President Obama's Victory Day Rudeness: I Apologize for My Country's Scorn of Living Russians and Soviet Dead

Mothers and daughters became Soviet warriors. (Click image to view it full size.)

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I AM ASHAMED of how those who rule the Imperial United States and its European satrapies dishonored the millions of Soviet men, women and children who were slain in the epic struggle to save the world from Nazism.

I am ashamed of how we who have never yet suffered comparable invasion  have been taught to belittle the breathtaking sacrifices of those who fought and died to defeat the most obviously sadistic invader our unspeakably savage era has thus far produced. I am ashamed of the politics of xenophobia and greed that demand we disdain fellow humans we should instead hail as heroes and heroines, not just of their own Motherland but of all humanity.

Behind my shame at our overlords' unconscionable bad manners on this particular Victory Day is my far greater shame at how we in the United States have allowed our once-exemplary representative democracy to be reduced to an oligarchy of global oppression and environmental ruination.

I am especially ashamed of how its tyrannies are perpetuated by a white electorate so blinded by racial, socioeconomic and religious hatreds,  it seems idiotic to imagine it will ever stop voting against its own well-being. 

But my country has become so much a police-state, I dare not continue without affirming my shame is the shame of a patriot – that if I did not love my country, I would not so grieve its betrayal. I would not denounce the capitalist One Percent and their political vassals for looting my country into poverty. I would not damn the One Percent's ballot-box disciples for voting my country into ruin merely to inflict suffering on those whose race or ethnicity or gender or sexuality they despise. If I did not love my country, I would not be so appalled by the electronic concentration camp  to which it has been reduced by these betrayers of liberty and their wanton perversions of democratic process.

Nor dare I rationally hope for liberation in what remains of my lifetime. The U.S. Ruling Class is protected by technologies of surveillance and retaliation we can scarcely imagine. Armed with powers earlier generations attributed only to god, it is combining the doctrines of Ayn Rand economics, U.S. exceptionalism and divine-right imperialism into a new and uniquely USian form of Nazism – a Nazism in which absolute power rests not with a single despot but with an infinitely despotic cabal of corporate executives.

The pivotal question of our time, brought into sharp focus by the events in Ukraine, is therefore whether this newest, U.S.-sponsored onslaught of the human penchant for moral imbecility can be brought to bay before its proponents literally nuke the world into a radioactive cinder. 

Yet even if we somehow succeed in building a successful resistance, it may already be too late for our species and this planet as we know it. Indeed it is entirely conceivable some sure but thus far secret knowledge of ourselves as denizens of a dying world is what is fueling the unrelenting greed of the One Percent – a greed so limitless it has no known precedent in human experience.

Is this what is happening? Have the One Percenters been reliably informed their deadly contempt for Nature commanded by the Abrahamic religions has already doomed us? Is the One Percent's intent now merely to see who can collect the most wealth before the too-long-ignored-and-despised Mother Earth sounds the final buzzer? 

Only the darkest and most hopeless of times could produce such otherwise-unthinkable thoughts. And that – the darkest most hopeless time in our species' history – is the time in which we are cursed to live and challenged to do whatever we can to resist the encroaching darkness.

Another dark time, nearly as dark and hopeless as the present, were the months immediately after Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union on the Summer Solstice of 1941.

But the Red Army and the Soviet people fought back valiantly, eventually defeating what was then the best trained, most technologically advanced war machine on Earth. 

Let us therefore never forget their victory came at a terrible price – their combined military and civilian deaths now estimated to be as many as 43.3 million. (Yes, this is the same material linked in my second paragraph above. But the source for the 43.3 million figure is the researcher Boris Sokolov, for whom you must scroll far down the text.)

All such numbers are inconceivable unless we restate them in quantities we can envision. 

Picture a man or a woman or a child. Then picture that person dead. Picture a corpse.

If you accept Sokolov's estimate (which I do), picture that corpse multiplied 43.3 million times. Forty-three-point-three million is the present-day population of five cities the size of London. Or five the size of New York City. Or four the size of Moscow. Now try to envision these entire municipalities filled with naught but corpses – decomposing bodies that were once living men, women and children, folks with all the pleasures and pains and ambitions and desires and other emotions you or I or anyone has.

That's what it cost the Soviet Union to save us from the Nazis.

But the most important element in this recitation of grim facts is that the Soviet people prevailed – and that by prevailing they saved us all, every man woman and child now alive – from those earlier forms of fascism and Nazism personified by Mussolini and Hitler. (Yes, Fascist Italy did indeed aid Nazi Germany  in the invasion of the Soviet Union.)

The English-language service of the Russian state television network, RT, celebrates this 70th anniversary of the Soviet triumph with a Victory Day program  so thoughtfully scripted it should be preserved and issued as a DVD. It is a valuable historical document, and if it is available, I will add it to my own personal library. 

RT's coverage gives us the obligatory summaries of the fighting but also offers vital glimpses of social history – stories of the people and how they coped with the stresses of enemy invasion.

It includes a sampling of the often poignant poetry of Russian wartime popular music. It is a musical literature utterly unlike the self-consciously happy-faced, “Boogie-Woogie Bugle-Boy-of-Company-B” trivializations with which we in the wartime U.S. were sedated. But you'll have to wait a bit for all the RT material to load, and then you'll have to scroll down to its last pages.

The songs are each accompanied by translations into English, and two are especially moving. One is called “White Cranes”:  “Sometimes it seems to me each fallen soldier/ That never came back from fields of gore/ In fact did never perish as they told you/ But turned into a crane as white as snow.” The other is “Wait for Me”: “That in the midst of gunfire/ It was your waiting for me/ That saved my life.”

Also especially relevant on this occasion is the 2010 Russian film entitled Brestskaya Krepost – “Brest Fortress” in English – that tells the heartrending stories of some of the soldiers and civilians, among them three women, who fought in the battle that was the Soviet equivalent of our Pearl Harbor and Wake Island battles combined.

Available as a DVD with some versions subtitled in English, it is notably unlike most Hollywood war films in that it neither sanitizes the horrors of the battlefield nor belabors the audience with pro-war propaganda.

The ability of Russian cinematographers to depict horrendous violence without simultaneously glorifying it is a skill that has apparently been carefully denied their U.S. counterparts. But that should surprise no one who understands that in the new imperial U.S. oligarchy, government at every level and all its mainstream informational media (including film producers, textbook publishers and advertising agencies), are owned and controlled by the same self-serving inner circle of voraciously capitalist One Percenters.

Nor is there any doubting the diabolical, Josef-Goebbels-inspired efficacy of the uniquely privatized U.S. government propaganda apparatus that has been spawned by the One Percent's seizure of power. The greed and selfishness the propaganda so successfully evokes was undoubtedly a major if undocumented factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Prepared in accordance with state-of-the-art psychological research, its influence is so irresistible, it has already convinced the nominally well-informed people of Western Europe to accept the Big Lie World War II was single-handedly won by the United States. 

This same process of de facto psychological warfare, the relentless dumbing-down I label “moronation,” is what sustains Moron Nation – that portion of the U.S. electorate which is ever more militantly white, theocratically Christian, aggressively reactionary and therefore ever more inclined to embrace a uniquely USian, Ayn Rand version of Nazism. Its emergent ideology is already apparent, not only in the use of “austerity” as a euphemism for calculatedly genocidal elimination of social services, but in a local war against public-transport users I wrote about extensively earlier in this decade.

Now of course the One Percent's (allegedly unofficial) propaganda machine – which in truth is as potent and functionally official as Goebbels' own Ministry of Propaganda – is turning not just its assault weapons but its heaviest Joe McCarthy siege guns on anyone of significance who dares dispute the empire's portrayal of Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine.

Quoth the ever-reliable Robert Parry via a Consortium News exclusive:

U.S.-taxpayer-funded Radio Liberty has a checkered history that includes hiring Nazi sympathizers as Cold War commentators. Now, one of its current writers has used the platform to bash an American scholar who won’t join Official Washington’s “group think” on Ukraine.

That follows Parry's earlier report detailing how the group-thinkers insist on describing the deadly ramrodding of Ayn Rand capitalist savagery down post-Soviet Russian throats as nothing more than “growing pains” intended “to help (these people) attain a better life.”

Which suggests another presumably unthinkable thought:

Given its context of economic warfare with imperialistic intent, could it be the real reason Obama snubbed the Russian people and their Victory Day celebration is that he cannot agree with what it celebrates?

Remember it was the immediate ancestry of the present-day One Percent that tried via the Bankers Plot of 1934  to join the U.S. to the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis.

Perhaps then Obama is no different from so many other U.S. politicians in harboring a clandestine, beyond-top-secret commitment to the Nazi resurgence already evident in the Western Ukraine and unquestionably lurking in the Moron Nation shadows of the USian Homeland as well.

After all, what is Nazism – particularly with its profit-expanding policies of slave labor and the extermination of anyone no longer exploitable for profit – but the ultimate form of capitalism?

LB/3-10 May 2015

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Electronic Surveillance Is the End of All Human Potential

The personal computer: despite its apparent homeyness, an electronic ball and chain. A picture made while I was adjusting the focus on my M2 Leica. Kodak BW400CN, no other data; colorization and posterization by Gimp Image Editor. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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(A conceptual prelude to this essay appeared as my contribution to the comment thread of Truthout's republication  of Chris Hedges' “The Sparks of Rebellion,” 30 September 2013.)

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PREDICTABLY, NO ONE DARES articulate the three most bitter truths revealed by Edward Snowden's courageous disclosures about the National Security Agency and its total surveillance state. Firstly, Snowden's revelations make it clear the political revolution that was allegedly to have been facilitated by computers and other digital technologies was never more than delusion. Secondly, he has laid bare the fact the United States of America is no longer anything like yesteryear's “sweet land of liberty” – that it is instead the most aggressively merciless empire in human history, potentially as murderous at home as it already is abroad. Thirdly – and this is by far the most painful truth of all – there is no longer any doubt we are now and forever stripped naked by the relentlessly probing electronic fingers of the state. We have been robbed of the privacy that was the wellspring of not just our personal freedom but of all human aspirations, and it is now becoming ever more obvious there is not one fucking thing any or all of us can do to regain what has been stolen from us. It is literally as if we have been conquered by some alien race of super-tyrants from outer space.

Our stunned silence in the face of this self-inflicted and most likely fatal turning-point in our species' evolutionary history – the fact it obliterates any and all possibility for the sorts of individual innovation that has hitherto been our collective salvation – is attributable to the Moron Nation ignorance fostered by the censorship and disinformation necessary to perpetuate capitalism, with capitalism here defined as I always define it – infinite greed elevated to ultimate virtue. Thus we have been conditioned to adopt the self-defeating belief liberty is not an inherent human right protected by law but is merely a privilege awarded only by possession of certain products, specifically computers, cell phones and other devices of information technology.

Now though we are discovering these instruments we were falsely taught were the epitome of liberation are instead the cornerstone devices of the total-surveillance state and are therefore mechanisms of self-enslavement. Our resultant mental paralysis is yet another proof of our cradle-to-grave conditioning in a society cunningly restructured into a global Skinner Box, the notorious rat-race prison beloved of the behavior-modification psychologists whose incipiently fascist theories underly so much of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us. Whether we admit it or not – and most of us cannot stand the pain of such honesty -- we are reduced to the terrorized consciousness of laboratory animals for whom certain maneuvers previously brought rewards and an illusion of security but now yield only painful electric shocks.

Meanwhile the absolute refusal of mass media to acknowledge what obtains is merely another example of the obscene selfishness that is capitalism in action. Computer sales alone generated revenue of $85.5 billion in 2011,  the last year for which complete data is available, with sales of wireless devices adding another $169.8 billion.  The combined totals, $255.3 billion, amount to 15 percent of 2011's retail and wholesale gross domesticproduct. In other words, our induced compulsion to squander skyrocketing sums of money on our own ever-more-inescapable electronic shackles generates an income vast enough to bribe every paycheck journalist in the nation and yet allow for the unimaginably lavish profits demanded by our One Percent overlords.

Perhaps in part because I am a grandson of Amos R. Bliss, the Canadian engineer who in 1901 invented theautomotive dynamo  and thereby made possible the motorcar as we know it, I know something about the research and contemplation that precedes creativity whether practical or artistic. I therefore recognize how the bottomless pathos of our now-eternal nakedness is the death of all such effort. From now hence, the omnipresence of the total surveillance state denies us the privacy essential to human initiative and guarantees our ingenuity can be realized only within the vindictively conformist and therefore relentlessly oppressive limits of the corporate hierarchy.

We already know the results. An earlier example was the zomboid stultification of the Medieval schoolmen, imprisoned by doctrines that, on pain of being burned alive, allowed no metaphysical speculation beyond how many angels might occupy the head of a pin. Today we have the corporate and governmental aristocracies similarly straitjacketed by the dogma of ever-expanding profit and thereby denied the measures that might (yet) save our species from extinction and our planet from reduction to a cockroach-infested midden. Tomorrow, thanks to the electronic rapists of the NSA and how they have violated even our contemplative space, we are allowed no creativity whatsoever.

That fictional production-line art factory in which each sweaty member of a minimum-wage workforce uniformed in smocks and berets repetitively applies a single one-color brush-stroke to each canvas as it speeds past on a conveyor belt may be more prophecy than fantasy. Go to school; study art; indenture yourself for life with student loans; don the black beret and white polyester smock of Picasso Products or the blue beret and gray denim smock of Matisse Manufacturing -- that or paint yourself an artsy placard saying “will work for food”: it's the new American Dream. 

Surely it is no coincidence the U.S. government with all its spies and assassins and surveillance technology and weapons from which there is now no sanctuary anywhere on this planet is the exact duplicate of the all-seeing, endlessly vengeful, infinitely sadistic god of the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The Republican Party, from its inception the voice of the financial and industrial One Percent, now officially claims the U.S. as a Christian empire, “one nation under god,” which of course means all the enemies of that god – Nature, women, a long litany of “deviants” that includes gays, lesbians, transsexuals, bisexuals, unbelievers, nonconformists and of course writers and artists – are now (or soon will be) enemies of the state. In the previous century, such tyrannies were sometimes overthrown by revolutions, witness the events in Russia, China, Vietnam and Cuba. But now, given the eternal invincibility guaranteed the government by its technology, our only hope of liberation is the death-dealing paradox of Mother Nature's apocalyptic rage against the very infrastructures upon which our lives depend.

Nevertheless I still hear many people, and not all of them young, who in their abyssal ignorance of realpolitik fantasize some basement-bound hacker – the modern equivalent of the attic-dwelling anarchist – will cobble together a digital device capable of defeating the machines by which we are oppressed and enslaved. Obviously this is the newest most delusional manifestation of the clinical condition known as magical thinking – believing in something that is simply not possible. To repeat what I noted above, such invention demands privacy, and that is precisely what we are no longer allowed, nor will we ever be allowed such privacy again. It also demands vast sums of capital – the imperial necessity that underlies our staggeringly huge military research budgets – and most of all what it requires is access to supportive technology of a caliber no revolution-minded hacktivist could ever possibly afford. Thus the evil genius of the One Percent in making access to such knowledge and facilities dependent on education so impossibly expensive it is available only to the trust-funded spawn of the corporate aristocracy or to those willing to indenture themselves for life – in either case the ultimate guarantee of political reliability under capitalist governance.

I have argued earlier variants of these points since the personal computer craze began in the late 1970s, when the earliest forms of digital technology were fervently embraced by the nation's (pretend) Left – bourgeois elitists who were too anti-intellectual to comprehend class struggle and too slothful for the hard work of organizing but had enough disposable income to decorate their homes with electro-baubles by Hewlett-Packard, Radio Shack, Apple and a half dozen other manufactures. The owners of these new machines instantly proclaimed possession of a computer an essential demonstration of one's revolutionary zeal. They defined the virtual way as the only true path to “people's revolution” – ironically the very sort of uprising their other activities, such as spiking trees to maim or kill forest workers, proved they secretly but profoundly (and hypocritically) feared. Most of all they sneered whenever I pointed out to them that any medium dependent on public utilities or corporate and government communications networks was only “free” until some bureaucrat or executive felt threatened enough to flip the master-switch and turn it off. And – of course – they haughtily dismissed those of us who did not own computers (typically because we could not afford them), as hopelessly reactionary.

Hence, eerily like the ever-formidable Russian intelligence operatives who recognized a mechanicaltypewriter can never be hacked,  I long ago chose to retain the 1935 Royal Standard I now routinely use for addressing envelopes or filling out forms and as my writing machine during power outages. I likewise kept the 1940s vintage Royal Portable that has accompanied me on various journeys since I was in my late 20s and now lives in semi-retirement under my desk. But my lingering fondness for typewriters was dictated by economics rather than foresight. I had no computer at all until 1999, and that was a used machine given me by a dear friend. Even I – a proud cynic all my adult life – did not recognize the ultimate capitalist scam of disguising electronic shackles as vital personal and household tools and thereby convincing us to build, with our own hard-earned money, the digital slave pens in which we are now inescapably imprisoned.

Now though thanks to Edward Snowden and thanks even more to Audre Lorde, a woman about whom I unfortunately remained in total ignorance until only days ago, I at long last have far better words to describe the ultimate truth of our electronic circumstances. Indeed they are Ms. Lorde's own words,  written in 1984 as the title of an essay, and I cannot possibly improve on them: “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House.”

LB/13 October 2013

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Total Surveillance: Assault on Electronic Media Freedom

Another Tacoma graffito, seemingly a declaration of love, probably drawn by a young woman, and in any case unique, unlike anything of its kind I have seen anywhere including Manhattan. I photographed it in May 2009, forgot about it, then rediscovered it a couple of days ago. Leica M4, Voigtlander f/1.7 35mm Ultron, Kodak 800 color negative film, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on picture to view it full size.)

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FORMAL, NAZI-STYLE tyranny remained unnecessary in the United States as long as the One Percent could maintain the Big Lie of “American democracy.” Public opinion was controlled not by a Gestapo – the German acronym for Geheime Staatspolizei (literally, “Secret State Police”) – but by disinformation, misdirection and outright falsehood. The resultant ignorance – the infinitely malleable and thus dependably submissive anti-culture of shrunken consciousness I mercilessly label “Moron Nation” – was maintained by a carefully fostered combination of paranoia, bigotry and xenophobia in which “intellectual,” “subversive” and “traitor” quickly became synonyms. It was perpetuated by an induced ignorance of history – an unabashed contempt for historical knowledge and a vehement hatred of history as a subject – that has no counterpart in human experience. But now, thanks to the quasi-democratic anarchy of electronic media, Moron Nation is ever-so-slowly giving way to something else. What it will be – whether it will be the Internet equivalent of an old-time Ku Klux Klan rally or an USian version of the deservedly legendary Petrograd Soviet  – remains to be seen. But it is the desperate fear of the latter that prompts the Ruling Class to impose what we already recognize as the total surveillance state: the real-world fulfillment of Jewish, Christian and Islamic theology in which a heavenly Führer tracks the lives of every one of us in meticulous, zero-tolerance detail, from the moment we are born until the instant we die. Monitored as we are from cradle to grave, it seems we cannot possibly organize any effective resistance to capitalism and its new paradigm of USian governance, absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Or is that merely what our masters want us to believe?

The bright side of electronic media is not only that it gives us fingertip access to the libraries of the world. It is also how it brings so many of us the increasingly persuasive arguments of both the libertarian Right  and the mainstream pseudo-Left, the words of fierce, often eloquent critics who credibly decry the entire “war on terror” as an extended variation on the old Reichstag Fire. Side-stepping their economic differences, these sources agree the USian Ruling Class is using the threat of Islamic terror to provide an ongoing rational for wiping out  our constitutional rights. Far more inflammatory material generated by the genuine (i.e., socialist) Left is available too, though access is often deliberately hampered by Google. Included in these worth-the-search offerings from the Real Left are the priceless archives of socialism and anarchism defiantly uploaded by the Soviet Union  during its final days and the regularly updated analytical resources of the World Socialist Web Site.  For the determined searcher – that is, one willing to look well beyond the first few Google pages – there are also any number of supplementary sources, both for reference and for breaking news. Thus a vast quantity of material that is definitively challenging One Percent absolutism is now available to more people than ever.

But electronic media has its dark side too, half of which is the built-in, seemingly permanent barrier that prohibits universal Internet access. This is the staggering cost of Internet service in the United States, its prices by far the highest in the world.  While these fees are nominally explained by the obscene salaries of Internet service-provider executives, an equal factor is no doubt Ruling Class insistence on censorship by price, which is motivated by the corporate and political aristocracy's terror of what might happen were the Internet's wealth of material to regularly reach the most viciously exploited members of the industrial world's most economically oppressed, most relentlessly overworked population. Perhaps it is partly in anticipation of Internet-agitated revolution the United States already imprisons more people, whether proportionally or in raw numbers, than any other nation on the planet. 

Predictably then, Internet access by those of us who are lower-income folks age 60 and over – which includes the 62-and-over demographic now being targeted for extermination by murderous cutbacks in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food-stamps – is therefore kept at less than 20 percent by the outrageous monthly rates – as high as $70 or more – charged for USian high-speed Internet. (While the access study linked immediately above was conducted in Texas, nearly identical results – unfortunately not available on-line – were produced by studies in Washington state, which is as allegedly progressive as Texas is demonstrably reactionary.) Thus the common denominator of exclusion from the Internet is poverty – not just amongst the elderly but within all age groups. Obviously, it is no accident those of us who are most savagely victimized by capitalism are those of us who are also most excluded from the Internet's treasure-trove of information.

Nor is it coincidental the USian pseudo-Left stubbornly ignores (and often vehemently denies) the existence of this severely prohibitive class barrier. By so doing, the pseudo-Left not only proves beyond argument its maliciously bourgeois nature, but vividly demonstrates how it serves the One Percent within the broader context of the Ruling Class.

The other dark aspect of electronic media – actually its darkest – arises from the military origin of computers and the Internet itself. From this perspective – the fact the original computers were weapons, and the fact the precursors to the Internet were intended to further the USian agenda of capitalist imperialism and world conquest – we learn all we need to know. The hideous truth is the advent of the total-surveillance state is nothing more than the fulfillment of an implacably tyrannical purpose that existed from the technology's very beginning. To my knowledge, no other writer has dared point this out, nor has anyone mentioned its corollary – that believing mechanisms of death and oppression will ultimately be employed for  human betterment is no less absurd than imagining a nuclear-waste dump can be converted overnight into a vegetable garden. Moreover, the manner in which the instruments of this hitherto-unprecedented tyranny were marketed to the USian public, and the manner in which the public in its consumeroid frenzies of trinket-materialism literally fought to the death over lap-tops, digital cameras and cell-phones, has no parallel in history. Never before have people killed themselves in stampedes for enslavement. But the looming threat of the total-surveillance state has been common knowledge at least since the 1940s – which means Moron Nation knowingly embraced its own degradation, selling itself and its descendants into slavery at every opportunity and by every possible means. That's why, whether from the electronic concentration camp  of today or the grovel-in-filth servitude that is its inevitable tomorrow, only a miracle can rescue us now.

LB/25 August 2013

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