Written by Dmitri Drobnitky; Originally appeared at VZ, translated by AlexD exclusively for SouthFront
The sponsors, liberal media and the invited celebrities to the women’s protest marches expect to lay the foundations for a mass grassroots left activism in the US and in the near future their return to power. Theoretically the plan is not bad.
The women’s anti-Trump protest marches (the participants named it Million Women March) were held this past Saturday in the American capital, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and well as in London and other European capitals.
The marches slogan with Madonna’s helping hand became “love”, although love, reconciliation and forgiveness were the least talked about by the left-liberal NGO organisers.
The official words of the protesters posted ahead of time in the network were the phrase “Welcome to your first day! We will not go away!” however, the most popular slogan, replicated on ten thousand hand-made and printed placards were the words: “Pussy grabs back”.
The participants were given pink hats with ears that were called pussy hats, that is, cat beanies… and also “vagina hats”. Participants carried banners with the words written Viva la Vulva!, “Patriarchy can suck my clit!”, “Long live the power of the vagina!”… There were other provoking slogans.
In all, almost all the creative protest was revolving around the female sexual organ. There were rare exceptions, which consisted of male representatives of the LGBT movement, which talked and wrote about their own, avoiding, however, mentioning the phallus, in any case, away from the sin.
And all this vulgarity was carefully mixed with hatred. Madonna, speaking from a tribune in Washington, was reading a text on paper, and when came off of it, swearing so viciously and sophisticated, that even the liberal channel CNN was forced to remove her from live broadcast.
There were two other slogans of the march: “The future is nasty!” and “You haven’t seen yet nasty women!”. Thus the demonstrators played on Trump’s phrase, uttered at the heart of debates with Hillary: “What a nasty woman!”.
All this action, the columnist of the Washington Examiner Byron York called it, by a term well known to us, Pussy Riot. He is hardly unaware of the existence of the eponymous punk-feminist project, acclaimed at the time in Russia. He simply wrote what he saw, a revolt of the same place.
Without a doubt, this is the most massive post-inauguration protest since 1973 when Richard Nixon started his second term as president. But then it was understandable, demonstrations were clearly anti-war, people demanded the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam.
But what about now? The new president in office for only a day, and pop stars, LGBT activists and leftist leaders already call for “resisting the tyranny” (Madonna’s words).
At first glance, all seems a thoughtless protest against their own defeat in the elections. And if only the presidential! The Liberals lost the Congress, lost in record number since 1927 of governors and legislatures of the States.
We lost, but will not go anywhere? For the citizens of Russia and Ukraine it sounds painfully familiar, but are American “Maidaners” that naïve?
Is it possible that they simply came to let off some steam? Heck, it’s even healthy. However, it is unlikely that the organisers, who through social networks summoned people to the protests (among them the publication Politico mentioned the Council for the Protection of Natural Resources, the fund “Planned Parenthood”, the American Civil Liberties Union and the NGO Sierra Club), poured money so generously on a collective relaxation therapy.
Yet there was a lot of money spent. No, I do not say that the participants (male and female) of the marches were all entirely paid for. By no means. Most likely 99.99% protesters came to the marches of their own free will and even paid for their tickets to Washington from their own pockets.
But any mass action requires expenditures. The stage, microphones, invitations to the VIPs, lawyers, covering the events and approving marches routes and meeting locations with the authorities… It is true that no permission is required for a demonstration in the USA, but mass rallies still always are agreed with the police and municipalities, no one wants surprises and provocations.
Finally, the work of the activists also is not always free. They also must have their travel, food, clothes, means of communications (in places of mass congestion, cell phones are unreliable), as well as the pink vagina-beanies…
And something tells me that without George Soros it wouldn’t have happened. First, he was already involved in the financing of the African American radical movement Black Lives Matter, second, he openly boasted about not leaving Trump in peace even after the inauguration.
However, the names of the sponsors are not important. What is important, is that having invested their money, they require a return. It is unlikely that they will be satisfied with the result in the form of calming the liberal community.
Some foreign and local experts think that this entire anti-Trump mob was conceived with the aim of exerting pressure on the new president. Something to the effect of: Bend, Donald, and better still, go while the going’s good, otherwise “we will not go away”.
Well if the organisers and sponsors of the American “Women’s March” think this way, they have once again underestimated Trump.
If the 45th president, being the “non-system candidate” survived the onslaught of the American political elite, the press and many provocations, then, taking the Oval Office, he would certainly not retreat and give in to blackmail.
In his Twitter Big Donald first sarcastically remarked, “Why didn’t these people vote?” and chided the pop-divas, taking part in the protests: “Celebs hurt cause badly”, and an hour and a half later, noted that “Peaceful protests are a hallmark” of the American democracy. And further, “Even if I don’t always agree, I recognize the rights of people to express their views.”
Between these two tweets he was negotiating with the representatives of the US business community and attended the swearing in ceremony of thirty new employees of the White House. That is, he worked. The dog barks and the caravan passes.
Trump’s opponents, of course, miscalculated royally over his chances of victory at the elections, but hardly so stupid as to further waste time and money on useless and resource-intensive interventions.
Someone will say, that the Liberals are blind and will continue to step on the same rake. This is possible but I am inclined to think that the day of the world Pussy Riot was called not to “topple Donald” but to finally help implement the project, which the American Liberals are dreaming about for the last two years.
In December 2014 in the left-liberal publication Politico an article by Bill Scher was published with the title “Can the Left Launch Its Own Tea Party?
The right-wing conservative Tea Party (or the Tea Party movement) haunts the Liberals since 2009. At the mid-term elections to the Congress in 2010 it returned the Republicans to a majority in the House of Representatives, at the same time seriously shaking the establishment of the “elephants”.
In 2014, the Tea party secured the control of the Senate as well, taking the commanding heights in the party.
Suffice it to say that the participants of the Republican primaries Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Scott Walker belong to the movement, and the speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan and the vice-president Mike Pence, though not one of the originators of the “tea riot”, call themselves its active followers.
Regardless of the fact that the extreme right political faction is its own rich patron (the most prominent are the billionaire brothers Koch), it is first of all a spontaneous grass-roots movement.
Bill Scher in 2014 lamented that the left does not have such a movement and suggested to create it immediately. At the time, the majority of the discourse was on the potential racial protests, which were thundering in Ferguson, New York and Chicago. And the Liberal experts saw Senator Elizabeth Warren as the leader of the “new left”.
When the whole primaries campaign in 2015-16 the Vermont Socialist Bernie Sanders led, all eyes were turned on him. Indeed, old man Bernie created some semblance of grassroots, and the youth, without comparison did not go with the movement headed by Donald Trump.
Already in February 2016 I was writing in VZGLIAD [Tr.: the article is in Russian only], that Sanders’s so-called political revolution is doomed. In July everything was finished [Tr.: the article is in Russian only]. And Bernie did not even have enough courage to resist to the end the Party establishment and corrupt Hillary.
I think many now in the Democratic Party are kicking themselves. Yes, Sanders almost certainly would have lost the presidential elections, just as Clinton did, but the Democrats would have at least saved face. Bernie would have been a symbol of the lost battle but not the broken flaming leftists, who, given time, will take revenge and move “further than Obama” (Sanders term).
But what is done is done.
Now with the Pussy Riot the liberals are looking for the basis of a grassroots movement, without which their political future in America is very nebulous and in large part sad.
On January 21 2017 the same publication Politico, which dreamed in 2014 about a black grassroots, now asks the question: will the “Women’s March” be the left of the Tea Party or end like the Occupy Wall Street movement?
It is exactly on this that the sponsors, liberal media and invited celebrities to the protest count on. It is exactly into this large sums of money were invested, to lay the basis for mass left, grassroots activism and in the near future return to power.
In theory, the plan is not bad. But I think, it finally puts a cross on the Western, at least the American, left movement.
Shifting the focus from human rights to women’s rights (it is a one-sided interpretation) will not help the Democratic Party, or the liberal politicians to become the spokespersons of the popular vote.
Let more women vote against Trump than for him. Let almost 30% of Americans consider that “abortion on demand” is their inalienable right, let the citizens of the USA today be more tolerant today of same-sex marriages, than ten years ago, this does not make women, as a dedicated electoral group, a guarantor of future victories for political correctness and liberal system of values.
The whole policy of the left these past few years was based on identity politics, of belonging to a non-white race, LBGT community or gender group, failed miserably. The Left lost the middle class, workers and engineers, farmers and military, teachers and homemakers.
Donald John Trump picked them all up. My colleague Kholmogorov in a heated polemic even called [Tr.: the article is in Russian only] the 45th president “progressive socialist” (of course, not having in mind the Soviet socialism).
Of course, Trump is no socialist. He reduces the taxes, talks about the deregulation of business and cutting government interference in education and healthcare.
Trump is the sentence of the old version of the Western leftist movement with its trade unions and strikes. It is not only that the American leftists do not expect to ever build in the US socialism outside university campuses, even socialism in the Northern European model.
In my opinion, first they brought the repudiation of the main component of the left political agenda of the 20th century West, the same component that even the laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize Barak Obama did not pull.
The Left does not fight for peace anymore.
Please note that the participants of the Women’s March frustrated by losing the elections are not some super-pacifists, and Hillary Clinton, who, overcoming the resistance of Obama’s advisers and even the Defence Secretary, unleashed a war in Libya and demanded the introduction in Syria of a no-fly zone even when the Russian Aerospace Forces were conducting operations, in other words, she worked towards a Third World War.
Even Bernie Sanders in the course of his primaries campaign almost never spoke of foreign politics and did not criticise the establishment about its belligerence. As if the world was not on the brink of a new cold war. To reach out to the Russians? This is not Bernie. He also said that he would “stand” against the “aggressive Russia”.
Yet in 1973 people were mainly protesting against wars. Yes there were hippies, lovers of marijuana and supporters of freedom of morals, but the main nerve of the then leftist protesters was anti-war.
And today one can cycle through the gender, race and sexual prejudice in search of a passionate minority as a base for left-liberal revenge. He was not destined to take place because of peace, détente and foreign policy realism once again are topics of discussion by the right. As Taft. As Teddy Roosevelt and Nixon.
As well as about jobs, industrialisation and the protection of motherhood and childhood.
And their opponents merely swear from the stands and wear vagina costumes.
Such is the inglorious end of the leftist movement, as we knew it.
We are see an astonishing, even bizarre but potentially winning anti-Trump coalition that spans the spectrum from left to far right. An analysis of American politics that lumps them all together as the “left” is flawed. It is far more instructive to look at the different constituents, their motives and what brings them together than to try to generalize about them.
Here’s my try, down and dirty and with a broad brush:
First the right. The Russia-haters, reactionaries like McCain and other globalist Republicans and apparently the neocons, the CIA and much of the Deep State – and perhaps a majority of the globalist banksters – looking for allies in stopping Trump from disrupting their plans for world domination.
Then the corporatist Democrats like the Clintons and Obama, the professional politicians whose job is to deliver the support of the people to the billionaire class; the upper ranks of the non-profit industrial complex; and assorted billionaire sponsors of NGO’s such as Soros and Gates. Their goal – along with protecting their jobs and positions – is channeling the anger of regular people – especially around gender, racial, nationality and identity issues, whatever (as Bernie pointed out) doesn’t cost the billionaires much money – protecting their rackets and again serving their masters by defending the globalization project and MIC.
Then comes the labor leadership, the grant-funded “left” and lower ranks of the nonprofit industry, heads of government agencies and academics, and economically comfortable issue activists – civil rights, environmental, social justice, etc – outraged at Trump’s attacks on their many arrangements and agreements to preserve the labor, health and safety standards we’ve won over the past 80 years – and on their own comfortable livings.
Also at this level are a minority of small business people who believe in civil liberties, free speech and a level playing field, who are disgusted with Trump’s appointment of banksters and monopolists.
This largely takes us to the left flank of the political spectrum as represented in Congress and reported on in the MSM. But we are still far to the right of the median views of the American public on core economic issues. MOST OF THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SPECTRUM – apart from a few voices like Bernie Sanders – HAS NO PRESENCE IN THE CONGRESS OR IN THE MASS MEDIA! And THIS is where the real left is!
Contrary to what the author suggests, given a halfway fair process and even with virtually zero coverage in the mom, Bernie Sanders absolutely would have won the Democratic Nomination and gone on to win the general election! He gave voice to what regular Americans already believe and were saying in private to their closest friends for decades now. The billionaire class – or at least their strategists – knew it. Trump jumped into the race (at Bill Clinton’s request) to run as the Anti-Bernie, and got by one estimate 200 times more airtime that Sanders. (I doubt the Clintons imagined he’d ever actually win.)
The DNC, with the help of the vote-rigging machine that gave us George Junior twice, stopped Bernie in arguably the dirtiest election campaign in American history, and when an insider leaked part of this story to Wikileaks (Assange strongly suggested it was DNC IT manager Seth Rich, who was executed on a DC street in July) the Clintons started shouting that Russia did it in a very effective move to distract the media’s attention from the content of the emails.
This “real left”, the working people whose views were expressed by Bernie, is concerned with declining wages and the disappearance of good jobs, growing debt, a collapsing health care system and rolling foreclosure crisis, collapsing public services, schools and safety, environmental disasters and increasingly shameless and uncontrolled plunder by the banks – and by wars that send their children home brain damaged or in a box.
Some of this working class left, the “labor-left populists”, the Berniecrats, were out protesting this past week. Some were won to Trump’s side. More were won to a watchful neutrality by his economic vision, much of it lifted straight from Bernie’s speeches – but lacking a real way to pay for them. Most of them are still watching Trump’s moves around job creation, hoping that he’s for real. As it becomes clear that Trump’s economic populism is a fraud (which it is), this “real left” will take the stage.
There is no going back; 2016 was the year we discovered each other and found our voice. The mood of the people is turning toward the revolution we all know needs to happen.
The obvious strategy for George Soros, the CIA and their constellation of NGO’s, corporatist politicians and foundations is to head off this gathering people’s revolution by organizing a premature “color revolution” to overthrow Trump (and the Constitution), perhaps setting off a civil war that will cut right through the ranks of the working people.
Our job is to keep the focus on confronting Trump over bread and butter issues that effect everyday people and to resist getting sucked into their trap. And to resist the anti-Russia campaign that’s part of the bait.
That was a good one, mate. I have a few disagreements, but overall I agree. The left must avoid being taken for a ride by the neoliberal right at all costs. If Trump is to be opposed, that should be for his failures and not because the globalists demand so, while backed for any positive actions. A good example is Sanders’ support for his ditching of the TPP.