Three Essays: Is U.S. Socialism Doomed?; Today's U.S. Was Not My Birthplace; Notes On Boudica the Rebel

(Sorry this is so late. Computer troubles -- plus the infuriating fact the Internet's plague of unrestricted advertisement-monitoring software now makes U.S. broadband as slow as dial-up was 15 years ago -- turned production of today's OAN into an exhausting all-nighter.) 

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OCCASIONALLY THE REPORTS I read on other websites prompt me to address in comment threads subjects about which I already intended to write detailed columns here. But last week that happened as never before – not once but three times.

As most of you know, I am an avowed socialist – these days ever-more-strongly influenced by Marx, Engels and Lenin. (No doubt this is the concluding legacy of my involvement with “communists and stuff” that in 1963 convinced my first wife to end our marriage.)

In any case I long ago realized socialism is our only viable alternative if indeed we are to (maybe) save ourselves and our sorely wounded planet.

What attracted me to socialism was its innate humanitarian fairness – from each according to ability/ to each according to need. It was a concept in which I was tutored as a child by my Marxian father, and it became the core of my own ideology after I was jailed in connection with a 1963 civil rights incident –  the same atrocity that ignited my undying taste for the political activism that prompted my first wife's departure.

Prior to 1963, many people including my employers thought I was destined for The New York Times or some comparable journalistic Mount Everest. But my prospects of major newspaper employment died with my arrest in the newsroom of The Knoxville Journal – never mind the false charge of disorderly conduct was quickly dismissed.

Hence for the next 26 years I straddled the divide between lesser mainstream print-media outlets and the alternative press, at the same time participating not just in the Civil Rights Movement but also in the Anti-Vietnam War and Back-to-the-Land movements and even for a time in the New Deal wing of the Democratic Party.

But in 1983, all my life's work – including a book seemingly on the brink of publication, another in progress and a possible third in concept notes – was destroyed by a mysterious fire. The ensuing clinical depression led to an extended clash with a breathtakingly vicious, relentlessly vindictive Washington state welfare bureaucracy. Thwarting forever my three-year struggle to return to work (1987-1990), the bureaucrats maliciously destroyed my life by declaring me permanently unemployable.

Enraged by the end of all my aspirations and embittered by the realization I had been condemned to abjectly inescapable poverty, I allowed my anger to drive me deep into the camp of the Libertarian Conservatives.

But by late 2004, my own humanitarianism had resurfaced, again in socialist form, and I was mortified by my former apostasy.

Now though I was also keenly aware of how easily even those of us with presumably elevated political consciousness can be recruited to fascism by bitterness and rage – especially when such emotions are fully justified, as they were in my case.

Asking myself how I might have avoided such seduction, I realized the only preventative is ideological discipline. Hence the relevance of Marx, Engels and Lenin – not only in my life, but as a general antidote to the ever-more-obvious tyranny of capitalist governance.

It we are to successfully confront capitalism as it matures into unabashed fascism – as Wall Street's global empire imposes its regime of absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us – the solidarity evoked by Marxian ideological discipline is an absolute necessity.

But, here in the USian Homeland, does socialism – Marxian or any other kind –have even the chance of the proverbial snowball in hell?

I frankly doubt it. I have been debating with myself for some time whether to write about the diabolical cleverness with which our Ruling Class masters condition us all in Ayn Rand moral imbecility, thus to ensure socialism – or any other form of humanitarianism – will never again jeopardize the One Percent's obscene profits.

The question I asked myself was whether I should regard my thesis as too defeatist and therefore keep silent. Or should I speak my piece, in hope identifying a key Ruling Class tactic will enable us to combat it?

Two essays on the Internet this week made the decision for me. 

One was “Red Cross: How We Spent Sandy Money Is a 'Trade Secret',” here.  My hypothesis – that there will never be a socialist United States unless we can again learn to trust one another – fit naturally on the “Red Cross” comment thread:

The Ayn Rand mindset – moral imbecility for personal gain – poisons USians at every level, from the executive boardrooms, the politicians' mansions and the bureaucratic directorates to the ranks of the lowest level employees and government clerks, in for-profit and non-profit operations alike.

Exactly as (another poster) says, “greed, ignorance and corruption” have become the sole (and soul) defining characteristics of the modern United States.

That's why socialism – though it is the only possible solution to the problems that are destroying our species and our planet – seems forever doomed in the U.S.

 

Socialism requires mutual trust – especially trustworthy leadership. But too many episodes like this breaking Red Cross scandal demonstrate how the nation's relentless Ayn Rand conditioning has (deliberately) created a people for whom infinite greed is maximum virtue (and thus the rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth). 

Thus too neither any leader nor any organization will ever again be regarded as trustworthy. This is how the One Percent ensures its power is absolute and eternal – that is, until our entire species is extinct.

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The second decision-maker was “The United States of Cruelty,” by Charles Pierce of Esquire, here.  Writing about the manifest cruelties of USians – especially the growing hostility to lower-income people – Pierce inevitably prompted a discussion of U.S. complicities in mass murder. My contribution, sufficiently controversial its thumbs-up/thumbs-down counts continue to nullify each other, noted mass murder's origin in Abrahamic religion:

(I)t is at least arguable (mass murder) is the invention of the Abrahamic god, the deity of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:

“And the Lord our God delivered him before us; and we smote him, and his sons, and all his people. And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain...” (Deuteronomy 2: 33-34.)

Moreover, to make certain the faithful understand such genocide is truly the mandate of the Heavenly Führer, his will is repeated as a commandment:

“But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth...” (Deuteronomy 20:16)

Sarcastically parodying biblical style (which too many readers probably didn't get), I hammered out my conclusion:

Behold in these massacres commanded by the Divine Sadist the celestial glories of patriarchy and the amazing grace of Abrahamic governance. Verily, thus does man, ancient and modern, prove he was created in the image of this god of cruelty.

To me the above seems the perfect footnote to a piece on why the USian people will probably never embrace socialism.

As Francesca, a compellingly articulate woman of Occupy Tacoma, so memorably said to me on a rainy winter night three years ago: “the 99 Percent is terribly broken.”

Not only are most 99 Percenters Ayn-Randed to fascist moral imbecility; they're also Bible-thumped to genocidal hatred. And now with the First Nations people nearly exterminated, we their lower-income grandparents and parents and brothers and sisters – we who are elderly, disabled or chronically unemployed – we are undoubtedly next.

Why then do we socialists persist? Because we know resistance is our only remaining taste of freedom – the defining experience, however fleeting, of what it is to be fully human.

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Another Internet story, “JBLM may shelter detained immigrant children,” here (scroll down), prompted me to write a snide retort, and an equally snide rejoinder inspired another long-considered text. First I wrote:

Apropos Joint Base Lewis-McChord: I wonder how many of these imprisoned kids will be "encouraged" to enlist in the imperial war machine?

(Child recruitment age is 17-18. Given the skyrocketing unpopularity of the empire's wars, maybe that's the reason the Defense Department is interested in providing transit camps for child deportees.)

Then a poster screen-named ArthurKing (his real name?) denounced my reference to the imperial war machine as “a degrading, insulting comment toward our men and women in uniform and all those who have previously served.”

And I answered with an essay I might have titled “Today's United States Is Not the U.S. in Which I Was Born”:

Just for the record, Mr. King, I was part of the imperial war machine myself: Regular Army enlistment, active duty 1959-1962, overseas service in Republic of Korea, extended there by the Berlin Crisis of 1961, ETS September '62, honorable discharge from reserves in 1965. In those days we crossed the seas on troop transports: for me it was the USS Mann en route, the USNS Sultan returning.

Had you been amongst those of us who served – which I doubt – surely you would know soldiers are not insulted by truth. You would also know that honor is ultimately a personal matter – which is why, after the guns fall silent and the scalding venom of war has cooled and dried to dust, we recognize there was honor not only amongst ourselves but amongst our enemies as well.

The rest of your profiling is dead wrong too – laughably so in fact. I neither eat pot brownies nor attend drum circles, and – as I have all my life – I recognize the Second Amendment as intended for the ultimate defense of our Constitution.

But that does not change the fact the dear and promising nation from which I enlisted no longer exists.

A nation that was notably democratic if one were white (as indeed I am), but which ranged from not-so-democratic to openly tyrannical if one were a person of color – it was promising precisely because it shone with the potential of extending its radical notions of representative democracy at least to all its citizens and perhaps even to the world.

Then it was dealt a fatal wound on 22 November 1963. After that, it convulsed and twitched through its death-throes during a decade of political murders (Malcolm X; Martin Luther King Jr.; Sen.Robert Kennedy [the last man who could have saved us from ourselves]; Fred Hampton; the dead and permanently crippled at Kent State University and Jackson State College, etc. ad nauseam.

Since then, the ruling cabal of plutocrats and politicians has reduced us to irremediable wretchedness. We the people are powerless. Debt-slavery, foreclosure, eviction, inescapable poverty and homelessness have become our defining economic realities. The Constitution I swore to defend has been deliberately nullified. Its Bill of Rights has been maliciously repealed by the ironically named Patriot Act and the 2012 National Defense Appropriations Act. And now the socioeconomic and political tyrannies that formerly defined the lives of its people of color define the conditions endured by nearly all of us.

A working journalist since my 16th year (1956), I was a general-assignment reporter the day President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered, and more than once I had to wipe the tears from my eyes as I hammered out my assigned segments of our local reaction story and updated them for our extras.

During the years after the president was slain, I watched with horror while events that followed one another “as the night the day,” confirmed our darkest suspicions of what had obtained in that most mournfully infamous moment. (JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters; James E. Douglass, Orbis Books: 2008, presents an incisive analysis of our post-Kennedy history that proves beyond any scintilla of doubt the assassination was indeed a coup.)

Now, because I do so knowing I live in a realm in which the Bill of Rights exists only on paper, I feel a twinge of fear every time I write of the “imperial war machine” or dare state any other political truth. I know that in the new post-constitutional United States – our homeland ruled by the Ayn Rand moral imbecility of capitalist governance (absolute power and unlimited profit for the aristocracy; total subjugation for all the rest of us) – I (or anyone else) can now be disappeared or murdered at the government's whim. (If you doubt this, you are either ignorant or in psycho-neurotic denial.)

But I don't really care. I am 74 years old and increasingly crippled by ever-more-painful osteoarthritis. Given how our nation has been stolen from us – given how its thieves have made it the most relentless predator on our terminally sickened planet – my one remaining hope is I will be dead before these robber-baron plutocrats complete their unspeakably evil, 80-year scheme of global imperialism: the whole world an electronically overseen slave-plantation, its master the de facto Fourth Reich.

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The third comment-thread writing of an essay I had long intended for this space – speculation about Boudica, the Celtic revolutionary – was inspired by Chris Hedges' “The Ghoulish Face of Empire.” here.  The Boudica material, in my mind for years if not decades, emerged slowly:

This is some of Mr. Hedges best writing, and I salute its indictment of the USian Empire's Ayn Rand moral imbecility.

But many Romans feared the end of their imperium had come in 9 CE (AD), when guerrillas under Arminius (aka "Herman the German") massacred 20,000 Roman soldiers in the Teutoburg Forest. (A superb book on this war, which forever changed the map of Europe, is The Battle That Stopped Rome, [Peter S. Wells, W.W. Norton and Co.: 2003]).

Then within living memory was Boudica's Rebellion of 61-62 CE, in which the Romans' public flogging of a Celtic noblewoman and the public rape of her two daughters triggered what would be the bloodiest uprising in all Roman history.

Boudica was perhaps the original exemplar of the aphorism “never underestimate a redhead.” We're told she was a queen of the Iceni, a Celtic tribe from today's Norfolk area. But I suspect she was more likely the Archdruid, the equivalent of a pope, for no leader of a single tribe could have so quickly raised an entire people as she did: her mandate of revolutionary solidarity not only ended ancient feuds but mustered warriors from all Celtic tribes everywhere.

Though these events indeed blunted Roman hubris (and were amongst the reasons the early Christians believed the end of the world was nigh), the imperium survived to murder and vex my Celto-Pictish ancestors for another 414 years. Tragically for us all, the USian Empire is likely to prove just as resilient.

 

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Boudica's Rebellion is in some ways eerily similar to events in Iraq and thus warrants further discussion:

By Boudica's time, the Archdruidship had become a secret office due to Roman persecution of the ancient Celtic religion. Though polytheistic, Celtic belief centered on a variously-named goddess: the “mother of all being” said to have given birth to the universe and all its inhabitants. The religion's age is suggested by the genetically kindred Picts, residents of the isles and highlands of the Scottish north, who seem to have claimed direct descent from the legendary Tuatha de Danann – the “people of the Goddess Danu” whose traditions date to 1800 BCE and are recorded in the Medieval Irish Book of Invasions. 

Throughout the Celtic world, the Druids were pan-tribal leaders who combined the functions of teacher, scholar, scientist, judge and priest. A Druid's education is said to have taken 33 years. Because the Celts reckoned descent through the mother and regarded females as equal to (and in some instances superior to) males, Druids were as likely to be women as men. The resultant admixture of matriarchal theology and tribal democracy gravely threatened the Romans, who in service to their proto-capitalist economy sought to impose patriarchal authority on all imperial domains.

The Celts and Picts, for whom the personal was always political, thus viewed Roman conquest as triple tyranny – spiritual, intellectual, cultural.

 

Thus too the public flogging of Boudica and the public rape of her two daughters, girls of about 12 or 14 years old whose names have seemingly been lost, became to the Celts the ultimate symbol of Roman malevolence.

Two facts bolster my hypothesis Boudica was the Archdruid, as powerful as any ayatollah: 

(1)-Cassius Dio says she wore a tunic of many colors – a sartorial right the Celts reserved only for the the Chief Bard and the Archdruid.

(2)-Boudica's ability to stop feuds and raise warriors from tribes that were formerly hostile to one another (and possibly even from Ireland and the European mainland) demonstrates authority far beyond that of a tribal chief.

In any case she cleverly launched her rebellion when nearly all the strength of the Roman garrison was on the opposite coast laying siege to the Druid sanctuary at Ynys Mon. She attacked the Roman cities of Camulodunum, Londinium and Verulamium, which her army burned to the ground, killing an estimated 70,000 persons and leaving a dense signature of now-archaeological ash.

Then in a battle that no doubt reinforces today's Bushkin/Obamanoid hubris, she lost, defeated by superior Roman communications and the disciplined technology of the legions. The battle was thus akin to combats between modern-day natives and invading Europeans. Its site remains curiously unknown, as does the fate of Boudica and her daughters, who yet live in the revolutionary legends of the Occident.

Later I added another comment:

The Muse was in this recounting of history and will not let me rest without this addendum. Today, by what is said to have been Boudica's last speech before her final battle – “Let the men live as slaves if they want. I, a woman, would rather die” – Boudica has become not just a revolutionary heroine but an exemplar of the People's War, a symbol of the fighting spirit that made the female partisans and soldiers of the Soviet Union amongst the most feared warriors of modern history. (Doubt me? Google Ludmilla Pavlechenko or Zina Portnova.) Perhaps paradoxically, Boudica is also the neo-pagan equivalent of a saint (if not an embodiment of their Goddess herself). Which suggests the native traditions she defended have never really died. Beyond the borders of Imperium Romanum, amongst the Caledonians on the far side of the Hadrian and Antonine walls and across the water amongst the Eiru, the old ways lived on, and now they reappear, often spontaneously (and therefore sometimes quite eerily), in today's art and music and in many cultures of resistance as well, as if in answer to the very plea Chris Hedges so often articulates for all of us. As is said of others like her, Boudica Lives!

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In Case You Missed It: Outside Agitation Elsewhere

No doubt the following comment added to my misbehavior quotient on several bad-boy lists maintained by the various USian secret police agencies – though undoubtedly I was on those lists already. (I know for a fact the spooks were tracking me in the '60s – in 1967 they killed my best job offer of this lifetime, from the news department of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation – and I'm sure they prod the rubble of my life regularly even now. Or maybe especially now, particularly after my involvement in Occupy.) But as a once-very-dear-but-now-sadly lost friend named Alyce used to say (and I hope she still does), “joke 'em if they can't take a fuck.”

My venue was the president's own attempt to reposition himself as something other than an obedient servant of the One Percent, a propaganda piece entitled “Family-Friendly Workplace Policies Are Not Frills - They're Basic Needs,” here.  To which – yes with accompanying fear (I am no fool) – I typed my reply:

Any time President Barack Obama claims he's helping the Working Class (especially when he says something like “I'll work with anyone – Democrats or Republicans – to increase opportunity for American workers”), it's at least as big a Big Lie as “change we can believe in.”

Indeed his deceptiveness is proven by another story in this very edition of RSN: “A Secret Plan to Close Social Security's Offices and Outsource Its Work.” 

Here is an excerpt:

“Worse, the report also suggests that many of the SSA's critical functions could soon be outsourced to private-sector partners and contractors...The fact that neither the SSA, the Administration, nor the President himself are publicly fighting these brutal cuts is a betrayal of Social Security's promise. That betrayal is made even more acute by the fact that cuts to Social Security's administrative budgets do not help the deficit in any way, since the SSA is fully funded from Social Security's revenues.”

Once again, we see how Obama the Orator shape-shifts into Barack the Betrayer whenever his Wall Street masters snap their fingers – in this instance to sneakily facilitate the looting of our own pensions.

In terms of the bitterness and alienation so inflicted, he is undoubtedly the worst president in U.S. history – and idiot that I am, I voted for him twice.

My additional remarks were in response to other posters:

The one meaningful difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is the former are brazen Ayn Rand fascists while the latter cover up their moral imbecility with sleight-of-hand maneuvers and the Big Lie of progressive slogans.

The truth is both parties are against the female autonomy represented by Plan B. Apropos which, see for example “It's not Plan B if you can't get it,” also “How the right took over the debate.”

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Contrary to your Obama-the-victim fantasy, the president began his betrayals immediately after he won election, secretly meeting with the health insurance barons, promising he would rig the system so that USian health care would remain forever a privilege of wealth: the primary purpose behind ACA.

(Obamacare's secondary purpose is to enable USian propaganda that says “yes we have national health insurance” even as its co-pays and deductibles are so prohibitively expensive only the rich can afford them. Thus the obscene windfall profit atop the insurors' already obscene profits – all of us now enslaved by the requirement to buy mandatory insurance that the co-pays and deductibles guarantee we can never afford to use.)

Again before taking office, Obama squelched the effort to enact Employee Free Choice.

And he was already plotting to expand the national secret police apparatus to complete the nullification of the Bill of Rights begun by the Bush League.

Meanwhile, guess what – until the 2010 elections, when betrayed progressives voted none-of-the-above by not voting at all -- Obama had a Democratic Party majority in both houses of Congress.

So the fantasy he is a victim of Republican intransigence is just that – a fantasy. Or more aptly, a Big Lie to con those who believe in yet another Big Lie – that the U.S. is still a representative democracy.

LB/29 June 2014

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