Concentration camps and dead people are nothing to joke about. It’s OK, however, to cynically use them to whip people up into a paroxysm of manufactured mass fascism hysteria. Not that the neoliberal ruling classes and the corporate media would ever do that. No, they would never repeatedly attempt to evoke our hatred of the actual Nazis (and their actual concentration camps … which people were dragged out of their homes, loaded onto trains, and shipped away to, and which you could not voluntarily depart) in order to short circuit our critical thinking, or otherwise emotionally manipulate us into supporting their War on Populism.Many anarchists among the working class, who simply do not have the time to develop critical thinking skills, do not realize that contemporary capitalism has morphed into a new version of neoliberal fascism because they have always been taught to believe that fascism were stereotypes depicted by goosestepping fascist thugs who beat up decent people and send them on trains to their death. This new updated fascism uses more sophisticated psychological methods to deceive and manipulate people in order to continue their self-serving exploitation of people and nature.
Many US and western analysts take it upon themselves to regularly and harshly criticise Hashd, ignoring the fact that it was Hashd that saved Iraq (and the rest of the Middle East) from ISIS when all other “security” forces were on the run. The US objective in imposing this reform was to cripple all Iranian friends and allies in Iraq and divide Mesopotamia into Kurdistan, Shiistan and Sunnistan.
The 2019 Socialism Conference, like its annual predecessors, combines calls for radical economic democratic transformation and progressive social progress with the demonization of independent foreign governments that are targeted by the US government for regime change, such as Nicaragua, Cuba, Syria, Iran, China, and Russia.
The schedule of panels on foreign policy and international issues features a veritable who’s who of leftist regime-change activists. There is even a talk devoted specifically to demonizing the anti-imperialist left.
... we’ve all got some important questions to ask ourselves, haven’t we? Do we desire to stay in the familiar US-controlled world order at the price of omnicide and ecocide, or do we wish to roll the dice and bet on humanity instead? Do we wish to stay the course because it preserves a status quo that is all we’ve ever known, or do we take a leap of faith on the possibility that we can de-escalate all geopolitical enmity and move into collaboration with each other and with our ecosystem?I argue that it is not our inherited "fear-based mentality" from our evolutionary ancestors so much as it is the addiction to power which concentrated wealth delivers in abundance. Thus, aggression in the form of imperialism is necessary to preserve the system of capitalism and makes imperialism a necessity for the continuance of this system.
This choice right here is why I write so much about mankind’s need to transcend its old conditioning patterns and move into something wildly unprecedented. Our current fear-based mentality makes a populism-driven leap of faith into transcendence impossible and ensures that we remain on an oligarch-driven trajectory toward extinction. I firmly believe that we have the freedom to either pass or fail this test, but we don’t have the freedom not to take it. We’ll transcend our old conditioning patterns which we inherited from our evolutionary ancestors who lived in a wildly different world from the one we’ve created, or we will perish. It’s an A or B choice, but the choice is ours.
have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth [including other humans]. (Gen. 1:26)
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
MANUEL ZELAYA: That is how capitalism works. In the US, France, anywhere. Capitalism is based on just one principle: accumulation of wealth. That is how it functions here and in the rest of the world.
A small elite of transnational [corporations] associated with people in countries who clean up for them. They do business, and that business creates the need to set up security [power] for themselves.
The book ends with the words, “He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” Will we too declare, like Winston Smith, our love for ‘Big Brother’ above all else, or will we emerge victorious against the forces of a technological tyranny that appears to be just over the horizon? Or is Orwell’s 1984 just really good fiction and not the instruction manual for tyrants many have come to fear it is? [my emphasis]Yes, indeed, time is running out for all of us because most people, like Bridge, have consistently asked the wrong questions ever since Orwell wrote the book. What are the "forces of technology"? Technology are essentially sophisticated tools, whereas capitalism is a system that privileges owners of economies over the rest of us, and thus capitalist ruling classes have used technology to secure and protect their system of privileges and power.
As long as we colluded in the manufactured consensus of western societies, the system operated without challenge or meaningful dissent. A deeply ideological system destroying the planet was treated as if it was natural, immutable, the summit of human progress, the end of history. Those times are over. Accidents like Corbyn will happen more frequently, as will extreme climate events and economic crises. The power structures in place to prevent such accidents will by necessity grow more ham-fisted, more belligerent, less concealed to get their way. And we might finally understand that a system designed to pacify us while a few grow rich at the expense of our children’s future and our own does not have to continue. That we can raise our voices and loudly say: “No!”