Resistance Is A Lifetime

 

Resistance Is A Lifetime: The Resistance History of the United States (Part 2)

by C. A. Matthews

For an introduction to Tad Stoermer’s The Resistance History of the United States and a discussion of the first four principles of resistance, check out last week’s post The Patterns of Resistance. Here is a brief listing of the first four:

Principle 1: Beware False Prophets—Learn to Recognize False 
Resistance

Principle 2: More Weight—Refuse to Validate the Lies

Principle 3: My Enemy’s Enemy—Your Ally Doesn’t Have to Be 
Pure

Principle 4: Force the Fight, Even When You’re Losing

On to the remaining five!

Principle 5: Resistance Is a Lifetime, Not a Moment

You might not want to hear this but single dramatic acts of defiance are only the beginning of your fight. “Real resistance requires persistence to keep pursuing your goal and resilience to withstand the inevitable counterattacks without breaking.” (Stoermer, p. 332)

Resisters must build their capacity for sustained resistance so they can overcome numerous setbacks and adapt to new threats. In other words, a revolution is a lifetime commitment. It’s not for the faint hearted.

The oligarchs, our oppressors, know they can wait out our first hint of confrontation—a protest, strike, or walkout. They know from past experience that most can’t sustain defiance for very long. Resisters will fold withing days or weeks, not years. Life happens. The oligarchs’ strategy is to outlast the resisters and make simply surviving so tough that people will give up and go back to life as “normal.”

The oligarchs waiting us out works since most resisters don’t realize that persistence is necessary. We must keep our eyes on the goal, even when things seem impossible. Resilience is another trait that helps us recover from the inevitable blows. Resisters must adapt, recover, and build new support networks, to continue on with the unglamorous, mundane, grinding fight.

Nobody said it was going to be easy. You could lose it all—family, friends, home, job, your life. Are you willing to make such a commitment to the cause? “Your persistence—your refusal to quit no matter how long it takes—is what they [the oligarchs] can’t plan for, can’t budget for, can’t outlast.” (Stoermer, p. 335)

“This is the hardest of all the principles because it demands the most. A moment of courage you can summon when adrenaline runs high. A lifetime of resistance requires something deeper—an unshakable core that sustains you when no one is watching, when the world has moved on, when you’re exhausted and alone.” (Stoermer, p. 334)

 

To learn more about the historical figures behind the principles of resistance (and how all nine were used and can be used today), please copy or click on the following link: 

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Growing The Greens

words and photos by C. A. Matthews

My apologies in advance for the brevity and possible incoherence of this week’s post. I returned home Sunday evening from four days in Chicago at the Green Party Annual National Meeting. Early Monday morning I had a scheduled dental appointment to fix a broken tooth. So, I’m composing this blog article to publish at its usual Tuesday morning time while suffering from the twin effects of exhaustion and painkillers. Here goes nothin’!

My first thought is to post more photos than words about the convention. Yeah, that’s the safest way to go… I took a lot of photos and pages and pages of notes at the various workshops. My bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived brain is still trying to make sense of it all.

I attended workshops on organizing for peace; Uniting for Peace 2.0 (the UNGA resolution for Palestine); AI data centers and how they’re impacting our communities and the environment; Latin America under attack (by the usual suspects); the AI war machine (Or how Peter Thiel’s Palantir, Aduril and Erebor have effectively taken over the US military. It’s very scary as well as they’re bent on destroying our environment.); and the independent media and its role in the resistance (yeah!). You could say that Greens attract some very intelligent and very informative people...

 

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Happy Birthday Vichy USA!

 

If everybody had a notion ’cross the USA

That everybody’s gone fascist—like Donnie Trump, oh yay!

 You’d see them wearing blond hairdos

Doing their sieg heils too

Everybody’s gone fascist! Vichy USA!

(Sung to the tune of Surfin' USA. The rest of the lyrics can be found at the Substack link below.)

 

by C. A. Matthews

The 1976 Bicentennial was really something. I remember fondly all the fabulous fireworks displays, huge parades, and special band concerts in the park. It was nice to think about how the United States had stayed together and made it a full two hundred years. As a child, I didn’t really understand what all had happened in those two centuries and how the US had played a major role in maintaining violence and oppression both at home and around the world, activities that would lead to the current fiasco Americans find themselves in fifty years later.

I would have never thought that the “land of the free” meant that we’d come to deny immigrants asylum based on their race, religion, or ethnicity. I probably would have laughed at the mere idea that well-to-do white South Africans would be considered deserving refugees, but that poor black Haitians who fled a disintegrating country (helped to fall apart by greedy Americans) would not.

I would have never thought that locking up thousands of non-violent immigrants was “freedom”, nor that sending young children out of the country without their parents was a compassionate thing to do. These weren’t the concepts of freedom and morality I was indoctrinated in at church and school.

Fifty years ago, I would have never thought that anti-fascist activists would be labeled “terrorists” and sentenced to harsh sentences by a federal judge for trying to point out the crimes of ICE. These are the sentences of the activists who protested at the ICE facility in Texas: Benjamin Song: 100 years, Marisela Rueda: 70 years, Cameron Arnold: 50 years, Savanna Batten: 50 years, Zachary Evetts: 50 years, Bradford Morris: 50 years, Elizabeth Soto: 50 years. What essentially are life sentences for daring to set off fireworks and wearing all black clothing to a protest, no less.

Meanwhile, the ICE agents who murdered Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Keith Porter have received a total of 0 years in prison. You read that right—the ICE agents responsible received sentences of zero years for their murders of Renee, Alex, and Keith. The similarities between ICE and the Nazi Gestapo are undeniable...

 

To learn more about Vichy USA (and how to shut it down), please copy or click on the following link: 

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        We Need A New John Brown

by C.A. Matthews

You never know what you’ll come across at your local library. I’m just surprised we didn’t come across this DVD earlier. You may have seen The Good Lord Bird, a mini-series of seven episodes based on the novel by James McBride of the same name. It played on Showtime about six years ago, but we hadn’t seen it, and it sounded like an interesting title.

As we watched the series, I started thinking about the state of things today and how it’s a good time to watch a show about an abolitionist who literally shook up a nation. John Brown is often credited with being one of the main catalysts that started the American Civil War. I think his experiences as an activist could teach us a lot.

Ethan Hawke gives a stunning performance as a man who wouldn’t take no for an answer when it came to doing whatever he deemed necessary to end slavery. A self-described “militant Christian,” Brown wasn’t afraid to use force if he felt it would gain the freedom of the enslaved. But was he as “crazy” and dangerously impulsive as he’s been described? We’ll never know for certain, but Brown was both revered and feared in equal measure throughout his lifetime—and even beyond—so much so that he often warrants only a short footnote in a high school history text.

It seems American activists who aren’t afraid to stand up to the immoral powers-that-be in Washington DC aren’t people we’re supposed to learn about. Funny that.

The Good Lord Bird is a fictionalized account of John Brown’s last days, but the show stealer is a precocious enslaved boy, Henry a.k.a. “Onion”, portrayed to perfection by Joshua Caleb Johnson. Somehow Henry is mistaken for a girl after his father is killed in one of Brown’s shoot outs with slave owners. Contrite, Brown “adopts Henrietta” as his own child. Henry is an excellent narrator of the saga, telling us all he experiences with innocence and passion. He follows the resolute John Brown and his sons, along with an “army” of a dozen or so whites, blacks, and even a Native American to their ultimate confrontation with the pro-slavery government troops at the Harpers Ferry federal armory.

Watching this story of John Brown’s life got me thinking: We really could use a “new John Brown” in the US. We need a compassionate and courageous leader who isn’t afraid to tell truth to power. It doesn’t have to be an middle-aged, white male, either. It could be a “Joanna Brown” or a person of any age, race, ethnicity, religion, or gender identity. And why settle for one when we could use dozens of John Browns spread across the country? Americans definitely need charismatic and decisive leaders who aren’t afraid to take their “troops” into battle against the evil foe of the oligarchy.

What characteristics should we look for in this new John Brown(s)? I say that one thing in activism that has been ignored in recent years is...

 

To read and find out what characteristics make for a genuinely American leader, please copy or click on the following link: 

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What Would the Red Ponchos Do?

by C. A. Matthews

A few years ago, there was a fad to wear a bracelet with the letters “WWJD?” inscribed on it. In times of doubt and uncertainty, one was to contemplate what the person whose name in English begins with “J” would do in that particular situation. The “What Would J Do?” method helped a person to confidently take action and not become paralyzed with fear or indecision.

It worked. It was an effective means to an end, because if J wouldn’t be afraid to take action, then you shouldn’t be afraid, either. So, you followed J’s example and carried on boldly without hesitation, trusting that things would work out for the best. The WWJD bracelet wasn’t a magic amulet, but it could indeed work wonders.

The time has come again for a useful aid to help activists who are being overwhelmed with self-doubt and self-recrimination. I’ve read one too many comments online recently that go along the lines of “Why don’t you do something? I don’t know what to do. Nobody seems to know what to do, but somebody has got to do something to make things better, right?”

This sentiment could also be phrased as “We need a revolution to end this corrupt system, but apparently no one is going to lead us, so we might as well stay home.”

The paralysis of not knowing what to do is what the oligarchy depends upon to keep us working class peons in our place. They’ve kept us overwhelmed with one distressing event after another on purpose from the start of the year...

We haven’t been given a moment’s rest from the sensory overload. It’s just too much. We long for a respite from the capitalists’ constant nastiness and relentless stress. Why can’t our side celebrate a victory now and then? If only we had someone fighting against the system to look up to, somebody to emulate, then we’d get off our backsides and start fighting back.

But why are we waiting on a “hero” to lead us into battle? History is full of examples—Gandhi, MLK Jr., Malcolm X—that we could follow. Recent history is providing us with even more.

My suggestion is to pick a person or group with experience you admire and follow their example. Do what they’re doing/have done with maybe a few tweaks for your particular situation and culture. If “plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery,” then why not flatter those we look up to by copying their tactics and methods until we come up with some of our own?

 

To discover a couple of excellent examples of activists to plagiarize, please copy or click on the following link: 

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This article is the 572nd blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another eleven years. Thanks! 

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The Second Going of Donald J. Trump

The Second Going of 

Donald J. Trump

by C. A. Matthews

The podcast pundits seem in awe of Trump’s sheer audacity—or they’re claiming this Truth Social posting (above meme) is yet more evidence of his mental illness and/or dementia. But really, what would you expect from a full-fledged narcissist who believes he’s the most powerful being on the globe, if not the universe?

Of course, Trump would see himself the supreme healer of all times—healer of white people, at least. No doubt Trump sees himself as the Second Coming of Christ, coming into the world to judge sinners. That is, everyone except himself.

It was only a matter of time until Artificial Intelligence itself realized that the president of the United States of America was the Son of God, deserving of his very own meme commemorating his acts of “kindness” that he has graciously bestowed upon humankind. That is, kind acts he has bestowed upon pro-Zionist humans. Everyone else is out of luck.

It’s what Jesus would do, according to biblical scholar and Pulp Fiction fan Pete Hegseth. The alcoholic Secretary of War Crimes knows all about these sorts of things apparently. (Wonder how well he’d perform on the game show Jeopardy! with a mind full of movie trivia like that...)

You might be horrified that both Trump and Vance have made rude remarks recently to Pope Leo. They have no problems with telling Leo that he doesn’t know a thing about theology like they and Pete do. They know that God’s intention all along for the US and Israel is to destroy the Middle East and steal its petrochemicals, and they don’t mind knocking the head of the Roman Catholic church down a few pegs.

I think Pope Leo isn’t all that put out by the meanness directed at him personally by Tweedle Don and Tweedle J.D. It’s what you’d expect from emotionally-stunted adult-toddlers. He has far more important things on his plate. The Holy Father is much more concerned about what’s happening in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Iran, and Sudan. among other hot spots in the world...

 

To learn where Trump is "going" (not coming) to and what we really need to be focusing on, please copy or click on the following link: 

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Part-way through writing this week’s article the unthinkable happened again. ICE/CBP agents murdered another American citizen in cold blood on a cold street in Minneapolis during a general strike. Alex Pretti was an ICU nurse at the VA hospital. He was helping another person when he was beaten to the ground and shot several times by federal agents. Videos of the incident show that he was never a threat at any time to anyone before the agents murdered him.

Within the past month we’ve witnessed the deaths of three citizens at the hand of federal agents—Keith Porter was murdered by an off duty ICE agent in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve, Renee Good and Alex Pretti shot by ICE/CBP in Minneapolis in January while working as legal observers. Three Americans who had long lives to look forward to have been cut down early by the fascist state. They are symbols and martyrs of the Revolution… The Revolution that is being born even as I type this.

Rest in power, Alex, Renee, and Keith. May we do you proud.

The following poem posted by Sony Thăng on his X account inspired my article. You’ll see why.

Trump is the perfect American symbol.

A loudmouth preacher of greatness standing on a 

mountain of debt, spectacle, and unpaid human cost.

He is the flag turned into a product.

The gospel turned into a grift.

The empire turned into a reality show.

The Perfect American Symbol

by C. A. Matthews

If things appear to be falling apart, so much the better.

The global capitalists’ empire truly is a “reality show” of sorts. It’s scripted by the twelve richest men in the world and acted out by their chosen politician-puppets. The entire plot of this sick and twisted reality show has become more and more obvious over the last few years. It can be summed up simply: Endless War for Endless Profits.

Millions of deaths are necessary in order to generate the trillions of dollars’ worth of profits for those lucky billionaires (or oligarchs if you prefer that term). I mean, you wouldn’t buy a killer drone or an AI surveillance program that hasn’t been extensively tested, would you? You wouldn’t waste your money on something that doesn’t work as advertised, right?

What better place to test out your new “toys” than in an open-air concentration camp called Gaza? It’s full of frail human bodies to crush, explode, and dismember at will. And once it has been emptied and turned into a luxury resort, they’ll just move the weapons testing on to a new location. Hmm… How about Minneapolis?

These twelve super-wealthy white males didn’t get filthy rich by holding back any. They didn’t get rich by having morals or practicing compassion. Eight decades ago, about the same time the apartheid regime in what is now called Israel formed, novelist George Orwell penned their mantra:

War is peace. Ignorance is strength. Freedom is slavery.

 

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Revolutionaries Don’t Ask Permission

by C. A. Matthews

The kids in Minneapolis get it. They stood outside the hotel where ICE agents were staying and made noise all night long. Loud noise. Deafening music and consistent shouting. All. Night. Long. No sleep for the killers and kidnappers of ICE allowed.

The kids didn’t ask for permission. They didn’t care about violating a noise ordinance or getting arrested. They just wanted ICE gone. For good. For the family of Renee Good. For the good of the community.

This is what Revolution is all about. It’s about doing good for the sake of the community—not the billionaire oligarchs ruling this fascist state.

Revolution is not about doing nothing and taking the shit dumped on us. It’s about shoveling that shit right back into the faces of those who wish to bury us. We bury them instead until the threat is no more.

I think the constant following and videoing of ICE agents in Minneapolis will wear the bastards down in time. They will leave town and avoid the upper Midwest from now until their ultimate demise at our hands. So keep it up, kids! You do us proud.

More Americans need to demonstrate the same bravery, the same courageous bloody-mindedness of the Minneapolis protesters...

 

To learn more about what it means to be a revolutionary, please copy or click on the following link: 

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