The best lies are not lies but half-truths and implied half-truths
are more powerful than what is directly said. We see this in our news. Leave
out the part where you provoke someone to defend themselves and suddenly you
have justification for further attacks found in someones defense against the
initial attack. They tell you the presence of war is peace and the absence of
war is violence. Our governments continuously tell us that the people shooting
and killing are the ‘peacemakers’. The political narrative is distorted by
lies, half-truths and rhetoric to evoke an emotional reaction without
understanding a reality. The rhetoric goes further to often justify and promote
this same violence and murder by re-painting it with words of patriotism,
defense, freedom and other twisted rhetoric.
Patriotism is not only a part of nationalism, it is a crux
of it, and often what most call patriotism is nothing more than nationalism.
Nationalism is defined by as: a strong identification of a group of individuals
with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. Often, it is
the belief that an ethnic group has a right to statehood, or that citizenship
in a state should be limited to one ethnic group, or that multinationality in a
single state should necessarily comprise the right to express and exercise
national identity even by minorities. It can also include the belief that the
state is of primary importance, or the belief that one state is naturally
superior to all other states. When governments rally around their anti-migrant
war mongering praise of the nation they choose to mask this with the term
‘patriotism’, the love and devotion to the nation that is seen as ‘number one’.
The belief of the so-called patriot is very much one that embraces the idea
that their governments are naturally superior to all other states. This
superiority is quite often falsely defined with words such as freedom, liberty,
equality or rights. There is little emphasis on what those actually mean,
outside of more emotional rhetoric that tends to be vague at best. There is no
defined ethic or concept that all can see under a true definition. The declared
belief in equality does not apply to many people groups still to this day. You
must begin to question the rhetoric you are being fed. Look for the implied
messages and the half-truths.
The New World Order conspiracy analysis is painfully close to the
truth. Elites do work to push their agendas without public scrutiny. The World
Bank, NATO, and IMF are all global institutions which leverage their power to
pursue the interests of American empire and subdue rising threats from below.
Globalization, a euphemism for expansionism, continues to have devastating
effects on developing nations as
transnational corporations ship jobs overseas or across the border
where they can exploit the cheapest labour markets. The mainstream
media has evolved to serve its own interests (and thus the interests
of the status-quo power structures upon which they depend). In working
to maintain their dominance as super-powers, Western nationa has transitioned from using
the communist-bogeyman to the much more effective and never-ending threat of
terrorism to continually increase its military might. And an appalling 1% of
the world's population owns over 40% of the world's wealth, while over 3
billion people lanquish in dire poverty.
That these things are happening is not in dispute. What we
have to question is the conclusions we should draw from them. This is important
because we need to make sense of all these problems so we can ultimately determine our success in solving them. Blaming a few individuals for
the problem leads to one set of conclusions and strategies for change.
Recognising the deeper economic forces of which these individuals are only a
part will lead to another set of strategies.
So let's think very seriously about the usefulness of framing all of the
world’s problems around an elite group of bankers quest for world domination.
If this narrative is misleading, then it will mislead everyone's efforts who
take it seriously. The problem isn't "them." They are just symptoms
of the deeper cause. Kill off all of the elite today and new people would
jockey to take their place.
But the good news is, people are waking up, and they are
rejecting the values of rulers. Capitalism is a worldwide system that over
several centuries, carried their practices to every corner of the globe,
destroying and displacing other traditions, usually through warfare. World
history for the last five hundred years is thus mainly the story of this
assault that capitalists have thrown against the world’s peoples, beginning
with the peasants of Europe, in order to seize their lands and force them into
wage slavery (wealth-making propertyless labourers). You should be aware that
countries that came to be called communist were just capitalist states doing
what capitalists always do: enslave and exploit their populations. There was
always a tradition that perceived the Soviet experiment and the colonial
revolutions that aped it in these terms. Now that the Soviet Union is gone,
more people are realizing that those so-called communist countries were just
capitalism in a different form and had little to do with the struggle against
capitalism.
It is impossible to defeat our ruling class by force of
arms. The level of firepower currently possessed by all major governments and
most minor ones is simply overwhelming. It is bought with the expropriated
wealth of billions of people. For any opposition movement to think that it can
acquire, maintain, and deploy a similarly vast and sophisticated armament is
ludicrous. I have nothing against armed struggle in principle (although of
course we don't like it); We just don’t think it can work now. It would take an
empire as enormous and rich as capitalism itself to fight capitalists on their
own terms. This is something the working classes of the world will never have,
nor should we even want it. It means that we have to look to and invent if
necessary other weapons, other tactics. But we must be careful not to fall into
the nonviolence/violence trap. Is tearing down a fence a violent act or is it
resistance to the violence of those who erected the fence in the first place?
Is throwing a tear gas canister back at the police who fired it an act of
violence or is it resistance to an act of violence? Nonviolence is a key
ideological weapon of a violent ruling class. This class uses it to pacify us;
it uses its mass media to preach nonviolence incessantly. Such rhetoric is an
effective weapon because we all (but they don't) want to live in a peaceful
world. We must never forget that we are at war, however, and that we have been
for five hundred years. We are involved in class warfare. This defines our
situation historically and sets limits to what we can do. It would be nice to
think of peace, for example, but this is out of the question. It is excluded as
an option by historical conditions. Peace can be achieved only by destroying
capitalism. A major weapon of capitalists has always been to simply murder
those who are threatening their rule. Capitalists (generically speaking) are
not merely thieves; they are murderers. Their theft and murder is on a scale
never seen before in history - a scale so vast it boggles the mind. Capitalists
make Genghis Khan, and Attila the Hun look like saints. This is a terrible
enemy we face. Capitalism must be explicitly refused and replaced by something
else. This constitutes war, but it is not a war in the traditional sense of
armies and tanks; it is a war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday
life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators
of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done
in the past, to try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had
to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue to do so.
We can turn now to a notion of how we might want to live.
Let’s assume, for the moment, that we could start from scratch to build a
totally new social world, building up our neighborhoods just the way we wanted.
What would they look like? What would the core social forms be? In order for
capitalism to be destroyed, millions and millions of people must be
dissatisfied with their way of life. They must want something else and see
certain existing things as obstacles to getting what they want. It is a new
prevailing vision, a dominant desire, an overriding need. What must exist is a
pressing desire to live a certain way and not to live another way. If this
pressing desire were a desire to live free, to be autonomous, to live in
democratically controlled communities, to participate in the self-regulating
activities of a mature people, then capitalism could be destroyed. Otherwise,
we are doomed to perpetual slavery and possibly even to extinction.
The content of this vision is actually not new at all. The
goal socialists has always been to restore community. Marx defined socialism as
a free association of producers, and the free development of each is a
condition for the free development of all. The aim have always been clear: to
abolish wage slavery, eradicate a social order organized solely around the
accumulation of capital for its own sake, and establish in its place a society
of free people who democratically and cooperatively self-determine the shape of
their social world.
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