Over the past few years, CBS’s Norah O’Donnell has perfected a particular genre of Pentagon PR, doing numerous glossy ride-along reports and softball sit-down interviews with military brass and promoting the Pentagon’s overall message that it simultaneously keeps the world free from Bad Guys and desperately needs more and more money to keep up with a rotating cast of villains.
If CBS was paid to make PR packages for the Pentagon, they wouldn’t look any different than this.
Let’s begin by breaking down her most recent Pentagon infomercial—a 60 Minutes lead segment from last Sunday detailing how the US Navy is “protecting international waterways” from Yemeni Houthis. O’Donnell’s puffy ride-along has all the trappings of the genre: no critical questions, only superficial historical context, sexy b-roll of American technological power, sycophantic sit-down interviews with US military officers, and, of course, no humanization of or perspective from the Official Enemy—just presenting them as faceless Arabs hellbent on terror for its own sake.
Essential context, that President Biden’s refusal to back a ceasefire in Gaza is leading to an escalatory framework, isn’t explored at all. That there could be an alternative to blowing up even more of the poorest country on earth, that pushing to end the bloodshed in Gaza is one path to reducing piracy in the Red Sea (something the White House itself admits behind closed doors), is simply not an option. Because it’s not an option the military presents O’Donnell, and their word is total.
This embarrassing segment comes on the heels of last year’s more overt—and explicit—Navy commercial where O’Donnell aggressively analyzed the “State of the Navy” and determined they were scrappy underdogs who needed more money and more support in Congress.
“Do you get briefed on China’s growing military threat and the progress they are making?”
“How aggressive has China become, in the air?”
“How much do you worry about the People’s Liberation Army rocket force?”
“How much more advanced is US submarine technology to Chinese capabilities?”
“Is it your hope that the force posture of the US Navy will deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan?”
“At some point are [the Chinese] going to reach numbers [of naval ships] that we can’t prevail over?”
“How would you describe what China has been able to do militarily over the last 20 years?”
“Why is China able to build more warships more quickly than the US?”
Later, when tossing even more softballs to hawkish lawmakers Democrat Elaine Luria and Republican Mike Gallagher, O’Donnell—looking Very Concerned—asks, “What is it about the US Navy that has allowed the two of you to find common cause?”
Wow, really tough stuff. O’Donnell could have mentioned that Luria paid offher considerable campaign debt with super PAC money from Raytheon and General Dynamics, but this would involve actual journalism and we couldn’t have that. The closest O’Donnell gets to anything remotely approaching pushback is when she tees up a grapefruit for Admiral Samuel Paparo, the commander of US Pacific Fleet, by asking, with a wry, skeptical smile, “China has accused the United States of trying to contain them. What do you say to China?”
Paparo gives a glib response, asking China: “Do you need to be contained?” O’Donnell nods along and it’s off to more b-roll of scary Chinese rockets.
The entire point, of course, is to lobby the public and, by implication, Congress, to shovel more money into the US military—a public debate which, such as it is, happens every summer. The tough journalistic posture O’Donnell is striking here is that of a reporter bravely taking on military skeptics. “60 Minutes spent months talking to current and former naval officers, military strategists, and politicians about the state of the US Navy,” she says to open the second half of the segment. “One common thread in our reporting is unease both about the size of the US fleet and its readiness to fight. The Navy ships are being retired faster than they’re getting replaced.”
So, O’Donnell talked to a bunch of conflicted parties who are funded by the military industrial complex and get rich off of it, and they said they need more money? Does O’Donnell talk to any peace activists or anti-escalation voices in Japan or the Philippines? Any senators opposed to the unprecedented large military budget? Anyone who thinks these billions could better be spent housing the poor? Or expanding medicare? Obviously not.
O’Donnell’s wide-eyed aircraft carrier field trips are just a variation on an old media workover trope of The Media Ride-Along, perfected in the context of police departments by local TV news and shows like COPS and Live PD for years, which themselves are variations on military embedding reporting. Only O’Donnell isn’t even feigning like she’s on the front lines, or reporting on anything that can’t be gleaned from a Senate military report. She’s just there to lob handpicked military spokespeople softballs and take sweet b-roll of kick-ass military hardware.
O’Donnell then bizarrely asserts that China ignored American diplomatic outreach over a “spy balloon”—a “spy balloon” the US government later acknowledged wasn’t actually doing any spying. “Chinese military leaders have been mostly silent, and have ignored efforts by the US military to keep the lines of communication open,” O’Donnell tells the viewer. “Even when a Chinese spy balloon entered US airspace, and was shot down by the US.”
To compound these fears, throughout the segment O’Donnell insists China “now has the biggest navy in the world,” which is true in the technical sense that it has the most boats, but as David Axe at Forbes notes:
There’s an important caveat in this hull tally. American vessels on average are much larger than Chinese vessels are. The smallest USN warship type—the Littoral Combat Ship—displaces 3,000 tons of water. The median USN ship—an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer—displaces up to 9,500 tons. The smallest PLAN ship in the DoD count is the Type 056 corvette, displacing 1,500 tons. The median PLAN ship is a Type 045 frigate displacing around 4,000 tons. In all, the U.S. fleet weighs in at around 4.5 million tons. The Chinese fleet might slightly exceed 2 million tons.
All of these nuances and qualifications are lost. Instead, the viewer is fed only panic-inducing talking points of an axiomatically expansionist and sinister Chinese threat and a brave US empire that simply needs more money to keep up. This kettle logic, inherent in all military propaganda, is central to every single talking point O’Donnell gets across: The US military is simultaneously all-seeing and all-powerful but also woefully underfunded and in urgent need of hundreds of billions more dollars.
This isn’t to say O’Donnell has never criticized the military, but when she does it’s internal issues, not criticisms of its fundamental purpose. In 2020, she did a series on a failure of the Defense Department to properly investigate rape and assault cases in its ranks—a report she followed up in 2021 and again last December. Good reporting, no doubt, but nothing genuinely subversive to hawks in Congress or military leadership who tolerate this type of house cleaning so long as the budget remains unaffected.
There are too many other military infomercials to count. On Oct. 8, 2023, O’Donnell had a sit-down with retiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley. Here, again, no difficult questions were asked—except, of course, consistent with the media’s consensus on Biden, an attack from the right on the US withdrawal process from Afghanistan. But Milley’s spin was front-loaded on the segment, with O’Donnell telling viewers that “in 2021, Gen. Milley had counseled President Biden to keep 2,500 troops in and around Kabul,” as if preventing the Taliban takeover, long viewed as inevitable, was that easy.
In March of last year, O’Donnell did the obligatory imperial feminism segment about women rising up the ranks of the Pentagon, featuring a vacuous sit-down interview with “the four highest-ranking women in the US military to discuss learning lessons of resilience, battling discrimination with determination, and cultivating the next generation of leaders in the military.”
CBS News has a recurring segment called “Profiles in Service” that’s directly sponsored by weapons-maker Raytheon (now—after years of bad press—rebranded RTX), where O’Donnell does puff pieces on various military personnel.
Last December, O’Donnell did a workout segment for CBS Nightly News with “badass” US Marine Corps Captain Riley Tejcek, another “report” that looks indistinguishable from a military zoomer recruitment campaign.
She hosted CBS Evening News directly from a US military base in Bahrain on Jan. 29 where she, according to CBS’s press release, “got rare access to the United States Naval Forces Central Command and the United States Fifth Fleet.”
O’Donnell, who once did a rose-tinted nostalgic segment on the military base she grew up on in South Korea, clearly doesn’t think critically about any potential downsides to the US’s obscene Pentagon budget—which is predicted to top $1 trillion in the coming years. The sprawling global US military architecture is simply seen as a law of nature, an obvious and unquestionable good that is a force of order and humanitarianism. That it could, for example, be propping up ethnic cleansing in Gaza, is too unbearable to imagine, so this part of their duties is glossed over, bracketed as an unfortunate but separate part of their core function, and stripped from the context of broader regional conflict. After all, the Pentagon is just a humble enforcer of the Liberal Rules-Based Order. That it could do illiberal things, prop up illiberal ends, and work to defend myopic, brutal. and petty US imperial interests flies in the face of this cheesy 8th grade book report narrative. And to strip this narrative apart, or challenge it in serious ways, would be too messy, too unpleasant. And, most frightening of all, may involve doing actual journalism.
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The panel discusses the personality of Trotsky, his political posture, his opportunistic tendencies, and why the bourgeoisie has traditionally seen Trotsky and his movement as a tool to divide and defeat the unity of world Bolshevists, and thereby world revolution. In 1903 Lenin formed a party "of a new type", Bolshevism, to effect real revolution, separating his group from social democracy. Trotsky, on the other hand, a ferocious egotist, was content with the drift of social democracy, and opposed Lenin on all major points endorsed by the Leninist tendency, acting in effect, like a bourgeois revolutionist, a "Menchevik". There were also fundamental differences regarding tactics and strategies.
As early as 1903, in making revolution, there was the question of class alliances. Lenin favoured an alliance with the peasantry, the Mensheviks, and Trotsky, favoured the bourgeoisie. Had he emerged victorious in that contest, the Bolshevik revolution would have been doomed.
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Why are 8 of 11 US aircraft carrier strike groups always in home port?
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Jeff J. Brown
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Why are 8 of 11 us aircraft carrier strike groups always in home port? What does it mean for NATO's planned war with China, using Taiwan as a proxy? China Rising Radio Sinoland 240406
As the spectre of a cataclysmic World War grows, idiotic move by idiotic move, our Associate Editor is busier than ever!
USN carriers and other deep water war vessels now have a huge crosshair on their backs.
2024-04-06
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I regularly check the website called South Front (see below), and I suggest you do, too. Every week or so, they post an updated “US Carrier Strike Group Location Map”. It shows, with little pins, where all of the United States’ deep water aircraft carrier groups are. I check it every week and I can tell you I have never seen more than two to three actually out on the high seas. Even a month ago, Uncle Slaughter couldn’t even keep one around the Arabian Gulf.
Uncle Slaughter usually keeps one in the West Pacific between Japan and the Philippines, but all of the rest are in port. And there’s a reason for this. If you look at the map, the USS Ronald Reagan has not been out on the high seas since November 2023, the Nimitz since September 2023, the George H.W. Bush since July 2023, the Gerald R. Ford since January 2024, and the John Stennis since December 2019. Why is this? These aircraft carrier groups are not 100% seaworthy. Everybody, even in the mainstream media, makes fun of the Gerald R. Ford. It is a white elephant that cannot stand the test of real combat.
What is even more hilarious with respect to China is that on a typical US aircraft carrier, you have three kinds of airplanes. They are the F-18, which was launched in 1983, 40 years ago. You have the T-45, which came out in 1991, over 30 years ago. Then you have the more recent F-35, which is a laughingstock around the world, because it can’t fly. It is constantly being called back to the hangar since it can’t fly. It even has to be repainted every time it goes out, since the stealth coating on it wears off after each sortie. Not to mention they are crashing left and right. The F-35 is another white elephant that could not stand the test of real combat against a country like China or Russia.
The F-18 has a combat zone of 500km. That means that it can go out 500 klicks, then come back 500km for a total of 1,000. It has to be able to come back to the aircraft carrier to get refueled. The T-45 has a combat zone of 600km. When it’s able to fly, the F-35 has a combat zone of 750km.
Just this week the United States is begging Yemen for a diplomatic solution for their control of the Red Sea. This tells you how openly weak NATO really is. NATO is reduced to plowing billions of dollars and euros of weapons into Ukraine to slow down the eventual victory of Russia there.
But here’s the deal. The Chinese have three short-range aircraft carrier killer missiles, for naval battle theatres. The YJ-83 can go 250km, which is perfect for Taiwan, since it is only 150km away from the Mainland’s coast. The YJ-62 has a 400-kilometer range, well beyond the Pacific side of Taiwan. The YJ-18 missile has a range of 540km. This means that with only these short-range aircraft carrier killer missiles, a US carrier cannot get any closer than about 600km away from the Chinese coast. Result: the F-18 and the T-45 airplanes are totally useless. Why? If the aircraft carrier comes within range of the YJ-18 missile, it is going to be sunk in a matter of minutes.
It is even worse than that. The Chinese have hundreds of aircraft carrier killer missiles of longer range. The DF-21D can take out an aircraft carrier 1,500km away, perfect for Yankee bases in the Philippines. The DF-26 goes 3,000km, perfect for Japan, 2,000 klicks away.
Not to mention that China has two hypersonic missile models. The DF-17 can go 3,000 klicks. The DF-27 can go 8,000km, all the way to Hawaii and take out whatever ships may be docked there. Not only can the DF-27 take out Pearl harbor, it can also take out Guam, a major American air base in the West Pacific, as well as the US base in Darwin, Australia. The DF-17 at 3,000km can take out Japan and Yankees in the Philippines. And of course, South Korea is just hundreds of kilometers away from mainland China, and Taiwan, only 150km.
China’s navy is bigger than the United States’, which surprises a lot of people. But it is true. It already has two active aircraft carriers and is launching a third one in 2024, the Year of the Dragon. Reports are that the People’s Liberation Army Navy has 59-79 submarines, with 16 of them nuclear-powered, many of which are loaded with aircraft carrier killer missiles. The US has 68 subs and Russia 64.
How many planes does China have in its military inventory? Two thousand. They only have to go as far as Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and South Korea, a maximum of 2,000km. The supply chain from Long Beach in California and Seattle in Washington State is 11,000km. It doesn’t do any good to store up matériel in Hawaii, Guam and Darwin, knowing China can take those out in several minutes.
Uncle Slaughter wants to be Globocop, with many hundreds of military bases occupying every continent. It has 5,500 military aircraft to China’s 2,000, but the prior’s are all across North America, South America, Africa, Europe and Oceania. Ditto the US’s subs off the coast of Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Syria, in the Black Sea and keeping an eye on so many other perceived enemies. China’s military posture is 100% defensive. It is only concerned with the South China Sea and the first tier of islands off its coast. NATO’s is 150% offensive across Planet Earth.
Above: Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii and Darwin, Australia only have to wait a few minutes for thousands of (hypersonic) missiles to rain down on their US bases. (North of Japan) When DPRK strikes, South Korea won’t know what hit them.
Only one in five American aircraft carrier groups are on the high seas at any given minute. NATO knows Baba Beijing is stocked to the hilt with “can’t defend against” hypersonic missiles. Yet, the United States is going to make sure that it goes to war with China over Taiwan, as a Ukraine-like proxy, because capitalism cannot survive without war. Democrats and Republicans, they’re just Party D and Party R of the Capitalist Party of the United States. You can say the same thing for the liberals and the conservatives in Europe – 100% Capitalist Party members. Western governments are totally owned and operated by Wall Street, the City of London, military, media and pharmament corporations. Their victims are Western citizens and the rest of the Global Majority.
I keep reminding everyone that China and North Korea (DPRK) have had a mutual defense treaty since 1961, recently renewed. Nobody fucks with North Korea, not even the United States. You can see how Uncle Slaughter keeps the DPRK at arm’s length. Why? DPRK has MIRV ICBMs (Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicle Intercontinental Balllistic Missiles) loaded with nuclear warheads. It also has hypersonic missiles along with Russia and China. The United States and Europe don’t even have them yet. They’re still in the testing stage.
Thus, if the United States triggers a hot war with China, 1.2 million Marxist-Leninist-Communist-Socialist-Confucist North Korean soldiers, who love to kill capitalists are going to pour across the 38th parallel and do to the USA what they did to Douglas MacArthur in 1950 – kicked his ass all the way to Pusan, on the southern tip of the peninsula. North Korea has thousands of missiles and millions of artillery shells. What is the United States’ 30,000 troops stationed in South Korea going to do against that? In one week, DPRK would overrun South Korea. Ditto Japan. The United States has 50,000 troops stationed in Japan. North Korea can fire their missiles on Japan, just as China can.
Given all of this, a conventional hot war with China is a Western loser bad joke. Nevertheless, for the City of London, Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex, this is all a gigantic profit point for Western capitalists. They are going to push the United States into war with China, regardless of the results and consequences. The United States even imagining trying to win against China (or Russia) doesn’t matter, because what really counts are the profits that are gained by the City of London, Wall Street and all of the military contractors.
In any case, what is especially scary is that after China takes back Taiwan into the motherland, is NATO insane enough to use nuclear arms in Taiwan, as a Hail Mary to save their asses? We already know how that would turn out. Nuclear winter and Homo Sapiens saying, “Sayonara dear world”.
We can even talk about West Asia=Middle East, with psychopathic Israel spearheading the NATO Holocaust there. I said in my book, 44 Days Backpacking in China (https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2018/06/30/praise-for-the-china-trilogy-the-votes-are-in-it-r-o-c-k-s-what-are-you-waiting-for/) that the fate of the world will be decided by the fate of Jerusalem, and the unhinged, Talmud-Torah-driven Jewish State has 200 rogue, thermonuclear weapons. After seeing what they are doing to Palestinians, do you think they won’t use their nuclear arms in desperation to stave off losing? I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count.
The United States and NATO want to project an image of invincibility to the rest of humanity. Going back to the Ancient Greeks and Romans, all expansionist, hegemonic empires do. They want to project their delusional full spectrum dominance. However, during the Cold War, NATO and the Warsaw Pact were at a stalemate. The United States lost in Korea, lost in Vietnam, lost in Afghanistan, and are pathetic, occupying forces in Iraq and Syria. Hell, the West can’t even beat little Yemen. Just this week the United States is begging Yemen for a diplomatic solution for their control of the Red Sea. This tells you how openly weak NATO really is.
NATO is reduced to plowing billions of dollars and euros of weapons into Ukraine to slow down the eventual victory of Russia there. In desperation, will NATO go nuclear there, when the obvious is known to all of the world that it has lost against Russia? All NATO has done in Palestine is to create a holocaust against women, children, old people, starving them to death and destroying their entire infrastructure. They have gained absolutely nothing in terms of military victory.
NATO has always been very good at slaughtering old people, women, children and defeating much weaker opponents like Grenada, Panama and Libya. Uncle Slaughter’s delusional psychopathy of controlling the world’s peoples and their resources lasted about ten years, from 1990 to 2000, when Wall Street and the City of London were raping and plundering what was left of the USSR, driving the people into destitution, starvation and misery.
The 21st century is very different. Since the year 2000, Russia now has what is ranked as by far the best military in the world. And I just read an article recently that China is ranked ahead of the United States in military might, this coming from a conservative think tank. Need I mention the military might of DPRK and Iran?
Great thinkers and leaders have long been pointing out the obvious, that capitalism cannot survive without war, expansionism, enslaving the weak and expropriating their natural resources. Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and Martin Luther King all pointed out this manifest historical truth.
This is why, in spite of the reality on the ground that I have described to you above, Wall Street, the City of London and NATO’s Military Industrial Complex will push Uncle Slaughter into a hot war with the People’s Republic of China, tragic to say.
Follow the money, my friends. KA-CHING!
Reference: Locations Of US Carrier Strike Groups – March 26, 2024 – South Front
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Why Gramsci Is So Relevant Today
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This essay is based upon part of a paper that is currently under peer review with an IR journal.
Antonio Gramsci spent a significant proportion of his early life in poverty on the island of Sardinia and throughout his life had to deal with physical pain due to a malformation of the spine and various other disorders. After winning a scholarship he moved to Turin, where he joined the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and became heavily involved in the organization and education of workers in Turin. With others, he also started the weekly socialist newspaper He spent 11 years in prison, during which his health deteriorated with a lack of adequate medical care "his teeth fell out, his digestive system collapsed so that he could not eat solid food ... he had convulsions when he vomited blood and suffered headaches so violent that he beat his head against the walls of his cell." He died in 1937, at the age of 46. It was during these eleven hellish years in prison that Gramsci worked to address the question of why he had mistakenly seen Italian fascism as a possible passing phase of bourgeois reaction to the biennio rosso (two red years) of 1919-1920, during which concessions were made by the Italian elite to the domestic working class to regain political stability, rather than as a new viable and sustainable mode of bourgeois authoritarian domination. The result was the prison notebooks, consisting of more than 3,000 pages.
The imbibing of the hegemonic culture into the minds of the general population is a major function of the school system, with both school curricula and school books being tightly controlled. Inconvenient facts and ideas are kept away from impressionable young minds. This continues within the university system, where “critical” theory means being critical of only the cultural aspects of society and the study of economics has been stripped of its dangerous political-economic insights into the real workings of Western societies. Gabriel Rockhill has done much excellent work in showing how the US state and related foundations (e.g. Ford, Rockefeller) funded and directed the non-communist “critical” theory that now dominates the Western social sciences.
just six conglomerates plus Meta, Google and Elon Musk. The newspaper industry has also been radically consolidated within a handful of owners, many straddling multiple countries (e.g. News Corp). All of the Western media tends to rely upon two news agencies for much of their content - Thomson Reuters (owned by the Thomson family) and the Associated Press, based in London and New York respectively. Reuters is well known for tight linkages with the security services, including the hiring of ex security service personnel. Any non-compliant media outlets are swiftly reminded of their responsibilities to the capitalist elite hegemony, and if necessary financially disciplined or even removed (as with Parlerin 2021, as currently threatened with respect to TikTok, and as facilitated by recent EU “misinformation” legislation). Naked Capitalism has an excellent piece on the latter here. The Guardian newspaper was directly disciplined by the UK security servicesafter its publishing of documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013, and has been a reliable servant of the UK ruling class ever since.
In the modern world the category of intellectuals … has undergone unprecedented expansion. The democratic-bureaucratic system has given rise to a great mass of functions which are not at all justified by the social necessities of production, though they are justified by the political necessities of the dominant fundamental group. (Ibid: 13)
The combination of extremely high concentrations of ownership and control of the means of cultural production, and corporate entities, together with the relatively small number of organic intellectuals with shared backgrounds in influential and senior roles across the spectrum of society allows for a high level of message discipline. We have seen this with respect to the COVID pandemic, the proxy war with Russia, the Zionist genocide, the increasingly aggressive nature of Western rhetoric and actions toward China, and the drive to divide and conquer the population along intersectional lines such as race, sexual orientation and gender identity (itself undermining basic concepts of biological sex) while ignoring the fundamental question of class dynamics and economic inequality. The latter has been very effectively spread through many aspects of society, such as the academy and schools, human resources departments and government agencies and policies just as the capitalist class intensified the class war in the 2010s after crushing Occupy Wall Street.
The construct of “hate speech” has been extensively utilized, together with the manipulative misuse of the term “misinformation”, to support extensive new censorship laws as well as the outright banning of non-compliant media outlets such as Russia Today. With the intensification of the ruling class war against the rest, and the increasingly desperate measures to somehow hold back the inevitability of the rise of the Other 7 Billion spearheaded by China and Russia, must come greater cultural control at home. Note the highly coordinated fashion of the rise of “anti hate speech” laws across Western nations recently:
No alternative voices must be allowed to gain traction, as has been the case with TikTok and the evisceration of Zionist propaganda and disinformation. Increasing losses, such as those in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine and across the Sahel must be carefully filtered and used to stoke a sense of threat rather than one of acceptance and an anti-war mentality. Gramsci would recognize the increasingly fascist nature of Western societies as it is accepted by the elites that social democracy and the manufacturing of consent may no longer be fully up to the task.
Accepting the relative specificity, and the significant historical determinism, of the processes of change within individual societies, Gramsci immersed himself in the history of Italy, and Europe in general, and the nature of the dominant ruling coalitions. Gramsci (1971b: 200) also rejected
a scholastic and academic historico-political outlook which sees as real and worthwhile only … movements that are governed by plans worked out in advance to the last detail or in line with abstract theory and noting that reality produces a wealth of the most bizarre combinations … it is not reality which should be expected to conform to the abstract schema
Accepting the importance of contingency and the shortcomings of universalist schemas. In Germany and England, the bourgeoisie had allied itself with the old feudal aristocracy who remained as a governing stratum. As in Italy, Gramsci saw the resultant ‘revolutions’ as passive ones, driven by the dominant classes and the state downwards rather than by a mass revolution that replaces the dominant classes (e.g. the Russian Bolshevik Revolution). The US Civil War swept away the feudal and aristocratic structures of the South, and the extremely small (in relation to European nations) scale of the US state represented little resistance to a more purely bourgeois dominance.
The complex interactive nature of the relationship between material capabilities, institutions and ideas, and the power of new ideas that become part of the common sense, is detailed by Gramsci:
a popular conviction often has the same energy as a material force or something of the kind, which is extremely significant. The analysis of these propositions tends, I think, to reinforce the conception of historical bloc in which precisely material forces are the content and ideologies are the form, though this distinction between form and content had purely didactic value, since the material forces would be inconceivable historically without form and the ideologies would be individual fancies without the material forces (Gramsci, 1971d: 377).
In the 1950’s Liberation Theology arose within the Latin American Catholic Church to challenge elite dominance that the Church had been instrumental in legitimizing and was heavily suppressed. More recently, evangelical congregations subject to the teachings of the Prosperity Gospel have grown rapidly within Latin America and Africa without such suppression. For example, a third of Brazilians were members of such congregations in 2010, and many churches have become major business empires with interests and philosophies overlapping with other societal elites. Within China, the Party-state has been extremely mindful of controlling, or if needed suppressing, religious movements that may create a challenge to its legitimacy and the hegemonic culture that serves its interests.
Where civil society is little developed, as in pre-communist Russia, a direct assault upon the state, a war of manoeuvre, may be successful. Where civil society is well developed, as in the liberal capitalist nations, such a direct assault will not prevail. The war of manoeuvre must be preceded by a war of position that challenges the cultural dominance of the historic bloc. In this respect, a constant focus of the historic bloc upon ‘radical’ intellectuals, and actions to repress and delegitimize them becomes a first line of defence against the success of any counter-hegemonic cultural project. In Latin America the opposition had been successful in establishing a counter-hegemonic cultural project in the post-war years in many nations was set to take the reins of power. The result was the alliance between the US capitalist elite and their Latin American capitalist and military vassals to crush this project through state terror, coordinated at the inter-country level through Operation Condor. Terror was unleashed upon “the enemy within” over a couple of decades until the oppositional organic intellectuals were dead, tortured and terrorized into subservience, or had fled abroad (and even there they were not safe from assassination and abduction).
This is a war of very different state/society complexes, on one side those dominated by the capitalist class and on the other those where the bourgeoisie is subjugated by the Party-state (China) or or where its power is very significantly balanced by other interests (Russia and Iran). The Western capitalist classes must discipline their own populations, even to the point of those populations accepting the sacrifice of their own social support systems and perhaps even lives to preserve their own domination. As bourgeois democracy fails to do this, increasingly authoritarian and fascistic tools will be utilized. The fascist US reality of 1917-1920 as President Wilson and the capitalist elite manipulated and bullied the American people into a war that they did not want stands as a possible low-tech version of the future of Western nations.
References
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ABOUT ROGER BOYD Academic Researcher in Geopolitics and Climate Change. Fellow, Balsillie School of International Affairs.
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Politician Calls For “Hiroshima” Solution To Gaza
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Politician Calls For “Hiroshima” Solution To Gaza
The Jimmy Dore Show Apr 2, 2024#TheJimmyDoreShow
Tim Walberg, a Republican politician that somehow represents the utterly benighted people of Southern Michigan, is emblematic of the repugnant state of American politics. This moral imbecile, who in any country with some functional media, political culture, and education, should not be elected to ANY public office, is a repeatedly re-elected Congressman, who now has come up with the brilliant idea of "nuking Gaza". Even in the US this proposal proved to be a bit too much, so some people pushed back. As we might expect, this alarmingly ignorant man, and a coward to boot, is now busy trying to walk back his idiotic and criminal utterance, but it's hard to disavow something so vile and stupid as thinking that the best way to get rid of those pesky Palestinians is to nuke them and be done with it. Has this idiot even looked at a map? We know that the long-suffering Palestinian people have no friends in the US political class, as both faces of the Uniparty are completely in the pocket of the MICIMATT (Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank) complex, a confabulation of warmongering interests constantly pushing, hypocritically and sanctimoniously, for more war and imperialism. But to tolerate people like Walberg is ridiculous. Believe it or not, it is in this foul-smelling cesspool that Americans "make their presidential choice" every four years, a particularly cruel joke in 2024 as Donald Trump is as pro Israel as any Democrat. Yes, this is the best Democracy that money can buy, folks. Look at what it gets us.
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Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact.
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.
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I regularly check the website called South Front (see below), and I suggest you do, too. Every week or so, they post an updated “US Carrier Strike Group Location Map”. It shows, with little pins, where all of the United States’ deep water aircraft carrier groups are. I check it every week and I can tell you I have never seen more than two to three actually out on the high seas. Even a month ago, Uncle Slaughter couldn’t even keep one around the Arabian Gulf.
Jeff J. Brown is a geopolitical analyst, journalist, lecturer and the author of The China Trilogy. It consists of 44 Days Backpacking in China - The Middle Kingdom in the 21st Century, with the United States, Europe and the Fate of the World in Its Looking Glass (2013); Punto Press released China Rising - Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations (2016); and for Badak Merah, Jeff authored China Is Communist, Dammit! – Dawn of the Red Dynasty (2017).
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