The Times…

Are not looking good, Ukraine vs. Russia, Israel vs, Hamas, China vs. Taiwan, North Korea, they are all powder kegs that can lead to WW III. Take a look at how WW I started by petty local wars that exploded into world conflict.

Bigotry and hatred is spreading around the world against those who are different. Fascism and  authoritarianism is creeping into countries political systems around the world.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich writes,

The corrosiveness of hate
The challenge ahead
October 16, 2023

Friends,

I’m trying not to despair, but the world seems awash in hate right now. In the Middle East. In Ukraine and Russia. In rabid anti-immigrant movements in Europe. Among some Trump followers, including Trump Republicans in Congress.

Threats are mounting against Muslim Americans and Jewish Americans. On Saturday, outside of Chicago, a 6-year-old boy was stabbed to death in an anti-Muslim hate crime. Threats of domestic terrorism are rising.

Yesterday I saw a demonstration by students at a university that prides itself on free speech and inclusion, but the rally reeked of hatefulness and intolerance.

Tragically, hate is a huge motivator. “The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who,” wrote Kevin Phillips, the political analyst who died last week.

I did not know Phillips well. We appeared together on various panels and forums over the years, so I heard a lot of his views about political strategy. I’m reluctant to speak ill of someone recently deceased, but it is important to understand Phillips’s legacy.

I did not know Phillips well. We appeared together on various panels and forums over the years, so I heard a lot of his views about political strategy. I’m reluctant to speak ill of someone recently deceased, but it is important to understand Phillips’s legacy.

His 1969 book, “The Emerging Republican Majority,” was for many decades the GOP’s blueprint for how to win over white voters unhappy with the Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights in the 1960s.

Phillips urged Republicans to link white voters’ racial anxieties to issues such as crime, federal spending, and voting rights, and make racially coded appeals such as “law and order.”

It worked — helping to produce Richard M. Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972, Reagan’s in 1980 (aided by Reagan’s condemnation of “welfare queens”), George H.W. Bush’s 1986 victory (remember “Willie Horton”?), and GOP majorities for decades.

When I was in grad school we talked about prime emotions love and hate are strong bonds. If you can connect with those emotions in politics you have a voter for life.

I’m often reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s words in his Second Inaugural Address, on March 4, 1865 — when the end of the deadly Civil War was in sight, when South and North were brimming with hate of each other, and when many on the Union side were eager to punish the rebels. But Lincoln understood his task:

“With malice toward none with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Of course Hamas militants must be held responsible. So must Putin. So must Trump. So must those who are now threatening Muslim Americans and Jewish Americans, as must everyone who is blinded by hate.

In holding them responsible, though, we must make every effort not to fuel even more hate.

Let us try to make bonds of love.

 

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In another Robert Reich article he writes…

Robert B. Reich: Trump’s chaos agenda: Reagan’s negative view of government has morphed into a malevolent anti-democracy fervor
By Tribune News Service
October 11, 2023

Like most of you, I’ve been following the harrowing news about what’s occurring in Israel and Gaza — and, of course, Trump’s crazy attempt to blame it on Biden. “The horrible attack on Israel, much like the attack on Ukraine, would never have happened if I were President — zero chance!” he said with his usual modesty, even though Trump is more responsible for the diminished capabilities of American intelligence (connected to Israeli intelligence) than Biden or any other recent president.

Ronald Reagan told Americans that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Reagan is still revered, especially by Republicans, but his negative view of government has morphed into an authoritarian fervor within the Republican Party.

And that fervor has become the basis of a strategy — led by Trump — for seeking to persuade the rest of America that the nation is ungovernable as a democracy and therefore in need of an authoritarian strongman.
This is the underlying agenda of Trump and his enablers as we head into the terrifying election year of 2024.

It’s behind Trump’s increasingly wild ravings. It animates the House nihilists (such as Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Andy Biggs, and Nancy Mace). It fuels the zealotry of Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy. It’s behind Steve Bannon’s and Tucker Carlson’s incendiary agitprop. (It’s also basic to Putin’s maneuverings.)

The more chaos Trump and his allies create, the more pessimistic Americans feel about the capacities of our democratic institutions to govern the nation — which advances their authoritarian agenda.

And that is what his worshiping cult followers want to be what to think, what to say, and what to believe.

I am glad that I’m 75 because in another 25 years I don’t want to be around, we leave this world in a awful mess. On the brink of war, economic collapse, global warming, forever plastics and chemicals in our oceans, and a atmosphere full of ozone depleting chemicals.