We Can Still "Make Them Bleed"

Thoughts on Dealing With the Neofascist Majoirity

Eighty years ago, a well-organized group called the Polish Home Army launched an almost unbelievable uprising against the Nazis who had held Warsaw for five years. They had planned it for many months, and had somehow kept it a complete secret from the Gestapo.

The Poles had waited until the Russians, who had been pushing the Germans back across the Soviet Union for two years, reached the other bank of the Vistula. Within two days the vast majority of Warsaw was liberated. They expected the Soviets to quickly cross the river and link up with them, something that could easily have been accomplished. But to their horror, the Red Army did nothing.

Not only that, the Kremlin refused to allow the western allies to drop supplies to the gallant Poles until it was too late. Josef Stalin did not want to have to deal with an independent Polish government that had the courage to liberate itself. He wanted puppets, and didn’t allow his army to move until after the gallant Poles had been overcome after two months of savage fighting. In the great Polish film director Andrezj Wajda’s film Kanal about the uprising, one member of the Home Army acknowledges that they have no chance of winning. “But at least we can make them bleed,” he says.

Our situation is not nearly that bad — yet — except in one way: The Poles were brutalized by the Russians and the Germans. WE voted to do this to ourselves. I thought of that this week, when the collection of contemptible sellouts called the Republican members of Congress sold out the American people and passed the bill to strip health care from millions and make the tax cuts for billions permanent.

Most of them, except for a few of the stupidist like Alabama football coach turned senator Tommy Tuberville, knew very well that this was bad for America and might even be bad for them, but they did it all because their Fuhrer told them to, just like all those Germans who died for their Fuhrer decades ago. The vast majority would perform fellatio on Donald Trump in public if he demanded it, something that would be in a sense less humiliating.

But what do the rest of us do now?

Metaphorically, make them bleed. Do not cooperate or normalize anything these bastards are doing. When the effects of all that they have done begin to bite, hard, make sure that the people who suffer know who did this to them, and why.

Yesterday was our nation’s birthday. I’ve been reading David Blight’s great biography of Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom. Douglass said in 1865 that the end of slavery meant we had to create a new nation from the best and the ashes of the old. Now, we’ll have to overcome these monsters and do it again.

But first, we must make that possible. The Trump Republican Party has to be utterly destroyed as a political force, and the Democrats need to be reformed and revitalized and the obscenities being committed against us seem to be doing that.

We have to be patient, but determined to win. Because we really can’t survive the consequences of losing.

PS: By the way, there are no “moderate Republicans” today. Of the three votes in the U.S, Senate against their “big beautiful bill,” Susan Collins woried it might cost her reelection next year; Rand Paul refused ¹to increas the deficit and Thom Tillis has been driven out of the Senate by Trump, is retiring and has nothing to lose.

In the House, only two Republicans said no. Kentucky’s Thomas Massie, another deficit hawk, and Pennsylvania’s Brian Fitzpatrick, who represents a moderate district that was actually won by Kamala Harris.

The other 218, including every GOP congressperson from Michigan, acted as enemies of the people. Don’t forget.

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