De VS is een fascistische (politie-) staat

Posted on October 20, 2020June 14, 2024 by Willem Wachtmeester

De VS is
het land dat: -heeft geprobeerd meer dan 50 regeringen omver te
werpen (en dat is in veel gevallen gelukt), -heeft een geheime dienst
opgezet die in de eerste 40 jaar van haar bestaan minstens 6 miljoen
mensen heeft vermoord, -heeft een keihard
politie-vrijwilligersnetwerk opgezet dat elke binnenlandse politieke
beweging heeft vernietigd die ‘een bedreiging vormde’ voor de bestaande
overheersing (of die overheersing nu werd uitgevoerd door de Democraten of de Republikeinen,
Ap), -heeft een gevangenissysteem op poten gezet, waarin een groter
percentage van de bevolking werd en wordt vastgezet dan waar ook ter wereld en
dat tevens een wereldwijd geheim gevangeniswezen heeft opgezet waar wordt
gemarteld…… (en waarschijnlijk ook gemoord….)

Het
voorgaande heeft Gabriel Rockhill laten volgen op een uitspraak van
Vicente Navarro, die erop neer komt dat we moeten begrijpen dat in
tegenstelling tot wat ons wordt voorgehouden door de massamedia in de
VS, fascisme geen extreme ontwikkeling is, die gelimiteerd voorkwam
in de geschiedenis, integendeel fascisme heeft zich uitgebreid, is
genormaliseerd en bestaat overal….. (wat mij betreft is Nederland
daar ‘een mooi voorbeeld van’: fascisten als Wilders [PVV] en Baudet [FVD] spreken grote bevolkingsgroepen aan, zoals fascisme voor WOII door de
meeste Nederlanders als een vrij normale politieke stroming werd
gezien, waar de aanhangers dit uiteraard volkomen terecht vonden)

Rockhill
houdt een betoog over democratie, geboren in het Griekenland van
2.500 jaar geleden en dat dit systeem wordt gezien als leidend in de
huidige VS (en de rest van het westen, Ap), fascisme wordt volgens
hem gezien als een ideologie die eens aan de macht kwam en dat in
Europa, ofwel een beperkt deel van de wereld. Dat fascisme werd met
succes door democratische krachten verslagen. Echter daar gaat
Rockhill niet mee akkoord, hij betoogt dat fascisme voor velen andere
waarden vertegenwoordigd en dat het onderdeel is van de
klassenstrijd.

Rockhill
gebruikt m.i. te veel woorden, maar dat is mijn zienswijze en die is
uiteraard niet leidend, vandaar ook dat ik het hele artikel heb
overgenomen. Fascisme is van alle tijden, je kan zelfs een aantal van
de Romeinse dictators uit de oudheid aanwijzen als fascisten, waar
eigen volk altijd voor ging op andere culturen van buiten het
Romeinse rijk, beter gezegd buiten het Italiaanse deel van het
Romeinse rijk.

Vergeet
niet dat antisemitisme (wat mij betreft een vorm van fascisme) al in
de middeleeuwen bestond en zelfs voor WOII was het alom tegenwoordig
in Europa, of dat nu wel of niet gepaard ging met pogroms. Eén van
de bewijzen daarvoor zijn wel gezegden waarin Joden werden afgedaan
als gierige vrekken die iedereen het vel over de oren trokken,
gelukkig gezegden die heden ten dage niet meer of nog amper worden
gebruikt (en dat meestal door fascisten/neonazi’s). Ook in Nederland
was voor WOII het antisemitisme alom aanwezig….. Het is dan ook een
gotspe dat Israël zich toont als een fascistische apartheidsstaat,
in feite gegrondvest en ‘gelegitimeerd’ over de rug van de
holocaustslachtoffers en van de Palestijnen die door Israël worden
behandeld als onmensen….. Misschien is het nog wel erger dat de
westerse landen die de grote fout maakten te helpen aan die holocaust
nu weer partij kiezen voor de onderdrukker in deze: Israël……

De
belangrijkste conclusie uit het schrijven van Rockhill is wel dat
fascisme alom tegenwoordig is, waarbij hij George Jackson aanhaalt,
die stelt dat kapitalisme de bron
is van fascisme (en neoliberalisme, een nog
hardere en nog meer inhumane vorm van het kapitalisme, Ap). Fascisme beoordelen aan de hand van de geschiedenis
in Duitsland, Italië en Japan (waaraan je ook Turkije kan
toevoegen), werkt niet, fascisme is wel degelijk aanwezig, zoals het
altijd aanwezig was, in de oudheid, het kolonialisme en zoals gezegd
in het kapitalisme/neoliberalisme…… Wat betreft het kolonialisme:
in ‘Nederlands Indië’ was de NSB de grootste partij voor WOII en
niet voor niets…… (waar de gewone bevolking van Indonesië
overigens niet mocht stemmen, maar dat is ‘logisch’ immers anders was
de NSB bij lange na niet de grootste partij geweest)

En ja de
VS kan je wat mij betreft zonder meer aanmerken als een fascistische
politiestaat, die alle kenmerken van fascisme toont (als aanvulling [met één dubbele] op de genoemde zaken in de eerste alinea):

de VS is een grote ‘neokolonisator’, dit middels de illegale grondstoffenoorlogen die de VS keer op keer
voert…..
de VS is een land dat meer geheime diensten kent dan ooit eerder
vertoond (meer dan 25!!), diensten die niet alleen de VS als Vierde
Rijk dienen in het buitenland, maar zeker ook in eigen land (zo gaf
een hooggeplaatste FBI beambte onlangs toe dat elke ideologische
politieke organisatie die ‘te links’ was, met alle macht werd
bestreden om te voorkomen dat deze in de politiek een factor van
betekenis kon worden…)
de VS is een land waar racisme welig tiert
en waar de politie en FBI de bewaarder zijn van de witte status quo
de VS
is een land waar zoals gezegd meer mensen gevangen zitten dan waar ook
ter wereld, waar het gevangenissysteem voor het overgrote deel een
commercieel bedrijf is geworden, waar de gevangenen in feite
slavenarbeid verrichten……
De VS een land dat meer dan 800 militaire bases heeft over de wereld…….

Mensen
er zijn nog veel meer voorbeelden te bedenken neem de zogenaamde
democratische verkiezingen, waar burgers willens en wetens worden
tegengewerkt om ter stembus te gaan en waar in feite het kapitaal
in de vorm van grote bedrijven uitmaakt wie er wel of niet president mag worden…… Grote bedrijven die
deels de regering manipuleren en met kapitalen de kandidaat van hun
keus aan de macht brengen, waarbij niet vergeten moet worden dat er
amper verschil is tussen Democratische en Republikeinse regeringen,
beiden dienen ze de god van het kapitalisme en daarmee in feite een
fascistische maatschappij…….

Tot slot nog dit: het zal een ieder intussen wel duidelijk zijn dat VS president Trump een fascist is en dat geldt tevens voor de rest van zijn administratie…….

Het
artikel van Rockhill werd eerder gepubliceerd op CounterPunch en werd
door mij overgenomen van Information Clearing House (onder het
artikel kan je klikken voor een ‘Dutch vertaling’, dit kost enkele
tientallen seconden tijd):

Fascism:
Now You See It, Now You Don’t!

By
Gabriel Rockhill

“We need
to understand that, contrary to what we are told by the U.S. media,
fascism is not an extreme development, limited in time and place,
that occurred a long time ago. Quite the contrary. Fascism is
extended, generalized, and exists everywhere.” – Vicente
Navarro

October 12, 2020
“Information
Clearing House”
– Only one country in the world has, in recent history:

+ endeavored
to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments

+ established
an intelligence agency that killed at least 6 million people in the
first 40 years of its existence

+ developed a
draconian police-vigilante network to destroy any domestic political
movements that challenged its dominion

+ constructed
a mass incarceration system that cages a greater percentage of the
population than any other country in the world, and which is embedded
within a global secret prison network and torture regime.

Whereas democracy
is the
common term used to describe this country, we learn that fascism
only occurred once in history, in one place, and that it was defeated
by the aforementioned democracy.

The expansiveness and
elasticity of the notion of democracy
could
not contrast more starkly with the narrowness and rigidity of the
concept of fascism.
After all, we are told that democracy was born some 2500 years ago
and that it is a defining feature of European civilization, and even
one of its unique cultural contributions to world history. Fascism,
by contrast, purportedly erupted in Western Europe in the interwar
period as an aberrant anomaly, temporarily interrupting the
progressive march of history, right after a war had been fought to
make the world ‘safe for democracy.’ Once a second world war
destroyed it, or so the narrative goes, the forces of good then set
about taming its evil ‘totalitarian’ twin in the East in the name
of democratic globalization.

As value-concepts
whose substantive content is much less important than their normative
charge, democracy has been perpetually expanded, whereas fascism is
constantly constricted. The Holocaust industry has played no small
part in this process through its endeavors to singularize the Nazi
war atrocities to such an extent that they literally become
incomparable or even ‘unrepresentable,’ while the purportedly
democratic forces of good in the world are repeatedly held up for
emulation as the model for global governance.

Concepts-in-Class-Struggle

The ongoing debate
over the precise definition of fascism has frequently obscured the
fact that the nature and function of definitions differ significantly
depending on the epistemology employed, meaning the overall framework
of knowledge and truth. For historical materialists, concepts like
fascism are sites of class struggle rather than quasi metaphysical
entities with fixed properties. The search for a universally
acceptable definition of a generic concept of fascism is therefore
quixotic. This is not, however, because concepts are relative in a
purely subjectivist sense, meaning that everyone simply has their
own, idiosyncratic definition of such notions. It is that they are
relational in a concrete, material sense: they are objectively
situated in class struggles.

It is bourgeois
ideology that presumes the existence of a universal epistemology
outside of class struggle. It acts as if there was only one concept
of each social phenomenon, which corresponds of course to the
bourgeois understanding of the phenomenon in question. What this
ultimately means, from a materialist perspective, is that the
bourgeois ideology inherent in the very idea of a universal
epistemology is itself part of class struggle insofar as it
surreptitiously endeavors to disappear all rival epistemologies.

If we dig deeper into
the differences between these two epistemologies, which are rival
accounts of the very function of concepts and their definitions, we
see that materialists—in stark contrast to the idealism of
bourgeois ideology—understand ideas to be practical tools of
analysis that allow for different levels of abstraction, and whose
use-value depends on their ability to map material situations whose
complexity surpasses their own. Within this framework, the goal is
not to define the essence of a social phenomenon like fascism in a
manner that could be universally accepted by bourgeois social
science, but rather to develop a working definition in two senses. On
the one hand, this is a definition that works because it has a
practical use-value: it provides a coherent outline of a complex
field of material forces and can help orient us in a world of
struggle. On the other hand, such a definition is understood to be
heuristic and open to further elaboration because Marxists recognize
that they are subjectively situated in objective sociohistorical
processes, and that changes in perspective and scale might require
modifying it. This can be clearly seen in the three different scales
that I will use for developing a working definition of fascism: the
conjunctural, the structural and the systemic.

Multi-Scalar
Analysis

The historical
materialist approach to fascism accords a primacy to practices, and
it situates them in relationship to the social totality, which itself
is analyzed through heuristically distinct but interlocking scales.
The conjunctural, to begin with, is the social totality of a specific
place and time, such as Italy or Germany in the interwar period.
Historically speaking, we know that the term fascism (fascismo)
emerged as a description of Benito Mussolini’s particular brand of
organizing, but that it was only theorized gradually, in fits and
starts. In other words, it did not appear as a doctrine or coherent
political ideology that was then implemented, but rather as a rough
and loose description of a dynamic set of practices that changed over
time (early on, unlike later, fascism in Italy was reformist and
republican, advocated for women’s suffrage, supported some limited
pro-labor reforms, feuded with the Catholic Church, and was not
openly racist).

It was only after the
fascist movement had evolved and began to gain power that attempts
were made by Mussolini and others to retroactively consolidate their
disparate and shifting practices in such a way that they could be
presented as fitting within a coherent doctrine. On numerous
occasions, Mussolini himself insisted on this point, writing
for instance: “Fascism was not the nursling of a doctrine
previously drafted at a desk; it was born of the need of action, and
was action; it was not a party but, in the first two years, an
anti-party and a movement.” José Carlos Mariátegui has provided
an
insightful, fine-grained analysis of the internal struggles
operative early on in the Italian fascist movement, which was
polarized between an extremist faction and a reformist camp with
liberal leanings. Mussolini, according to Mariátegui, occupied a
centrist position and avoided unduly favoring one group over the
other until 1924, when the socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti was
assassinated by fascists. This brought the battle between the two
fascist cliques to a fever pitch, and Mussolini was ultimately forced
to choose. After making an unsuccessful overture to the liberal wing,
he sided with the reactionaries.

Since its inception,
then, the concept of fascism has been a site of social and
ideological struggle, if it be the clash between extremists and
reformists within the fascist camp, or more generally between
fascists and liberals within the capitalist camp. These conflicts
were themselves ultimately nested within the overall conflict between
capitalists and anti-capitalists. It is from this vantage point of
interlocking levels of struggle that we can establish a first working
definition of fascism, once it came to be more or less consolidated,
by identifying how it emerged within a very specific conjuncture and
stage of global class warfare. In the threatening wake of the Russian
Revolution (which was followed by failed revolutions in Europe and
later the Great Depression in the capitalist world), Mussolini and
his ilk used mass communications and propaganda to slowly but surely
mobilize sectors of civil society—and particularly the
petty-bourgeoisie—with the backing of big industrial capitalists,
around a nationalist and colonial ideology of ‘radical’
transformation in order to crush the workers movement and launch wars
of conquest. At this level of analysis, fascism is practically
speaking, in the words
of Michael Parenti, “nothing more than a final solution to the
class struggle, the totalistic submergence and exploitation of
democratic forces for the benefit and profit of higher financial
circles. Fascism is a false revolution.”

This conjunctural
analysis is, of course, markedly distinct from liberal accounts of
fascism, which tend to focus on surface phenomena and superstructural
elements that are severed from any scientific consideration of
international political economy and class warfare. If it be a
politics of hate, a logic of ‘us and them,’ a rejection of
parliamentary democracy, a question of aberrant personalities, a
dismissal of science, or other such characteristics, the liberal
approach to fascism is preoccupied with epiphenomenal traits at the
expense of the social totality. It is the latter, however, that gives
these traits—when they do in fact exist in some form or other—their
precise meaning and function. It is worth recalling, in this regard,
as Martin Kitchen pointed
out, that “all capitalist-countries produced fascist movements
after the crash in 1929.”

If the bourgeois
concept of fascism obscures the social totality of the conjuncture
within which European fascism historically emerged under that name,
it casts an even longer shadow over the structural and the systemic
dimensions of fascism as a practice. As we shall see in the case of
George Jackson, Marxists have insisted on the importance of
inscribing the conjunctural analysis of European fascism within a
structural framework in order to reveal the forms of fascism
operative within conjunctures where liberal theorists often claim
they either do not exist at all or they are somehow less severe. The
interwar period in the United States, for instance, when compared to
what was going on in Italy and Germany, reveals striking structural
similarities.

Finally, the broadest
scale of analysis, which appears to be invisible to liberals, is the
capitalist world system. As historical materialists like Aimé
Césaire and Domenico Losurdo have argued, the barbarism of the Nazis
should be understood as a specific manifestation of the long and deep
history of colonial butchery, which has brought capitalism to every
corner of the globe. If there is something exceptional about Nazism,
Césaire
claimed, it is that concentration camps were being built in
Europe instead of in the colonies. In this way, he invites us to
situate the conjunctural and structural scales of analysis within a
systemic framework, meaning one that accounts for the entire global
history of capitalism.

The bourgeois concept
of fascism seeks to singularize it as an idiosyncratic phenomenon,
which is largely or entirely superstructural, in order to foreclose
any examination of its ubiquitous presence within the history of the
capitalist world order. In contrast, the historical materialist
approach proposes a multi-scalar analysis of the social totality in
order to demonstrate how the conjunctural specificity of interwar
European fascism can best be understood as nested within a structural
phase of capitalist class warfare, and ultimately within the systemic
history of capital, which came into the world—in the
words used by Karl Marx to describe primitive
accumulation—“dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with
blood and dirt.” As one scales out or in, the precise account and
operative definition of fascism can change because of the material
variables involved, and some have therefore preferred to restrict the
term fascism
to its conjunctural manifestations (which can, at times, be useful
for the sake of clarity). However, even if the latter tactic is used,
a full analysis of fascism within the social totality ultimately
requires an integrated account in which it is recognized that the
conjunctural is situated within the structural, which is in turn
embedded within the systemic. Fascism, as a practice, is a product of
the capitalist system, whose precise forms vary depending on the
structural phase of capitalist development and the specific
sociohistorical conjuncture.

The Ideology
of Fascist Exceptionalism

Simone de Beauvoir
once
quipped that “in bourgeois language, the word man
means a bourgeois.” Indeed, when the members of the colonial ruling
class known as the American founding fathers sent forth their solemn
declaration to the world that “all men are created equal,” they
did not mean that all human beings were actually equal. It is only by
understanding their unstated premise—that man
means bourgeois—that
we can fully comprehend their intent: the non-humans of the world can
be subjected to the most brutal forms of dispossession, enslavement
and colonial carnage.

This duplicitous
operation, by which a particular (the bourgeoisie) attempts to pass
itself off as the universal (humanity), is a well-known
characteristic of bourgeois ideology. Its inverted form, however, is
perhaps even more deceptive and insidious, because it has not—to my
knowledge—been widely diagnosed. Rather than universalizing the
particular, this ideological operation transforms the systemic into
the sporadic, the structural into the singular, the conjunctural into
the idiosyncratic.

The case of fascism is
exemplary. Whenever its name is invoked, we are ritualistically
redirected by the dominant ideology to the same set of specific
historical examples in Italy and Germany, which are supposed to serve
as the general standards by which to judge any other possible
manifestations of fascism. According to the most un-scientific of
methodologies, it is the particular that governs the universal,
rather than the other way around. In its most extreme ideological
form, this means that if there are no jackboots, Sieg
Heil
salutes and goose-stepping soldiers, then we cannot possibly be
within what is commonly known as fascism.

This ideology of
fascist exceptionalism is a natural outgrowth of the bourgeois notion
of fascism. By conceptualizing Germano-Italian fascism as sui generis
and defining it primarily in terms of its epiphenomenal
characteristics, it severs it from its deep roots in the capitalist
system, and it obfuscates structural parallels with other forms of
repressive governance around the world. This ideology thus plays a
crucial role in class struggle: it takes a general feature of life
under capital and it transforms it into an anomaly, which some have
even sought to elevate, in the case of Nazism, to the metaphysical
status of being incomparable in its irreducible singularity. The
particular thereby serves to conceal the general.

A Dragon in
the Belly of the Beast

George Jackson
stalwartly rejected the ideological particularization of fascism and
pointed out all of the structural similarities between European
fascism and repression in the United States. Unsurprisingly, a
liberal critic once proclaimed that the U.S. was not fascist simply
because Jackson said it was, thereby dismissing out of hand his
structural analysis as simply a subjective opinion (a classic case of
liberal projection). Jackson’s argument, however, was not reducible
to an ex cathedra pronouncement but was instead based on a careful,
materialist comparison between the situation in the United States and
the one in Europe. “We are being repressed now,” he
wrote. “Courts that dispense no justice and concentration camps
are already in existence. There are more secret police in this
country than in all others combined—so many that they constitute a
whole new class that has attached itself to the power complex.
Repression is here.”

When Jackson refers to
the U.S. as “the Fourth Reich” and compares American prisons to
Dachau and Buchenwald, he is obviously breaking with the
exceptionalist protocol that drives the Holocaust industry by
elevating European fascism to the singular status of the
incomparable. And yet, what he is in effect doing in his analyses of
the U.S. is that he is simply rejecting the a-scientific approach to
fascism described above, which emphasizes idiosyncrasies in order to
obscure structural relations. Instead, he begins the other way
around, with a materialist analysis of the modes of governance
operative in America, and here’s
what he found:

The new corporate
state [in the U.S.] has fought its way through crisis after crisis,
established its ruling elites in every important institution, formed
its partnership with labor through its elites, erected the most
massive network of protective agencies replete with spies, technical
and animal, to be found in any police state in the world. The
violence of the ruling class of this country in the long process of
its trend toward authoritarianism and its last and highest stage,
fascism, cannot be rivaled in its excesses by any other nation on
earth today or in history.

Those who would
dismiss this as hyperbole, thereby refusing to even engage in
historical comparisons, simply reveal one of the most insidious
consequences of the ideology of fascist exceptionalism: any
materialist analysis of comparable situations is a priori verboten.

Rather than recoiling
in horror from the term fascism,
which has been ideologically reserved for a few, now distant,
historical anomalies, or what George Seldes called
“faraway fascism,” Jackson draws the most logical conclusion from
the point of view of historical materialist analysis: what’s
happening before his eyes in the United States is an intensification
and globalization of what transpired, under slightly different
conditions, in Italy and Germany. In fact, he
directly identifies the driving forces behind the perception
management that attempts to blind us to American fascism as
themselves being a cultural product of this very same fascism:

Right behind the
expeditionary forces (the pigs) come the missionaries, and the
colonial effect is complete. The missionaries, with the benefits of
Christendom, school us on the value of symbolism, dead presidents,
and the rediscount rate. […] In the area of culture […] we are
bonded to the fascist society by chains that have strangled our
intellect, scrambled our wits, and sent us stumbling backward in a
wild, disorganized retreat from reality.

Moreover, Jackson,
like other Marxist-Leninists, identifies
the nucleus of fascism in “an economic rearrangement”: “It is
international capitalism’s response to the challenge of
international scientific socialism.” Its nationalistic garb, he
rightly insists, should not distract us from its international
ambitions and its colonial drive: “At its core, fascism is
capitalistic and capitalism is international. Beneath its nationalist
ideological trappings, fascism is always ultimately an international
movement.” Jackson thereby responds to the ideological
over-inflation of the concept of democracy by extending the notion of
fascism to include all of the violence, repression and control
operative in the imposition, maintenance and intensification of
capitalist social relations (including the reformist welfare state).
Some might prefer to distinguish between this form of general
fascism, which would include authoritarian and liberal rule, and a
more specific definition of fascism as the extensive use of state and
para-state repression for the ultimate purpose of increasing
capitalist accumulation. These are not, however, necessarily mutually
exclusive definitions since the violence of capitalist social
relations takes many different forms—direct repression, economic
exploitation, social degradation, hegemonic subjection, etc.—and
this
is what Jackson brings to the fore.

Seeing through
the Bourgeois Concept of Fascism

The bourgeois concept
of fascism aims at dissimulating its structural and systemic
character, as well as the deep material causes driving its
conjunctural emergence, in order to present it as absolutely
exceptional, by cordoning it off in a specific time and place. It
seeks to convince us, at all costs, that fascism is not
an essential aspect of capitalist rule, but rather an anomaly or an
exceptional break with its normal functioning. Moreover, it presents
it as far away, burying it in a past that has been overcome by
democratic progress, brandishing it as a future threat if people do
not conform to the dictates of liberal rule, or sometimes locating it
in distant lands that are still too ‘backward’ for democracy.

The materialist
approach to fascism refuses the blinders imposed by the perception
management inherent in the bourgeois concept, and it clearly
identifies the ideological double gesture of capitalist rule: it
overinflates and even universalizes its purportedly positive traits,
constructing a
mythological history of so-called Western democracy, and it
erases or particularizes its negative characteristics by making
fascism into an idiosyncratic anomaly. By beginning the other way
around, historical materialism examines how actually existing
capitalism relies on two modes of governance that function according
to the deceptive logic of the good cop / bad cop interrogation
tactic: wherever and whenever the good cop is not able to inveigle
people into playing by the rules of the capitalist game, the bad cop
of fascism is always lurking in the shadows to get the job done by
any means necessary. If the latter’s stick appears to be an
aberration when compared to the carrot of the good cop, this is only
because one has been hoodwinked into believing in the false
antagonism between them, which dissimulates the fundamental fact that
they are working together toward a common goal. While it is certainly
true, from a tactical organizing perspective, that dealing with the
histrionics of the good cop is usually far preferable to the
barefaced barbarism of the bad cop, it is strategically of the upmost
importance to identify them for what they are: partners in capitalist
crime.

Gabriel
Rockhill is
a Franco-American philosopher, cultural critic and activist. He the
founding Director of the Critical
Theory Workshopand
Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. His
books include Counter-History
of the Present: Untimely Interrogations into Globalization,
Technology, Democracy (2017), Interventions
in Contemporary Thought: History, Politics,
Aesthetics (2016), Radical
History & the Politics of Art (2014)
and Logique
de l’histoire (2010).
In addition to his scholarly work, he has been actively engaged in
extra-academic activities in the art and activist worlds, as well as
a regular contributor to public intellectual debate. Follow on
twitter: @GabrielRockhill – –
“Source“–

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Voor wereldwijde VS terreur zie: ‘VS vermoordde meer dan 20 miljoen mensen sinds het einde van WOII……..‘

‘VS buitenlandbeleid sinds WOII: een lange lijst van staatsgrepen en oorlogen……….‘

‘List of wars involving the United States‘

‘CIA 70 jaar: 70 jaar moorden, martelen, coups plegen, nazi’s beschermen, media manipulatie enz. enz………‘

Voor meer berichten over fascisten, neokolonialisme, democratie, communisme, politiestaat, antisemitisme en/of Israël, klik op het desbetreffende label, direct onder dit bericht.

Neoliberalisme kan als we niet ingrijpen de doodstraf betekenen voor de mensheid

Posted on August 28, 2020June 14, 2024 by Willem Wachtmeester

Paul
Edwards geeft in een beknopt artikel op Information Clearing House weer waar het op staat wat
betreft de mensheid en de weg waar deze naartoe gaat als het
kapitalisme de kans krijgt om haar zieke economische handelswijze op
te blijven leggen aan die mensheid (kapitalisme: mijns inziens
geëvalueerd in het huidige ijskoude, inhumane neoliberalisme)….

Zonder
een evolutie in het denken over de huidige status quo*,
zal dit neoliberalisme onherroepelijk leiden tot niet alleen de
vernietiging van de aarde zoals wij die kennen (zie de door de klimaatverandering gestimuleerde grote natuurrampen), maar ook tot de
vernietiging van de mensheid >> het grote uitsterven van een
groot aantal diersoorten is wat dat betreft een teken aan de
wand…….

8 dead as Storm Laura hits Haiti; Storm Marco set to hit Louisiana, World News | wionews.com

De gevolgen van storm Laura in Haïti…..

Volkomen terecht haalt Edwards Keynes aan die al eens stelde: ‘het kapitalisme is het buitengewone geloof dat de naarste mensen met de smerigste doelen, op één of andere manier het grote goed zullen dienen (een wel heel vrije vertaling van mijn hand)

Een
evolutie in denken zal gepaard gaan met strijd, dat is onontkoombaar,
daar de machthebbers van nu, de plutocraten en de grote bedrijven
alles doen om een verandering te voorkomen, sterker nog grote bedrijven hebben baat bij dictaturen (geen problemen met milieumaatregelen en het uitbuiten van arbeiders wordt middels steekgelden voor de machthebber en diens kliek ‘gelegitimeerd….’)…. Daar is overigens niet eens een volwaardige dictatuur voor nodig, zie een groot aantal zogenaamde democratische landen in Afrika en Zuidoost-Azië…..

Die grote (westerse) bedrijven
zijn in handen van die plutocraten of
investeringsmaatschappijen, waar die laatsten dan ook weer worden
geleid door welgestelden en ook al zijn deze welgestelden niet zo machtig als de plutocraten, vervullen ze gezamenlijk wel degelijk een belangrijke
functie in het behouden van de neoliberale status quo…..

Niet
voor niets dat de VS en haar bondgenoten zoveel oorlog voeren,
waarmee men altijd weer de eigen belangen behartigt: de wapenindustrie draait daardoor op volle toeren, goed voor de grootaandeelhouders in die industrie (oorlog is ook goed voor de oliemaatschappijen en haar grootaandeelhouders zoals ‘ons koningshuis’).

Aanvullend zijn die grote bedrijven en hun lakeien in de poltiek mede verantwoordelijk voor:

het tegenwerken van landen waar men niet aan het kapitalisme/neoliberalisme hangt, of van landen die niet onder de knoet van de VS en andere
westerse landen wensen te leven
het
al eerder genoemde verplaatsen van fabrieken naar landen waar men geen rekening behoeft
te houden met het milieu en waar men arbeidskrachten mag uitbuiten op
een manier die het best is te vergelijken is met slavernij, dus niet
alleen wat betreft het ‘loon’ maar ook door amper of niet bestaande
arbeidsvoorwaarden
het
onderwerpen van landen die strategisch gelegen zijn, waarmee men
de macht over andere landen kan behouden, bijvoorbeeld
als deze strategisch gelegen landen belangrijk zijn voor de routes ten behoeve van het
grondstoffenvervoernaar de VS en andere westerse landen
het
veiligstellen van die grondstoffen als olie, gas, steenkool en een groot
aantal andere grondstoffen, neem materialen die worden gebruikt in
computers en smartphones, of bijvoorbeeld materialen die nodig zijn
voor de fabricage van accu’s
- Terzijde is ook de landbouw afhankelijk van grote geldstromen, waarmee men megastallen bouwt, oerwoud afbrandt voor sojateelt en het bouwen van gebieden voor veeteelt (in het Amazonewoud van Brazilië), terwijl bijvoorbeeld onze intensieve veehouderij grootgebruiker is van die soja, de intensieve veeteelt is dan ook een belangrijke aanjager is van de klimaatverandering en de enorme ellende die dat nu al veroorzaakt……

Voor
al deze zaken is het uiteraard van belang een enorm wapenarsenaal
voorhanden te hebben, waar de welgestelden zoals gezegd de grootaandeelhouders
zijn van niet alleen de oliemaatschappijen en mijnbouwbedrijven,
maar juist ook van de grote wapenfabrikanten en daarmee bedoel ik ook
fabrieken voor rollend, varend en vliegend oorlogstuig…..

Intussen
hebben de plutocraten en investeringsmaatschappijen ook de reguliere
westerse media overgenomen, waarmee dezen een nieuw controle- en
propaganda-apparaat hebben gecreëerd om de massa’s eronder te kunnen houden met leugens en andere manipulaties……

Niet voor niets dat naast het grootste deel van de
westerse politici, vooral die media een grote bek hebben over de
sociale media waar men nog wel onafhankelijke nieuwsgaring kan
vinden, nieuwsgaring die vaak lijnrecht ingaat tegen wat de reguliere media het vok willen laten geloven… Men doet dit door te in te hakken op ‘fake news’
(nepnieuws) en te spreken over manipulatie van het volk, juist zaken waaraan westerse politici en de hen bedienende media zich beschuldigen…. (neem de aanloop en uitvoering van de illegale oorlogen die de VS is begonnen, met grote graagte nemen de reguliere westerse media de leugens van geheime diensten als de CIA en de NSA over, ondanks dat de redacties van die media weten dat deze diensten onnoemelijk veel vaker liegen dan de waarheid vertellen, sterker nog men onderzoekt de zogenaamde redenen niet eens die worden gegeven voor ‘de noodzaak in te grijpen……’)

Edwards stelt in feite dat we zo snel mogelijk moeten ingrijpen en de strijd moeten aangaan met het kapitalisme, voordat de doodstraf van de hele mensheid wordt voltrokken…….

Onder het volgende artikel kan je klikken voor een ‘Dutch vertaling’, dit neemt wel enkele tientallen seconden tijd in beslag.

Capital
Punishment

By
Paul Edwards

August
17, 2020 “Information
Clearing House”
– There’s no ambiguity in the term: capital punishment is
killing, carried out by an entity commonly, but not exclusively,
judicially empowered. It refers only to the killing of persons, of
course. Doesn’t it?

In this uniquely terrible time in
America, when there is such fathomless confusion and desperation,
such vitriolic, violent and conflicted fury in the adversarial
masses, when we watch the empty catechism of our national mythology
shatter and evaporate, when we are compelled to stare into the abyss
of all our historic falsity, pretense, viciousness and dishonor, when
national disintegration and death seem not only possible but likely,
to hold on to sanity one must try to understand how this could have
come to be.

How is it that a nation that had as close to a
truly fresh start as any known, that, free of the socio-economic
bonds and fetters of ossified, post-feudal Europe and unencumbered by
the congealed paralysis of tradition that strangled Africa and the
Orient, might have evolved according to the best Enlightenment ideals
and humane practices, has declined to a point where its political
farce is moribund and stinking, its economic reality is obscenely
vicious, and its whole society is crippled by anxiety, fear and
racial hatred?

It’s not possible to trace and catalog the
impenetrably tangled complex of historical decisions and choices
that, in aggregate, over time, led to the critical, perhaps fatal,
condition in which we are enmeshed and imprisoned today, but that’s
not required. What is
required is a species of miracle. One that only occurs when mankind
makes a quantum cognitive leap from one universal, absolute, and
ruling dogma to a wiser, sounder paradigm

The leap
that must be made, and against which the odds are astronomical, is
from the petrified religion of Capitalism to a life-centered,
life-preserving economic system. If this transition is not made and
Capitalism is allowed to continue its mindless, murderous assault on
all life it will destroy the natural world, including the human race.
That all humanity is not afire with passion to demand this leap be
made is due entirely to the managed ignorance and policed impotence
of The People perpetuated by the Capitalist Tyranny.

Capitalism
has been a tool of privilege and power, and a cynical, cruel,
malevolent fraud from its beginnings. In its simple, ingenious design
it has proven to be the most efficient tool for mercilessly
exploiting human vulnerability and utterly debasing rational
government ever devised by the perverse mind of Man. Its simple basis
is using money to extract surplus value from workers paid the lowest
possible wage. In situations of general human poverty–which,
historically was nearly everywhere, always–Capital paid only the
bare pittance that could keep its miserable labor pool alive.

Marx,
in his prolix, academically impenetrable prose, clinically dissected
and dismembered Capitalism long ago, but only after its raging
infection had armed controlling elites with a financial bonanza that
enabled them to own entire governments and impose their vile dogma on
the great mass of humanity. It was sold as a means–the only one–to
generate prosperity which would benefit all justly, according to
their contributions to its success. That was the mantra, endlessly
repeated and affirmed by the power of the state, that allowed it to
assume the magical character of a religion.

In Marx’s day,
Capitalism evolved in an atmosphere of violent, unregulated blood and
guts competition, and enterprises stood or fell, throve of failed, on
the basis of “to the victor belong the spoils”. Many great
fortunes in the 19th and early 20th centuries saw their massive
success and consolidation built of the bones and blood of their
out-hustled, out-maneuvered rivals.

That kind of open
warfare, so damaging to so many Capitalist entities, went out through
the brokered collusion of industry and government by World War I.
Socialism, ever its bete noir, saw its central tenets appropriated to
change Capitalism’s rules, to diminish raw competition, and to
shore up the howling fraud of private enterprise. By the Great
Depression Capitalism had become a welfare client of nations and a
bad joke for cognoscenti.

Keynes said it: “Capitalism is the
extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of
motives, will somehow work for the benefit of all.”

Though
both critics and oligarchs knew its falsity, and though its ruinous,
catastrophic crashes had repeatedly rocked the world, violently
battering working people, its propaganda prevailed. That humanity is
ignorant and gullible is not news, witness America today, and
recovery from the fully metastasized systemic disease of the
Capitalist catechism is glacial in this nation of baffled, deluded
people, in spite of their long suffering under it.

J.K.
Galbraith nailed its hucksters to the wall: “The modern
Conservative is engaged in one of mankind’s oldest exercises in
moral philosophy: the search for a superior moral justification for
selfishness.”

But that, too, is outdated. They no longer
search. They make no effort to justify themselves and their crime.
Their power, entrenched and buttressed by rented governments, permits
them to gloat openly and flaunt their piracy. They truly believe, in
the face of the mortal chaos they’ve created, that–as the Harpy,
Maggie Thatcher, once boasted–there is no alternative.

It’s
not so. There is today no continuity of what was called Capitalism.
It’s dead. It doesn’t exist. The phony artifact of classic
Capitalism long since ceased to be about initiative, cunning, and
independent rapacity, and is now a sick racket on life support,
relying on government welfare with no need to function efficiently or
even adequately. Trillions are funneled into it by the government it
owns to fuel the Imperial War Machine and fade the global crap game
of debt and derivatives it runs as a casino. When bets go bust the
state manufactures more fiat money with less and less real value,
jeopardizing the dollar hegemony that is Welfare Capitalisms only
support.

The Imperial State, borrowing from itself, and
peddling cheapened money to financially captive foreign governments
to fund its militarist follies and further enrich its billionaire
owners, having raped its own country’s natural resources, fouled
the whole world’s air, land, and oceans, murdered many millions of
the guiltless poor and helpless, and stolen its citizens birthright
and future, teeters perilously at the brink of implosion and
meltdown.

Capital punishment, indeed…

When hope
fails, magical thinking begins. A miracle of human evolution is
needed for life to continue. There is no time left, and there are no
options, no escapes, no dodges. Life forms must adapt, evolve, or
die. Contrary to our central myth, we are not an exception. We must
act now, and choose life or extinction. This will be our finest hour.
Or, very soon, our last.

Paul
Edwards is
a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached
at: hgmnude@bresnan.net

Jos Palm (pres. OVT Radio1): Marx reduceerde de mens tot mier…….

Posted on May 16, 2018June 14, 2024 by Willem Wachtmeester

Schreef eerder al een bericht over de OVT uitzending van afgelopen zondag, waar katholiekenlikker Palm, presentator van het Radio1 programma vond dat Angela Davis best beschaafd kan spreken…*

In diezelfde uitzending kwam Marx ter sprake (China zou Marx herontdekt hebben…) en verdomd daar ging Palm weer gierend de bocht uit, toen hij tegen een ‘deskundige’ zei: “Als ik me niet vergis zag Marx de mens al mieren die de geschiedenisbalk moeten dragen….” De deskundige, sinoloog Rogier Creemers zei het met Palm eens te zijn…..

Tja, figuren als Palm hebben al hun idealen van weleer bij het grofvuil gezet en zijn doorgegaan als de voorhoede van het ijskoude, inhumane neoliberalisme………. Sterker nog, ze spugen op hun eerdere idealen, als zou de wereld intussen volmaakt zijn en:

er geen honger meer bestaat
de arbeiders overal fatsoenlijk worden behandeld
er geen slavernij meer bestaat
er geen oorlogen worden gevoerd om grondstoffen
er geen werk wordt uitbesteed naar arme landen, zodat de eigenaren nog dikkere winsten behalen
er geen zware sociale ongelijkheid meer bestaat
er geen corrupte meer bestaat
de banken de klanten geen poot meer uitdraaien en werken ten goede van de klant en de maatschappij in het geheel
de mens niet langer wordt vergiftigd middels voedselinname en ademhaling
de scholing voor een ieder gelijk is
iedereen toegang heeft tot een goede gezondheidszorg
men niet meer wordt belazerd met slechte producten en andere oplichterij
alsof de mens verlicht is en niet meer geestelijk wordt geknecht: -door religies, -valse voorlichting in scholing en manipulatie door de reguliere media en het grootste deel van de politieke richtingen…..

Tot slot: alsof er geen klassenmaatschappij meer bestaat………

Marx was voor een gelijke en fatsoenlijke behandeling van iedere wereldburger, waar geluk voor ieder mens prominent in zijn werk staan….. Dat is toch echt heel iets anders dan de mens als ‘werkmier’ neer te zetten….

* Zie ook: ‘Jos Palm (OVT presentator): “Angela Davis klinkt alleszins beschaafd…….”‘

Zie ook het volgende artikel op Aleke’s Blog!: ‘5 mei…..Karl Marx‘, met een link naar een mooie documentaire.

Voor meer berichten met Palm, klik op het label OVT, direct onder dit bericht.

De langzame moord op de ideeën van Martin Luther King…………….. Ofwel: Dr. Martin Luther Kings lessen willens en wetens verzwegen….

Posted on January 23, 2018June 14, 2024 by Willem Wachtmeester

Het
volgende uitstekende artikel van Paul Street handelt over de lessen
van Martin Luther King (in de VS vaak aangeduid als MLK) waarover men in de VS en de rest van het westen
liever niet spreekt, dit daar in zijn visie o.a. alleen echte gelijkheid kan
ontstaan in een vorm van socialisme………

Het is op 4 april a.s. 50 jaar geleden dat de staat dr. Martin Luther King liet vermoorden….. Vandaar veel aandacht dit jaar voor deze vrijheid en gelijkheidsstrijder. In de VS is 15 januari, de geboortedag van MLK, een vrije dag: ‘Martin Luther King Day’. Een uiterst hypocriet gebeuren als je het Paul Street vraagt, daar men vooral niet spreekt over de ideeën die King had over de ideale maatschappij en de vorm van bestuur die alle burgers ten goede zou komen, niet alleen de witte midden en hoge inkomens. Een wereld waarin arbeiders niet langer uitgebuit worden door en voor de ondernemers en aandeelhouders (en welgestelden in het algemeen).

Zo is echt socialisme of communisme een oplossing voor veel van de huidige ellende in de wereld. Vergeet niet dat communisme tot nu toe nooit heeft bestaan in onze wereld. Wat betreft socialisme kan je het Chili van Allende, Cuba van Fidel Castro en Venezuela onder Chavez en Maduro aanwijzen als voorbeelden (ook al was en is dit nog niet zoals het zou moeten zijn, echter wel zo goed dat de arme bevolking een veel beter leven kreeg, inclusief gezondheidszorg, een fatsoenlijk dak boven het hoofd en alfabetisering. Vandaar ook dat de VS zo haar best doet daar een eind aan te maken, wat tot nu toe al een aantal keren is gelukt, neem de uiterst bloedige staatsgreep tegen de democratisch gekozen regering van president Salvador Allende op 11 september 1973 in Chili, waarbij Allende strijdend werd vermoord…….. (betaald door- en onder regie en mede verantwoording van de CIA…..)

Momenteel is de VS naast het voeren van illegale oorlogen bezig met een economische oorlog tegen Venezuela, helaas is een heel groot deel van de Venezolaanse bevolking op de hoogte van de smerige streken die de VS het land levert (stop op leveringen van medicijnen en levensmiddelen) dat ze aan de kant van Maduro blijven staan. (dit nog naast de door de CIA georganiseerde gewelddadige protesten in Venezuela….)

De kijk van MLK op de wereld was volgens de schrijver van het volgende artikel, Paul Street, de reden waarom de overheid in de VS King alleen wil herdenken als strijder voor gelijke rechten t.b.v. gekleurde burgers……. Men leidt willens en wetens de aandacht af van de visie die King had op de VS en de wereld in het groot. Street spreekt dan ook (terecht) van een voortdurende morele en intellectuele moord op Martin Luther Kung………. (‘vreemd genoeg’ is er ook in de EU amper of geen aandacht voor de linkse kant van King….)

Zijn visie op de wereld, gecombineerd met zijn charisma is dan ook de reden waarom Martin Luther King ‘een bedreiging was’ voor de overheid en ‘wel vermoord moest worden…..’

Counterpunch
JANUARY 19, 2018

Dr.
King’s Long Assassination

by PAUL
STREET

Photo
by Ron Cogswell | CC
BY 2.0

As
the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s violent death (on
April 4, 1968) grows closer, you can expect to hear more and more in
U.S. corporate media about the real and alleged details of his
immediate physical assassination (or perhaps execution). You
will not be told about King’s subsequent and ongoing moral,
intellectual, and ideological assassination.

I
am referring to the conventional, neo-McCarthyite, and whitewashed
narrative of King that is purveyed across the nation every year,
especially during and around the national holiday that bears his
name. This domesticated, bourgeois airbrushing portrays King as
a mild liberal reformist who wanted little more than a few basic
civil rights adjustments in a supposedly good and decent American
System – a loyal supplicant who was grateful to the nation’s
leaders for finally making noble alterations. This year was no
exception.

The
official commemorations never say anything about the Dr. King who
studied Marx sympathetically at a young age and who said in his last
years that “if we are to achieve real equality, the United States
will have to adopt a modified form of socialism.” They delete
the King who wrote that “the real issue to be faced” beyond
“superficial” matters was the need for a radical social
revolution.

It
deletes the King
who went on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in late
1967 to
reflect on how little the Black freedom struggle had attained beyond
some fractional changes in the South. He deplored “the arresting of
the limited forward progress” Blacks and their allies had attained
“by [a] white resistance [that] revealed the latent racism that was
[still] deeply rooted in U.S. society.”

“As
elation and expectations died,” King explained on the CBC, “Negroes
became more sharply aware that the goal of freedom was still distant
and our immediate plight was substantially still an agony of
deprivation. In the past decade, little has been done for Northern
ghettoes. Al the legislation was to remedy Southern conditions –
and even these were only partially improved.”

Worse
than merely limited, King felt, the gains won by Black Americans
during what he considered just the “first phase” of their freedom
struggle (1955-1965) were dangerous in that they “brought whites a
sense of completion” – a preposterous impression that the
so-called “Negro problem” had been solved and that there was
therefore no more basis or justification for further black activism.
“When Negroes assertively moved on to ascend to the second rung of
the ladder,” King noted, “a firm resistance from the white
community developed…In some quarters it was a courteous rejection,
in others it was a singing white backlash. In all quarters
unmistakably, it was outright resistance.”

Explaining
to his CBC listeners the remarkable wave of race riots that washed
across U.S. cities in the summers of 1966 and 1967, King made no
apologies for Black violence. He blamed “the white power
structure…still seeking to keep the walls of segregation and
inequality intact” for the disturbances. He found the leading cause
of the riots in the reactionary posture of “the white society,
unprepared and unwilling to accept radical structural change,”
which” produc[ed] chaos” by telling Blacks (whose expectations
for substantive change had been aroused) “that they must expect to
remain permanently unequal and permanently poor.”

King
also blamed the riots in part on Washington’s imperialist and
mass-murderous war on Vietnam. Along with the misery it inflicted on
Indochina, King said, the United States’ savage military aggression
against Southeast Asia stole resources from Lyndon Johnson’s
briefly declared and barely fought “War on Poverty.” It sent poor
Blacks to the front killing lines to a disproportionate degree. It
advanced the notion that violence was a reasonable response and even
a solution to social and political problems.

Black
Americans and others sensed what King called “the cruel irony of
watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die
together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in
the same school. We watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts
of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the
same block in Detroit,” King said on the CBC, adding that he “could
not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.”

Racial
hypocrisy aside, King said that “a nation that continues year after
year to spend more money on military defense [here he might better
have said “military empire”] than on programs of social uplift is
approaching spiritual doom.”

Did
the rioters disrespect the law, as their liberal and conservative
critics alike charged? Yes, King said, but added that the rioters’
transgressions were “derivative crimes…born of the
greater crimes of the…policy-makers of the white society,”
who “created discrimination…created slums [and] perpetuate
unemployment, ignorance, and poverty… [T]he
white man,”
King elaborated, “does
not abide by law in
the ghetto. Day in and day out he violates welfare laws to deprive
the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building
codes and regulations; his
police make a mockery of law;
he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provision
of public services. The slums are a handiwork of a
vicious system of
the white society.”

Did
the rioters engage in violence? Yes, King said, but noted that their
aggression was “to a startling degree…focused against property
rather than against people.” He observed that “property
represents the white power structure,
which [the rioters] were [quite understandably] attacking and trying
to destroy.” Against those who held property “sacred,” King
argued that “Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how
much we surround with rights and respect, it has no personal being.”

What
to do? King advanced radical changes that went against the grain of
the nation’s corporate state, reflecting his agreement with New
Left militants that “only
by structural change can current evils be eliminated, because the
roots are in the system rather in man or faulty operations.”
King advocated an emergency national program providing either
decent-paying jobs for all or a guaranteed national income “at
levels that sustain life in decent circumstances.” He also called
for the “demolition of slums and rebuilding by the population that
lives in them.”

His
proposals, he said, aimed for more than racial justice alone. Seeking
to abolish poverty for all, including poor whites, he felt that “the
Negro revolt” was properly challenging each of what he called “the
interrelated triple evils” of racism, economic injustice/poverty
(capitalism) and war (militarism and imperialism).
The Black struggle had thankfully “evolve[ed] into more than a
quest for [racial] desegregation and equality,” King said. It
had become “a challenge to a system that has created miracles of
production and technology” but had failed to “create justice.”

“If
humanism is locked outside the [capitalist] system,” King said
on CBC five months before his assassination (or execution), “Negroes
will have revealed its inner core of despotism and a far greater
struggle for liberation will unfold. The United States is
substantially challenged to demonstrate that it can abolish not only
the evils of racism but the scourge of poverty and the horrors of
war….”

There
should be no doubt that King meant capitalism when he referred to
“the system” and its “inner core of despotism.” This is clear
from the best scholarship on King, including David Garrow’s epic,
Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Bearing
the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian
Leadership Council (HarperCollins,
1986)

No
careful listener to King’s CBC talks could have missed the
radicalism of his vision and tactics. “The dispossessed of this
nation – the poor, both White and Negro – live in a
cruelly unjust society,”
King said. “They must organize
a revolution against
that injustice,” he added.

Such
a revolution would require “more than a statement to the larger
society,” more than “street marches” King proclaimed. “There
must,” he added, “be a
force that interrupts [that society’s] functioning at some key
point.”
That force would use “mass civil disobedience” to “transmute
the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force”
by “dislocate[ing]
the functioning of a society.”

“The
storm is rising against
the privileged minority of
the earth,” King added for good measure. “The storm will not
abate until [there is a] just
distribution of the fruits of the earth…”
The “massive,
active, nonviolent resistance to the evils of the modern system”
that King advocated was “international in scope,” reflecting the
fact that “the poor countries are poor primarily because [rich
Western nations] have exploited them through political or economic
colonialism. Americans in particular must help their nation repent of
her modern economic imperialism.”

King
was a democratic socialist mass-disobedience-advocating and
anti-imperialist world revolution advocate. The guardians of
national memory don’t want you to know about that when they purvey
the official, doctrinally imposed memory of King as an at most
liberal and milquetoast reformer. (In a similar vein, our ideological
overlords don’t want us to know that Albert Einstein
[Time magazine’s
“Person of the 20th Century”] wrote a
brilliant essay making the case for socialism in
the first issue of venerable U.S.-Marxist magazine Monthly Review
– or that Helen Keller was a fan of the Russian Revolution.)

The
threat posed to the official bourgeois memory by King’s CBC
lectures – and by much more that King said and wrote in the last
three years of his life – is not just that they show an officially
iconic gradualist reformer to have been a democratic socialist
opponent of the profits system and its empire. It is also about how
clearly King analyzed the incomplete and unfinished nature of the
nation’s progress against racial and class injustice, around which
all forward developments pretty much ceased in the 1970s, thanks to a
white backlash that was already well underway in the early and
mid-1960s (before the rise of the Black Panthers, who liberal
historians like to blame for the nation’s rightward racial drift
under Nixon and Reagan) and to a top-down corporate war on
working-class Americans that started under Jimmy Carter and then went
ballistic under Ronald Reagan.

The
“spiritual doom” imposed by U.S. militarism has lived on, with
Washington having directly and indirectly killed untold millions of
Central Americans, South Americans, Africans, Muslims, Arabs, and
Asians in many different ways over the years since Vietnam.
Accounting for roughly 40 percent of the world’s military
expenditure, the U.S. maintains Cold War-level “defense” (empire)
budgets to sustain an historically unmatched global empire (with at
least 800 military bases spread across more than 80 foreign
countries and
“troops or other military personnel in about 160 foreign
countries and territories”) even as a near-record 45 million
U.S.-Americans remain
stuck under
the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level. A
very disproportionate number of the nation’s poor are Black and
Latino/a.

It
is obvious that the racist and white-supremacist real estate baron
Donald J. Trump spoke disingenuously in tongue when he mouthed nice
words about Dr. King last Monday. But what about his
predecessor, Barack Obama, the nation’s first technically Black
president? It was cruelly ironic that Obama kept a bust of King in
the Oval Office to watch over his regular betrayal of the martyred
peace and justice leader’s ideals. Consistent with Dr. Adolph Reed
Jr.’s early (1996) dead-on
description of
the future President as “a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable
credentials and vacuous to repressive neoliberal politics,” Obama
consistently backed top corporate and financial interests (whose
representatives filled and dominated his administrations, campaigns,
and campaign coffers) over and against those who would undertake
serious programs to end poverty, redistribute wealth (the savage
re-concentration of which since Dr. King’s time has produced a New
Gilded Age in the U.S.), grant free and universal health care,
constrain capital, and save livable ecology as it approached a number
of critical tipping points on the accelerating path to irreversible
catastrophe. Thus is that one of Obama’s supporters (Ezra
Klein)
was moved in late 2012 to complain that a president “whose platform
consists of Romney’s health care bill, Newt Gingrich’s
environmental policies, John McCain’s deficit-financed payroll tax
cuts, George W. Bush’s bailouts of filing banks and corporations,
and a mixture of the Bush and Clinton tax rate” was still being
denounced as a “leftist.”

Obama
opposed calls for any special programs or serious federal attention
to the nation’s savage racial inequalities, so vast now that the
median of white households was 20 times that of black households and
18 times that of Hispanic households near the end of his presidency.
He did this while the fact of his ascendency to the White House
deeply reinforced white America’s sense that racism was over as a
barrier to black advancement and generated its own significant white
backlash that only worsened the situation of less privileged black
Americans.

Obama
made it crystal clear in ways that no white president could that what
Dr. King in 1963 called America’s unpaid “promissory note” and
“bad check” to Black America would remain un-cashed. This was all
too sadly consistent with Obama’s preposterous 2007 campaign claim
(at a commemoration of the King-led 1965 Selma Voting Rights March)
to believe that Blacks had already come “90
percent” of
the way to equality in the U.S.

Completing
the “triple evils” hat trick, Obama – the self-appointed
chief-executioner atop the Special Forces Global War on (of) Terror
Kill List – embraced and expanded upon the vast criminal and
worldwide spying and killing operation he inherited from Dick Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and George W. Bush. He tamped down
Bush’s failed ground wars only to ramp up and inflate the role of
unaccountable special force and drone attacks in the spirit of his
dashing and reckless imperial role model John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Obama’s drone program, Noam Chomsky noted in early
2015,
was “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times.” It
“target[ed] people suspected of perhaps intending to harm us some
day, and any unfortunates who happen to be nearby,” Chomsky wrote.

In
waging his deadly and disastrous, nation-wrecking and regionally
destabilizing air war on Libya, Obama (unlike Bush prior to the
invasion of Iraq) did not even bother with the pretense of seeking
Congressional approval. “It should be a scandal,”
Stansfield Smith wrote
on CounterPunch one
year ago,
“that left-liberals paint Trump as a special threat, a war mongerer
– [but] not Obama who is the first president to be at war every day
of his eight years, who is waging seven wars at present, who dropped
three bombs an hour, 24 hours a day, in 2016.” As Alan
Nairn told Democracy
Now’s
Amy Goodman in early 2010,
Obama kept the nation’s giant imperial machinery “set on kill.”

Meanwhile,
Obama far surpassed the Cheney-Bush regime when it came to repressing
antiwar dissenters, not to mention those who opposed the rule of the
1 percent – smashed by a coordinated federal campaign in the fall
of 2011. “As all kinds of journalists have continuously pointed
out,” Glenn
Greenwald noted in
early 2014, “the Obama administration is more aggressive and more
vindictive when it comes to punishing whistleblowers than any
administration in American history, including the Nixon
administration.”

Furthermore,
and to make matters far worse, Obama helped keep the planet set on
burn. As Stansfield Smith noted two days before the horrid
Trump’s inauguration:

Obama,
who says he recognizes the threat to humanity posed by climate
change, still invested at least $34 billion to promote fossil fuel
projects in other countries. That is three times as much as George W
Bush spent in his two terms, almost twice that of Ronald Reagan,
George HW Bush and Bill Clinton put together…Obama financed 70
foreign fossil fuel projects. When completed they will release 164
million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year
– about the same output as the 95 currently operating coal-fired
power plants in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Oklahoma. He financed two
natural gas plants on an island in the Great Barrier Reef, as well as
two of the largest coalmines on the planet… Moreover, under Obama,
the U.S. has reversed the steady drop in U.S. oil production
which had continued unchecked since 1971. The U.S. was pumping just
5.1 million barrels per day when Obama took office. By April 2016 it
was up to 8.9 million barrels per day. A 74% increase.

As
Obama proudly said in 2012, in the film This
Changes Everything:

‘Over
the last three years I’ve directed my administration to open up
millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different
states. We’re opening up more than 75% of our potential oil
resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs
to a record high. We’ve added enough oil and gas pipelines to
encircle the earth and then some. So, we are drilling all over the
place, right now.’

“Drill,
baby, drill!”

Perhaps
the dismal neoliberal Obama presidency – a key midwife to the Trump
atrocity – was at least an object lesson on how real progressive
and democratic change is about something bigger than a change in the
party or color of the people in nominal power. That is certainly
something King (who would be 88 today) would have understood very
well had he been able to witness the endless mendacity of the
nation’s first half-white president first-hand.

“The
black revolution,” King wrote in a
posthumously published 1969 essay titled
“A Testament of Hope” (embracing a very different, authentically
progressive sort of hope than that purveyed by Brand Obama in 2008)
“is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is
forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws – racism,
poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are
rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals
systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical
reconstruction society of society itself is the real issue to be
faced.”

Those
words ring as true as ever today, with heightened urgency as it
becomes undeniable that the profits system is driving
humanity over an environmental cliff. They
are words we never hear during official King Day commemorations.

King,
it is worth recalling, was recruited by antiwar progressives to run
for the U.S. presidency in 1967. He politely declined, claiming that
he’d have little chance of winning and that he preferred to serve
as a force of moral conscience for all the nation’s political
parties.

The
deeper truth, clear from his late-life writing and speeches, is that
he had no interest in climbing into the power elite: his passion was
directed toward a “revolution” of “the dispossessed” and a
mass grassroots movement for the redistribution of wealth and power –
a “radical reconstruction of society itself” – from the bottom
up. Dr. King was interested in what the late radical U.S.
historian Howard
Zinn considered the
more urgent politics of “who’s
sitting in the streets,”
very different from what Zinn saw as the comparatively superficial
politics of “who’s
sitting in the White House.”

King’s
officially deleted radical record and Zinn’s clever and sage
dichotomy are worth bearing in mind in coming months and years as we
watch the nation’s “left” liberals try to call forth and herald
a new Obama (Oprah perhaps?) in 2020. That is certainly one of
the last things we need.

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Paul Street keep writing here.

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Jolande Withuis stelde in OVT dat marxisme seksistisch is en de 19de eeuw niet bestond uit arbeiders en fabriekseigenaren…….. OEI!!

Posted on August 14, 2017June 14, 2024 by Willem Wachtmeester

‘Utopia’ is een programmaonderdeel in het Radio1 programma OVT waarmee de ongelofelijke hufter en monkelend presentator Jos Palm alsnog zijn overheersende stempel weet te drukken op de zomerprogrammering van OVT, terwij hij zelf met vakantie is……. Daarbij heeft hij niet de hulp van één van zijn collega’s presentatoren van OVT, maar van Julie Blussé, blijkbaar een vrouw waar Palm wel wat in ziet………

Utopia n.a.v. het boek van Thomas More, dat vorig jaar 500 jaar bestond. ‘Ondertitel’ van de serie: ‘Een serie over dromers en doemdenkers…’ Opvallend dat men als tune het nummer ‘Utopia’ van Goldfrapp gebruikt, terwijl de geweldige zangeres, muzikant, componist en producer Alison Goldfrapp in dit nummer vooral wijst op het onder de fascisten in Italië destijds in zwang zijnde Utopische ideaalbeeld……..

Vorige week zondag (6 augustus) was het de beurt aan Marx om doorgezaagd te worden door ‘deskundigen’ waaronder Jolande Withuis. Uiteraard werden de Sovjet Unie, China en Noord Korea neergezet als zijnde communistische staten, gebaseerd op de denkbeelden va Marx……. Daar valt echter, om het maar voorzichtig te zeggen, het e.e.a. aan op te merken. Laat ik niet te lang uitweiden en het tot één cruciaal punt beperken: deze voorbeelden waren en zijn deels dictatoriaal geregeerde staten, zeg maar gerust politiestaten….. Politiestaten die door een relatief kleine groep welgestelde ambtenaren (bestuur, politie en strijdkrachten) worden bestuurd, uiteraard met een ‘mooie rol’ van de grote bedrijven, die zich prima voelen in een dergelijke maatschappij………

Kijk en als Marx aan één ding de pest had, was het wel aan op dergelijke manier bestuurde landen, waar de gelijkheid ver te zoeken was en nog is. Al moet gezegd worden dat dit niet meer geldt voor het huidige Rusland, daar het niet meer als ‘communistisch’ wordt gezien en dat ook niet is (precies zoals dit ten tijde van de Sovjet Unie niet zo was)……… Ook onder Stalin hadden de hoge ambtenaren en partijleiders een welvarend leven, inclusief een buitenhuis en dure vakanties….

De enorme koekwaus Withuis stelde dat bepaalde zaken in het door Marx en Engels geschreven manifest niet kloppen. Zo stelde ze dat het in de 19de eeuw in Groot-Brittannië echt niet zo was, dat de maatschappij alleen maar bestond uit arbeiders en rijke fabriekseigenaren……. Goh, meen je dat nou Withuis? Dus er waren ook boeren, bakkers landarbeiders en ga nog maar een half uur door…… Jezus wat een opmerking, of Marx en Engels van de pot gerukt waren en niet begrepen hoe de maatschappij werkte, een maatschappij waarin zij NB zelf leefden…….

Eén ding is zeker de grote onderlaag in de Britse 19de eeuw (overigens in heel Europa) was straatarm, honger eiste haar tol en in heftige winters waren de dodenaantallen gigantisch (overigens nog in de 80er jaren van de vorige eeuw, overleden er veel oude Britten tijdens de winter, wegens gebrek aan brandstof voor hun kachels……)…….

Overigens was het contingent aan fabrieksarbeiders enorm in de 19de eeuw, waar zelfs kinderen werden gebruikt als arbeiders, kinderen die niet zelden werkdagen van meer dan 12 uur maakten. Niet voor niets schreven Marx en Engels tegen die enorme mensonwaardige uitbuiting door de rijke fabriekseigenaren…… Ach ja, Withuis is intussen de 160 jaar al gepasseerd en ‘zo kan zij het beter weten dan wie ook…..’

Withuis noemt zich o.a. feministe en moest nog even fijntjes zeggen, dat marxisme seksistisch is……. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! Waar haalt ze de nonsens vandaan?? De meeste vrouwen van fabrieksarbeiders werkten in de grote textielfabrieken, logisch dat ook zij onderwerp waren van het Marxisme. Zo schreef Engels in zijn boek: ‘De oorsprong van het gezin, de privé-eigendom en de staat’, dat de onderdrukking van de vrouw niet uit de lucht kwam vallen, maar een product was van de ‘opkomende’ klassenmaatschappij…..*

Marx en Engels verzetten zich zelfs hevig tegen een resolutie op de Eerste Internationale in 1866, waarmee men de vrouw uit het productieproces probeerde te duwen (dit onder pleitbezorger Lasalle)…….. Maar nee, Withuis weet het beter……..

Tot slot hoorde ik Withuis nog opmerken dat het heel erg eng is (hoor), als je denkt en vindt dat het anders kan…… (dan de huidige inhumane ijskoude neoliberale maatschappij…… Ap) Nee hè Withuis, daar moet jij niet aan denken, veronderstel dat iedereen nu eens echt gelukkig zou kunnen worden, dat er geen mensen meer worden uitgebuit door westerse en andere geldhaaien, een wereld waar iedereen toegang heeft tot een goed en betaalbaar onderdak, goed en betaalbaar onderwijs** en goede en betaalbare gezondheidszorg…… Een wereld waar men geld uitgeeft om het volk een beter leven te geven, i.p.v. kapitalen in een donkere oorlogsput donderen, of miljarden te laten verdwijnen in de kluizen van de financiële- en bouwmaffia………. Een wereld waar honger, (makkelijk te genezen) ziekten en armoede eindelijk echt worden teruggedrongen………

Een wereld die Withuis niet wenst, waarin een land als de VS wordt belet de ene na de andere illegale oorlog te beginnen, een wereld waarin het geloof voorgoed een kleine bijrol op het persoonlijke vlak zal spelen, waar de jongere generaties niet meer worden gehersenspoeld met het gif van religies, gif waarmee men de grote uitgebuite onderlaag belazerd en belooft dat het echte leven pas na dit leven begint, dus even hard doorwerken (en afzien), ben je na je dood in het paradijs……. (ofwel: Utopia…..)

Wat een flutserie dat Utopia, walgelijk!

* Zie o.a.: ‘Marxisme, feminisme en de emancipatie van de vrouw‘ , een duidelijk en gedegen pamflet van Brecht De Smet.

** Onlangs werd nog gemeld, i.t.t. eerdere berichten, dat de leerlingen in het privé-onderwijs aanmerklijk beter presteren dan hun leeftijdsgenoten in het reguliere onderwijs…….. (logisch, alleen al gezien de klassengrootte in het reguliere onderwijs….)

PS: voor muziek van dr. Pisser, klik op het label ‘recept’, direct onder dit bericht (na een aantal berichten opnieuw op dit label klikken, op het laatste niet herhaalde recept, daar u anders hetzelfde recept keer op keer herhaald ziet worden). Voorts kan u muziek links naar albums met uiteenlopende muziek vinden op mijn Facebook, Google+ en Twitter pagina, daar vindt u ook de nieuwste berichten, verwijzingen naar artikelen van anderen, petities, enz.

Dr. King’s Long Assassination

Dr.
King’s Long Assassination