History, Official Lies, and Poetry

Sunday, September 15, 2019

I only recently noticed that President Trump’s casual revisions of historical events include a preposterous explanation of the Soviet Union’s motive for its invasion of Afghanistan in December, 1979:

“Russia used to be the Soviet Union. Afghanistan made it Russia, because they went bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan. Russia. … The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there. The problem is, it was a tough fight. And literally they went bankrupt.” — President Donald Trump (January, 2019)

In the early 1970s, Robert Bly wrote a long poem, “The Teeth Mother Naked At Last”; in one of its sections, a satiric recitation of the lies the President tells on a daily basis culminates in a parallel collapse of historical motivations:

“(The President) insists that Luther was never a German, and that only
the Protestants sold indulgences,
That Pope Leo X wanted to reform the church, but the “liberal elements”
prevented him,
that the Peasants’ War was fomented by Italians from the North.”

As Bly pointed out in his poem, the willingness of a populace to accept lies on this scale is a reflection of the grip of the death-wish on the nation’s culture.

I never thought I would regard the CIA as a friendly witness, but things have long surpassed any normal expectations. President Trump is so woefully ignorant that I have little choice but to call upon a government agency long known to be hostile to anything insubordinate to the corporate interests of U.S. global hegemony:

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp81b00401r000600120003-3

It is true that Islamic-inspired separatists engaged in terrorist activity in opposition to Russian rule at the outset of the conflict known as the Second Chechen War, but that occurred 20 years after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in order to prop up a puppet government. There is no evidence whatsoever to support Trump’s account of a significant conflict of the Cold War.

I have not the slightest idea of how to break the hypnotic grip of deceit that Mr. Trump has on a large segment of my fellow citizens. How is it possible that over 40 percent of the population has no problem with a president who would appear to be more interested in facilitating the dissemination of false information provided by the intelligence operations of Vladimir Putin? The Russian people deserve better, and so do we.

One of the readers of this blog, according to this site’s records, seems to be located in the “Russian Federation.” While it is a pleasant fantasy to suppose that a young Russian poet is reading this blog, it would appear more likely that it is being tracked as part of an overall assessment of Trump’s opposition. It’s hard to believe that a blog with an incredibly minuscule level of readership would be worth registering on their political scales, but perhaps the plans for rounding up the opponents of dictators, no matter how mild their protest, have accelerated far beyond our reasonable fears.

I highly recommend another outlet that is no doubt being tracked, too: Larry Smith’s recent commentary in his CALIBAN CHRONICLES:

http://calibanonline.com/newsletter/CC33.pdf

VOLUME 9 – No. 1 WWW.CALIBANONLINE.COM Sunday, September 1st, 2019

And, of course, the usual suspects:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/15/donald-trump-nuts-impeachment-25th-amendment-2020-election

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/robert-reich-donald-trump-economy-warning_n_5d55034de4b0eb875f1f7e8c?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAACHgH05fGTMsCsP6v797ahbJE0ZMPAfKe2dkPplI4wnOwz8QkiSfEPcvwlc-Ts1qTHgwr6U7Y2Ar7moNV5iRc5Uz0eOpXyr7gb7e0gunO7-jQrR80sARFGgJQkyr8QvEtLvS374xuQEhFLq0T7vVwVxNVAtepDC68VDbloo3FzRD

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