The American Crisis, Part Eight: A Post-Election Obituary
Farewell to the Republic?
By not prosecuting Trump for treason, America paved the way for his dictatorship;
but we have not yet begun to fight!
by Kevin Annett
A nation without a sovereign, save the people themselves! Our bold American experiment in liberty has provoked the hatred and wicked design of tyrants and monarchs everywhere. Yet for all that, it is not a foreign enemy that will destroy our Republic, but only we ourselves. – Thomas Paine, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, Christmas 1777
Only one thing could have stopped us from coming to power: if our enemies had struck at us early on with the utmost severity. But they lacked the will and courage to do so and our victory was assured. – Adolf Hitler, 1934
If a people go down fighting against tyranny, they can rise again and recover their freedom. But a people who abjectly surrender and bow before that tyranny will never recover, and their freedom is lost forever. – Winston Churchill, June 28, 1940
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The American Republic has committed suicide. Two and a half centuries after its birth, the nation will once again be ruled by a deranged and unaccountable monarch.
It’s been said that our best teacher is a black eye. Or, as The Art of War warns, “You do not know your enemy until he has drawn your blood.”
With the November 5 ‘election’ of Donald Trump, corporate fascism in America has moved from a political abstraction to a bloody reality. Trump now controls all three branches of government: the Senate and Congress, the Supreme Court, and the presidency. With the Democrats politically impotent, the Trump regime holds absolute power - not only as a one-man government, but effectively as a single party state.
Does anyone realistically expect him to ever relinquish such power?
Like Hitler, Trump is history’s dark judgement on a nation. It is pointless to speak of winners and losers. All are punished by the triumph of autocracy. And the punishment will only worsen.
This catastrophe is not simply because of the November 5 election that unlawfully put an impeached lunatic and criminal back into the Oval Office. It isn’t just the fault of the hordes of MAGA morons who want a king to rule over them. By not putting Trump on trial for treason after his attempted January 6 coup in the service of Russia, every public official in America betrayed their oath of office to defend the Constitution. Having lost the moral battle against a billionaire oligarch by placing him above the law and smoothing his way to power, the Democrats’ election loss was just the next domino to fall.
After all, how was America’s first criminally convicted president allowed to be on the November 5 ballot? Regardless of the Trump-dominated Supreme Court’s approval of such illegality, the Democrats could have countered that unconstitutional decision by getting state courts to remove Trump’s name from the ballot.
Equally incredulously, why was Trump treated like a legitimate candidate by the media and Kamala Harris, who on principle should have refused to debate or campaign against a proven traitor and violator of his Presidential oath of office?
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the alleged Russian spies, were electrocuted in 1953 for doing a lot less than what Trump has done in ‘giving aid and comfort’ to America’s enemies. (1) Yet even his proven collusion with Russia to subvert the 2016 presidential election has not stopped Trump from heading to the Oval Office rather than to an electric chair, or even a jail cell.
The Democrats handed Trump the election by making the classic mistake in warfare of underestimating and not knowing their enemy. None of the happy, over-confident Kamala Harris crowds understood the beast they faced and how much its rot has undermined America. MAGA violence has been a loaded gun thrust at the head of every Democratic voter and county commissioner.
Why did Kamala Harris lose every swing state where she was leading in the polls? Because of a Trump-orchestrated fear and terror campaign that threatened to violently “bring down America” if he didn’t win the election. The most ruthless thugs usually win.
As well, don’t forget that big money runs both the Democrats and the ‘Republicans’. The direct rule of the big bourgeoisie without the buffer of political parties is fast becoming the wave of the future. So, Americans’ choice of a dictator is not that unusual in the Age of Corporate Oligarchy.
Besides, even if the Democrats and the courts hadn’t enabled Trump’s victory, one-man rule has always been inherent in the American Presidency. Now it’s a functional requirement of the Corporatocracy.
Nobody should be surprised when King Donald the First resumes his use of the government and military as his personal playthings to feed his global business empire, even if it provokes war. It’s not like he hasn’t done it before. Besides, that’s the way of things now, in the age of mega-corporate rule.
It used to be that what was good for General Motors was good for America. Now, what’s good for the head CEO is what’s good for everyone, whether they like it or not.
After all, that’s what fascism is: the fusion of big money with government into a massive, totalitarian state, led by an absolute ruler whose word is law.
In such a regime, the masses are kept in line by being pitted against each other and pumped with a hateful, nationalistic hysteria whose offspring is war abroad and a police state at home. Trump’s ‘Enemies List’ is no joke, nor is his plan to deport eleven million Americans. For only the permanent fear and repression of ubiquitous “Others” can keep the dumbed-down populace distracted and the dictator on his throne.
Welcome to the Third Reich, American Style.
Geo-politically, America’s self-destruction suits Russia and China just fine because it’s been their game plan all along. As a Russian-sponsored Fifth Columnist, Trump will ensure that China’s hegemony continues to spread and absorb the North American economy and its resources. Trump will deliberately steer America into enormous indebtedness and economic ruination to profit his own global corporate Empire and his colleagues in Moscow and Beijing.
This arrangement is also for an even more insidious reason. A Republic like America that was founded on the principle of peoples’ self-governance is a threat to China, Russia, and the other oligarchies that operate as the medium for an expanding global Corporatocracy. Accordingly, Trump’s regime will dutifully ensure that America’s “bold experiment in liberty” will not survive much longer.
With the entire State now controlled by the ‘Republicans’, there is no means within the status quo by which to stop the Trump dictatorship. Something more is needed now: a grassroots, revolutionary movement to not only resist the new tyranny but overthrow it.
Americans who remain loyal to their Constitutional democracy have already slipped far down the slope to slavery by bending to Trump’s neo-fascism. Now is the time to halt that retreat and reclaim the Republic. But that effort will not come from ourselves as we are presently constituted, either individually or politically.
Most of us are too wedded to the false assurances and comforts of a rapidly vanishing life. To recover our liberty, we must go through a cleansing, Valley Forge-like catharsis and become free of our fears and false loyalties. Only then can we learn how to not only fight institutionalized tyranny but overthrow it and the system of dictatorial corporate rule that engendered it.
Little that we have been equipped with up to now will help us in that battle. We must learn to think and act under fire, as people with a new, revolutionary purpose. For history has come full circle.
The second American Revolution against an absolute monarch has begun.
Napoleon observed that people always make revolutions with their eyes upon the past. This will be our biggest temptation and roadblock in the years ahead, as many of us will habitually look to “the next election” and a revived Democratic party to undo Trumpism. But in four years, there will probably be no election. The judicial and political infrastructure of the old Republic will be dismantled.
In the years ahead, there will be only two options for Americans: to either adapt to the corporate fascist regime or overthrow it. The toppling of a tyrant and tyranny is our God-given and Declaration of Independence-granted right and duty as free people.
How then can we overturn the Trump regime?
First, by doing what justice and the law demand and arresting the criminal Trump before he can assume office. Anything less is to line up with him as a passive accomplice.
Second, by casting away our illusions and joining hands across the old party allegiances. Democrats and non-MAGA Republicans should coalesce into a new political party of National Union to unite all our democratic forces, as happened during the first American civil war.
Finally, if Trump does take office, by boycotting and impeding the Trump government at every level while raising up a genuine Republic within our local communities.
As is our constitutional right, Americans must begin to take back power through their own self-governing assemblies and courts, protected by local sheriffs and county militias. For only such a dual power can defend us against a growing MAGA violence and be the counterweight that will dissolve the power of the Trump dictatorship at the grassroots, teaching people how to establish liberty by and for themselves.
Fortunately, for some years now, Americans have been doing exactly that in order to prepare for this crucial moment, in league with allies in Canada. Armed with the Home Rule governance provisions guaranteed by many state constitutions, sovereign common law assemblies have formed across the nation and have passed laws outside federal jurisdiction.
Often protected by the existing county sheriffs, these assemblies have created courts of record to pass and enforce local laws according to the will of the people. This network of popular democracy will be an essential bulwark of any national resistance movement, catalyzing millions of Americans into similar reclamations of the law and governance. For as Samuel Adams of the Sons of Liberty said in 1774,
“It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”
More than a means of resistance, these assemblies are in fact the seeds of the new Republic.
In closing, we must remember that the present catastrophe was caused by something much deeper than politics. The Vietnam Veterans used to say that the war has come home. Now we see that war in full, savage bloom. Can we expect anything less from our legacy of violence?
America has spent its history exterminating black and brown people and putting foreign dictators in power to keep US corporations fat. Since 1945, the CIA has killed more than seven million people in military coups and wars. The illegal Vietnam ‘War’ murdered more than one million people and tore America apart, introducing the Nixon form of secret government that engendered Trumpism. From all that filth has arisen a clique of billionaires who run the country, make the laws, rape the land and its wealth, and control the media and public consciousness.
So why is anyone surprised that all that blood and violence has vomited up Trump and corrupted our Republic and its people beyond recognition, setting the stage for totalitarianism? That corruption is most obvious in the MAGA fanatics and Trump, who like Hitler is a diagnosed criminal psychopath capable of anything.
And yet all Americans must accept responsibility for the rapacious corporate system that has led to our present malaise. We must resolve to actively abolish that system and establish a democratic and cooperative economy where the rule of billionaires is vanquished, and the nation’s wealth is held in common by and for all the people.
The truly all-peoples’ Republic that we will establish on the ashes of Trumpism will be a more complete democracy, embodying the new birth of freedom that we experienced as a people during our last great civil war.
As Abraham Lincoln wrote on the eve of that conflict,
“I know there is a God, and that He hates injustice and slavery. I see the storm coming, and I know that his hand is in it. If He has a place and work for me, I believe I am ready.”
Let us begin, for the storm is upon us.
The author, Kevin Annett, M.A., M.Div., (right) is of mixed American and Canadian ancestry who is a leader of the movement to establish a constitutional Republic in Canada. He is a convener of the global Republic Alliance and its common law courts. Kevin is an award-winning scholar, author, and activist who has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his quarter-century campaign to prosecute genocide by Canadian Church and State. His websites include www.republicofkanata.org and www.murderbydecree.com . His email is angelfire101@protonmail.com .
This article is the eighth in a series entitled The American Crisis, written in the spirit of its namesake by Thomas Paine to revive the hearts and sharpen the minds of a struggling people. The other articles in this series can be viewed at www.republicofkanata.org under Breaking News.
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Footnote (1): Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. – Article III, Section 3, The Constitution of the United States of America--
