Nicker on 8/9/2025 at 12:56
I originally drafted this topic towards the end of the last election, assuming that common sense and decency would prevail, and that the USA would need to do some healing by addressing the root causes of its fascio-fascination. With the triumph of lunacy, the idea of healing seemed like a pipe dream but, after rethinking things, I now believe that a process of Truth & Reconciliation might help the USA extract itself from its present death spiral.
DJT is a moral black-hole and there are many legislators and enablers who have been drawn into his deadly orbit. They are committed to his success because, at this juncture, they see no way out. It's do or die and the health of the nation (or the world) is a secondary concern to their own survival. Of course many of them now realise that survival is contingent on completely surrendering their humanity, and ultimately leads to being consumed by the singularity of DJT's diseased ego. There is no inner circle, only an infinitely dense, dark point of no return.
But what if there was a real possibility of escape? What if a significant number of those people, circling the drain, could save themselves and their country? What if they had a real option to shift momentum before the whole thing goes off the cliff with them pointlessly pumping the breaks?
I suggest that a bi-partisan commission of Truth & Reconciliation might be that opportunity. Such a process cannot happen while the abuse is still taking place, but the realistic offer of it could create a fork in the road, an escape route where enough enablers could change course and avoid destruction, personal and national. This wouldn't mean avoiding any consequences for bad choices but it could offer an alternative to the threat of serious sanctions or prosecution.
Truth & Reconciliation is a process first proposed and enacted by Nelson Mandela (AFAIK), following the end of Apartheid in South Africa.
As summarized by AI, it's mandate was to:
Investigate human rights violations by both the apartheid government and anti-apartheid movements between March 1, 1961, and October 8, 1990.
Promote healing and reconciliation from the wounds of apartheid and build a more peaceful society.
Facilitate restorative justice. Instead of focusing on prosecution, the TRC prioritized uncovering the truth through testimony from both victims and perpetrators.
Canada presently has a similar commission for resolving the historical abuse and exploitation of its First Nations and it's lingering, harmful effects. It has been and continues to be very effective in navigating the morass of issues. It is far from perfect, it is laborious and uncomfortable, but it is effective and adaptive. I believe it has tipped the balance and enabled meaningful change.
I suggest that crafting and offering a bi-partisan Truth & Reconciliation Commission, in the USA, at this time, could help avert total disaster and speed a meaningful process of healing the national psyche.
Thoughts?
Starker on 8/9/2025 at 19:46
For such a process to work, you would need all sides to be willing to be honest participants, more or less. That ain't happening. And let's not forget that the US chose everything that is happening while being fully aware of what was on the table. A plurality of people voted for this. They chose a leader who had his followers attack the Capitol, promised to inflict pain and misery on the people they don't like, and was known for his shameless venality.
When the supporters of the current regime see what's happening -- for example people being sent to overseas torture prisons without a trial or any due process and their lives being destroyed for no good reason -- what do they do? Do they feel disgusted? Do they recoil in horror? Do they protest it? No, they cheer it on and ask for more. They want more human rights violations, not less.
Twist on 8/9/2025 at 23:31
Quote Posted by Starker
For such a process to work, you would need all sides to be willing to be honest participants, more or less. That ain't happening. And let's not forget that the US chose everything that is happening while being fully aware of what was on the table. A plurality of people voted for this. They chose a leader who had his followers attack the Capitol, promised to inflict pain and misery on the people they don't like, and was known for his shameless venality.
When the supporters of the current regime see what's happening -- for example people being sent to overseas torture prisons without a trial or any due process and their lives being destroyed for no good reason -- what do they do? Do they feel disgusted? Do they recoil in horror? Do they protest it? No, they cheer it on and ask for more. They want more human rights violations, not less.
I almost agree 100%, except for one part: A sizable portion (a majority?) of those supporters have no idea what's happening. They would dismiss everything you said in your second paragraph as fake news, or just roll their eyes at you like you're some kind of kooky extremist.
My wife's extended family hails from a small, midwestern farm town. They are kind, warm, decent people who would offer you the shirt off their backs to help you out -- no matter who you are.
But they're Trump supporters. They have
no idea what's really happening.
Blame it on social media, corporate media... all of the above, whatever. We now live in tightly sealed information silos. There is no common reality.
We can't "reconcile" without a common truth.
demagogue on 8/9/2025 at 23:40
This is part of my day job because we're often writing about transitional justice processes for other countries, so it was natural for me to think about the fact that the US has never had a real transitional justice process for its original sins, the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, slavery and Jim Crow, and basically theft of the entire West and Southwest from Mexico, and its failures to do that on all three of those fronts have left a culture of impunity and contempt and hatred for Native, Black, and Latin Americans.
Anyway, yes, I've been writing about the need for the US to have its own transitional justice processes for a long time now... Often you'll see people bring up individual threads of it, like the Land Back movement for Native Americans, reparations for the Black community, tearing down Confederate flags and statues, & here you're talking about a Truth & Reconciliation process it looks like just for Trump's time in office.
By the way, phrasing it like that implies like other T&R processes where amnesty is given to low level police that tortured people, which isn't exactly the place where the US is. We're not at the stage where the entire gov't is a fascist abuse machine from top to bottom, so there's not a single unblemished official, everything is covered up, and there is little chance of accountability. We're still at the stage where abuses are special and flagrant, and everybody linked to them needs to be investigated, prosecuted, and do jail time.
But my larger point is that a TJ process needs to aim big, and cover all of the historic abuses as part of the same process across just about every public sector, legal and agency reforms, prosecutions, reparations, land management, management of history, memory, public signaling, & public education, lustration, etc., etc. It's something that needs to be comprehensive and takes decades to work through. It shouldn't be thought of as just this or that little piece in a short time frame. Well to begin with, it's something where you have to research the other examples out there, since over 80 countries have had TJ processes, so there's a lot of experience out there we can learn from. But definitely the US is due for some TJ self-reflection & real action to exorcise the demons.
- - - - - -
Edit: Going of Starker's & Twist's points, you need a public process to go over the truth, so the prosecution of Trump & other officials if they've had conduct at the criminal level needs to have very public trials where commentators are going over the evidence, and then there should be some public process going over the evidence of all kinds of official crimes.
It's like anything where there's a massive population denying basic truths... Like at the end of WWII, it was very important that they got local German communities and bused them to the death camps and made them look at the bodies directly so it couldn't be denied. In Israel, if there were any justice in the world, they need to take every village and bus them to Gaza to look at the rubble, the starvation, the toddler skulls with sniper bullet holes in them, etc., directly so the intentionality of it can't be denied.
Whatever is the equivalent of that is what the US needs to do, but anyway, it's something that has to be done town by town, locally, where people are forced to recon with the truth in front of them.
It'd be a hard sell if Maga supporters have a say in it happening. But I can foresee some tracks where Maga collapses sensationally and are out of power as long as Republicans were shut out after the Great Depression. Just today Trump's letter to Epstein was published, and against most people's assumption, it's clearly a drawing of a naked girl, in that age between getting pubic hair but before her breasts develop (take a step back, by the way, to consider that this is how we have to talk about our president now) and not a woman. The more people dig, the worse it's going to get, and it has no bottom.
But it gives me some hope that at some point much of the worst things are going to be accepted by the public enough to collapse the movement and leave a Democrat-only party that may have the ability to put something like this together. But as with anything we'll see.
There's a vocal thread in the public discourse that everything happening right now is just the prelims for a bona fide fascist movement in the US in the 2030s, that really will need to end with the Dear Leader, an actual competent one, being hoisted upside-down on a meat hook or having his body burned in front of his bunker, or the like, by the end of it.
But I sometimes think, if we do go down that track, it's going to be more like Franco, or so many "soft" dictatorships, where it'll just be 40 years under the thumb of a competent (enough) dictator, and it just kind of fizzles away at the end, but no real TJ process follows. It's really hard to predict, but obviously it's best if there is a real TJ process that forces people to seriously recon with our history and take real action on it. So in that sense, it's better if there's some incident or basis fomenting a sensational and definitive collapse of the movement, and one party left in control that has the chance to do something about it.
Starker on 9/9/2025 at 09:35
I believe that there certainly are people who remain either blissfully unaware or at least find it easier to behave as if nothing is happening, but when it has come to the point that the state media is actively cheering on that their president is ----ing Satan, it's hard to believe that the majority remains completely unaware of the corruption and abuses. The attack on the Capitol at the very least should have pierced the bubble.
Harvester on 9/9/2025 at 12:41
Well, a couple of months ago I was in a discussion with some Christian Trump supporters about innocent people being deported to El Salvador and put in torture prisons, and most of them knew only about that one high profile case that's been all over the news. They came with memes claiming that he was a gang member (which he's not, those memes are false), but also most of them didn't know that this was just one case of many. They also didn't know that the El Salvador president is a dictator and even calls himself so, they asked to see the source for that claim (it's been on many news sites so that's not hard to find) and parrot the Trump line that the president of El Salvador is just cleaning up his country. Some of them knew more and didn't care that innocent people were being sent there, a position I can't understand at all from people claiming to be Christians, but I found most of them were mostly clueless about what's really going on but still called me an idiot for knowing more than what Fox News and Newsmax are saying. Needless to say, I am no longer on that Christian meme site since I feel next to no kinship with such people. I mean we can post funny Bible memes all day but frankly I prefer the company of atheists or people of other religions who are well-informed and compassionate to the company of these poorly-informed and sometimes plain cruel nationalist Christians.
DuatDweller on 9/9/2025 at 15:35
If I were to abuse myself, would that be abuse?
I wonder because I don't condone fanaticism, even if religious.
Remember the biggest gift of God to the world, freedom of choice.
Azaran on 9/9/2025 at 16:11
There's many places around the world where such a commission would be useful. Too many unspeakable atrocities over the last few decades have been committed with complete impunity, and their perpetrators (those still alive anyway), are out and about as we speak, while the crimes are swept under the rug or barely mentioned as footnotes
