Something's Gotta Give
There will come a tipping point, a moment when Trump and his loyalists' cruel and criminal actions turn the tide wholly against them. What happens then?
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I included a quote from Charles de Gaulle at the end of the my book review of American Overthrow.
It’s a quote I use to help me.
The French general who had evacuated to England in 1940 refused to consider defeat, even after Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands had fallen, and even after Germans had entered Paris unopposed.
“Believe me,” said General Charles de Gaulle in a radio broadcast on 18 June 1940. “I speak to you with full knowledge of the facts and tell you that nothing is lost in France… Has the last word been said? Must hope disappear? Is defeat final? No!”
He was in London at the BBC, and although few heard his speech initially, word spread.
“Whatever happens, the flame of the French Resistance must not and will not be extinguished,” he said, emerging as the leader of France in exile.
That speech, and those words, “ignited a resistance movement not only in France but anywhere the Third Reich had boots on the ground,” wrote Clodagh Finn and John Morgan, authors of The Irish in the Resistance.
I included his words at the end of my review, because American Overthrow’s author Keir Giles declined to end his book with any conjured optimism.
“As I have discovered with each of my previous books, artificially-inserted optimism is a shortcut to false predictions,” he wrote. And that is absolutely fair.
In Part 2 of our Q&A on his book, he told me:
“There’s a very depressing pattern. I think I mentioned it in the conclusion of this book, that whenever I write something, it usually comes out first in hardback. And it’s usually a set of predictions, and the pattern is, I say, “Here’s a situation. It is very bad. Unless action is taken to remedy it, it is going to get very much worse.” And then, no action is taken and it gets very much worse. But a year after the hardback edition, there’s the paperback edition, for which I always write a new foreword. The new foreword usually consists of a list of, “Well, here’s everything that I said was going to happen, and we didn’t do anything about it, and then it happened.”
So here we are in a new situation. What I would greatly look forward to at some point, and I really do hope that it happens with this book because it hasn’t happened with any previous ones, is that I might be wrong.”
As I told him, I hope he is wrong, for humanity’s sake.
But as I have been reflecting on his book, which documents in methodical detail the destruction of America by Trump and his loyalists, I realize that he created a document that is definitive in tallying up Trump’s crimes.
He manages to mute all the background noise and give us something we can hold in our hands and say, “Look, here it is. Not a clown show, but a transformation of America that copies Russia — destructive actions aligning with Kremlin objectives, benefiting Moscow and Beijing, even surpassing Russia in scale and speed of crimes and demolition.”
Keir describes this as a “crash programme of state capture,” as seen by “the military patrols in US cities, police raids on homes of government critics, mass detentions without due process, the suppression of the media and rights to free expression, masked paramilitaries enjoying impunity for committing murder on the streets, convicted criminals released because the victims of their violence were the president’s enemies, and the evisceration of America’s defences against terrorism, extremism, and disease as part of a whole rather than disconnected phenomena.”
Seen as a whole, the enormity of the corruption and profiteering, the attacks on perceived enemies, the attacks on elections, and the well-being of the population, we gain a very clear picture of both extreme destruction and malfeasance.
And this is important, because something’s gotta give.
And we don’t know what that tipping point will be.
Craig Unger just wrote a brilliant post documenting how nothing is moving the needle.
But even he concludes with the possibility that something will ultimately move the needle, but it won’t likely be a one-off report.
With American Overthrow, and my review to sustain you until the book is widely available, we have the forensic evidence we need in one place to force international law to bring charges against Trump and his loyalists for war crimes and crimes against humanity, which is the International Criminal Court’s bailiwick. Three dozen countries are forming their own Special Tribunal at The Hague to bring Putin and members of his regime to trial for their war crimes in Ukraine.
As Croatian sociologist and politician Vesna Pusić, who served as First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign and European Affairs in the cabinet of Zoran Milanović, told me: “If you are a potential war criminal, international tribunals are a tricky thing: you never know who or when they are going to indict.”
So when you see the speed at which Trump’s regime is demolishing democracy to harden autocracy, while taking direct aim at the ICC, you must see it through Pusić’s lens: “You never know who or when they are going to indict.”
I thought about this as I was being interviewed yesterday on The Thom Hartmann Program on the scandal of the Trump Organization banks accounts being closed due to anti-money laundering investigations and the measures France is taking to thwart poisonous propaganda and social media.
There will come a tipping point when the alternate reality Trump and his loyalists have created will no longer hold.
There will be one more scandal — it could already be the banking scandal, the 385 bank accounts that were closed, the grotesque excess of 385 bank accounts — that can topple the whole criminal gang.
We see in a new poll that 73 percent of Americans don’t agree with Trump’s priorities.
This is obviously late stage, but as de Gaulle reminds us, the defeat is not yet final.
Intellectual historian Dr. Marci Shore reminds us about the very moment when a tide swelled up against Romanian tyrant, Nicolae Ceaușescu. It started with a man in a crowd who yelled ‘boo’ during a speech — and a spontaneous rebellion erupted against a brutal, repressive regime, resulting in Ceaușescu’s execution on Christmas Day 1989 by a firing squad, along with his wife, Elena, after a brief televised trial.
Romania had its tipping point.
As I noted on Thom’s show, there are two worlds — the fact-based world which we grew up in and which I still reside in and the fiction world Trump inhabits. That fiction is propped up by excessively well-funded Russian influence campaigns and laundered through billionaire-owned media.
As international lawyer Victor Rud told me: “Russia’s WMD is … precisely ‘words.’ They invade, occupy and control the most valuable real estate, our cerebral cortex. We’re catatonic about it all.”
But what if we all agree that something has gone horrible wrong — and like France and Estonia — we can agree that something needs to be done. Could we then begin to take narrative control back, bring more people back to fact-based reality and out of the mental prison of the televised clown show? And what happens then? I don’t know the answer, but what’s happening in America cannot be allowed to proceed.
I do know that researchers identified that meeting non-violent resistance goals requires 3.5 percent of the population to participate.
In my latest report on Estonian resistance, I learned that key number.
Accord to Harvard researchers, only one to three percent of any population participated in Resistance efforts in World War II. But the researchers determined that once a Resistance effort engages 3.5 percent of the population, that’s the threshold when non-violent campaigns can achieve their goals.
For this to happen in America, the catatonic phase must pass, as well as the ‘extraordinary passivity’ Keir identified in Part 1 of our June Q&A.
Yesterday, I learned that people from Haiti who have not committed crimes are being outfitted with ankle bracelets in America.
I also learned another man died in an ICE concentration camp, bringing the total deaths of ICE prisoners — that we know of — to 50 since Trump returned to power.
Something’s gotta give.
As Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, who joined the French Resistance in 1941 as a translator and courier for an underground intelligence cell, said:
“You simply couldn’t stand by with your arms folded.”
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