Not even the best propaganda system will save them

The mask of legitimacy is slowly crumbling, as the current world paradigm, based on lies, selfishness and short-term thinking continues to spawn crisis after crisis and war after infernal war…

BY PETER PAVIMENTOV [print_link]

It is interesting that some of the banking community abroad are running scared of the people’s moral opinion on the bank rescue by public funds and its resulting recovery of the speculative sector whereby enormous bonuses are once again being paid. Even the Governor of the Bank of England, not a minor office holder, counsels a breaking up of those banks too large to fail. And the American president makes again misleading compensatory noises about the salaries of the officers in those institutions who apparently did not pay the government back.

This unease is also slowly penetrating to the Wall Streeters, who as usual remain fully blind to public opinion. But one must expect here the normal psycho-terrorism to be applied, scaring those whose life existence is threatened and already diminished by the drain of the economic strength of this country. What do the financial rapists care how many businesses go out of existence, or how much government reduces social support for those who worked hard most of their lives for these benefits? War and a strenuous effort to keep the creaking colossus of capitalism going, informs the leading lights of extortion whether in lower Manhattan or in Washington, D.C.

Never has the misalignment of the economy been so starkly evident as today, much more so than in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when the masses of the poor were less informed and less educated than now. That is the threat with which the present power holders must cope and all their propaganda in the pre-bought media will not save them, because the carefully constructed edifice of received opinion is now dangerously leaning over.

America has ever been the country of personal anarchism, where individual assertion was part of the national character, where a basic cynicism underlies reluctant acceptance of imposed rules and where one may hope this contrariness may save this nation and the world. Though nationhood is a misnomer as well as an outdated notion, despite its lingering on more people become aware that there is little difference in humanity whether one is born in Topeka, Kansas or in Isfahan, Iran, but artificial borders between countries remain in place as ordained by the military and economic overlords.

However the realization that propagandized thinking is a thing of the past penetrates more and more Western minds which can only be to the benefit of those submitted to Western aggression. Colonialism in whatever form is over and the sooner this will be clear to the oppressor classes, the easier and quicker their fate will be, because rebellion is in the air. It is a process that unlike previous eruptions of class societies will move slower like tectonic plates shifting in our earth, a slowness which could be unfortunate for the health of our planet, but come it will. The suspension of belief is a process that cannot be forced but must be allowed to grow by itself, even though it can reach spontaneous combustion at a certain point. Like the nefarious warlords in the Pentagon, who for their reason to exist like nothing better than to create international tension, the many profiteers and others who push their own idealistic conservative programs in this corrupt government, are appearing to be more and more redundant.

This is because there are sure signs that voters have become aware that the two factions of the same power cabal play footsie with each other and that the one faction called misleadingly the Democrats is in fact the one possibly most deleterious to the public’s economic welfare.  No rational government has laws that politicize the judiciary nor should such excesses be tolerated like a Supreme Court of judges appointing a president. Therefore as this government has proven to be inimical to the people’s interests, it needs to be removed, not by votes as it is clear that voting is a spurious exercise, but by popular mobilization. How this will be effected is unpredictable, but it is a historical imperative. One cannot unfortunately predict or even steer popular movements with certitude, and each has its own impetus and character. The breaking up of Federal power is very much needed at this late stage and a breaking up of the United States into smaller units desirable because smaller units allow for more egalitarianism and input from the people. States by themselves never declare war, nor can they exert undue economic pressure. How then true democracy and equality can be reached is left to common consent in each state after this suffocating and all pervasive structure of capitalism is abandoned with its extortionate first commandment to compete, a slave ring around everyone’s neck causing antagonism and alienation unworthy of the human soul.

Should humanity finally see the light despite the dense fog of propaganda, rewarding some and abandoning most in our social world will be a thing of the past and when everyone is allowed input in how societal rules are constructed and applied, the ills of capitalism will be gone. Transforming the Res Publica into a form of tribalism is truly the most rational goal at present, even if perceived by a mere handful. After this difficult stage is completed we may at last deal with the problems such a transformation will undoubtedly bring with it. No human social organization is ever ideal, expecting that would be a step backwards, but maybe now the swell of discontent is rising, the breaking up of institutional injustice could be a near event for this country as well as a salvation for all those it now attacks and tortures unrelentingly.

PETER PAVIMENTOV is a senior columnist with The Greanville Post.