Darvish Khan Writes

Comparisons of the American empire to the Roman empire only go so far, but they don’t have to be exact to be striking and relevant. I refer to both empires in the past tense as an act of grammarly prescience.

Both were based on the greatest military war machines of their time; both were dedicated to economic empire and  to the increasing benefit of an oligarchy; both subverted a semblance of republican government with the cult of an elite devoted to militarism and corporatism; both were given to socialized cruelty and greed on an epic scale; both gave rise to totalitarian government in which submission to the gods of the state became the definition of patriotism; and both collapsed on the basis of sheer unsustainability.

The biggest difference between now and then is that the entire world economic and political order is collapsing into statism and totalitarianism. But the American empire is leading the way. It has at most another decade or two. And when the American empire collapses, China and Russia will collapse also, but not all at once.

Modern empires are based on the command of fossil fuels, manufacturing and foreign consumer markets. The age of fossil fuels is almost over and so the age of empire is almost over. Green energy does not allow for empire. This is why the richest and most powerful nations are not willingly going Green. In fact, it is why they oppose going Green.

It will be a protracted and bloody transition to a world based on sustainable energy. It will represent the end of the world as we know it. And this will allow for a merciful and compassionate new beginning.

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American fascism is pretty straightforward. The most difficult thing is to get past denial by dropping linguistic prudery. There is something of a comparison with the phrase, “Black lives matter”. If the response is, well, all lives matter, you have missed the point and revealed your unconscious (or conscious) racism. If the objection to the phrase “American fascism” is that any comparison to the Axis powers is banal, this also misses the point that the  military industrial complex has, as Eisenhower warned it would, come to rule our political economy.

The problem seems to be the sheer inability to grok what’s happened  since the end of the 2nd world war, and in particular the last 20 years. And this is very straightforward. The Spy and War Machine, a corporate enterprise, largely dominates the economy, and domestic and foreign policy. The corporate sector as a whole completely owns our politicians and dictates public policy.

The government is owned by corporations, who dictate the policy that spends our tax dollars. And this obviously includes Democrats just as much as Republicans. Both parties wholly support the Spy and War Machine, endless wars, jingoistic foreign policy, Islamophobia, the support of Salafi fundamentalism in Saudi Arabia and radicalized Judaism in Israel, American exceptionalism, the carceral state, racist law enforcement, wealth and income inequality, corporate control of food and energy production, and refusal to take global warming and climate change seriously. Both parties support a highly militarized and violent corporate state owned and run by oligarchs.

It’s that simple. The United States of Corporate Fascism.

O, and about King Baby Trump: he’s just the mewling and bawling version.

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Religious/ racial nationalism is surging globally, and with more than a little help from the USA. This is hugely ironic, of course, given our putative constitutional mandate to enforce the separation of church and state. But hey, why let the Constitution get in the way of empire? In America, everything is sacrificed to empire- just like in ancient Rome.

The religious right here in the US is largely white, rural, southern, Protestant and Republican. But when Zionists are included, the mix is significantly broadened to include radicalized Jews, often urban and well educated, and many of whom consider themselves liberals. The same goes for Christian Zionists, who are much more numerous: they cross the political spectrum to include liberals, who avow hatred of racism yet embrace Zionist apartheid. This in fact includes every recent president and most of Congress, and goes a long way toward explaining the glorification of the defense budget. Of past living presidents, only Jimmy Carter has criticized Israel as a state sponsor of institutionalized racism, and for which he has been exiled by Democratic Party poohbahs.

Israel is a shining example to many avowed and closet white Christian supremacists for the astonishing success it has had with Zionist apartheid. Israel has done what no other country since the end of the second world war has done- with the exception of South Africa, but which racist experiment failed, in time. Israel remains a roaring success in state sponsored racism. The thinking of dedicated white Christian supremacists goes, if Israel can do it to the Palestinians, we can do it to the Coloreds. It is just a matter of adopting their methods. Hence, among other things, the wall.

We can thank 9/11 and “Shock and Awe” for enshrining Islamophobia as the enduring central basis of US foreign policy. Every president since George Bush has continued to support the entirely fabricated meme that Islam- and not rogue radicalized political actors, is responsible for world terrorism. This jingoistic prevarication is now largely directed at Iran as the primary sponsor of terrorism but which serves entirely to further the geopolitical aims of empire. Big Media, or corporate media, has shamelessly enabled this propaganda.

In India, the rise of the Hindutva BJP party seeks to radicalize the Indian population in a similar manner. Nehru’s legacy is  blamed for subverting India’s greatness with Marxism and secularism. The US and India share a raging Islamophobia as a reaction to the many problems in achieving political consensus in recent decades. Modi’s India would in fact delegitimize a thousand years of Indian Islamic history as an aberration that must be corrected. This absurdist propaganda nonetheless has considerable traction in India- and among Hindu chauvinists elsewhere.

Interestingly, this support comes from unexpected quarters in the most vocal and obnoxious way imaginable. David Frawley, founder of the American Institute of Vedic Studies based in Santa Fe, NM, is a convert to Hinduism and a priest in that faith. He has become more Hindu than the Shankaracharya (roughly, a Hindu Pope) in his utterly dogmatic insistence than Hinduism alone is appropriate to guide India’s destiny. This completely reverses the premise of modern India and, very importantly, authentic Indian spirituality.

India, like the US, has always, more than less, encouraged religious pluralism. The problem from the Hindutva point of view has been shifting political winds that created first Muslim dynasties and then the British Raj which disadvantaged Hindu dynasties. This spanned a time period of over a  thousand years preliminary to the time of independence in 1947. To adopt the position that the “real India” is a purely Vedic India that has been relentlessly compromised by the course of history is not simply jingoistic revisionism, but intellectually and spiritually pathetic.

What Frawley, Hindutvas and religionists so sadly get wrong is that authentic spirituality has little to do with religion – and has even less to do with politics. And that India’s greatest spiritual figures have consistently affirmed this by abjuring politics. That the BJP and the RSS- which organization is based on Hitler’s Brownshirts, along with religious figures turned politicians, and converts to priestly abracadabra- that they would lead (Hindu) India into a spiritual renaissance is laughable and highly destructive.

Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and his brother monks, Sri Aurobindo, Ramana Maharshi, and all the rest of India’s hidden and public saints and masters never got or get directly involved in politics, especially communal (religious) politics. Never.

Religionists never comprehend that the real and exalted masters of spirituality are not exclusively from a given faith, and that it is the exalted masters who represent in their person the acme of spirituality, not the religion which they may profess. This is kindergarten stuff, but completely ignored by the likes of Trump, Netanyahu, Modi and their sycophants.

Avatar Meher Baba, the descent of Vishnu into human form for our time, born in Puné, India, in 1894, emphatically endorsed a secular India and said of Nehru: “There will not be the like (the equal) of Nehru for seven hundred years”. Baba and Mahatma Gandhi met for the first time in 1931 on the SS Rajputana;  Gandhi was going to the Roundtable Conference in England, and for Baba it was the first of many trips to Europe, England and America. Baba advised Gandhi, and other independence leaders such as B. R. Ambedkar, on political strategy, particularly in regard to securing the rights of untouchables, in an independent India. Baba was also the primary source for Gandhi’s non-violent political strategy.

Avatar Meher Baba’s message of divine love has no religious or sectarian basis at all. It is based on Baba’s claim to be the Avatar, the descent of God into human form, the Prophet of our time. Baba was born into the Zoroastrian faith but placed absolutely no spiritual importance on religious beliefs and practices apart from the remembrance of God and the Master and the repetition of his/ her name.

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Fascism, American style, is based on the incoherence of empire. As the clock ticks out on late stage capitalism, aka neoliberalism, the problem of empire becomes more and more desperate. The only strategy left to prop up our enormous political and economic rot is to go full-on Orwellian. Good students of language and politics see this at once.

But many do not. In fact, most do not- even educated elites. American politics has been drifting to the right for decades. So much so, Democrats are now way to the right of Republicans, historically considered. There is no major- or even minor, party (except for the Green Party, which has never gotten more than 2.6% of the vote in a general election) which now represents the working class. There is no significant party which represents democracy or egalitarianism, let alone a party that can articulate the compelling argument for promoting peace and going green.

Both parties are fully in thrall to corporatism and militarism as the defining basis of  both domestic and foreign policy. The malignant trillion dollar defense budget, most of which is outsourced to corporations, sets the agenda for political and domestic life. And the rhetoric of patriotism has doubled down on the need to return to a mythic America that has only existed in the fervid brains of jingoistic marketers.

There is the overarching lie of the free market, when there is no free market. The economy is totally rigged to benefit the rich and powerful, i.e. corporatists. There is the overarching lie of the need to protect “the American way of life”, a life based on “freedom” which is under perpetual attack, when the opposite is true: the US perpetually foments war to fill coffins and coffers by all means violent, overt and covert. Our elections are touted as democracy in action, when they are an extremely bad joke. We claim to be peaceful and law abiding but have the world’s largest gulag of prisons and have the highest per capita incarceration rate as the direct result of a racist criminal justice system.

We claim- that is the president and Congress, to champion human and civil rights, and to especially eschew and condemn anti-Semitism, when we support decades-long virulent and vicious apartheid in the case of Israel (remember, Arabs are Semites). We claim to champion freedom of speech and religion but endorse the world’s greatest Spy Machine and have supported raging Islamophobia as a foreign and domestic policy for decades.

In fact, America is run on Orwellian conspiracy theories which despite being fantastic, are acted upon with the greatest gravity and patriotic zeal.  Liberals champion Russiagate as a narrative of choice as it absolves them from complicity in King Baby’s reign. Conservatives protest that government is useless, after kneecapping it. Big Media loves the bitter political polarization and perpetual crisis for the fantastic revenue it generates, like manna from heaven. But the net result is a weary and angry public which knows it is being relentlessly lied to, but can’t prove it. It doesn’t really want perpetual war and the surveillance state; it doesn’t really want an America armed to the teeth, engaged in massacres and suicide; it doesn’t really want an insufferably low minimum wage, employer based health care, oligarchy, the ravaging of environment, denial of global warming and looming global catastrophe.

But the incoherence of fascism, American style makes it so.

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Sustainability is the global crisis of our time. The machine age, symbolized by the automobile, is carrying us off the cliff. We, the lemmings, are driving the car. It really does seem as if we are powerless to slam on the brakes.

Followers of Meher Baba can take hope, if that’s the right phrase and attitude, in Baba’s two car accidents; one in Prague, Oklahoma on May 24, 1952 and the other in Satara, India on December 2, 1956. Baba and several of his disciples suffered severe injuries, and one died in the Indian accident. Baba said of his injuries that the machine broke his bones in order for him to break the backbone of the machine age. About the Oklahoma accident, Baba said “America has long been clamoring for my blood.” This accident began as a cross country car trip that started in the Carolinas and which happened to retrace the route of the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of Cherokee and other native tribes to Oklahoma. His beloved and most important disciple, Mehera, also suffered severe injuries, especially to her face and skull. They both shed blood on American soil.

Baba claims he slammed the brakes on the machine age. We have to wait and see what that entails. In 1954 at Meherabad, India, Baba issued his Final Declaration. This was two years after the accident in America and two years before the accident in India. This is one of the most intriguing and arresting statements he ever made.

The Final Declaration announces that he will suffer a strange disease which will cause his humiliation, result in the breaking of his silence (a decades’ long physical silence), effect his violent death and result in his glorification. And immediately before or after the breaking of his silence, 3/4 of the world will be destroyed. This series of events will be of a short duration, and is referred to as his Manifestation, which will be followed by 700 years of increasing love and peace, after which he will return again which will be the juncture of the beginning and end of a cycle of cycles, representing billions of years.

This announcement was amended by two subsequent announcements, a Clarification and a Confirmation, which state that the Final Declaration was given in both his language and our language, and is not all to be taken literally.

Baba dropped the body in 1969, 15 years after the Final Declaration.

The Avatar is the Sustainer, the Preserver and Protector of all. Each of his advents makes the adjustments necessary for creation to continue. Our machine age is increasingly being recognized as an extreme crisis in sustainability that cannot continue for much longer. The brakes are being slammed.

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We are well into the age of Orwellian shitfuckery. A good start date for this age is 9/11/2001. This marks the symbolic crashing of the corporate state and the consequent panic that elevated demagoguery as the primary basis for a US foreign policy devoted to empire. 9/11 and the resulting campaign of  “Shock and Awe” plunged America into a state of continuous carnage and lying.

This shitfuckery initiated by George W. Bush was continued by Obama who, like Bill Clinton before him, sanitized the neoliberal project as a bipartisan affair, but which was rudely exposed by King Baby Trump to conceal the neofascism we now find ourselves wallowing in. The neoliberal state lead directly to the neofascist state.

How did this transformation happen? It was very simple. The failing corporate state embraced militarism so ardently on a bipartisan basis for so long  and with such committed lying that the political birth of King Baby Trump emerged as a magnificent turd. A really beautiful, beautiful turd.

Orwellian shitfuckery of corporatism, militarism and racism regaled by a compliant Big Media as patriotism has become normalized. This is who we now are. King Baby may stay or go, but the corporate state in support of the Spy and War Machine will remain. We will remain eternal friends with the religious and racial fascism of Saudi Arabia and Israel. We will continue to be completely bamboozled and bullied by our inverted definition of anti-Semitism  to believe that institutionalized racism in the name of the Terror Wars and Zionist apartheid is perfectly legitimate- even to the point of supporting war crimes as a patriotic duty.

There is no end to the age of shitfuckery as long as we refuse to give up the racialized corporate state and its embrace of death in exploiting the earth and laborers in pursuit of  greed. We would rather die in a global bonfire of shitfuckery.

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