We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, October 2, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Saturday, October 2, 2021

  • The War on COVID-19: Man’s Final Conquest of Nature by Nozomi Hayase from 21st Century Wire. My reaction: Hayase apparently acknowledges that the capitalist class is using science "for a “Great Reset” to re-engineer the global economy as the world emerged from the pandemic.", but doesn't make this point explicit enough. Yes, I insist that the ruling class is using science, like all other institutions, to improve their dominance of the world and to prevent (in their delusional minds) a runaway climate that threatens most life on Earth with extinction. 
The above article, and others of Johnstone, explains why today's advanced capitalist nations are pure examples of fascism: the merging of governments with corporations such that the latter controls the former. Fascism is the inevitable final stage of capitalism. The ruling capitalist classes, which have had considerable dominance via their US/Anglo/Zionist Empire over the world since WWII, have had difficulty defining this word for very obvious reasons. 
 
I think that George Orwell produced the best definition. He determined from what the word commonly meant was little beyond a "swearword". This obvious development was the considerable work of capitalist propagandists who had exceptional difficulties with the word in order to prevent the real meaning from influencing the minds of most people. You see, this increasingly transnational capitalist class (which soon evolved into a US/Anglo/Zionist Empire that we see today) defeated another would-be fascist-capitalist empire and arose from WWII with different methods, other than violence, to achieve compliance to the interests (wealth & power) of the capitalist ruling classes.
 
After a lifetime (I'm 85 years of age) of considerable reading of political history from original sources, I've concluded that the term fascism describes the core meaning of an all-powerful, transnational capitalist class that has taken complete control of governments without the pretenses of liberality (def. #1). Fascism is the last stage of the development of capitalism. The older conventional meanings differ widely, but they all included violent means to get compliance from the great masses of people. But, outright violence is irrelevant to my meaning of the term. There are other ways to create compliance to the diktats of a ruling class, and the contemporary transnational capitalist class of the Empire are using all of them.
 
You see, the new capitalist overlords were so impressed by the effectiveness of their propaganda during WWI and the 1930s that they chose different methods to ensure compliance. They did not completely dispense with more violent means of compliance, but largely directed their more violent methods against minorities and poor European-Americans (and, of course, foreign populations). The huge prison population, consisting of disproportionate minorities and poor people, reflects this fact. In the new version of fascism, the original capitalists of Britain and the USA have more frequently emphasized control of the thoughts of their subjects through re-writing of history and control over media as well as control over all other institutions in order to reflect their values and interests. It doesn't take an advanced degree to see if you control jobs, careers, and grant funding (for independent contractors), you can effectively control behavior.

Now with the ruling class engineered corona-19 "pandemic", they are increasingly using more militant methods of control via mandates that prevent people, if they are not vaccinated, from keeping their jobs, traveling, eating at restaurants, attending public events, etc. The ruling capitalist class is essentially creating a two-class society: theirs and their obedient followers and the rest of humanity who they are slowly reducing in numbers in a desperate method of preventing the effects of abrupt global warming which they have caused.
 
I offer my own website as proof. Despite my anti-capitalist orientation, they have not decided to banish my website from the internet because of the relatively low numbers of followers. They use algorithms to reduce the number of hits enjoyed by opposition websites, and they have been effective to lead people away from such dissidents. They censor highly qualified experts who oppose or criticize official pandemic policies on their media and more popular internet sites. Soon the ruling class will tire of the use of mind-control methods and use more violent means of containing opposition as they are now doing in Australia.

I think bloggers like Australian Johnstone with her critical use of "narratives" are catching on to what's happening and the true meaning of fascism.
  • CIA plan to poison Assange wasn’t needed. The US found a ‘lawful’ way to disappear him by Jonathan Cook, an independent British journalist now living in Nazareth in the right-wing Jewish occupied territory of Palestine which serves the hegemonic interests of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire, from his weblog. (Note: To those of you who have been closely following the persecution of Assange by the Empire, the article contains nothing new. The entire article encompasses all the main efforts to punish Assange for revealing the Empire's secrets.) My reaction: You might also be interested in an article by Joe Lauria entitled "What the Yahoo! Assange Report Got Wrong".
  • Does Capitalism Make Us Crazy? by Susan Rosenthal from her weblog. (Note: Rosenthal, a retired psychiatrist, gives a Marxist perspective on mental health.)
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