•••What liberals need to understand (Response to Jimmy Dore)

Annotated by Patrice Greanville
In this episode The Finnish Bolshevik provides an excellent overview of the liberal mentality, its good points and bad points; essentially its dangerous limitations grounded in bourgeois delusions, opportunism, and plain political cowardice, all of which make most liberals de facto collaborators with the imperialist status quo. He also notes Jimmy Dore's brave struggle against the "synthetic left", and his own evolution toward more radical positions consistent with genuine socialism.  

Personally I find his critique of liberals and their mythologies refreshing in an ideological field deliberately brimming with confusion to the point of incoherence. His dismantlement of the notion that America has devolved into the oligarchic tyranny we witness today, rather than it having been an oligarchic tyranny all along, the inevitable outcome of the natural dynamics of a capitalist order, is especially welcome. I have been agreeing with that assessment practically all my adult life. In 1996 I wrote an essay on the disgusting performance of the American media pointing out that those who spoke wistfully about Cronkite and Murrow as some sort of Golden Age of mainstream US journalism were simply fooling themselves (and anyone who believed them). My argument was simply that if the press —and media in general—had really functioned as its liberal apologists adduce, telling it like it is without "fear or favor" (as the NYTimes' self-flattering motto proclaims), and supplying the US population 24/7 with reliable flows of information free from the constant anticommunist, pro-oligarchy and pro-imperialist lies and omissions that poison all their product, then the history of the world for the last 75 years would be unrecognizable. In sum, my theorem argues that with a mass media committed to aggressively and pro-actively serving the people, not the corporate oligarchs, and thereby with a population armed with a far better and more sophisticated understanding of world history and social processes, the following things and events would not exist or would have never happened, as an enlightened American public would have never permitted it. We would be facing a completely different reality. Maybe not full-fledged socialism yet, but moving towards it. And the world would be a cooperative world mostly at peace.

Note: My arbitrary catalog starts with the close of WW2 in 1945. The events, entities and processes mentioned below are but a small sampler of what has gone wrong, usually listing just the most emblematic items in each category:

•The Cold War, and ensuing encirclement of Soviet Union, China, etc. 
•The Demopublican duopoly
•Rise of the oligarchic kakistocracy 
•Rise of US imperial hegemony and neocon defense of world supremacy by any means necessary
•Rise of military Keynesianism and the permanent war state
•The CIA plus alphabet soup of similar "national security agencies"
•Overthrow of Iran's PM, Mohammad Mosaddegh, installation of Shah dictatorship (1953)
•Interventions in Central America (Overthrow of pres. Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954); El Salvador (1970s-80s),     Nicaragua (1970s/to date)
•Interventions in other parts of LatinAmerica (Overthrow of Chile's Socialist Pres. S. Allende (1973); support for Argentine Junta dirty war (1970s); support for Brazil dictatorship; hybrid war against Venezuela and Cuba. Support for Colombia's brutal oligarchy, etc.
•The Korean War 
•The Vietnam War
•The Iraq War (twice)
•Intervention in Syria (ongoing)
•Intervention in Libya
•Color revolt/putsch in Ukraine (ongoing)
•Cuban blockade / Cuban missile crisis
•Overthrow of Indonesian leader Suharto (1965—Bloodiest coup in modern history)
•Inequality deepens throughout the world, rise of the new trillionaires
•With US/UK ruling elites tied to oil regime, fossil fuels precipitate climate change crisis, and mass capitalogenic species die offs.
•Digital revolution & computer advances trigger incurable, massive unemployment and a crisis of overproduction, ushering the "Fourth Industrial Revolution" and "The Great Reset"
•Second Cold War focused mainly on Russia, China and Iran

Many of these crimes and calamities materialized during presidential regimes usually depicted as patriotic or exemplary by the US exceptionalist / imperialist canon. Truman initiated the Cold War, created the CIA, dropped A-bombs on Japan to deter the Soviets from presumptive "aggression",  launched the Korean War, and served notice to leftists at home that the US would now be tacking hard right. It did. Early postwar meddling in Iran and Central America, for example, as well as Cuba, and Vietnam took place under the popular Eisenhower regime, who thereby confirmed the country's openly imperialist course.

Obviously, a much better informed US public would not have ever elected a Bush, a Clinton or a Trump. Or even an Obama, a proficient demagog chosen by the ruling elites to repair the damage done to America's image and governing circles' legitimacy by the clumsily oligarchic Bush 2. In this context, the whole farce of identity politics would not have existed in the absence of a reigning duopoly shilling for a virtually unchallenged capitalist regime. It's clear that, historically, truth is on the Left and capitalism or, as some aptly call it, "neofeudalism", requires the Big Lie to remain alive.  And the Big Lie is not a new phenomenon in America, but actually the norm.

By The Finnish Bolshevik