De VS is een fascistische (politie-) staat

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 Workshop and 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"- 

Click for Spanish, German, Dutch, Danish, French, translation- Note- Translation may take a moment to load.

============================================

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

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.......

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

See also

In case you missed it: US 'would lose a war with China fought in the Pacific: Pentagon sources warn

Western media’s favorite Hong Kong ‘freedom struggle writer’ is American ex-Amnesty staffer in yellowface

Click for Spanish, German, Dutch, Danish, French, translation- Note- Translation may take a moment to load.
==============================
* De status quo die zo angstvallig wordt vastgehouden door politici, die in feite worden gestuurd door de grote bedrijven en de financiële sector, maar ook door de grote mediabedrijven en de super welgestelden, ofwel de plutocraten..... Anders gezegd: deze grote bedrijven en plutocraten hebben in feite de politiek in de zak, iets dat met de Coronacrisis nog eens is bevestigd, miljarden voor bedrijven terwijl de verplegende en verzorgende beroepen kunnen barsten en men al jaren veel te weinig investeert in onderwijs en medische zorg..... Neem wat dat laatste betreft ook de bezuinigingen op de GGD, terwijl de AIVD in 2016 al waarschuwde dat Nederland niet klaar was voor een pandemie...... Eén en ander is ook terug te vinden in het opleggen van de belastingen: hoe is het mogelijk dat de laagst verdienende arbeiders een veel hoger percentage aan belasting moeten betalen dan de (grote) bedrijven, terwijl die bedrijven makkelijk veel meer belasting kunnen betalen...... Overigens ook te zien aan het laag houden van de spaarrente ten behoeve van de grootaandeelhouders, waardoor ook de pensioenfondsen miljarden hebben verloren en daarmee bijna werden en worden gedwongen hun geld op de beurs te vergokken....... (dat is niet nodig als de pensioenfondse maar wilden investeren in bijvoorbeeld woningbouw en daar hoeven geen winsten van 10% per jaar te worden behaald, een paar procent is al voldoende om aan de verplichtingen te kunnen blijven voldoen......)

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

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....

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.

Help Paul Street keep writing here.

Join the debate on Facebook

More articles by:PAUL STREET

Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014)

Zie ook: 'Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: 8 wijze lessen!'

        en: 'Martin Luther King jr. vermoord door de overheid, aldus rechter........'

        en: 'Martin Luther King misbruikt door Radio1'

        en: 'Martin Luther King: de moord van 50 jaar geleden door de VS overheid uiterst beperkt herdacht'

        en: 'De oorlog tegen het arme deel van de VS bevolking'

        en: 'Nam Kurt Cobain zijn eigen leven? Niet volgens een flink aantal mensen'

        en:  'Paul Scheffer, het media-orakel met een 'vlijmscherpe analyse' over het racistische optreden van de politie in de VS......... AUW!!!'

        en: 'Willem Post over de zegeningen van het zero tolerance beleid in de VS en ach, het is misschien ietsje doorgeschoten.......'