KNOW YOUR ENEMY

Upton Sinclair said that it was hard to get a man to understand a thing when his paycheck depended on his not understanding it.  There is a parallel to that idea at work in American people today.

Americans live uneasily, in the illusion of democracy, under the most powerful, and determinedly evil, government as has ever existed.  Most may not read on, outraged in moral certainty the assertion is insane.  Moral certainty has gotten us where we are.

For those who wished to know the truth of America’s Capitalist Empire and were capable of facing it, it was always available, and it continues to be.  To cite America’s criminal history would take volumes, and those volumes already exist, for those with courage to peruse them.  The Empire’s catalogue of criminality is not in question by the informed.  It is indisputable: a given.

The vast mass of the ignorant have been made so by scientific propaganda, and they have lost their capacity for independent thought.  They were powerless to prevent the creation of their opinion, and they are sure their views about America are their own, individually arrived at.  That makes them hard to modify.

Unamuno said that all learning requires admission of ignorance, which is why it is so assiduously resisted.  There is a prevailing idea that adults should be ashamed to admit ignorance, which prevents most from learning anything, but there is another factor yet more powerful.  To admit he is wrong about a deeply held, core belief not only exposes his error but also challenges his very essence as a man.  To admit one was wrong in saying the Steeler’s won the Super Bowl is not hard; to admit one has been indoctrinated with a totally false understanding of one’s own country is not possible without great anxiety and shame.

The long history of The Empire’s purposeful, cynical erasure of American’s ability to know the truth of their government’s villainy has trained them to eagerly embrace the agents and causes of their betrayal.  This is tragic on a monumental scale because The Empire’s crash will be paid for most punishingly by its people.

The poisonous propaganda was never partisan.  It was not an exclusive product of a party or political ideology, of left or right, liberal or conservative, progressive or reactionary.  It is a quasi-religious dogma that exalts the dominion and hegemony of a Super Race that has exploited and enslaved the world for its profit.  As in every historic empire, stimulation of human vanity insures that the mass feels its identity with the controlling power, feels at one with it, even as it is absolutely subjected by it.

This is a process as old as history.  It was refined and reinforced by terror in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but it was so perfected by the American Empire that bloody, flagrant terror was not needed.  What Orwell wrote of presciently has been fully instituted.  Americans, left and right, liberal or proto-fascist, are irretrievably in the thrall of Capitalist dogma, and happy to be.

In its period of greatest stress, the Soviet Union employed what it called War Capitalism.  That term defines our economic system, now permanent.  The Empire depends entirely on production for war; it dwarfs all other sources of profit for its giant corporate owners.  America is a War Machine, whose people support it unreservedly.  The Empire could not continue if it were not so.

CAPITALISM'S LOSERS: A homeless man in America, an increasingly common sight in all major Americans cities as the social disease behind the phenomenon is systemic.