[Graphic: Historical cartoon. From WCHS History online.]

=By= Joseph Waters

The first thing that comes to mind is a sense of déjà vu that we’ve all been through something remarkably similar to this before – like in 2008. Now we get to experience hope and change Republican-style. Eight years ago the liberals were euphoric while conservatives were fuming; now we have the reverse situation.

Myth #1: Trump isn’t really Republican – To which I reply: Did he run as a Republican? Yes? Then he’s a Republican. That was easy. Let’s move on.

Myth #2: Trump is anti-establishment – This shows an incredible degree of political ignorance. In the American mind, there is a “political class” and “media class” and a multitude of other communities, groups, special interests, genders, minorities, etc., etc., that are seen and treated as distinct, apart, and often at odds with one another. One group that is singled out for extraordinary persecution is the lowly businessman. You see, big government, those fat cat politicians and union bosses, enrich themselves at the expense of the humble businessman simply trying to make an honest buck to scrape by while providing for his children (and employees). The reality, of course, is that the big businessman (like Trump) and the big government politicos are old pals – they are even the same people. They are part of the same group, the same ruling class. In a similar way, in medieval times, if you took a superficial look at European feudal society you might conclude that there was an aristocratic class and an ecclesiastical class, when in reality they were part of a single ruling class; according to the feudal law of primogeniture, the first-born son would inherit the entire estate while the second sons would often enter the priesthood.

At any rate, Trump has been involved in politics before. He has funded and lobbied politicians and participated in propaganda and political operations; now he has just decided to become a politician for a short while. He has apparently flirted with the idea of running for president since the 80’s. Many capitalists do this and then go back to the so-called private sector; they may go back and forth because it can be boring just doing the same thing all the time. Regardless, the private businessman will engage in political activism through lobbying, running an NGO, and assisting the CIA in their covert operations (including espionage, propaganda, economic sanctions, assassination, coups, etc.) by providing funding, technical expertise and agent cover through their corporations. The point is: There is no wall dividing up the private and public sectors. All those ruling class members are in the same club, they play for the same team and they are cut from the same cloth. Even the playboys and jet-setters are expected to kick in once in a while and assist in ensuring that their class, the ruling class, remains the ruling class.

Myth #3: The system works. The people have spoken! – The power elite of the ruling class outflanked a lot of us with this caper. By appointing Trump president they were able to show the world that democracy and pluralism work. They were able to make a liar out of all of us, including Julian Assange of Wikileaks who proclaimed that “Trump would not be allowed to win.” I believe it is quite possible the power elite (through the CIA) decided it was wiser to let the under(funded)dog win since over 90% of elections are won by the candidate with the most money. Hillary raised over twice as much money as Trump did. The message is that big money cannot always have its way and the little guy is beginning to assert some control over the government. Just keep voting and everything will be fine. The system works. Our democracy is safe and sound. On the contrary, the vote very likely was rigged in favor of Donald Trump according to investigative journalist Greg Palast and professor Mark Crispin Miller, who has studied voter suppression and election fraud tactics. According to Dr. Miller, when the exit polls differ widely from the election outcome, this is not likely to be evidence of bad polling methods, but rather proof that the vote tallies were tampered with. My own feeling is that when it comes to a question between whether the elites and their agents are mistaken or incompetent or whether they are corrupt and duplicitous, I think that without compelling evidence to the contrary, it is safer to assume the latter possibility.

Unfortunately, in their analyses these two gentlemen seem to lean toward the ridiculous notion that the mean ol’ Republicans are stealing elections from the timid and perpetually bullied Democrats. The two parties may represent different factions in the capitalist one-party state, but they certainly seem to collude (especially toward the top) a lot more than they compete. For instance, how often have you heard a politico refer to his or her “friends across the aisle?” When they are no longer in front of the cameras, they go back to being quite chummy.

I speculate that the CIA is deeply embedded within the DNC and GOP and allows the two parties to vie for its affection and may tip the balance for one or the other if it has a clear preference. Actually, we should probably have seen this coming. For one thing, following the pattern of the last few decades, it is the Republican party’s turn to represent the capitalist ruling class in government. Also, as indicated earlier, a Trump “win” turned out to be the best mechanism for keeping the masses fired up and most starkly divided. If Hillary had won, then you would have outraged conservatives with a lukewarm, perhaps relatively content batch of liberals and everyone else. Due to the fixed outcome for Trump, again, you have euphoric conservatives and irate liberals; it’s a win-win!

Myth #4: The (liberal) media favored Hillary. – The teenage daughter that is the American people succumbed to reverse psychology and ran into the arms of the bad boy Donald Trump. Trump received over $5 billion in free advertising from the MSM during his campaign according to Lee Camp of Redacted Tonight (twice as much as Clinton). Trump got 23x as much coverage as Bernie Sanders, by the way. In fact, if you tally up the value of free advertising Trump received (remembering that there is no such thing as bad publicity – especially when it comes to Trump) the maxim remains true that the candidate with the most money wins!

Myth #5: Trump will end all the wars and imperialist aggression! – I see no evidence for this beyond Trump’s rhetoric. The important question to ask is why Trump and his supporters are against foreign wars. The why is very, very important in determining how likely it is that the US will turn away from its quest for global domination. The answer to the question “why” seems to be that the wars are “stupid” or “too expensive.” I for one do not find this to be reassuring; this is not a very moral, progressive or principled stance to take. All that is needed is another Gulf of Tonkin or 9/11 type provocation or false flag attack and, well, President Trump’s hands will be tied; he will have to act to defend America!

Having dealt with several Trump myths, I would like to make a few more observations. The conflation by the media of the far left with the far right and all manifestations of “extremism” has been with us for a long time, but now Trump has become the “pied piper” for all these folks. The ruling class strategists have painted these contrasting ideologies with the same wide brush. Once it was forbidden to speak of the working class because of the Marxist connotations of the term, but now the media propagandists are happy to talk about a white working class in the context of how reactionary they are claimed to be. Sadly, there is some truth to this because the white working class has been reared to be white supremacist; this is enormously helpful for purposes of divide and rule. The bourgeois ruling class would love to encourage and exacerbate this racial division.

Also, I think there is another dangerous and disturbing possibility that we must consider, and it is that the Trump rapprochement with Russia could be a CIA/ruling class ploy to drive a wedge between Russia and China – that powerful alliance is the greatest threat to their plans for global domination.

Finally, in a bizarre twist, many supposed leftists are proclaiming a victory for the people with this Trumpocalypse. This is a strange and dangerous development and has no basis in reality. I really hope I’m wrong and that Trump stops the wars and defies the ruling class in its quest for world domination, but I’m not at all optimistic about that eventuality. We need to keep asking questions, retain a healthy skepticism, apply a Marxist analysis to events and not get suckered by a massive CIA propaganda/psyop/political operation.

Joseph Waters is a highly respected political activist. He operates the blog, Proletarian Center for Research, Education and Culture (Prole Center).

Hillary with Donald and his oldest sons. Old friends?

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Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

Presstitutes at work.

And here we have Norah O’Donnell, chauvinist cheerleading dolt and certifiable ignoramus, imperious in that silly, haughty way that some pretty people sport by dint of mere genetic accident, throwing softball questions at Ashton Carter, so he can “inform” the American public about the “need” to stand firm against America’s multiple “national security threats”  (“Russian aggression” et al). Carter’s unchallenged description of what the US is doing in Mosul (and Syria) is so superficial and self-serving as to be almost laughable. Needless to say, this is all a total inversion of truth.  But that is what passes for journalism on the corporate media. Poor world.

Here’s how CBS bills this piece of trash:

[World socialist flag by Frankoko.]

Andre Vltchek – from Moscow
Itinerant Philosopher and Journalist

People all over the world are fed up with capitalism. They don’t always know how to formulate their aversions anymore (the result of a confusing ‘education’ and disinformation campaign pouring out of the West), but intuitively they are increasingly longing for socialism or even Communism; definitely for some humane, compassionate system based on social justice, kindness and anti-imperialist principles.

Such sentiments are everywhere, in countries as diverse as the Philippines and Bolivia, South Africa and Kirgizstan.

The rulers and propagandists in the West are well aware of this ‘dangerous trend’, and they are trying to reverse it with increasing determination – even with brutal force.

In the past, they used to simply try to fully ideologically discredit all socialist and Communist thoughts. Billions of dollars were spent on propaganda and disinformation, on ‘re-education’ of the masses in all corners of the globe, on targeted scholarships and tactics aimed at dividing the Left. This approach was successful, but only to a certain degree. All over the world, the leftist revolutionary ideas would lose some ground for a while, but then they would re-emerge again, often under some new labels and banners.

Lately, the Empire has begun changing its strategy. Instead of trying to contain its main adversaries, it has decided to exterminate them ‘intellectually’ once and for all. And how better to do it than by what it always does the best – by spreading confusion, nihilism and chaos!

*

Instead of attacking socialism and Communism directly, the Empire has begun its massive campaign to discredit most of the countries that are being governed by left-wing governments and movements. This is of course by itself nothing new. What is ‘innovative’ is that this time Western propaganda has actually began arguing that the anti-imperialist countries are essentially not left wing at all, that they are more capitalist than the West itself, that they are ‘anti-people’, and sometimes even fascist.

New derogatory and thoroughly grotesque terms like ‘state capitalism’ have been invented and put to destructive work. These terms have then been repeated so often that they have become normalized, and eventually been adopted by the Western ‘soft left’, the liberal media and academia, as well as by the countless ‘progressive’ but anti-Communist movements – including anarchists.

While I was told by some of the greatest revolutionary figures like Eduardo Galeano and Pramoedya Ananta Toer, that it is time for ‘un-dusting the old flags and symbols’ (and they were clearly talking about the socialist and Communist ones), the Western official propaganda and much of the Western ‘left’ were busy spreading their vitriolic but contagious doctrines that ‘the labels’ should be once and for all declared obsolete. “I don’t want to be part of any political party or any movement”, one hears increasingly from millions of couch and cafe revolutionaries in cities like London or Paris. “I don’t like to be labeled”. Or typically so in those places: “I have my own mind”.

Except where there are no structures, no strong organization, no labels or flags, there can be no true victory.

But who cares about victory? Soon it became clear that the ‘progressive’ Western ‘opposition’ was not truly seeking to take power or to implement real revolutionary changes. It wanted to ‘improve things at home’, instead of abolishing the entire monstrous world order. It felt cozy and comfortable being a toothless discussion club, hating everything that was truly fighting, risking life while trying to stop imperialism and the Empire from devouring the Planet.

Thus was born the grand quiet alliance of the Western establishment (the Empire), the liberals and of those undefined (or of loosely defined) movements like the anarchists. It was directly antagonistic to almost all the countries where the Left was by now holding power. It ‘distrusted’ leading revolutionary figures. Needless to say – the criticism of the world revolutions has been based strictly on Western liberal values and doctrines.

Those countries that decided to face the Western Empire were generally labeled as un-democratic, as being arch violators of human rights. Socialist nations became the main target of the propaganda. Their every move has been scrutinized, each error blown out of proportion. Grotesquely, the West was, as mentioned above, now criticizing them for ‘not being socialist enough, or socialist at all’. It is because the demagogues in London, New York and Paris knew perfectly well that socialism, even Communism, is once again, for many people all over the world a great asset, not liability.

In the meantime, millions of ‘purists’ from the pseudo-Left in the West got engaged in endless and pointless theoretical debates about what was or not true socialism and Communism.

“Is socialism, the Chinese way, truly socialism?” they are repeating, like parrots, all over Europe and North America. “Is Russia socialist at all, or is it governed by a strongman and by a bunch of selfish oligarchs?” And of course: “How socialist are countries like Iran or South Africa?”

The verdict of the purists is always extremely stern. Almost nobody manages to survive the scrutiny! The purists in the West don’t hold power, and it is apparent that they don’t really want to. They bark. They philosophize. They throw sticks into the wheels of those who are truly and determinedly fighting for a better world. They ridicule the revolutions and any powerful left-leaning state.

Victorious and actively militant anti-imperialist governments and nations make them feel irrelevant, obsolete, embarrassing.

And the Empire knows it. It understands. It uses the soft Western left against the arch socialist and Communist enemies.

It is using soft left effectively because it is selfish, cowardly and it lacks discipline. But above all, because it is self enamored.

*

And so, in great unison with the Western Empire’s palace propagandists, the soft Western anti-Communist ‘left’ is arguing that the governing Left all over the world is not really true left, that the countries that call themselves socialist are in fact more capitalist than the West, and the world can only be saved by some extremely vaguely defined and abstract system of collective production means (unrealistic and utopian, as nowhere except in the West and in a handful of countries inhabited by European descendants, like Argentina, would such concepts be supported by the masses).

The new alliance is against China, Russia, South Africa, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, Iran, Eritrea; it is basically against all countries that are still opting for an independent, anti-imperialist course.

All these countries are ‘wrong’. All of them are brutally ‘oppressing their people’ and in almost all of them the local ‘oligarchs are more brutal than in the West’.

You look closer, and it’s all manipulation and lies, or at best half-truths. However, ‘falsehoods repeated a thousand times have a tendency of becoming the truth’, as an ‘icon’ of German Nazism explained many decades ago. And so it goes…

Fabrications are sinking deeper and deeper into the sub-conscience of the people, in the West but also in countries that are being targeted. Nobody dares to protest, to scream loudly: “Nonsense! These countries are actually socialist!”

What eyes are seeing and what the brains are conditioned to ‘conclude’ are suddenly two thoroughly different things.

The strategy of the Western Empire is clear: it makes things thoroughly confused, too complex to understand, lacking in transparency.

“Capitalist China, right-wing Russia, anti-black South Africa, state-capitalist Venezuela, monolithic and Fascist DPRK. Who would want to follow their examples? Better to accept the familiar Western fundamentalist capitalism and imperialism”. That’s what the world is being maneuvered into thinking.

Brilliant indoctrination strategy! Except… Red flags, fresh from being washed, are proudly waving all over the world, once again. In China and Russia, in South Africa and in so many other places, people are proudly returning to the old labels.

Not everyone can understand, anymore, but many are still able too feel, instinctively, and as a result of these basic human impulses, a violent clash between depressing deceit and simple human desires and dreams will soon become imminent.

Originally published by NEO.

Andre Vltchek

Philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist, Andre Vltchek has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are revolutionary novel “Aurora” and two bestselling works of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and  “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. View his other books here. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Al-Mayadeen. After having lived in Latin America, Africa and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.

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Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?