JARED BALL—Wakanda Forever is its own hopeful title. Forever are we to see our ambitions for a better world in a Wakandan fantasy, one, as Lawrence Grandpre suggests, is based not on culture, or I would add political organization, but on the random divine act of a meteor delivering a plant, and one based on quiet isolation, and ultimate service of empire. Forever are we to have our political aspirations defined, and diverted by Marvel, Disney, and characters created by now dead White men.
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JOE LOMBARDO—I think we will never make the basic changes that we need to have a peaceful and prosperous world and country through the present political structures. More and more people are giving up on the two-party system. Our corporate media keeps us in the dark. We are seeing increased censorship and attacks on those who tell the truth by expressing opinions different from the government’s narrative. These attacks include those on Julian Assange, Daniel Hale and the recent FBI raid on the African People’s Socialist Party among others. If the people come to the conclusion that we need basic systemic change and we are unable to get it through our present political structures, we will have to fight for it in other ways.
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—All of our world’s worst problems are created by the powerful. The powerful will keep creating those problems until ordinary people use their superior numbers to make them stop. Ordinary people don’t use their superior numbers to stop the powerful because the powerful are continuously manipulating people’s understanding of what’s going on.
Humans are storytelling creatures. If you can control the stories humans are telling themselves about the world, you control the humans, and you control the world.
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Last Wednesday, 4 May 2022, Caleb Maupin filed what is surely one of his most important chats, covering, as usual, a variety of topics, but the outstanding part comprised a couple of subjects rarely discussed with such honesty and lucidity, namely, the issues that define what is being “on the left” in the US, and the urgent need for a completely new approach to regain relevancy. Up to this point, says Maupin, the Right is eating our lunch. While the left has spent much of its political capital on what he defines as depressing and even pessimistic “causes” (abortion rights, overpopulation, anti-imperialist struggles, environmental destruction, etc.), all of which are valid and even urgent, Maupin notes that they also usually trigger a negative reaction in the working class, thereby opening the door to the Right, with its misty-eyed hymns to family, patriotism, praise for the invididual, “democracy”, “freedom”, “free enterprise”, and so on.
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BEN NORTON—But if you were to read Orwell, you would think that the Soviets were the real evil ones. As Asimov observed in his review, in 1984, “Orwell didn’t want readers to mistake the villains for Nazis. The picture is of Stalinism, and Stalinism only.”
In fact, Orwell had nothing at all to say about the enormous Soviet sacrifice in World War II. He was much more interested in demonizing the USSR and everything it stood for. Because, like much too many anti-communist “leftists,” Orwell’s hatred of communists exceeded his hatred of genocidal fascists (something he shared in common with Conservative Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain).
