Dana Blankenhorn

The Privilege of Struggling Against Taliban and Oligarchs

I had no idea I was privileged until I moved into my present house.

My new neighbors were all black. Lower middle class. They worked hard. They had bought into the neighborhood 15 years before, in a rush, after the Open Housing Act enabled “integration” in Atlanta. It was, in fact, just a new form of segregation. But they were thankful for what they had, with a stubborn working-class pride in what they did and what they had done.

They raised me. (Mrs. House here lived to be 101. She was 99 and still going strong when I took this picture.)

About 20 years ago, with Afghanistan underway and Iraq coming, Republicans talked about how “we have to fight them over there, so we won’t have to fight them here” and about how “freedom isn’t free.”

Now we are fighting them here. The American Taliban and economic oligarchs represent the whole of today’s Republican Party.

They were right about one thing, however. Freedom isn’t free.

The Siege of America

Americans have felt under siege for over 13 years now.

The present era of history, the backlash against President Obama and all Americans who supported him, began within days of his election.

It has only accelerated since.

First, Obama himself was declared illegitimate, other, a foreigner. This lie made it easy to define Obama’s supporters in the same way.

Vladimir Putin used this hatred to make Donald Trump President. There is no longer any serious question. Trump was Putin’s man.

Trump created the conditions for a Second American Civil War. It began his first year in office. It only grew hotter after the murder of George Floyd.

Every American, even the most fervent Trump supporters, learned in 2020 that they were a minority among Americans. This broke their faith in the American Constitution, as the Confederacy broke faith with it in 1861. As was true then, government “of the people, by the people, for the people” was redefined to mean only some people.

Many Republicans still support Russia over Ukraine. Others seek to drop their own past into a memory hole, while retaining the essence of Putinism. They believe only those loyal to their twisted, anti-American ideals has a right to rule. They believe women should be slave to a man’s sperm, that blacks should be slaves to whites, that gays should be slave to straights, and that only history reflecting this may be taught. Anyone sympathizing with Obama’s America deserves to be oppressed, forced to repeat lies and made to shut up, forever.

This is what makes Ukraine the real turning point of history. The war in Ukraine is revealing the Civil War within America. The minority is as armed and angry as the South was in 1860.

The Siege of Ukraine

We’re now in the most dangerous and (for outsiders) nerve-racking portion of what I’m going to call Ukraine’s War for Independence.

It’s the siege.

Having spent most of the arsenal they came in with, Russia is trying to destroy Ukrainian cities and starve out the people, wrecking utilities, food supplies and safe gathering places. It won’t work. If you can’t take the people (and they can’t) you can’t take the place. That’s the lesson of Iraq, the lesson of Afghanistan, the lesson of Vietnam and nearly every other war since the Second World one. The only wars that work are wars of extermination. Ukraine is as big as Texas, with a population like California.