hands where they can see them.
“. The vast majority of Black homicides are by Blacks.”
And the vast majority of White homicides are by Whites.
In the rest of the world, nobody would assume you’re reaching for a gun.
And what idiot would?
A culture based on fear and mistrust is a good one to leave imo.
The fake leftists and their demands like “defund the police” etc. If the police are defunded it opens a market for private security, the arguments about tran-;genderism open a market for so-called ‘sex change’ operations, Joe Bidden is an obvious sociopathic war monger. Given the association of the DNC with color revolution technology we should be wondering how much of what we see is what it appears to be and how much is astroturf. Thats not to say that the greater part of these people are insincere, but that opposing groups can be infiltraited by the same people to steer the whole process to a desired end, as in regime change/color revolution operations.
Cops have been killed by someone reaching into the front of their car. Two sheriffs deputies were shot the day before yesterday, by a young black man who walked up to their car and emptied his gun into them. One was a 31-year old woman with a 6-year old son, and the other a 24-year old man, both in their first year in the department. They were shot in the head and other wounds. ‘Activists’ then went to the emergency room and yelled ‘We hope you die’ and other things MORE unpleasant and tried to block the entrance and exit to the hospital ER. Rittenhouse’s victims all had criminal records, including one who served years in prison for raping a 12-year-old. And it is odd that there is sympathy for Rittenhouse?
We are in Bizarro’s world these days Steve. The left are a bunch of debauched perverts and long-term unemployed no-gooders, the right are small business families and members of functioning communities. I say all this as a long term member of the economic left. It is hardly new in history. The Lazzaroni were used similarly by the Borbon King to virtually eliminate all the Naples’ middle class… and with that, also eliminate all the King’s opposition, and incidentally condemn southern Italy to decades of economic stagnation.
It does not even matter what Rittenhouse has or has not done. I am with him because he is the champion of the sole internal force of dissent, and the only one which can be developed as an anti-war party in the USA today. They attract a lot of sympathies among Latino and Muslims.
Ramin, you’ve been hoodwinked. Now that you are here in the USA you have to realize what that means. You’ve been taken in by the Trumpsters. They would have you believe that he is some kind of populist wunderkind. He’s actually a Zionist shill. Most Zionists in the USA are Christian. They think he’s the new King Cyrus who will bring the Jews back to Jerusalem and start that ” transformative, apocalyptic” (Bannon’s words) war that will change everything. They have their Rapture suits all dusted off and are ready for their warrior messiah to return to Earth to exterminate all unbelievers, including you, Ramin. They’re f-ing crazy, but that’s beside the point. They are Trump’s rock-solid base. They will vote for him no matter what he does. He will win in November because of them. Wake up, Ramin. You have been hoodwinked!
It’s not quite that simple, Tommy!
I dealt with the complexity of matter elsewhere….in a refreshingly soothing and Reasonable Way there………but THAT thread is getting old! But I gotta run…….
SO: Here you go, for you and Disaffected ……………and all the Disgusted, disillusioned, discouraged and worse:
/outcome-of-a-disputed-us-vote-a-hot-fall-or-an-icy-crusade/#comment-852514
I’ll see you on the flip side.
Many pleasant surprises ahead, Tommy!
Don’t shut them out of your vision…if not for yourself…then at least consider that Unknown Speech there .in that late reply………….in terms of the possibility that there might indeed be “MORE” than has met your vision and hearing so far………then at least for others’ sake!
THIS Unknown Speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOjC1uZgke8. .
He’s a con man, Bro 93, pure and simple. He will say or do anything to be reelected. He goes to court for numerous felonies the minute he leaves the presidency. Do you think they’ll provide him with Secret Service protection in prison to keep him away from “Bubba”?
I am afraid, Mr. Mazaheri, that you are beginning to lose me more and more. After reading your well-written, sensitive, and in many ways perceptive, article, I was quite taken back to read “the state’s attempted assassination of Jacob Blake”. Now I wonder how on-the-spot actions of a local cop can be equated with “the state”. The cop acted to enforce the law and to protect his life, no state policy was involved in that. Since you have familiarity with America, why don’t you ever condemn black violence – black on white as well as black on black? It is so easy to just blame it away! Frankly, no civilized country would tolerate the kind of behavior that is unfortunately so common amongst the blacks in USA. Not even in African countries. And I urge you to honestly consider this: If you were the cop trying to arrest a criminal who was resisting violently, whereupon you tasered him but to no effect, and then the criminal reached inside his car to pull out something, how would you have reacted? Would you not have feared for your life? And to ensure your survival, would you not have fired not just a single shot but a few to ensure that he did not draw on you? I await your comments.
Shooting someone seven (!!) times in the back who wasn’t armed in Murican -nderstanding is considered self-defence ?
Only in Merica…
The suspect was reaching into his car to retrieve something, so naturally he had his back to the cop. Now if you were the cop in that situation, you would have to be a mind-reader to know whether the suspect was retrieving a gun to draw and fire on you or perhaps just a knife. Would you not have feared for your life? The whole problem with the shootings of blacks by the police is that in almost all cases the black suspects were violently resisting arrest. Some of the shootings have been by black cops as well. This is a massive law and order problem, only sometimes a racial one.
Anywhere else and he’s reaching for his wallet…..licence and registration.
Your country has gone mad.
I usually love your articles Ramin, but this one was iffy. I don’t know if you were trying to be funny, but this kid was proto-fascist. We have a proto-fascist movement building up akin to the Patria Y Libertad organization that formed against Allende during 70s Chile. They were a bunch of upper and middle class reactionaries who fought the working class coalition in the streets.
We don’t have a “fake” left, we have the Western left, which has been with us since the days of Lenin. It’s left-communism, aka, an infantile disorder. It’s a Kautsky-ite and Trotskyite left. Then with the infusion of the New Left, the Frankfurt School, you have the current left which is infused with so much liberalism that you cannot tell the difference many times. This is the Western left that’s been State Department approved. The older “Stalinist” (I hate that word) left had been decimated and this New Left, counter culture, liberal-left took over.
Most leftists in America, and the West in general, are Trots, anarchists, social democrats, dem-socs, Euro-communist or left-coms. They’re useful idiots for the State Department, and the various umbrella orgs funded by the Ford Foundation and such.
I get that you guys out East can see through the obvious ‘color revolution’ taking place, but do not praise the proto-fascist right wing that makes up Trump’s base. We are staring at a possible Pinochet style takeover with Trump if stuff were to really, really hit the fan bad. Trump’s backers, the Council for National Policy, are theocratic, reactionary, libertarians that will privatize everything and back it up with repression if need be. Plus, they’re Christian Zionist psychos that believe in Third Temple mania.
So America is complete clown show from “left” to right.
The 3 people shot by Kyle Rittenhouse were all three shot in the process of attacking him.The three shot weren’t workingclass nor were they middle class.They were all three part of the criminal lumpen proletariat class.Under communism those three would have been sent to long years in labor camps.Or depending on the seriousness of their crimes,and some of those were pretty bad,they would have been executed.The Soviets didn’t play with the dregs of society who took anti-social actions.
I could care less if those three were honor roll students or valedictorians. The point is that the kid is a product of a right wing proto-fascist subculture that’s developed since Trump’s rise. His defenders are some of the worst this country can offer. I am no fan of the ActBlue Charities BLM co-opted left, but this idea that somehow this Proud Boys wannabe needs to be understood is so crazy. I could care less what the new Freikorps in this country thinks or says or does. I don’t defend them, and if they get attacked by thugs, I wouldn’t write an entire piece thinking they’re a victim.
We’ll have to disagree there. Where I come from people come together to stop mobs burning our neighbors property.And if attacked we defend ourselves,and if that takes deadly force,so be it.I don’t think anybody thinks in those situations about fascism. You think about saving your neighbors,and yourself.
No, these people look for trouble. They want to shoot. They want to kill. The whole defense thing is just an excuse. This is the same as the Freikorps and Patria Y Libertad in Chile. They think they’re defending stability and order, but in reality they’re defending a status quo that shatters people at home and abroad. This isn’t to defend the pseudo-left in this country but it’s to also condemn this phony “self defense” narrative the right likes to employ. They’re ready for the right wing death squads. They’re ready for “order” to become right wing authoritarian rule to “disappear” some of these leftist thugs.
“We are staring at a possible Pinochet style takeover with Trump if stuff were to really, really hit the fan bad. Trump’s backers, the Council for National Policy, are theocratic, reactionary, libertarians that will privatize everything and back it up with repression if need be. Plus, they’re Christian Zionist psychos that believe in Third Temple mania.”
Absolute bollocks, Damien
The “they are” you cite are a small number of fake or very confused “Christians”.
To pigeon hole the rest of the population, including a great many who have NEVER been political before…nor ever gone to church.either….. including millions of “walk-away” blacks and hispanics……a wide variety that ARE coming out of their stupor…..and confound that complexity and diversity with those few crazies….. is opportunistically ridiculous.
ALL to shoehorn a very much more complex situation into YOUR cramped ideology.
And a good number of those “fundy” nutcases are for the rabidly Anti_Trump neo-cons and the endless wars and Mad Dog Mattis and other generals (who will NOT have the support of virtually any rank and file soldiers they might attempt to order to “remove Trump”….I predict) and their MIC profit generating wars that ARE going to be ended….despite many pretend “peace supporting” people’s incredulous protests……….. their whole world view going up in smoke soon, I betcha!.
You’ll need a plan B….and might as well make it….. proposing something positive, rather than writing off the clear…Red Landslide Coming majority of 330 million people as “a protofascist right wing” mob.
Because most of them want the endless regime change wars ended??
How patently absurd.
Say what you want to say about the average Trump supporter, they have been suckered and propagandized by a second tier faction of the ruling class. The Council for National Policy is the group that put Trump into power, and is the organization that this guy sold his soul to. He went from grabbing women by the you know what to holding Bibles up in the air and pretending he some sort of Christian. All to get the evangelicals to vote for him. So he’s no savior, just an opportunist. The rest are proto-fascists in the making.
What is so “complex” about this? I am not talking Brownshirts but future right wing authoritarians in Brooks Brothers. That’s what the idiotic couple who defended their McMansion with AR-15s look like to me.
The average Trump supporter is ready to form right wing death squads at the snap of his fingers if things really got out of control. Even if many have never been political, stepped into church, or saluted the flag, the point is they’re being radicalized to demand “order”, whether they take it up themselves like this 17 year old nut you guys defend, or if they allow Trump to do it for them.
And I know that Trump would put a damper in the deep state’s plans, but what I am saying is that this country could take a right wing authoritarian turn too. I am saying that either way this country is on a downward spiral.
You’ve been drinking too much Q-Anon kool-aid to think straight. And are you American because what American says “bollocks”?
One with love of language and a raised vocabulary? ;-)
I did not see that in the person’s post. I saw a denial of the proto-fascist movement that is rising.
There is really no such thing as a genuine “Left” in the West, nor is there any genuine “socialism.” Just take a look at the kind of “journalism” being propagated by the WSWS, which has somehow become popular among those frustrated with the mainstream “Left” even though it is published by a Trotskyist cult (not dissimilar in many ways to MKO, PKK, and PJAK but obviously lacking a militant wing) that promotes color revolutions against Iran, China/Hong Kong, and Belarus. Practically every article they publish lately on Iran is written by Jean Shaoul, a covert Zionist shill, accompanied by obnoxious advertisements for a garbage book written by a hack named Keith Jones on how “workers” can instigate regime change against the government of the Islamic Republic.
They are disgusting crooks and charlatans, and they are absolutely without a doubt controlled opposition, but they’ve fooled a lot of gullible people. If you contrast WSWS to CNN, MSNBC, Washington Post, NY Times, etc. you’ll find very little difference in the tone and ideology of their coverage, especially when it comes to topics such as BLM (which is a Zionist-backed and funded movement), Kyle Rittenhouse (who they all claim, without a shred of evidence, to be a “white supremacist”), and the coronavirus lockdowns (which they all fanatically support — WSWS and the other so-called “Left” and “alternative” media like DSA-affiliated Jacobin and “anarchist” LibCom promote even more stringent and economically crippling lockdowns.)
When it comes to the West, you cannot think in terms of “Left” and “Right.” These dichotomies have long since been proven to be artificial and simply a means of fooling people into thinking their respective nations are actually fully functioning democracies where voting actually matters and politicians are actually civil servants. It’s all a lie.
In the West (and also much of the East), it is all Zionism. Everything the Western media (including most of the so-called “alternative” media) promotes and agitates for, regardless of their political line, is about shilling for Zionist world order. This is why the US and most of the Western regimes have deliberately collapsed their economies and are agitating for violence against small business owners so that psychopaths like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Larry Ellision, et al become even richer than they already are.
If you want a glimpse of what the future under Zionism looks like, read cyberpunk novels like “Neuromancer” and watch movies like “Blade Runner” — the end result of such dystopias are even more extreme dystopias, such as that described in “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” The objective of ZIonism is literally Hell on Earth, a preview of which can be witnessed and experienced in Gaza and Yemen on a daily basis.
So there is no “Left” and “Right.” There are only Zionists and those who are being oppressed and terrorized by them, whether they realize it or not. And most people in the West are still very much unaware of the Hell they are being subjected to and who is actually responsible. Unfortunately, most Westerners, in spite of their hopeless wage slavery to their Zionist overlords, are still too distracted by partisan politics, identity politics, racial issues, consumerism, hedonism, etc.
Hopefully they will begin to wake up before its too late to save Western civilization from being totally obliterated by the Adversary.
Dear Ramin. Excellent analysis. I always enjoy your thought-provoking writing. But you say: “The rural/urban divide is the most pernicious divide across the West today”. Maybe it is in the West that you know best, eg Paris France, and Europe more widely, but where I live, just north of Antarctica, and in the USA it is the suburban experience that dominates. In the USA, according to Bloomberg, 52% describe their neighborhood as suburban, 27% describe it as urban and 21% as rural. I believe the anomie amongst whites is mostly a bored and frustrated suburban youth thing. So it includes both Kyle and his opposite numbers in ANTIFA…same breeding ground. Granted, the situation amongst black USAmericans looks quite different, but I don’t think the notion of a rural/urban divide helps much there either.
Excellent article, and not just because I agree with most of your points. I have been impressed recently by your ability to step out of the binary models we are supposed to fit into (either you’re a Trumpist, or a bona fide antiracist).
I was also moved by the Kyle Rittenhouse story, and shocked by the extreme hypocrisy displayed by the left. So, after whining for years about the death penalty and stressing that everyone has a right to redeem himself and have a second chance, all of this is suddenly thrown out of the window when a 17-year old immature teenager shoots 3 guys in what is obviously self-defence ?
it is true that this guy is not a hero. But the point Ramin makes is that he, too, is misguided. I challenge anyone here to look back at the time when he was 17 and claim that he was, at the time, a fully sane, balanced, rational adult. I for sure wasn’t.
The main issue is a question of culture, of exceptionalism, and of guaranteeing security for all US citizens. The US fake-left does not want to tackle these topics because, well, they are fake ; they have no answer, except continuing support for US imperialism abroad, and a not-so-well-hidden desire for anarchy at home. If you don’t have anything to propose to small business owners or regular Americans except stand down and watch their property being burnt down or looted, of course they will vote for Trump en masse, even if the guy is just a con man. He’ll be the cleanest dirty shirt…
Once again a balanced structural analysis by Ramin which hits the mark. By far the best I’ve read yet. Thank you!
Is it so difficult to see?
USA is under zionist attack. The country has been robbed blind, just now the last valuable assets are being robbed and the billionaire oligarchs (The Big Tech) earn hundreds of billions monthly while FED (read: zionist digital money laundering operation) gives out “help” to billionaires.
There is no left, there is no right. There is zionist rule. If the politician is so called right, he is bought, he kneels in front of the zionist. Why deny it? Show me one, just one, who does not. You cannot, no way. The so called left is just the same, th only difference being that they admit it, they are in the pocket of Soros, and they love it.
This very same group of people pulled off Bolshevik Revolution. What a success? Brilliant. All white intelligentsia killed, zionists won. Abramovich here, abramovich then there. Big success.
Now they will pull off the same stunt. Now the white man is not a capitalist swine, no no, he is White Supremacist. This time the killer is not a woke proletariat, no no, it is a woke BLM activist and it may white just as well. A willing executioner, while the real power lurks in the shadow of the “Free press”, which advocated killing. “Kill fascists!”
Same guys, same method. Same result: Best people killed, worst saved. One group benefits. Guess which? Oh, what a conundrum, is it not?
A 17 year old cannot drink alcohol, cannot purchase a firearm, cannot vote. Youth game hunters must be accompanied by an adult in the field.
Yet, here was a 17 year old, out on his own, carrying a deadly weapon, amidst civil unrest, without adult supervision. Child abuse, or neglect, by parental authorities allowing Kyle to be in that situation. Yet nobody is asking logical questions.
Kyle must be either a vigilante or a hero. No shades of grey allowed.
Reality has been suspended during the current year’s crises.
Before a vote has been cast, both sides have declared that they will not accept defeat. Completely dysfunctional.
I’d get more worked up about it, but Kyle is a fake, just as fake as the initial Blake shooting.
Clowns In America and their Media Servants.
Igor, you’ve nailed it. Whatever actually happened in Kenosha, and Minneapolis, and Portland was street theater, designed to give Trump the excuse he needs to send in his Storm Troopers and declare martial law. He’s posing as the “law and order” president. This is just like what happened in Berlin in 1933. You know what happens next, don’t you, Igor?
Igor is correct. That was no place for a 17 year old boy.
Tommy, however is all wet (wrong again!).
Trump is not posing..AND not taking the bait, either. What “Declaration of Martial Law” Tommy???
There hasn’t been any such declaration. You ought to give up that wet dream of yours. Help was offered to quell the rioting, looting and mayhem…in Portland, In Seattle, In Minneapolis in Kenosha………and the help offered from Trump was refused. And he was NEVER going to just order the national guard in unilaterally like the dictator you imagine him to be, Tommy.
He understood what the trap was. That was reason # 1 for not taking the bait.
Same way Putin didn’t take the bait of rolling into Kiev with Russian Army tank columns. Same kind of EMPIRE trap, Tommy.
Most people here can probably see the rough parallel. Why can’t you???
Reason # 2 was to allow the people to see what you still remain blind to, Tommy
Now that the people have seen it, and recently so have the MSM pundits seen that the people have seen…and are not cooperating with their tricks…..those same mayors and governors ……. shocked to their senses by newer polls …….are now taking leave of their senses AGAIN….. tying themselves into absurd contortions and knots blaming Trump and his expanding base of “right wing extremist conspiracy theorist (talk about PROJECTION! LOL) for “causing for the rioting” they called “peaceful protests” just a few days earlier!
Because it’s all about the election not about “justice” and certainly not about “black lives”…especially not in Chicago whose black mayor has been presiding over more murder of blacks…….. by each other….. than are killed by all cops in America…..by a long, long way.
And do you recall that woman mayor of Chicago praising the coming “New World Order” several times, at the start of the 2020 riots as though she had been programmed by George Herbert Walker Bush himself???
I do!
SO: It is the Democratic mayors and governors whose Deep State Masters ordered them to pose as serving “justice” that are causing their colored base to “walk away” in very great numbers…as they and Ramin can see (probably by talking to quite a few of the suffering street people!) that those governors and mayors are murderous frauds using the poor like toilet paper.
If you could open your eyes to that plain as day reality, Tommy, you too might be capable of walking away from being dupe of The Empire…..instead of losing your bearings to their well designed “leftist” profile of you.
The first step is to gain some control over your knee jerk ideology driven fake left emotions.
You can do it….IF you try!
Just realize that this is much, MUCH more complex than those “by Imperial DESIGN” easily profiled far too simple emotions of yours.
How complex???
Very, very complex!
Consider this talk between two intelligence contractors with extensive overseas experience, who disagree on many fine points but DO agree on the major points, and very interestingly……….both share the experience of having met and worked with Muammar Qhaddafi ….and consider him as a very good person who gave his life for standing in the way of the CHAOS Hitlery and Obummer brought to that entire “Arc of Crisis” in service of The Empire
https://youtu.be/h4BcAiz-TBM?t=1019
Special Edition Middle East Talk [IRAN]
I do hope the title catches Ramin’s eye…………because there is a TON of fascinating material in this 2 and a half hour conversation between hostess of Tore Says ………..and Buff Perry …who is rather more admiring of Persian complexities of culture and thinking than Tore is….with her Greek-American dread of “The Turk”…Erdogan.(SE Turkey has a concentration of Shiites..in BIG majority Sunni Turkey and Iran/Turkey economic ties are strong…..despite the Sunni/Shiite divide) and of course Tore is majorly suspicious the Deep State players like Peter Strozk, John Kerry and others……… very active in Iran going back decades
A fascinatingly complex puzzle, Tommy!..
The guest, Buff Perry goes all the way back to Thomas Jefferson……..in the American experience of attempting to understand Islam………..and the mistakes Jefferson made that resulted in the first fighting by Americans…so far from home……..in the Mediterranean…and North Africa. The Barbary Coast.
Buff Perry claims that he was scheduled to be on Pan Am 103..out of Libya, blown up over Lockerbie in 1988……….but by some kind of fluke, he says….missed that flight.
Check it out. You won’t be disappointed.
Rittenhouse was perfectly in the right to defend himself. The writer of this article assumes that left-wing people can trample on the rights and properties of others. Outrageous nonsense.
In any normal country, self-defense is entirely justified – including Iran. But it seems that our Zionist host has other ideas.
Well written as usual Hr Mazaheri.
If you want to find the fake left heroes in murica i suggest checking the gateway pundit and/or the college fix, both are fake right/US exeptionalism/#miga/maga sites but i guess that is why they expose so many of the neoliberal modern heroes..
I will show you the part of murcan soceity i love with 3 links,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLR9y98gXZI&list=TLPQMTUwOTIwMjBJDFV10_rIqQ&index=8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIWI8qeEI8s&list=TLPQMTUwOTIwMjBJDFV10_rIqQ&index=3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFadVIY3tS8&list=TLPQMTUwOTIwMjBJDFV10_rIqQ&index=11
“How can Jacob Blake be shot seven times in the back by a cop in front of his three sons?”
Quite easily actually, given the circumstances (cops pointing guns at you, threatening to shoot if you do not comply) and his behavior (reaching into his car for what the police could only reasonably assume was a weapon).
When the police are pointing guns at you, threatening to shoot if you do not get on the ground and your reaction is to start reaching into your pocket or into your car, the only RATIONAL assumption to make if you’re one of those cops is that the guy is reaching for a weapon. Why else would he possibly risk getting shot unless he though he might be able to shoot first?
The opportunity to realize his dream was too good to be missed — and the cop was right as there hasn’t been any repercussions for the execution. The city will pay a few dollars, cut a few services to pay for it, and then move on.
Wasn’t the first time, and won’t be the last time either.
We need clear terminology here. The US does not have a Left. The US Left died in the 1960’s when it was not passed on from one generation to the next. Some of the new generation did understand Leftism but they were too scattered and in chaotic lives that they were unable to put back together a Left after McCarthyism destroyed it. Fascination with the Frankfurt School, mainly Marcuse. helped poison the working class “”moral compass” of the Left. And yes, I was there, and the leadership was largely Jewish, people like Claude Steiner who sincerely thought they were moral, but were acting out Identity Politics. BTW, his book, “Healing Alcoholism” is the final word on the subject. It was free on his website before his death, and it’s probably still free somewhere on the web. The earlier version of the book, “Games Alcoholics Play” was also a gem. They were not into Jewish supremacy but in fact they only networked with people from Jewish ethnicity. But their bottom line was a completely different “take” on what;s important. Marx was not in their synagogue.
The main Fake Left exists in all the “industrial democracies”, and that’s the “Social Democrat” parties. the Labour Party in the UK, the “Socialist Party” in France, and they betrayed the working people from the very first. By 1914, those parties all voted for the Great War and the betrayals never ended.
The third left is the sock puppets of George Soros and I think the Socialist Worker Party and the Third Socialist International which openly supported the war against Syria with a major paper in May 1, 2013.
This turd is still stinking at https://socialistworker.org/2013/05/01/solidarity-with-the-revolution and the list of famous people who signed it is still worth noting.
The Left still has authentic organizations, such as wsws.org</http, but really the baton has largely passed over to syncretism which tries to combine the best of the Left with the Right. Two examples: fort-russ.com and http://www.egaliteetreconciliation.fr There are others,, including one in Poland whose leader is rotting in prison, charged with being a Russian or Chinese spy. Sorry I could not find his name or organization, but their symbol is like the letter Z, with arrows pointing both Left and Right. Perhaps someone else recalls. In any case there are a growing number of Left-Right websites.
There is a Left-Right syncretism in Iran, too. Nationalist, check. Socialist, sort-of-check. Religious values, certainly. Ramin has written about this.
Why the political Left in the US loses?
The 3-lettered US intel agency aka ‘The Company’ recognized the value of the political Left to amplify issues even better than the mainstream media could – as long ago as the 1960s!
Even Robert Anton Wilson ex-editor of ‘Playboy’ in his excellent ‘The Illuminati Trilogy’ wrote that in every resistance/anti-government group – if they had 4 members, 1 of them would be from an intel agency
The political Left are *the controlled opposition.
… and here its pertinent to recall Lenin’s words:
“The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.” ― Lenin
Regards
Hahaha!!! A black “Kyle Rittenhouse” would have been shot by the police before he could say anything about what side he was on. “Open carry” states are only “Open carry” for whites. For blacks, they’re “Open suicide” if they try to exercise their hypothetical rights. They’ve done experiments in malls in “open carry” states. They’ll have a white person with a legal permit go in openly carrying their legally permitted firearm. Nobody bothers them, although they might get a few funny looks.
Then they have a black person, dressed identically and so on, go in with the exact same legally permitted firearm. Suddenly all the mall rent-a-cops are apeshit, stop where you are, what do you think you’re doing, hey Fred call 911!
I expect they never conduct those experiments where there are actual police around, though. It’s unethical to get your experimental subjects killed.
The author will probably learn these intricacies of American democracy as he spends more time in the country.