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PAUL EDWARDS, Senior Contributing Editor • Paul Edwards is a genuine Renaissance man, gifted with many talents and participant in many events and struggles of our tormented times. Our colleague Jeff Brown, who did a fine interview with him, sums it up thusly: “Paul’s life story is worthy of a biography: a rebel youth growing up, traveling and working around the world and then a long career as a Hollywood writer. Through it all, he has never lost his lifelong wrath against US imperialism and global capitalism, while seeking social and economic justice for humanity’s 99%…”
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
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Paul Edwards
The multiracial character of this wave of protests has stunned the establishment. (TGP screenshot)
The murder of black people has been a constant in American barbarity since Colonial times. Persistent white murder has caused black agony to erupt in spasms of despair that have only altered its methods, not ended it. White racism, officially supported, has suppressed black outrage but not stifled it. Whites continue to murder blacks but cannot murder black spirit.
After a long, grisly sequence of vicious and legally inexcusable murders by various vile, sociopathic, pseudo-military police forces, the Floyd murder inflamed it again, this time with complex differences. Unlike the national fury after the murder of Dr. King or the storm of rage over Rodney King’s abuse, this explosion can not be described as a “race riot”. Though the murder of a black man triggered it, and though his murder is the central theme around which the phenomenon has coalesced, the great majority of active participants have been white. This is unprecedented.
The question then is whether a small but not negligible minority of white Americans has, in a historically brief time, so developed ethically that it now embraces the deeply humanist creed of the moral giants, Einstein and Schweizer, Eugene Debs and Desmond Tutu. The answer is that it has.
Clearly, many whites have made that ethical climb, or they wouldn’t be in the streets in great numbers over what has been traditionally a black issue. This raises questions. Has definition of a traditionally racist issue morphed from what it historically has been? And is there, in fact, any issue that is strictly racial any more, at least among relatively enlightened whites?
Clearly, many whites have made that ethical climb, or they wouldn’t be in the streets in great numbers over what has been traditionally a black issue...If not, then it follows that for them an existential issue for one race is an issue for all races.
If not, then it follows that for them an existential issue for one race is an issue for all races. This is a huge stretch for the propagandized, deformed American psyche even to grasp, let alone fully to embrace. Stuffed with the poisonous philosophical styrofoam of American Exceptionalism, brains and souls befouled and infused with the shallowest, stupidest, cruelest, latter-day Nazi Ubermensch tripe, Americans are ill-equipped to understand and accept even themselves, much less those we’re schooled by The Empire to regard, around the world, as our subhuman underlings.
Powerful unanimity of purpose between elements of historically alienated “races”--the term is no longer validated by science, btw--not only seriously threatens racism and white dominion, it mortally menaces hegemonist dogma across the board, which makes it deeply terrifying to the American Capitalist Tyranny, its .0001% owner class and its purchased government. Passionate demand for an end to police murder of blacks, for defunding or eliminating these brutal, dishonest gestapos of state-directed terror, is just the most openly hideous crime our diseased system inflicts on all of us.
General awareness of this--taking nothing away from enlightened white empathy with blacks over serial murder-by-cop--is the far broader, denser background reality--as dark matter in the universe is the field and matrix of all that is visible--that with its tremendous gravity has drawn moral whites into genuine brotherhood of purpose with violently traumatized blacks in their frustrated and unending quest for justice in America.
Tragically, as acute observers see, though there is broad and growing comprehension by Americans of the deep falsity and brutal exploitation the State inflicts on the great mass of them, there is neither a committed cadre of inspiring leaders, nor a coherently formulated creed around which a potent public uprising against injustice can coalesce. In place of fused, mobilized, revolutionary unity, we have chaotic, unfocussed desperation.
This will not win. Historically, it never has. The long, sad unwinding of the beautifully, humanely motivated Occupy adventure is the latest case in point. Based on the widely shared conviction of the deeply evil, biocidal character of cheating, lying, obscene, violent, tottering Capitalism, having definite aims and goals, worthy despite the anxious ridicule of the besieged oligarchic state, it lacked the effectual warhead of a committed, passionate leadership with a defined program for elimination and replacement of the gangrenous piratical corpse it courageously opposed. And so, rudderless and internally confused, adrift, subject to attrition and relentless abuse at the hands of the System’s police, it broke, dissolved and faded away.
The reason no such cell of visionary leaders of a potent revolutionary creed exists here is neither single nor simple. Capitalist America--the monstrous corporate combine that owns and controls the State--has waged ruthless war against any politics intended to benefit the people, but repression alone has never eliminated determined political opposition anywhere. Decades of highly sophisticated propaganda has debased and lobotomized a victimized electorate but cannot eradicate intelligences that rise above it. A rebel group can be bought off if traitors run it but never from principled leaders and we’ve had public men who have not sold out and given their all to oppose our vicious system in years gone by, though we have none now. The best of them were undermined and sabotaged by the very organs of law so falsely celebrated as incorruptible and independent of co-optation.
The fact is that the combination of repression, propaganda, and legal malfeasance, have so thoroughly strangled truth in America that coalescence of a core team of the best minds and hearts is impossible. And even if it were not, absolute control of all organs and platforms of communication with American citizens belongs to the criminal State.
Does the lack of guiding hardcore cadre mean that this broad, inspired effort will come to nothing? Well, no, in the sense that Occupy didn’t come to nothing, and its effects outlived its endeavors, still reaching hearts and opening minds. It has already, in its main intent--demand for an end to police murder, for defunding, dissolution, and repurposing of the hideous Waffen SS ethic it has come to embody--made waves of progress that, regardless of success or failure, will never completely subside.
That said, the fantasy of a revolutionary transformation of the Capitalist Tyranny is just that. The movement, embodying in an inchoate way so much that is profoundly just and fervently desired by the most aware and enlightened Americans, lacks the social power it would need to break and replace our dirty, dying Empire and its antibiotic system.
A wise man observed that human history is a race between education and disaster. The great hope of the moment is that sheer fear of the people will bring to an end the sick Nazification of American police systems, for blacks above all, but in reality for all of us.
Overthrow of the Capitalist Tyranny depends, though, on irresistible citizen action based on a deeply informed conviction of its irremediable evil, and unshakable resolve to destroy it. The furious drive of the Capitalist Tyranny toward ecocide and our own extinction may not give us time to get there.
Nature has evidently had all the abuse she’s going to take from Capitalism.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PAUL EDWARDS, Senior Contributing Editor • Paul Edwards is a genuine Renaissance man, gifted with many talents and participant in many events and struggles of our tormented times. Our colleague Jeff Brown, who did a fine interview with him, sums it up thusly: “Paul’s life story is worthy of a biography: a rebel youth growing up, traveling and working around the world and then a long career as a Hollywood writer. Through it all, he has never lost his lifelong wrath against US imperialism and global capitalism, while seeking social and economic justice for humanity’s 99%…”
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
