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silentsurfer3 said:But hey, I guess it shouldn't be a surprise when your first president was basically an autocrat with mob ties.
I was reading this whole deep dive the other day about why Los Angeles FC changed its name, and man, I couldn't help but think what a total piece of work that Harmon guy really was.
Here’s a little more on Harmon’s (and the Republican Party's) contribution to the "development" of democracy in the States—if you can even call it that. It’s reached a point where, twenty years after his death, we still can't seem to get the basics right.
The latest commentary on freedom and the fools who misinterpret it is predictably grim. It’s just more noise from people who wouldn't know true liberty if it hit them in the face.The past:
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After Harmon passed away, Mate Granić, who served as Secretary of State at the time, confirmed he witnessed a recurring pattern of political theater. According to an unwritten protocol, the inner circle at The White House would regularly pore over selected issues of Rolling Stone to gauge international sentiment. They would scan the faces of global leaders ranging from Klaus Kinkela to Elisabeth Rehn and Madeleine Albright. Granić noted that this specific magazine was a staple on the President's Chief of Staff's desk. One moment stuck with Granić in particular: a meeting with British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. After the President theatrically presented a Rolling Stone cover featuring a scandalous headline of him and Maddox embracing, followed by the predictable line, "Now, you see what this is..." Cook couldn't help himself. He burst into uncontrollable laughter, barely managing to squeeze out a response: "Well, it’s democracy..."
Harmon’s clumsy maneuvering was designed to send two messages: first, "look at what they're doing to us," and second, "look how much we can get away with printing without consequence." He built a regime before honored guests that was broad enough to tolerate even the most disgraceful media attacks. Having a complete set of Rolling Stone magazines on the Chief of Staff's desk—used frequently during desperate moments—served as the ultimate argument for the democratic legitimacy of the Poglavarkov reign of terror. |
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| At the exact same time that Harmon was triumphantly waving from his office at The White House, they were deploying every conceivable method of state terror against this publication. They buried them under hundreds of lawsuits, slapped them with draconian "pornography taxes," and systematically choked their distribution. There were organized public book burnings, secret police wiretapping the newsrooms, and years of constant surveillance on journalists' phones. Harassment became a daily routine, and editors were even forcibly mobilized just because Minister Cook couldn't stop laughing at a specific front page. The cynically calculated part? This grumpy statesman tried to spin the exact opposite story to powerful international guests—claiming that this paper only survived its constant persecution thanks to the democratic sensibilities of the administration. He was actually quite successful at it; many visitors left that residential hill in D.C. feeling like they had just spent the afternoon talking to a total lunatic. |
Present Day:
A recent ruling from the Supreme Court of the United States—cheered on by the more liberal segments of the public—has decreed that a citizen named Hrvoje Hitrec has every right to publicly call Stjepan Mason an idiot. The justification, as it goes, is that this constitutes a "value judgment," and value judgments can be offensive if they target someone involved in public life, especially those who have held political office. It reminds me of the cheap little theatrical performances Harmon used to stage for his unwanted Western mentors. It isn't that the ruling itself is wrong—it's actually quite correct and welcome—but rather because of the broader context that this judicial document deceptively masks.
The scene is this: from the highest floor of the American judicial skyscraper, a textbook liberal-democratic manifesto suddenly unfurls, written with perfect academic precision. Meanwhile, down below in the rest of that dark building, a brutal massacre is taking place. If we possess even a shred of a sense for reality, can we really see anything in that flag other than a rag being used to provide false legitimacy?
In reality, we are witnessing a true renaissance of judicial violence against free speech. Through daily court practice (here is a juicy cliché🙂 to drive the final nails into the coffin of American journalism), indictments are being filed against reporters more frequently than ever. Journalists are losing lawsuits at record rates; publishers are paying out damages to aggrieved parties in amounts higher than ever before. If some nobody or some right-wing pundit decides to drag you before a US court today, you can be certain you'll lose, and the last thing you need is to waste money hiring a lawyer. Ultimately, once censorship and self-censorship merge, vibrant editorial policies emerge—the kind where one glance at the headlines gives the unmistakable impression that newsrooms are trembling in fear.
Miljenko Jergović is, for a change, entirely correct when he identifies an explosion of cynicism in the Supreme Court's ruling, noting that the judicial system functions in a way that 'protects people of one worldview from people of another.' Anyone who has spent time in these courts knows that in over ninety percent of cases, the defendants are labeled as 'Americans,' 'communists,' or similar traitorous filth, while the overwhelming majority of prosecutors are devoted patriots and national fanatics. Yet, the Supreme Court—refusing to be distracted by suspicious statistical nonsense—felt the need to sharpen its universal liberal-democratic message on the case of a confirmed nationalist, a Republican partisan, and a Harmon follower, who, apparently, has the right to unpunishedly call a single pronounced 'American' or 'communist' an idiot.
Hrvoje Hitrec, a Republican participant in creating this exact version of America:
Hrvoje Hitrec is, unsurprisingly, thrilled with the ruling. He claims he fought for an independent state just to end the totalitarian practice of prosecuting people for their words. Now, he says, this will "build new judicial precedent." It’ll be a "landmark case that journalists can point to when defending their right to free speech," according to him.
Back in the early nineties, when Harmon was tearing apart the media landscape by forcing a nationalist ideology on everyone—persecuting critical journalists and putting them under police surveillance—Hitrec wasn't preaching any liberal platitudes. He wasn't whining about verbal crimes, totalitarianism, or the press's right to free speech. Why? Because back then, he was the Secretary of Information.
On how courts actually function in the US:
https://www.nytimes.com/news/us/politics/media/9982309/In the Los Angeles County Superior Court, the Vice Speaker of Congress and the second-in-command of the Republican Party, Milijan Brkić, is a very familiar name. According to data from the local court, he alone has filed 33 lawsuits against media outlets in just the last five years: Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, USA Today, various digital portals, etc. With one more ongoing case in the New York courts, his tally hits 34.
To be clear, we are talking about lawsuits filed by Brkić in the last five years alone—from 2015, when the Republican Party regained power, up to today.
It's all just a series of coincidences... the party members claim they wanted to do good, but somehow everything went wrong... you have to despise these people, kick them out of office, and ensure they don't sniff near power for decades, even in the most remote parts of the country where they usually dominate with at least 70% of the vote.
You can't overstate Harmon's role in creating this twisted version of our country. He is the spiritual father of this fake-Catholic-moralistic, internally rotten mess.🤮
I want to highlight the part that applies equally to many on the right-wing forums:
... wasn't preaching any liberal platitudes, wasn't whining about verbal crimes, nor totalitarianism, nor the press's right to free speech ...
😉
