Wednesday, October 26, 2016

“Donald Trump and the ‘Rigged Election:’ What’s it all About, Alfie?”


THE DUOPOLY WATCH | Steven Jonas, MD, MPH 

In the Spring of 1918, the Prussian Army launched what proved to be its last major offensive on the Western Front.  It happened that since the Russian Revolution on October 25, 1917 [November 7, new calendar] and the departure of Russia from The Great War, Germany faced only one front.  But even it proved to be too much for an exhausted army, and the offensive failed.  Also, the British naval blockade had been proving to be increasingly effective in depriving Germany of both military and civilian goods, and food.  And so, the government began the negotiations with the Western Powers that eventually led to the Armistice of November 11, 1918, and then after that to the Versailles Treaty, which proved to be so disastrous for the whole of Europe, in the long run. 

However, the two leading commanders of the Prussian Army, Generals Paul von Hindenburg (later the Weimar Republic President who appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor on January 30, 1933) and Erich Ludendorff (who was a Hitler supporter from the mid-1920s), did not like the movement to end the war.  They thought that somehow Germany could fight on and did not only because the civilian government was weak-kneed and thus decided to implement the policy to bring the War to an end.  That the civilian government, especially the Social Democratic Party that was part of it, undertook this policy, after the War, and especially after the imposition the onerous Versailles Treaty, came to called, by the German Right, the “Stab in the Back.”  It was used, over-and-over again, to justify the development of various right-wing parties in Weimar Germany, most especially the Nazi Party.  Hitler and Goebbels were still using the phrase in speeches in the 1930s.

As everybody in the United States and indeed around the world who has any interest in the U.S. Presidential elections knows, Donald Trump, at the end of the last Presidential debate, on October 19, 2016, said that he would not necessarily accept the result of the vote on November 8.  If he thought that “something was going on” (a phrase that he uses constantly to describe supposed conspiracies of all sorts [of course without defining them, much less proving their existence]), he would not do so.  In the past several weeks he and his surrogates have been ramping up the claim that the election is somehow “rigged,” somehow by the Clinton forces, by the media, and by the very new claim that there will be massive voter fraud, by the millions.  This fraud will, of course, occur only in “certain neighborhoods,” “you know which ones I’m talking about.”

It is well-known that the standard Republicans have already begun the plotting to obstruct a Clinton Presidency to the greatest degree possible.  Senator John McCain has already announced that should the Democrats fail to gain 50 seats in the new Senate, that the Repubs. will block any Supreme Court nominees she proposes.  Since the oldest members of the Court are liberals, this would mean that eventually the reactionary Court majority would be re-established, by attrition.  (Would it come to be called “Court Unpacking?”  But that’s another story.)  But back to Trump. 

Click here for the full article. 

Source: The Greanville Post

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