But there's an uglier and tawdrier aspect to this. Just over two weeks after Ellison announced, the largest single funder of both the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign - the Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban - launched an incredibly toxic attack on Ellison, designed to signal his veto. "He is clearly an anti-Semite and anti-Israel individual," pronounced Saban about the African-American Muslim congressman, adding: "Keith Ellison would be a disaster for the relationship between the Jewish community and the Democratic Party." Saban has a long history not only of fanatical support for Israel - "I'm a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel," he told the New York Times in 2004 about himself - but also an ugly track record of animus toward Muslims. As The Forward gently put it, he is prone to "a bit of anti-Muslim bigotry," including when he said Muslims deserve "more scrutiny" and "also called for profiling and broader surveillance." In 2014, he teamed up with right-wing billionaire Sheldon Adelson to push a pro-Israel agenda. In that notorious NYT profile, he attacked the ACLU for opposing Bush/Cheney civil liberties assaults and said: "On the issues of security and terrorism I am a total hawk."

There's no evidence that Saban's attack on Ellison is what motivated the White House to recruit an opponent. But one would have to be indescribably naive about the ways of Washington to believe that such a vicious denunciation by one of the party's most influential billionaire funders had no effect at all.

The DNC headquarters was built with Saban's largesse: He donated $7 million to build that building, and he previously served as chairman of the party's capital-expenditure campaign. Here's how Mother Jones's Andy Kroll, in a November profile, described the influence Saban wields within elite Democratic circles:

No single political patron has done more for the Clintons over the span of their careers. In the past 20 years, Saban and his wife have donated $2.4 million to the Clintons' various campaigns and at least $15 million to the Clinton Foundation, where Cheryl Saban serves as a board member. Haim Saban prides himself on his top-giver status: "If I'm not No. 1, I'm going to cut my balls off," he once remarked on the eve of a Hillary fundraiser. The Sabans have given more than $10 million to Priorities USA, making them among the largest funders of the pro-Hillary super-PAC. In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential campaign, he vowed to spend "whatever it takes" to elect her. ...

The ties go beyond money. The Clintons have flown on the Sabans' private jet, stayed at their LA home, and vacationed at their Acapulco estate. The two families watched the 2004 election results together at the Clintons' home, and Bill Clinton gave the final toast at one of Cheryl Saban's birthday parties. Haim Saban is chummy enough with Hillary that he felt comfortable telling her that she sounded too shrill on the stump. "Why are you shouting all the time?" he says he told her. "It's drilling a hole in my head." Clinton campaign emails released by WikiLeaks in October contain dozens of messages to, from, and referencing Saban. And they show that he has no qualms about pressing Clinton and her aides on her position toward Israel. "She needs to differentiate herself from Obama on Israel," he wrote in June 2015 to Clinton's top aides.

Saban's attack predictably spawned media reports that Jewish groups had grown "uncomfortable" with Ellison's candidacy (the ADL pronounced his past criticisms of Israel "disqualifying"), while whispers arose that the last thing the Democratic Party needed to win back Rust Belt voters was a black Muslim as the face of the party (even though the Detroit-born Ellison himself is from the Rust Belt).

As both Chang and Vox's Jeff Stein have argued, the fact that DNC chair is a largely functionary position, with little real power over party policy or messaging, is all the more reason to throw Sanders supporters a symbolic bone. If Democrats were smart, this would be the perfect opportunity to capture that energized left-wing movement without having to make any real concessions on what matters most to them: loyalty to their corporate donor base.

But it's hard to conclude that a party that has navigated itself into such collapse, which deliberately and knowingly chose the weakest candidate, who managed to lose to Donald J. Trump, is one that is thinking wisely and strategically. As Chang persuasively argues, it seems Democratic leaders prioritize ensuring that the left has no influence in their party over strengthening itself to beat the Trump-led Republicans:

The same could be said of today's battle over the DNC and the push to install a loyal technocrat like Perez. This reluctance to cede control comes despite the fact that Democrats have lost over 1,000 state legislature seats since 2009. There is no case for Perez that cannot be made for Ellison, while Ellison is able to energize progressives in ways that Perez cannot. The question that will be answered on Saturday is whether Democrats have more urgent priorities than denying power to the left.

The warmup act for a full-blown American fascism and orchestrated race war is taking place in immigrant and marginal communities across the United States: Racial profiling. Random police stops. Raids at homes and businesses. People of color pulled from vehicles at checkpoints. Seizures of individuals with no criminal records or who never committed a serious crime. Imprisonment without trial. Expedited deportation hearings and removal proceedings that violate human rights. The arrest of a beneficiary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Daniel Ramirez Medina, 23, who along with the program's other 750,000 successful applicants had revealed all personal history to the government in applying for DACA status. Parents separated, perhaps forever, from their children. The hunted going underground. The end of the rule of law. The abandonment of the common good. The obliteration of a social state in which institutions and assistance programs-from public education to Social Security and welfare-make justice, equality and dignity possible.

White Europeans who are undocumented are not being targeted. The executive orders of President Trump are directed against people of color. They begin from the premise that white Americans are the true victims of neoliberalism, deindustrialization and falling living standards. The Trump orders are written not to make America great again but to make America white. They are an updated version of the Nazis' Nuremberg race laws, the Jim Crow laws, the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Naturalization Act of 1870. They are intended to institutionalize an overt racial hierarchy in the United States, one already advanced by the miniature police states in which marginal communities of color find themselves. In these impoverished enclaves there is no right to trial or due process. Militarized police kill with impunity, and the courts lock people away often for life. Rights are treated as privileges that can instantly be revoked. The poor, especially poor people of color, have been exempted from moral consideration. They are viewed as impediments to social cohesion. And these impediments must be eliminated. This is the template for what will come. Jews will be targeted, as recent bomb threats to a number of Jewish community centers and desecration of graveyards have made clear. American fascism will be cemented into place by uniformed and heavily armed paramilitary squads clutching the flag and the cross and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and the Lord's Prayer.

"Little or no prospect of rescue from individual indolence or impotence can be expected to arrive from a political state that is not, and refuses to be, a social state," the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman warned in "Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age.""Without social rights for all, a large and in all probability growing number of people will find their political rights of little use and unworthy of their attention. If political rights are necessary to set social rights in place, social rights are indispensable to make political rights 'real' and keep them in operation. The two rights need each other for their survival; that survival can only be their joint achievement."

Presidential chief strategist Stephen Bannon, in his public comments and his films such as "Generation Zero," has embraced a historical determinism worthy of Karl Marx. He posits that Western culture has been contaminated and is being destroyed by darker races and barbaric religions and belief systems. His conspiratorial view of history and society sees a global war between the white race and the lesser breeds of the earth as not only inevitable but one that will reinvigorate and purify America.

Racists and conspiracy theorists such as Bannon, Michael Anton, Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka constitute Trump's ideological brain trust. Gorka goes so far as to argue that the failure to understand the evil of radical Islam stems from a "systematic subversion of the national security establishment under the banner of inclusivity, cultural awareness and political correctness."

In a 2014 speech, Bannon said, "I believe we've come partly off-track in the years since the fall of the Soviet Union and we're starting now in the 21st century, which I believe, strongly, is a crisis both of our church, a crisis of our faith, a crisis of the West, a crisis of capitalism." (He delivered the talk via Skype to a group of other right-wing Catholics gathered in the Vatican. For a transcript posted by BuzzFeed, click here.)

"There is a major war brewing, a war that's already global," Bannon said. "It's going global in scale, and today's technology, today's media, today's access to weapons of mass destruction, it's going to lead to a global conflict that I believe has to be confronted today. Every day that we refuse to look at this as what it is, and the scale of it, and really the viciousness of it, will be a day where you will rue that we didn't act."

Bannon, as Micah L. Sifry points out in The Nation, is a proponent of the theory popularized by authors William Strauss and Neil Howe in their books "Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069" (1991) and "The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy-What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous With Destiny" (1997). This theory holds that roughly every 80 years, roughly an average human life span, the country goes through a cataclysmic crisis. This crisis unleashes genocide and other killing that last a decade or more. In its aftermath the social order is rejuvenated. Strauss and Howe highlight the American Revolution of 1775-83, the Civil War, the Great Depression and World War II as examples of how the cycle works.

"Inside each 80-year saeculum, Howe and Strauss argue, there are four turnings, each a generation long, and each as inevitable as the coming of the seasons," Sifry writes. "In the first turning, for the generation that survives the prior catastrophe, the newly restored society reaches a collective apex of social order and economic power. Think of America in the post-war boom of 1945 to 1965. Then comes the awakening, as the first new generation of post-catastrophe children enter adulthood and, unlike their traumatized parents, let loose with their emotions and take risks that their forebears would never have imagined. Hello to the long 1960s. Then comes the unraveling, as the once robust order starts to fall apart, people question the eternal verities and institutions weaken. The fourth turning is kicked off and punctuated by ongoing crises, out of which a whole new order is born." Pseudo-intellectuals such as Strauss and Howe play the role that Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and Alfred Rosenberg played for the Nazi Party. They give an intellectual veneer to racist conspiracy theories, a virulent nationalism, a hatred for culture and the lust for domination through violence.

I share Bannon's distaste for globalization, free trade agreements, the failure to put Wall Street bankers in jail, the bank bailouts and crony capitalism and would even concede that Americans wallow in the moral swamp of a culture of narcissism. He is right when he attacks the two major political parties as the one "party of Davos." But his solution to the purported crisis-total war by the white race to regain its ascendancy-is insane, as are the causes he cites: a New Deal that turned citizens into whining dependents; the permissiveness of the 1960s; white guilt that made the country cater irresponsibly to African-Americans by giving them social service programs and undeserved mortgages that led to the 2008 financial meltdown; an intellectual and a liberal class composed essentially of traitors; and the "new barbarity" of "Jihadist Islamic fascism."

Racism, misogyny, the inherent cruelty of capitalism and the crimes of empire, from Wounded Knee to Vietnam and Iraq, simply do not exist in Bannon's mystical nationalist worldview. He insists that the white male aristocratic elites who formed a republic that enslaved African-Americans, exterminated Native Americans and denied the vote to women and white men without property created "a church and a civilization that really is the flower of mankind." This is what he wants to recover.

Fritz Stern, in his book "The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology," wrote of the early fascists in Germany, "The movement did embody a paradox: its followers sought to destroy the despised present in order to recapture an idealized past in an imaginary future. They were disinherited conservatives, who had nothing to conserve, because the spiritual values of the past had largely been buried and the material remnants of conservative power did not interest them. They sought a breakthrough to the past, and they longed for a new community in which old ideas and institutions would once again command universal allegiance."

Bannon shares these fascist yearnings. He excoriates leftist and liberal elites for supposedly poisoning the minds of young people, a point he luridly makes in his film "Occupy Unmasked" (2012). A new generation, he says, has been brainwashed to see America as evil and the status quo as repressive. His mythical past will return through a crusade both domestic and international. All forms of coercion, from torture to murder, are justified. Any suffering along the way is the price that has to be paid for this white, Christian paradise.

The central tenet of fascism is always that war cleanses society and that the "virtues" that war inculcates in its combatants and survivors provide a new moral vigor. Bannon knows no more about war's reality, which I endured for two decades covering conflicts in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans, than he sees in Hollywood movies. But war for him, which will come in a confrontation with the Islamic world and perhaps China, cannot arrive too soon.

This clash of civilizations will be prosecuted in the homeland, too. Within the United States it will spawn the darkness endemic to all wars-sadism, hypermasculinity, blind obedience to authority, a belief in the efficacy of unrestrained violence, racism, hate crimes and the use of the organs of internal security and wholesale surveillance to crush all dissent and eradicate groups seen as opponents of authority. Those who orchestrate such crusades ultimately sacrifice themselves and their nations on the altars of the idols they worship. The conflict desired by Bannon and those around him could mean the extinction of the human race.

The paramilitary forces of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which will hire 10,000 more agents, and the Border Patrol, which will hire 5,000 more agents, along with the Homeland Security Investigations unit of the Department of Homeland Security, have deputized local and state police to function as their auxiliaries. These paramilitary forces will not disband once they have finished terrorizing and deporting some of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. They will turn on their next victims-Muslims, African-Americans, Asians and dissidents.

The paramilitaries relish their power to kick down doors while wearing body armor and pointing weapons at terrified women and children. They are not warriors, as they imagine, but goons. They have few actual skills. And they intend to remain steadily employed by the state. The for-profit prisons, reopened for business by Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, a man named not for one Confederate traitor but two, intend to remain full. The state will make America and the global community inhospitable for people of color and all those who attempt to stand with them.

Trump is stoking the darkest and most destructive strains of the American psyche. Congress, controlled by the Republicans, is unlikely to use impeachment powers to stop him. The courts are spineless subsidiaries of the corporate and security and surveillance state. The elites will not save us. If we fail to build mass protest movements, ones that cripple the ability to govern, we will be enslaved.

Sebastian Haffner (1907-1999) in his book "Defying Hitler" describes being a law clerk at the Prussian Supreme Court. The courthouse was raided in March 1933 by Nazi thugs. They grabbed the Jewish judges and lawyers and hauled them outside; never would the jurists return to their posts. A Jewish attorney, a former army captain who had been wounded five times and lost an eye fighting in World War I, resisted. He was beaten. "It had probably been his misfortune that he still remembered the tone to use with mutineers," Haffner wrote.

"I put my head down over my work," Haffner went on. "I read a few sentences mechanically: 'The defendant's claim that ... is untrue, but irrelevant. ...' Just take no notice!"

A brown shirt approached him and asked: "Are you Aryan?

Haffner shot back, "Yes."

"A moment too late I felt the shame, the defeat," he wrote. "I had said 'Yes! Well, in God's name, I was indeed an 'Aryan.' I had not lied, I had allowed something much worse to happen. What a humiliation, to have answered the unjustified question as to whether I was 'Aryan' so easily, even if the fact was of no importance to me! What a disgrace to buy, with a reply, the right to stay with my documents in peace! I had been caught unawares, even now. I had failed my very first test."

Haffner left the Kammergericht, Prussia's highest state court, and stood outside.

Four weeks into Donald Trump's presidency, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote that "nothing he has done since the inauguration allays fears that he is in effect a Putin puppet." The liberal pundit concluded with a matter-of-fact reference to "the Trump-Putin axis."

Such lines of attack have become routine, citing and stoking fears that the president of the United States is a Kremlin stooge. The meme is on the march-and where it will end, nobody knows.

Actually, it could end with a global nuclear holocaust.

The incessant goading and denunciations of Trump as a Kremlin flunky are escalating massive pressure on him to prove otherwise. Exculpatory behavior would involve setting aside possibilities for detente and, instead, confronting Russia-rhetorically and militarily.

Hostile behavior toward Russia is what much of the U.S. media and political establishment have been fervently seeking. It's also the kind of behavior that could drag us all over the brink into thermonuclear destruction.

But c'mon, why worry about that?

For countless media commentators and partisan Democrats including many avowed progressives-as well as for some Republican hawks aligned with the likes of Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham-the benefits of tarring Trump as a Russian tool are just too alluring to resist.

To be clear: For a vast number of reasons, the Trump administration is repugnant. And the new president's flagrant violations of the U.S. Constitution's foreign and domestic emoluments clauses are solid grounds for impeaching him. I'm glad to be involved with a nationwide petition campaign-which already has 890,000 signers-urging Congress to begin impeachment proceedings. We should go after Trump for well-grounded reasons based on solid facts.

At the same time, we should refuse to be stampeded by the nonstop drumbeats from partisan talking points and mainline media outlets-as well as "the intelligence community." It wasn't mere happenstance when the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, openly lied at a Senate committee hearing in early 2013, replying "No sir" to a pivotal question from Sen. Ron Wyden: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" The lie was exposed three months later when Edward Snowden made possible the release of key NSA documents.

Yet now we're supposed to assume straight-arrow authoritative honesty can be found in a flimsy 25-page report "assessing Russian activities and intentions," issued in early January under the logo of Clapper's Office of the Director of National Intelligence. That report has been critiqued and demolished by one astute analyst after another.

As investigative journalist Gareth Porter noted, "In fact, the intelligence community had not even obtained evidence that Russia was behind the publication by WikiLeaks of the e-mails [of the] Democratic National Committee, much less that it had done so with the intention of electing Trump. Clapper had testified before Congress in mid-November and again in December that the intelligence community did not know who had provided the e-mails to WikiLeaks and when they were provided."

More broadly and profoundly, many cogent analyses have emerged to assess the proliferating anti-Russia meme and its poisonous effects. For instance: "Why We Must Oppose the Kremlin-Baiting Against Trump" by Stephen F. Cohen at The Nation; "The Increasingly Unhinged Russia Rhetoric Comes From a Long-Standing U.S. Playbook" by Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept; and "The Did-You-Talk-to-Russians Witch Hunt" by Robert Parry at ConsortiumNews.

The frenzy to vilify Russia and put the kibosh on the potential for detente is now undermining open democratic discourse about U.S. foreign policy-while defaming advocates of better U.S.-Russia relations in ways that would have made Joe McCarthy proud. So, President Trump's expressions of interest in improving relations with Russia-among his few lucid and constructive statements about anything-are routinely spun and smeared as corroborations of the meme that he's in cahoots with the Russian government.

Many organizations that call themselves progressive are culpable. One of the largest, MoveOn, blasted out an email alert on February 10 with a one-sentence petition calling for a congressional investigation of Trump-flatly declaring that he has "ties to the Russian government."

Consider these words from President Trump at his February 16 news conference:

* "Look, it would be much easier for me to be tough on Russia, but then we're not going to make a deal. Now, I don't know that we're going to make a deal. I don't know. We might. We might not. But it would be much easier for me to be so tough-the tougher I am on Russia, the better. But you know what? I want to do the right thing for the American people. And to be honest, secondarily, I want to do the right thing for the world."

* "They're a very powerful nuclear country and so are we. If we have a good relationship with Russia, believe me, that's a good thing, not a bad thing."

* "By the way, it would be great if we could get along with Russia, just so you understand that. Now tomorrow, you'll say 'Donald Trump wants to get along with Russia, this is terrible.' It's not terrible. It's good."

And how could President Trump effectively allay fears and accusations that he's a Kremlin flunky? How could he win cheers from mainstream newsrooms and big-megaphone pundits and CIA headquarters? He could get in a groove of decisively denouncing Russian President Vladimir Putin. He could move U.S. military forces into more confrontational stances and menacing maneuvers toward Russia.

Such brinkmanship would occur while each country has upward of 4,000 nuclear warheads deployed or stockpiled for potential use. Some are attached to missiles on "hair-trigger alert"-which, the Union of Concerned Scientists explains, "is a U.S. military policy that enables the rapid launch of nuclear weapons. Missiles on hair-trigger alert are maintained in a ready-for-launch status, staffed by around-the-clock launch crews, and can be airborne in as few as 10 minutes."

What would happen if every single car in the world suddenly stopped running? What would you do? You'd have to walk to the nearest farm for your produce. Or start growing it yourself in your own back yard. "I could probably do the farming gig okay, but what about stuff like iPhones and toilet paper?" you might ask. "Where could we get that?" Living without toilet paper might become our next greatest fear -- but at least we'd have clean air.

What would happen if the Federal Reserve was suddenly eliminated? All those dollar bills that say "Federal Reserve" on them in big block letters would suddenly become obsolete. But at least we wouldn't have trillions of dollars in digital pretend-money zooming around cyberspace and then crash-landing into the world's largest banks instead of into our own pockets where they belong.

Immigrants are now and always have been the fresh lifeblood of America's work force. The Prez should be banning the Federal Reserve instead of immigrants.

What if no one could procreate any more, starting with the very next time that anyone had sex? Yikes! No more babies? That would be hard. The innocence and joy of a baby is the best gift in the world. But at least the children we still have now would be cherished, there wouldn't be so many throw-away children any more and we would think twice before dropping bombs on babies in the Middle East and starving all those little kids in Africa. Perhaps we would actually start treasuring the children we have now -- more carefully than gold.

What if there suddenly wasn't any government any more? Apparently President Trump is picking his new cabinet based almost solely on the criteria that each Secretary he picks positively hates the agency or department that he or she is now in control of? No more schools, post offices, affordable housing, paper money, infrastructure, workers' rights, national parks, justice, healthcare, whatever. Good luck with that one.

What if, suddenly, there are no more worries about climate change -- because it has already arrived and human beings are already dying by the millions? I have a friend in Alaska. She said, "Winter in Alaska isn't any fun any more. All the snow is melted and we only have slush." Really? All of it has melted? In Alaska, formerly known as America's icebox? "Well, there isn't a whole lot of it left." And it's clearly going to go downhill from there.

And what if, suddenly, there isn't any more [so-called] war? No more nuclear weapons, drones, tanks, sarin gas, napalm, ICBMs, F-16s, assault rifles, DU blasters or cluster bombs for us to spend our money on. "Jane, now you are just being silly. The weapons industry is the only industry we've got left these days. Think of all those people without jobs!"

"Hey, maybe they could grow vegetables? Work in a toilet-paper factory?" That would be nice.

PS: Here are some URL links with regard to why we need to stop all of America's "wars" and also stop all that shrill propaganda we constantly get bombarded with, trying to drive us into so-called wars like we were just so many cattle that could be prodded into their pens and slaughterhouses. For instance, who knew that an ISIS propaganda film, "The White Helmets," would be nominated for an Oscar?

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/02/24/syrian-war-propaganda-at-the-oscars/

http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/02/24/lock-up-england-in-jail-or-an-insane-asylum/

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/02/syria-a-confused-trump-strategy-lets-erdogan-u-turn-again.html#more

http://www.globalresearch.ca/how-a-real-war-on-terrorism-would-look-and-why-the-us-isnt-fighting-one/5575674
(c) 2017 Jane Stillwater. Stop Wall Street and War Street from destroying our world. And while you're at it, please buy my books!

This April 4th will be 100 years since the U.S. Senate voted to declare war on Germany and 50 since Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out against the war on Vietnam (49 since he was killed on that speech's first anniversary). Events are being planned to help us try to finally learn some lessons, to move beyond, not just Vietnam, but war.

That declaration of war on Germany was not for the war that makes up the single most common theme of U.S. entertainment and history. It was for the war that came before that one. This was the Great War, the war to end all wars, the war without which the conditions for the next war would not have existed.

As well recounted in Michael Kazin's War Against War: The American Fight for Peace 1914-1918, a major peace movement had the support of a great deal of the United States. When the war finally ended (after the U.S. had actually been in it for about 5% the length of the war on Afghanistan thus far) just about everybody regretted it. The losses in life, limb, sanity, property, civil liberties, democracy, and health were incredible. Death, devastation, a flu epidemic, prohibition, a permanent military and the taxes to go with it, plus predictions of World War II: these were the results, and a lot of people remembered that they had been warned, as well as that the ending of all war had been promised.

The peace activists had warned the U.S. government to stay out of the war (not out of foreign relations, just out of mass-murdering foreign relations). And they had been right. The regret was intense and lasting. It lasted right up until the worst result of World War I came along in the form of World War II. At that point, regret was replaced with forgetting. World War I was erased from popular history, and its child on steroids was celebrated rather than mourned, and has been celebrated with growing reverence ever since.

The massive peace movement that outlawed war in 1928, had been widespread, mainstream, and aggressive before 1917 as well. Antiwar Congress members had entered into the Congressional Record a sample of the flood of letters and petitions they had received urging that the U.S. stay out of war. Peace groups had held marches and rallies, sent delegations to Europe, met with the president, and pushed to require a popular vote before the launching of any war, believing that the public would vote war down. We'll never know, because the vote was never taken. Instead, the United States jumped into the war, thereby preventing a negotiated settlement and creating a total victory followed by vicious punishment of the losing side - the very fuel for Nazism, as well as for Italian fascism, Japanese imperialism, and the Sykes-Picot carving up of the Middle East so beloved by that region's residents to this day.

An antiwar exhibit that toured the U.S. in 1916 included a life-sized model stegosaurus that represented the fatal consequences of having heavy armor but no brains. The idea of preparing for war in order to achieve peace, which today is simple commonsense, was widely found to be a great source of humor, as Washington cynically pursued "preparedness." Morris Hillquit, an eloquent socialist - something of a Bernie Sanders without the 21st-century militarism - asked why European nations, having fully armed themselves to avoid war, hadn't avoided it. "Their antiwar insurance turned out to be a bad case of over-insurance," he said. You prepare for war, and you get war - remarkably enough.

Woodrow Wilson won reelection on an antiwar platform, and could not have won it otherwise. After he opted for war, he was unable to raise an army to fight his war without a draft. And he was unable to sustain a draft without imprisoning people who spoke against it. He saw to it that conscientious objectors were brutally tortured (or, as we would say today, interrogated). Yet people refused, deserted, evaded, and violently fought recruiters by the thousands. The wisdom to reject war was not lacking. It just wasn't followed by those in power.

The understanding that war should be ended, which reached its peak perhaps in the 1920s and 1930s, saw something of a comeback during what the Vietnamese call the American War. Martin Luther King did not propose a different war or a better war, but leaving behind the entire war system. That awareness has grown even as the Vietnam Syndrome has faded and war been normalized. Now, the U.S. popular mind is a mass of contradictions.

In a recent poll, 66% of people in the United States are worried that the U.S. will become engaged in a major war in the next four years. However, the U.S. is engaged in a number of wars right now that must seem pretty major to the people living through them, wars that have created the greatest refugee crisis so far on the planet and threatened to break similar records for starvation. In addition, 80% of the U.S. public in the very same poll say they support NATO. There's a 50/50 split on whether to build yet more nukes. A slim majority favors banning refugees who are fleeing the wars. And over three-quarters of Democrats believe, for partisan rather than empirical reasons, that Russia is unfriendly or an enemy. Despite the warnings of the wise for over a century, people are still imagining they can use war preparations to avoid war.

One thing that could help keep us out of more wars is the Trump face now placed on the wars. People who will hate Russia because they hate Trump may at some point oppose Trump's wars because they hate Trump. And those getting active to support refugees may also want to help end the crimes that create the refugees.

Meanwhile, German tanks are again rolling toward the Russian border, and instead of soliciting denunciations from groups like the Anne Frank Center, as recently done to combat Donald Trump's anti-Semitism, U.S. liberals are generally applauding or avoiding any awareness.

One thing is certain: we will not survive another 100 years of this. Long before then, we will have to try something else. We will have to move beyond war to nonviolent conflict resolution, aid, diplomacy, disarmament, cooperation, and the rule of law.

World Beyond War is planning events everywhere, including these:

Remembering Past Wars . . . and Preventing the Next

April 3rd at NYU, New York, NY. (details TBA)
Speakers: Joanne Sheehan, Glen Ford, Alice Slater, Maria Santelli, David Swanson.

April 4, 6-8 p.m. Busboys and Poets, 5th and K Streets NW, Washington, D.C.
Speakers: Michael Kazin, Eugene Puryear, Medea Benjamin, David Swanson, Maria Santelli.

There has been a lot of analysis suggesting that the executive-level politics we're seeing play out right now are about incompetence or irrationality. The psychology of the President himself has been called into question, with bizarre public performances and blatant falsities being propagated, mirroring that of others in the Administration. To those accustomed to the presidency (irrespective of ideology) requiring certain levels of comportment, decency, and accountability, this moment can be dizzying and even terrifying.

To reach the conclusion that this is the product of ineptitude or insanity, however, would also require us to conclude that the past two years of campaigning and governing have been equally accidental or the result of someone being unhinged (not to mention the years spent on television). A far more plausible conclusion is that this actually is being done by design, in the sense that the immediate goal itself is to stimulate chaos to induce fear in some and admiration in others. Indeed, Dr. Allen Frances (who helped write the DSM) cautioned against following this red herring: "Trump represents a political challenge to the American democracy. To attribute this to his psychological quirks is to underestimate the danger."

This is distinct from supposing that the contrived nature of the turmoil and ineptitude we seem to be experiencing is a kind of diversion or subterfuge meant to keep us from following the real moves being made or to throw us off the trail of potentially damaging storylines. It might be even simpler, in that chaos is the lifeblood of this Administration, the essential quality that animates their personalities and that has made them seemingly impervious to rational discourse, bad publicity, lampooning, or even fact-checking.

If chaos itself is both their method and goal, then the principal mistake they could make would be to seem reflective or repentant at any point. Instead, the premium is on being outrageous, unvarnished, off-the-cuff, impolitic, even shocking. In this view, the value is in appearing "unhinged," taunting the media and others with ridiculous "alternative facts," tweeting out misspelled rants at all hours of the day, asserting bald-faced lies, and acting in bizarre ways that give new meaning to the "bully" facet of the bully pulpit.

Taking it one step further, one can see the potential appeal of this modus operandi in some sectors-particularly those in the support base who are tired of politicians being all talk and no action. This contingent is more accustomed to the personality types found on "reality TV," which is popular for a reason. The President not only garnered support through those channels, but did so by accentuating a persona that is natural in its brashness-and that doesn't overestimate the refinement of the public.

Still, it leaves one to wonder where all of this may lead. Chaos for its own sake may be the order of the day, but surely there must be a long game at work in all this. Consider the posturing of an Administration whose support hinges on an intention to dismantle bureaucracies and "drain the swamp," to roll in and restore that which has been lost through years of capitulating to career politicians who have sold out our values, jobs, and security. This has been the mantra for a long time now, as was noted back in 2015:

"And while it may seem like a lurching, chaotic campaign, Trump is, for the most part, a disciplined and methodical candidate, according to a Washington Post review of the businessman's speeches, interviews and thousands of tweets and retweets over the past six months. Trump delivers scores of promises, diatribes and insults at breakneck speed. He attacks a regular cast of villains including undocumented immigrants, Muslims, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, his GOP rivals and the media. He keeps the narrative arc of each controversy alive with an endless stream of statements, an unwillingness to back down even when he has misstated the facts-and a string of attacks against those who criticize him. All the while, his supporters see a truth-talking problem solver unlike the traditional politicians who have let them down."

Following this arc, David Brooks recently characterized his fear about this Administration as "not that it's incipient fascism, it's that it's anarchy." Brooks is making a common mistake here in his conflation of anarchy with chaos, and moreover with his assessment of the Administration's possible intentions. One clue is the nod to Lenin as a paragon of "destroying the state," since what he replaced it with scarcely resembled anything like anarchism, instead moving toward an even more centralized apparatus. An even stronger prompt is Bannon's description of the aim as implementing "an economic nationalist agenda."

The contrast returns us to the question of what ensues in the emptiness created should the "chaos first" strategy succeed in crashing the system. History cautions that inducing such a vacuum by itself will more likely lead to authoritarianism, totalitarianism, dictatorship, fascism, or other similarly troubling variants. These repressive outcomes entail the replacement of the preexisting state with deeper forms of autocratic power (even when cloaked in populist rhetoric), often vested in an "inner party" circle or a single person.

Anarchism is actually the opposite of this. While the impetus to break down oppressive structures may be overlapping, it is equally the case that anarchism seeks to foster wider forms of participation in the process. As such, it is constructive in its attempt to "prefigure" this future through action in the present, seeking not primarily to create a vacuum (which could serve as an invitation to tyranny) as much as it strives to cultivate more egalitarian relationships and greater capacities for self-organization in the process.

As the German anarchist Gustav Landauer observed: "The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another.... We are the State and we shall continue to be the State until we have created the institutions that form a real community." Landauer articulates a more evolutionary perspective that sometimes contrasts with anarchism's revolutionary spirit, but the shared impetus is constructive.

At this juncture, the current Administration has not articulated a coherent worldview that provides any confidence that its penchant for destruction and chaos is anything other than an attempt to consolidate power. Indeed, the methods utilized (promulgating alternative facts, false populism, bullying and strong-arming, profiteering through governance, and the like) align much more closely with the hallmarks of despotic regimes, and bear no semblance to anarchism beyond a superficial equation with disarray.

Today we find ourselves at the horns of an ostensible conflict between "order" and "chaos," with the apparatuses of the "deep state" seemingly at loggerheads with this Administration's desire for "deconstruction." Where it will lead is hard to say, and we still haven't factored a third pole into the dynamic: the people, a large number of whom are awakened and mobilized right now. It is entirely possible that this era represents an opportunity for another framework to emerge, one that isn't defined in either reactionary or stationary terms. Perhaps out of the confusion will ultimately emerge evolution.
(c) 2017 Randall Amster J.D., Ph.D., is Director of the Program on Justice and Peace at Georgetown University. Among his most recent books are Anarchism Today (Praeger, 2012) and the co-edited volume "Building Cultures of Peace: Transdisciplinary Voices of Hope and Action" (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).

Dear Deputy Fuhrer Perry,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your pledge to destroy renewable energy sources, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Republican whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Trump at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 03-15-2017. We salute you Herr Perry, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Pence