Betrayal, Genocide and the Quest for a New Vocabulary

“TODAY IS A GOOD DAY TO HAVE A REVOLUTION”: another of my hitherto unpublished Occupy Tacoma photos, this from an informational demonstration in October 2011. Pentax MX, SMCP-M 100mm f/2.8, Fujucolor 800. Exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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IT'S A RARE occasion when the comments I write for other websites are so topically apt I can use them here with minimal editing and no introductory paragraphs. But it seems this week I hit the trifecta, with posts about the Obama Administration's apparently methodical betrayal of the New Orleans African-American community, austerity as a euphemism for genocide, and our desperate need for a new vocabulary of revolutionary socialism.

The result, its separate parts identified by subheads, is an essay detailing major aspects of the tyranny that now shapes our daily lives. Yet despite its grim portrait of our increasing subjugation, it uncharacteristically ends on a distinctly positive note. But its positivity is not the imbecility of hope, the slavish yearning for progressive change begrudgingly handed down from above, the junkfood Antoinette cupcakes occasionally doled out by corrupt, tyrannical politicians who represent only the One Percent. It is rather a curiously compelling intuition of consensus oh-so-slowly being born at the grassroots level, a vision as much libertarian and Gaian as it is paradoxically Marxian, a coalescence thus far so subtle it remains beyond our normal perception even as it promises to grow, in time, powerful enough to shake the United States and its global empire as nothing has shaken the world since the Soviet Revolution of 1917. 

Katrina Murder Cops Freed: Deliberate Prosecutorial Misconduct? 

 

We must ask ourselves whether the Obama Justice Department – especially given the racial implications of the Katrina murders – knowingly conducted a prosecution so deliberately flawed it would have to be overturned. 

In other words, is the reversal of the New Orleans convictions yet another result of the signature Obamanoid strategy of publicly supporting progressive change while secretly working for its antithesis?

The question is legitimized by Obama the Orator's many shape-shifts into Barack the Betrayer – for example how he clamored for restoration of constitutional governance even as he nullified the Bill of Rights by imposition of total surveillance. His repeated concealment of reactionary purposes behind Big Lies of progressive intent provides a strategic parallel that suggests the prosecutorial misconduct may have been carefully scripted precisely to void the verdicts. 

The outrageous magnitude of the misconduct – as if it were designed to be so extreme even judicial dullards could not overlook it – surely underscores its suspiciousness.

As to the beneficiary of such Chicago-type treachery, it would of course be the One Percent Obama so obediently serves – the white aristocrats who are ruthlessly gentrifying New Orleans and thus have a huge stake in terrorizing its black population.

How ironic – yet how typical of Obama's conduct in so many other matters – if the nation's first African-American president were to emerge as the Ku Klux Klan's strongest ally in the White House since Warren Harding or Calvin Coolidge.

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Slay the Safety Net/Kill the Poor: But None Dare Call It Genocide

 

The food-stamp cutbacks are part of a much larger bipartisan war against lower income people, which the Republicans and the Democrats alike know will kill many of its victims and which is intended to do just that.

These killings include approximately 45,000 persons who are murdered each year by denial of health care which -- in civilized nations -- is considered a human right. But the death toll goes far beyond that dismal demographic. Were the body-count expanded to include those slain by joblessness, bankruptcy, foreclosure, evictions, welfare cutbacks and homelessness, plus all those driven to suicide by these same conditions, the annual slayings would number in the hundreds of thousands. 

And these deaths are not accidental. They are the deliberate means by which capitalism rids itself of those of us who are elderly, disabled, chronically unemployed or otherwise no longer exploitable for profit.

The politicians, who serve only the One Percent, are well aware of what is being done. But the charade of democracy enables them to perpetuate their cunningly engineered system of  homicide by abandonment -- and thereby to exterminate us without the public embarrassment of death camps.

 

Yet no mainstream journalist -- including the reporters and commentators of the mainstream Left -- dares call this ongoing atrocity what it truly is: genocide. 

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We Need a New Vocabulary of Class Struggle and Public Morality 

 

While I heartily applaud Professor Richard D. Wolff's quest for more accurate functional definitions of capitalism and socialism, we also need a new terminology with which to clarify the resultant societal conditions, particularly the historical truth of class warfare. But more than that, what we need -- what we most desperately need -- is a vocabulary that acknowledges the ultimate morality of socialism versus the ultimate moral imbecility of capitalism.

These three categories of re-definition -- functional, societal and moral -- are already underway, and not merely by Professor Wolff's laudable efforts. The one great contribution of the Occupy Movement to this process was its resurrection of class struggle, the defining reality of capitalism that -- in the United States -- is hidden from all but the most astute observers. But even Occupy's long-overdue replacement of the soporific terms "bourgeoisie" and "proletariat" (or "Ruling Class" and "Working Class") with the more energizing "One Percent" and "99 Percent" has not sufficed to awaken the woefully dumbed-down USian masses. As a fellow Occupy activist so memorably said to me in late 2011, "the 99 Percent is broken." Thus the most vital struggle of our time -- indeed the most pivotal conflict of our species' history -- remains disguised as academic esoterica. Occupy began redefining economics as politics, but until the political becomes personal, the clash over humanity's future (or indeed whether we have any future at all), will remain marginalized -- in the cunningly blindered eye of the USian public, hardly more relevant than Medieval schoolmen debating how many angels might fit on the head of a pin. 

How then do we redefine the political to make it personal? 

The method -- small-group consciousness-raising -- was perfected by feminists in the middle 1960s. Though the USian branch of second-wave feminism was later co-opted by the forces of capitalism, its original ideological framework was socialism. Thus feminist grievances were initially shaped by the contrasts between socialist humanitarianism and capitalist savagery. The Occupy Movement made a similar attempt to articulate grievances. But it did so in the self-defeating context of the rabid anti-intellectualism that has become the defining characteristic of how the USian 99 Percent has been (deliberately) broken. To shout for example "stop foreclosure" is not the same as correctly asserting "foreclosure is malicious victimization by moral imbeciles called capitalists." But without formal ideological reference (or at the very least an implicitly ideological analysis), the latter statement is impossible to make with sufficient authority to overcome decades of capitalism's victim-blaming Big Lies. Predictably, the Occupy effort thus disintegrated -- mostly due to the Ayn Rand contempt and hatefulness with which anti-union "progressives" regard organized labor and working-class peoples in general. More to the point, Occupy's failure at consciousness-raising demonstrates the failures of the movement's (white/bourgeois) majority, not the method itself. To make the personal political, we must therefore follow the example set by second-wave feminism before its co-optation. We must answer, both implicitly and explicitly, the core question of USian consciousness: "what's in it for me?"

Though various polls indicate an extremely high level of USian disgust with public morality, those same polls paradoxically rank morality as amongst the least important considerations in shaping national political views. (See for example http://www.gallup.com/poll/154715/americans-negativity-moral-values-inches-back.aspx.) But the cleverly induced disconnects between the deliberately oppressive state of the national economy, the degree of one's personal wretchedness and the lack of national morality can be overcome by restatement of economic issues in moral terms. Thus I urge resurrection of an old but enduring socialist slogan: "from each of us according to our ability, to each of us according to our needs." I also urge us to coin new, forceful truthful definitions of both socialism and capitalism. Accordingly, I offer my own re-definition of capitalism, one I have regularly used here in Outside Agitator's Notebook and in other Internet posts since 2009: 

Capitalism: infinite selfishness elevated to maximum virtue.

Alternatively: 

Capitalism: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue.

 

This accurately defines capitalism in terms of what it demands of its adherents. A somewhat more detailed definition follows:

Capitalism: the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever dared assert.

 

The unchallengeable authority of these words -- the manner in which they hoist capitalism by its own petard -- is that they are merely a slight paraphrasing of capitalism as defined by Ayn Rand, Wall Street's messiah of moral imbecility. 

Which leads directly to a description of what was always the norm in the colonial domains of capitalism but has now become the new paradigm of USian homeland governance as well: 

Capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percenters; seductive rewards for the politicians, professionals, technicians and thugs who serve them; merciless subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

 

Such is the tyranny that now defines our lives. Hence I pray others will contemplate these definitions as a starting point for a new dialogue and improve on them or in any case disseminate them as part of the vocabulary of a new socialist revolution. Though this revolution has yet to tell us its name, its approach is undeniable. It is already recognizable as a hybrid of Gaian feminism, Marxism, democratic practice and libertarian localism -- a healing and redemptive ideological pragmatism that is gradually giving birth to a new solidarity. It is evolving despite the One Percent's imposition of the total-surveillance police-state and seizure of the technologies we mistakenly believed would facilitate our liberation. It is only a matter of time until someone articulates it in a manifesto so urgently compelling we are at last mobilized to rise up and save ourselves, our children and our planet. 

LB/22 September 2013 

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What's at Stake in Moron Nation's War against Knowledge

LIKE MOST AMERICAN intellectuals, I instinctively trust and respect librarians. They are, after all, the priestesses and priests of Knowledge, a realm I hold infinitely more sacred than any edifice of Abrahamic rites whether Jewish, Christian or Islamic. 

Even now, after 72 years learning the cynicism we in the 99 Percent soon discover is the chief prerequisite of emotional survival here in the Slave World the late Thomas Wolfe so aptly described as “this most weary unbright cinder,” Knowledge remains my Light-Bringer.  Its grail-quest is my only act of faith, its amelioration of ignorance my only act of true contrition. I enter libraries with a secret silent genuflection of the mind as fervent as the overt gesture of obeisance devout Catholics make when they approach their altars.

The only other locales I ever regarded with comparable awe are the long forgotten but eerily potent shrines of vanquished cultures one sometimes discovers in remnants of the American wilderness. These places, their ancient holiness preserved by isolation, are sanctuaries not just of Knowledge but of forbidden divinities and the uniquely sustainable alternatives for living they yet represent, their never-printed texts preserved in the ancient Mother Tongue of our collective unconscious – the lost but vital glimpses of past and future I sometimes blessedly encountered in the years before physical disability combined with our nation's new dystopian locked-gate exclusiveness to banish me  from Nature's own biblioteka: the back country I so loved to explore, usually under the guise of fishing or hunting.

I freely admit it; not just people but books and –  yes –  dogs and ravens and even trees and troutly waters and abandoned roads and standing stones sometimes speak to me. In the City I was always loquaciously a-prowl for new ideas, new songs,  new sensations, new intensities of love, new depths of human connection. But in the country I was silent, capable of extended motionlessness, ever alert to the messages of the environment, ever receptive to the soft barely discernible heartbeat of the forest, ever a-listen for the seductive voices of the river, which are so like women talking fondly in some adjacent room. That is the sort of man I am, a person for whom Knowledge is life itself, for whom the worst most terrifying aspect of death is that it is the end of Knowledge.       

Hence I approach librarians not just as my potential friends but as fellow conspirators in the resistance against censorship and the induced ignorance that fosters  our imprisonment in Moron Nation.  Only twice in my life have librarians disappointed me. One these disappointments was a sadly comical demonstration of ignorance by an employee of the Bellingham Public Library:  when I asked why there was nothing by Tacitus in the BPL card catalogue, the librarian responded by asking me if this classical Roman was a “current author” and if his  works were “current books.”  The other disappointment was  far worse, an astonishing act of anti-Knowledge treachery by one or more politically motivated librarians in New York City, about which I'll elaborate in a moment.    

But I never regarded either of  those dismal episodes to be anything more than anomalies.  Save in Bellingham (where the city's librarians were also infamous for serving the secret police by compiling lists of who borrowed which books), librarians have always my natural allies. Sometimes, by providing vital information, librarians have been my saviors as well – especially in Manhattan.  Hence when I saw Melissa Gira Grant's “Occupy Wall Street Librarians Strike Back,” I read it knowing I would learn something very important, as indeed I did, for the  text detailed an atrocity about which I had hitherto  seen only the most fragmentary reports:  how New York City – allegedly the cultural epicenter of the Western World – maliciously destroyed the 5000-volume free library assembled by Occupy Wall Street. 

Obviously this newest assault on our right to know was ordered because someone (again) adjudged Knowledge to be “dangerous,” an intolerable source of radical agitation. It hardly matters who gave the order or whether it was given at City Hall, at Gracie Mansion or in some clandestine enclave of the Homeland Security Department's secret police;  the salient fact of this story is the wanton destruction of the books, which by its undeniable truth is now proven to be an official policy of governance in the United States.

If this sort of action evokes a troubling deja vu – as surely it might – be assured your mind is not playing tricks;  the deliberate trashing of libraries is nothing new.   But libricide –  that is the proper term for it – is not just a Nazi German outrage. It was also popular in Pinochet's Chile, which makes its appearance on Wall Street hardly a surprise given the Central Intelligence Agency's Nazi, Chilean and New York City Police Department connections. Thus the following comment:   

Anyone who questions the need for a People's Library –  not just in NYC (which allegedly has the finest "public" library in the U.S. and one of the best in the world),  but everywhere else throughout our ever-more-oppressed nation –  should go to my blog for a glimpse of the significant radical history maliciously suppressed by the New York City Public Library itself. 

As I reported in my blog last year, The East Village Other published a fully detailed extra covering the riot, but by 1983 the extra had been removed from NYCPL archives by city librarians –  obviously cut from the microfiche files and the film then professionally re-spliced.  

No doubt the censorship was imposed because the 1967 incident was a genuine police riot –  an outrage in which the cops launched an unprovoked attack (note my photos in the above link) on a group of musicians who had obtained an NYC troubadour permit for their outdoor performance.

Also –  because the cops initially admitted their attack was triggered by two or three  complaints from the Lower East Side's small but disproportionately influential community of Ukrainian immigrants –  the incident raised an enormously embarrassing question.  How was it a few complaints from a notoriously fascistic, adamantly theocratic (Eastern Orthodox) minority had nullified,  for several hours on 30 May 1967,  not just a city-issued permit, but the rights guaranteed by the New York State and United States constitutions?  

The question was especially relevant since a substantial number of those immigrants had allegedly fled the Soviet Union to escape war crimes charges for their collaboration with the Nazis and were  said to be under the sponsorship and protection of  the Central Intelligence Agency.  Then as now, the answer might have revealed disturbing details about the relationship between the NYPD and the CIA, itself already infamous as a haven for Nazi war criminals.   

Though at first it appeared Ruling Class Media would adequately report the details of this atrocity –  note for example my photo in Newsweek –   the reportage quickly deteriorated back into oppressive conformity with the cops-as-heroes/hippies-as-demons motif  that characterized all "mainstream" coverage of the Countercultural rebellion in any and all of its forms –  anti-war, feminist, back-to-the-land, new music, alternative press, alternative spirituality etc. –  with EVO's unprecedented extra the sole documentation of what actually obtained that dreadful day in Tompkins Square. 

The extra's deliberate destruction by the city's librarians –  another act reminiscent of "the worst regimes imaginable" –  is therefore not just a ruinous loss, but a damning example of how "public" libraries can be co-opted to serve the will of the One Percent. Hence it might be revealing to know how many of the destroyed People's Library books had already been "disappeared" from NYCPL, whether catalogued (but never available for circulation) or deleted entirely. 

Obviously, the Ruling Class intends to keep our minds imprisoned in Moron Nation –  the 21st Century's artificially induced equivalent of the ignorance that paralyzed the peasants of  pre-Revolutionary Russia –   even as our bodies are herded ever closer to de jure enslavement.

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Apparently it is this unspeakable purpose – the imposition of ignorance so paralytic it cannot be overcome even by collective effort and so bottomless it cannot ever be escaped – that has clandestinely motivated much of the domestic policy inflicted on us by the One Percent since the end of World War II.

First was the demonization of intellectuals – psycholinguistic warfare that made “intellectual”  synonymous with “subversive” and even “traitor.” This brainwashing – or, more accurately, “brain-warping” – was cleverly sandwiched within the purges of Communists and socialists that began literally hours after the Japanese surrender.

For people too young to remember those years, one fact should suffice as portraiture: throughout the 1950s, my younger half-siblings and I were sternly instructed never to reveal to anyone our household included a substantial library, our father's lifetime collection of books. Even then, possession of Knowledge – unless of course one was part of the Ruling Class – was already a de facto crime: just ask the hundreds of thousands of classroom “brains” who were jeered, beaten, raped, and otherwise bullied into feigned stupidity.  The public elementary schools and junior highs were bad enough, but public high schools – in which vicious children had grown sufficiently large and strong to inflict severe and sometimes fatal wounds –  were realms of genuine horror, a topic to which we shall return. 

Meanwhile the quality of public education deteriorated steadily, a decline so obvious it was triggering school-reform controversies even before the Soviet Union orbited Sputnik I in the fall of 1957 and thus forever claimed for Communism the title “First into Space.” 

Though post-Sputnik panic brought about momentary improvements in public education under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, the rebellions of the 1960s once more frightened the One Percent with the power of Knowledge to inspire and agitate, and by the end of the decade, the deliberately induced decline in educational quality was again evident. The conservatives, especially the more overtly fascist John Birchers, loudly blamed “Communists” and “Com-symps,” but the outcry – as always – merely functioned to conceal how capitalism was transforming public education to serve its long-range goal of reducing the United States to its United Estates – eventually a realm of the corporate equivalent of antebellum plantations, literally a nation of slaves. The real villains were of course the One Percent, their malevolent Ayn Rand influence clandestinely applied at every level, a do-not-dare-tell-it truth recognized at least subconsciously by any reasonably perceptive reporter who was assigned to cover public education during those years.

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As I implied above, we cannot discuss the origins of Moron Nation without discussing bullying, a manifest hellishness I encountered in every public school I attended.

It was especially prevalent in the southern public high school where I endured ninth and tenth grades. Throughout my freshman year and into the first weeks of my sophomore year, I was bullied relentlessly: not only had my “Yankee” origins taught me to “talk funny”;  I was also smallish and slender, dyslexically clumsy and  dark-haired enough to be suspected of being Jewish. But I finally taught my slow-learning tormentors a sufficiently discouraging lesson:  attack me, I'll fight you;  and even if you win the fight, I will damn well inflict substantial hurt. In eleventh grade I attended school in urban Michigan, where a variety of factors combined to ensure I was not bullied.  But familial dysfunction involuntarily returned me to the South for twelfth grade,  and though I was in the same semi-rural district where I attended ninth and tenth grades, my enrollment in a newly constructed school apparently nullified my reputation for violent response. 

Because the act of writing is so often also an act of vivid recollection, working on this essay brought back the following long-forgotten incident in all its wrenching fear, anguish, rage and mortification:  

During class change maybe the first week of that final high-school September, a gang of at least a half-dozen football players attacked me in the hallway, forcibly yanked down my pants and hurled me into an adjacent girls' restroom, a vicious “prank” the purpose of which was to get me caught in pantless trespass by the school authorities and thus branded a pervert. But the hateful scheme failed. I fought my assailants with anything-goes ferocity,  inflicting enough pain they were unable to de-pant me completely, and when I was flung through the forbidden door, it was with one leg still trousered.  Then – much to my surprise – the girls themselves not only aided my escape but refused to rat me out. When word got around I was again carrying the modified bicycle chain with which I had notoriously avenged myself on a bully two years earlier, the jocks quickly found other targets.     

Given the perspective of 55 years and work on several in-depth education stories, I now recognize   schoolyard bullying as a central part of U.S. education: it is how we are psychologically prepared to function under capitalism – infinite greed as maximum virtue – whether we are destined to be predators or prey. It is also how we are all taught to behave under capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for everyone else. Schoolyard or workplace, the bullies maintain the capitalist order: executive attire, athletic jerseys or badges and uniforms, under capitalism they are all licenses for savagery and sadism, differing only in price and permissiveness.  That's why all the official pronouncements against bullying are ultimately nothing more than Big Lies – additional examples of the same sort of propaganda by which this Nation of Falsehood hypocritically denounces the savagery its policies intentionally perpetuate.

Indeed, bullying IS capitalism, the perfect micrososm of its predatory psycho-dynamics. But to connect capitalism and bullying (or to name capitalism as the perpetrator of its many other atrocities) is to commit heresy, to utter a statement so subversive, so taboo,  none dare do it publicly: a topic on which Richard D. Wolff has a great deal to say in a new book entitled Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism, about which more in a moment.   


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A Chris Hedges Essay We Should All Read at Least Once

Apropos our slave-pen economy, a month ago Chris Hedges published a provocative essay entitled “The Implosion of Capitalism,” which I bookmarked for recommendation and comment but then set aside as events later dictated. Now though in the aftermath of Memorial Day, which presumably   turned our thoughts to the costs inflicted on ourselves, our fellow humans and our planet by capitalism's relentless quest for “growth,” I offer it as an appropriate meditation.

Here, in the hope they will encourage you to read the essay from start to finish, are a few significant lines in which Hedges suggests the direction we must take if our species is to survive:
 
“Marx, though he placed a naive faith in the power of the state to create his workers’ utopia and discounted important social and cultural forces outside of economics, was acutely aware that something essential to human dignity and independence had been lost with the destruction of pre-modern societies...Rebuilding this older vision of community, one based on cooperation rather than exploitation, will be as important to our survival as changing our patterns of consumption, growing food locally and ending our dependence on fossil fuels.”

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Shameless Promotion of What I Hope Will Be a Vital Book

A few paragraphs ago I mentioned Wolff's Occupy the Economy, a chapter of which was printed recently by Truthout. Here is a sample paragraph:

“Questioning and criticizing capitalism have been taboo, treated by federal authorities, immigration officials, police and most of the public alike as akin to treason. Fear-driven silence has substituted for the necessary, healthy criticism without which all institutions, systems, and traditions harden into dogmas, deteriorate into social rigidities, or worse. Protected from criticism and debate, capitalism in the United States could and has indulged all its darker impulses and tendencies. No public exposure, criticism and movement for change could arise or stand in its way as the system and its effects became ever more unequal, unjust, inefficient and oppressive. Long before the Occupy movement arose to reveal and oppose what U.S. capitalism had become, that capitalism had divided the 1 percent from the 99 percent.”

I have not yet read the book, but I surely will. Wolff's potentially widespread public exposure of the taboo against naming capitalism as our adversary – a topic of Outside Agitator's Notebook since its inception in 2009 – is long overdue.

Perhaps now we've at last begun the national discussion that is prerequisite to our liberation.

LB/28 May 2012

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