In Bolivia today a charioteer whispers in our ear; “All glory is fleeting” as went the custom of Imperial Rome for parades of triumph; as America and Europe choose from starkly divergent futures in our elections and timed to force a re-evaluation of the threat to civilization represented by Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, Nazi ideologist and figurehead of the global Fourth Reich who slept with a copy of Mein Kampf on his nightstand in place of a Bible for many years as he modeled himself on Hitler and his political performance on Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, star agent of Putin who has engulfed us in the ten theatres of World War Three which includes subversion of America’s elections, Trump the rapist and standard bearer of theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and the dehumanization and theft of citizenship of women as chattel slaves through assault on the legal rights of bodily autonomy and reproduction, champion of white supremacist terror and the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison bond labor and theft of citizenship through vote suppression, toady of oligarchs and capitalist robber barons responsible for the largest shift in wealth from public to private hands in our history and suppression of unions, Trump who plans in his next turn as President not only the subversion of our democracy to t theocratic fascist tyranny but in granting capital and fossil fuel tycoons a free hand in plundering our resources will consign humankind to extinction.
In our elections the heart of humankind will be weighed against all of this, and I fear that we will be found nowhere near lighter than a feather. Anubis help us.
Yet those of us who resist all of this may be in the minority, while those who would enslave us and who hope by our degradation and subjugation to win membership in elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege have laid careful plans and committed vast dark money to the fascist cause, and in the struggle between good and evil in the human heart some avoid choosing a future to work toward. Perhaps the citizen electorates have not yet seized the streets in total mobilization to vote because they do not understand the true depth of our peril or that we will lose the vote and meaningful citizenship if we allow the enemy to capture the state as they did in the Stolen Election of 2016.
I will never forget a story my mother told me of a previous election and why every vote is crucial; she had been assigned to teach English and enculturate to our society a group of Cambodian refugees who had arrived in our town of Sonoma having never seen things like drinking faucets and were functionally without basic living skills, one of the many functions of public schools.
All of them vanished during an election, drifting back to school in small groups a couple weeks later. Mom asked one of them; “Where did you all go, and why?”
“To the hills. New President, soldiers come now,” was the reply.
“That can’t happen here.”
“That’s what we thought, before Pol Pot.”
I thought so too, before Trump.
Coup Attempt Fails In Bolivia | HuffPost Latest News
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bolivia-army-coup-fears_n_667c77afe4b07cb66c6caa08
Bolivia’s president urges citizens to take to streets to defend against apparent coup
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/26/luis-arce-bolivia-coup?CMP=share_btn_url
Events leading up to this:
Accidental president or coup-plotter? Trial lays bare Bolivia’s polarization
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/05/bolivia-jeanine-anez-trial?CMP=share_btn_url
Bolivia’s new leftwing president: ‘We have reclaimed democracy’
How Bolivia’s left returned to power months after Morales was forced out
Is Bolivia poised to swing back towards socialism?
Silence reigns on the US-backed coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia | Mark Weisbrot
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/10/evo-morales-interview-bolivia-mas-election
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/09/luis-arce-interview-bolivia-morales-coup
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/07/bolivia-elections-coup-mas-morales-anez
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/05/bolivia-coup-jeanine-anez-evo-morales-mas
Here follow my previous essays on Bolivia:
March 16 2021 A Reckoning for State Terror and Tyranny in Bolivia Signals Hope for Our Own in America
In Bolivia the new government has issued a warrant for the arrest of Interim President Jeanine Añez, figurehead of the 2019 coup against champion of the people Evo Morales. This is a reckoning for state terror and tyranny in Bolivia; can we too in America renounce and purge our betrayers from among us?
Key figures of the American front junta for whom arrest warrants have also been issued include former Justice Minister Álvaro Coimbra, former General William Kaliman, former Police Chief Iván Calderón, and Luis Fernando Camacho, Governor-Elect of Santa Cruz province; a cabal of state terror and fascist tyranny like that of which Trump was the figurehead, including Attorney General William Barr and Chad Wolf, Acting United States Secretary of Homeland Security, who sent federal troops and secret police to brutalize and abduct Black Lives Matter protestors hoping some of them would assault and kill his officers, and deniable forces of white supremacist terror and treason including the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers to enact a national campaign of arson, destruction, and racist violence, transforming a movement for equality and justice into a race war and insurrection as a pretext for the occupation of Democratic cities opposed to the fascist tyranny of Trump and the Republican Party in order to reinforce this illegitimate regime of Russian puppets and Nazi revivalists founded in the Stolen Election of 2016 and complete the fascist coup against democracy in America.
It has now been over two months since the horrific January 6 Insurrection, yet unlike Mussolini Trump and his monstrous family, co-conspirators, and collaborators in treason and terror remain unhung and free to enact further death and destruction of our citizens and monkeywrenching of our values of democracy and institutions of government. Perhaps there has been a clerical error, like the misprint which begins the dystopian film Brazil which prophecies our time so well.
The people of Bolivia have reclaimed their democracy from the jaws of the fascist beast, as have we in the victory of love over fear and hate with the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris; now we must follow their example in purging our betrayers from among us.
October 18 2020 Bolivia and America: Parallel Elections
Bolivia votes today in an election overseen by the organization which helped put a tyranny in power through a coup against the greatest living leader any nation in the Americas can claim, Evo Morales. Both here and in its nearest parallel, America, the elections are a forlorn hope of liberty which swim against the current of massive vote suppression and every weapon in the arsenal of authoritarian force and control.
Because the current regime of Bolivia is a puppet of American interests, the parallel only goes so far; the fate of Bolivia is a canary in the coal mine of the Fourth Reich’s hegemony of power and privilege, whereas if Trump can seize another Stolen Election as he did in 2016 as the vassal of Putin and agent of the subversion of democracy, there will be no force of balance as the guarantor of global democracy, and Trump’s allies in totalitarian fascism, Xi Jinping in China, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Narendra Modi in India, Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, Victor Orban in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and far too many others, the foremost of whom is former KGB Colonel and Tyrant of Russia Vladimir Putin who maneuvered his puppet into the White House through lies and propaganda and the vast dark wealth of oligarchs to open the way for his Great Powers conflict with Turkey for dominion of the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
No, the stakes for the destiny of humankind in the epochal struggle between totalitarian fascism and humanistic democracy are not as high in Bolivia as they are in America, nor the consequences as generalized and global; except, of course, for the people of Bolivia.
Let us give to fascism and tyranny the only reply it merits; Never Again.
And the very next day, I was so glad to be able to celebrate victory and the triumph of democracy in my post of October 19 2020, Victory in Bolivia; Democracy has triumphed against overwhelming odds in Bolivia; there is jubilation and a massive festival in the streets of its cities today as the people celebrate their repudiation of American imperialism and corporate influence.
Liberty has emerged victorious from its existential struggle with tyranny in Bolivia. Despite the enormous forces arrayed against liberty both internally and internationally, despite the shadow of American imperialism and the ravages of plutocratic capitalism, despite state terror and repression, the people have refused to submit and won their freedom.
Today my hope that we can do the same here in America is renewed.
August 9 2020 Tracks of a Monstrous Tyranny: the Revolution Challenges Bolivia’s Fascist Government
Like the tracks of a monstrous tyranny left in the blood of its victims, Bolivia’s fascist coup against democracy leaves an unmistakable trail of its criminal villainy; for it has suspended elections for the third time. They are afraid to face the judgement of the people, but face it they will, whether by the vote or the gallows.
And there is resistance; for a week now, protests have shut down the nation and are hammering apart fractures between the oligarchic capitalist elites and the government which seized power in a military coup. As Laurence Blair and Cindy Jiménez Bercerra write in the Guardian, “Demonstrators in Bolivia have dynamited Andean passes, scattered boulders across highways and dug trenches along rural roads to protest against repeated delays to a rerun of last October’s deeply contentious election, which led to the downfall of the long-serving leftwing president Evo Morales.
As the country’s death toll from the coronavirus pandemic mounts, more than 100 roadblocks and marches nationwide – convened on Monday by Bolivia’s main workers’ union and indigenous and campesino movements allied to Morales’s Movement Towards Socialism (Mas) – have brought the country to a standstill for six days.”
For this iniquity does not enjoy the support of the people, but is a puppet regime of American colonial imperialism and extractive plutocratic exploitation. The crimes against humanity and subversions of democracy perpetrated by this authoritarian state of force and control are without number, but principal among them are the repression of unions and political dissent and the arrest of their leaders, massacres and ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples on a scale which approaches genocide, the use of rape gangs to repress dissent and destroy matriarchal-led native cooperatives, the silencing of journalism and a campaign of arson against radio stations and other media forums, the dismantling of the public healthcare system and the use of brutality and violence in the expulsion of the Cuban volunteer doctors who were the sole recourse to medicine for the poor, and the sabotage of the economy through privatization and the transfer of ownership of natural resources and manufacture to foreign investors.
Interim president Jeanine Áñez has acted as a proxy of American interests and foreign plunder, has enacted a regime of brutal repression to deliver those profits to her puppeteers, and enforced her stolen election through invasion of indigenous-held areas in the free zone of Chapare. Few governments rely on sexual terror and brute force to the degree her regime in Bolivia has; for parallels one must look to the patriarchal insurgency of Boko Haram and to the state terror of Duvalier’s Haiti and his Tonton Macoutes.
To this madness and inhumanity we have given our blessing, as America fattens on the pain of others like a parasite.
Torch of Liberty 
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