AFTERMATH: a young woman finds an antique colander in the debris and wreckage washed ashore by the unprecedented high tides of an unusually severe winter storm. (Photo by Loren Bliss ©2022)
*****
WE ARE SUBJUGATED as we now are primarily because our conditioned ignorance and gullibility allow nearly all of us -- no matter how sophisticated we might imagine ourselves -- to be seduced by three of our species' most deceptively camouflaged intellectual malignancies.
The seductiveness of these symbiotic falsehoods is so overwhelming, not even the clarifying might of dialectic materialism -- Marxism's presumably impenetrable defense against irrationality -- seems able to protect us from their relentlessly induced delusions.
What are they then, these three most ruinous Big Lies, our ecogenocidally terminal triplets?
The most venomously destructive Big Lie is our pathetically superstitious belief in "eternal life," which -- because there's allegedly "a better home a-waitin in the sky" -- relieves us of any moral obligation to improve the conditions of life on earth. Next comes the ignorantly lethal twining of "progress" with the equally ignorant, equally false, equally crippling conviction the "moral arc" of our patriarchal history "bends toward justice."
"Progress" is the Big Lie that sought to shrink Nazi Germany from what it truly is -- patriarchy’s ultimate definition of itself -- to an anti-historical anomaly; the "arc toward justice" is the corroborative Big Lie by which our Masters leverage our brains into accepting "progress" as synonymous with "betterment" in the One Percent's living conditions -- never mind that for the 99 Percent, such "advancements" invariably mean worsening poverty, skyrocketing body-counts and irreversible environmental destruction.
But
as any serious student knows, the arc of history itself is absolutely
real -- though the reality it bends toward is not the blessing of
liberty and justice but the terminal curse of its antithesis:
ever-more-inescapably brutal subjugation by our nazi-minded Masters’
ever-more-technologically omnipotent arsenal of horrors. Doubt me?
Study the six-millennia historical timeline: note what Loreena McKennitt
so memorably describes as "the months of peace and all the years of war."
*****
WHILE CAPITALIST "PROGRESS" and socialist "progress" are conventionally believed to be diametrical opposites, closer scrutiny reveals each ideology is equally committed to the apocalyptic destruction of our Mother Earth. Though the socialist version is traditionally said to be synonymous with our species' quest for freedom and justice, that (former) ideological truth has since been reduced to yet another Big Lie by the fact Communist China now exceeds the United States as this planet’s deadliest polluter. (The U.S. remains our species’ all-time champion at any and all forms of industrialized murder, which thus preserves its top-seeded role as the world champion of deliberate ecogenocide, a ranking not even Nazi Germany could challenge.) Meanwhile the capitalist version of progress -- formerly euphemized as "bigger and better" -- is now revealed as the methodical reduction and subjugation of the 99 Percent: extermination of "surplus" workers and permanent enslavement of the survivors. Thus capitalist and socialist ideologies are now twinned in ecogenocidal destructiveness.
As our Masters learned by their nazification of Germany, the more vicious they are -- the harsher and more difficult they make survival for any of us whose lifeblood is measured by paychecks -- the closer they move the masses to embracing the intrinsically hateful identity-politics tribalism of generic nazism.1 And with the Soviet Union beaten, destroyed and no doubt gone forever, there is at present no power left anywhere on this planet -- absolutely none -- capable of organizing a genuinely powerful anti-nazification campaign, which is the only development that might -- though with odds now only slightly better than those of the proverbial snowball in hell -- yet save us from this all-encroaching, all-destroying evil.2 Such is the ecogenocidal reality of patriarchal "progress."
In
synergistic combination with the fake history of a nonexistent
"arc...toward justice,” the antisocial venom inherent in this notion of
"progress" is intensified to the Nth power, with every tyrant now
testing his3
serial-killer instincts in competition for top ranking on the
oppressive-technology-is-god’s-greatest-gift roster of our species' most
ecogenocidal Masters. But the concept of "progress" itself -- the
curiously persistent belief in some imaginary human dynamic that leads
inevitably toward individual and collective betterment -- is proven by
the very history it ignores to be among our species’ most
self-destructive forms of magical thinking. Never forget our Masters'
definition of "progress" includes the IBM-organized Holocaust,
and enough chemical, biological and thermonuclear weaponry to reduce
our Mother Earth to a cinder as lifeless as any asteroid.
Thus -- and it cannot be repeated too often -- the only “moral arc” evident in human history "bends" toward nazism on a global scale, which means we socialists are gravely mistaken in believing history is our ally and guarantor of our eventual triumph.
One of socialism's core principles -- that the historical momentum of "progress" makes socialism inevitable -- is itself proven wrong: not necessarily a Big Lie (at least not in the beginning), but unquestionably a ruinous misunderstanding. For as the ongoing reversal of every one of our progressive reforms proves beyond dispute, it is the ecogenocidal momentum of patriarchal history -- the irresistible force of our Masters' eternally nazified will (however ideologically disguised) -- that is destroying us.
Viewed
objectively, our history -- save during the immediate aftermath of the
Soviet Revolution -- is whatever our Masters impose on us; thus it is
inseparable from our Masters’ historically proven policy of imposing
ever-more-self-sustaining tyranny: a relentless march toward
ever-more-omnipotent aristocracy protected by ever-more-sadistic
zero-tolerance dictatorship fostered by ever-more-invincible technology.
*****
TO BEGIN THE process of discovering and thereby surviving the socioeconomic cancers lurking in our notion of "progress," we must first overcome the crippling aversion to the study of history intentionally inflicted on us by our Masters' insistence it be taught, K-12, as nothing more than wearisome, intentionally repugnant drills in rote memorization of names, places and dates.
Beyond that, I suggest reading five authors the ChristoNazis damn as both treasonous and heretical. These are: Howard Zinn, A Peoples' History of the United States (Harper and Row: 1980); Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (Beacon Press: 2014); Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: the Holocaust as History and Warning (Tim Duggan Books: 2015); Chris Hedges, American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press: 2006); Jeff Sharlet: The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008).
For
me, the most influential gift of the above reading was its revelation
of the ageless toxicity of the malevolence directed against the 99
Percent, especially the vast global majority of us who are not white. A
near-lifelong student of history and a miserably involuntary,
New-York-City-born resident of five former slave states during most of
my first 24 years, I am familiar with most of our Masters' innumerable atrocities; but until I read An Indigenous People's History and Black Earth, I had not realized our patriarchal Masters have always been motivated by the same philosophically and methodologically sophisticated hatefulness they exhibit today. Yesteryear's
Masters were just as conscious of the evil they were inflicting on
First Nations folk -- and just as sadistically gleeful about their
ecogenocidal triumphs -- as today's Masters are as they reduce us all
back to serfdom and slavery.
If we dare to truly comprehend the toxic magnitude of what assails us, I also recommend -- emphatically recommend -- reading what has again emerged as our species' bible of manifest evil, Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.4 If we are to truly know our enemy, Mein Kampf is the only book I know that reveals the otherwise unimaginable skill empowering the evil that is overwhelming us. Contrary to our most crippling misconceptions, our foes are neither ignorant nor stupid; they are in fact what they have always been: the best-educated, most intellectually malignant, most effectively cunning oppressors in our species' entire history. That's why -- if we are to have any chance of escaping our Masters' corporate slavepens -- learning something of our real history is necessarily part of our education for intellectual self defense. Nor can it be said too often the taboo'd historical facts revealed by the above bibliography prove beyond dispute our species' only "progress" since the advent of patriarchy is technological -- and that if we are not part of the aristocracy, its only "gift" is ever-more-inescapable despotism. Our freedom is diminished each time our Masters' technological prowess increases. Thus for us, we the people of the 99 Percent, "progress" merely strengthens the deadly shackles by which our Masters' long ago began re-enslaving us.
In other words, the sole function of "progress" under Capitalism is to sustain and intensify our Masters' savagery. "Progress" is thus revealed as the intentionally terminal opposite of "sustainability."
This is clearly the mindset from which our Masters developed and promoted electronic media --
the world's first genuinely inescapable shackles of total surveillance
falsely peddled as enhancements to human freedom and mindlessly embraced
by entire populations of self-obsessed, fanatically acquisitive workers
already reduced to pre-nazi moral imbecility by the relentlessly
worsened hardships of survival.
But when we discover our forbidden history's excruciatingly painful revelations, we are at long last able to chart such "progress" with an historically accurate arc. Whether from the five books cited above or from more extended studies of sociology and history, we learn that eras of humanitarian governance are but the tiniest intervals of relief in the long timeline of patriarchal despotism.
And then -- contrary to all the lies we’re told -- we discover the timeline’s arc curves relentlessly toward technologically maximized tyranny.
Which in turn reveals any notion of "progress" to be naught but diabolically clever propaganda, devastatingly effective in its primary function of perpetuating all present-day forms of tyranny. We discover "progress" as our Masters’ all-time whopper of deliberate disinformation and purposeful misdirection. As already noted, if we believe in "progress," we can always dismiss past atrocities as anomalous aberrations we've somehow (magically) grown beyond rather than acknowledge them as the horrifying declarations of present-day human surrender to ecogenocidal evil they actually are.
Meanwhile -- thanks to our Masters' ongoing destruction of our planetary resource base -- we the people of the 99 Percent, we who are Working Class even if we are too brainwarped to acknowledge our credit-card servitude, every one of us is now doomed to live forever in a realm of perpetually declining expectations and therefore eternal hopelessness.
What this means is implicit in the fact history tells us progressive change occurs only in response to rising socioeconomic expectations among the 99 Percent -- that declining Working Class expectations invariably diminish humanitarian considerations and often, as in the Holocaust or the extermination of First Nations peoples, completely suppress them.
Such is the challenge we socialists face. If even a trace of humanitarianism is to survive, if our species and our planet is to avoid destruction in some final paroxysm of terminal moral imbecility, we must transform our ideologies into effective antidotes against skyrocketing despair: precisely what history tells us is impossible in any time of societal despair -- never mind today's hopelessness truly is bottomless, without precedent in our species' experience.
Fact
is, our Masters today believe their technological omnipotence has freed
them of any obligations beyond themselves and their caste: theirs is
the sadistic moral imbecility of a Vlad Tepes elevated to infinity by
the “gifts” of modern technology: inescapable surveillance and an
ever-expanding arsenal of doomsday weapons, with the ever- worsening
environment to force our ever-more-violent reduction to social
Darwinism, just as our masters have always intended.
___________________________
1Why
nazism rather than fascism? Why do I choose "nazi" rather than
"fascist" as my generic term for the run-amok evil that assails us? Note
that each term originated from proper nouns. But in the capitalist
world, only "fascist" -- with its implicit absence of Auschwitz-type
death camps further gentled by the comic-opera undertones of the
Mussolini regime -- became the generic. And knowing the galaxy-class
psychological warfare skills of our Masters, I cannot doubt this now
effectively mandatory usage of "fascist" rather than "nazi" is
deliberate deception to downplay their malignant intent.
2Many
socialists, especially my fellow Marxians, will denounce my use of
"evil" as counter-revolutionary religious moralizing. In adamant
rebuttal I suggest such critics consult Webster,
which even in its unabridged second edition (Dorset and Baber: 1983)
minimizes the religious connections to "evil." I -- an agnostic Gaian
pagan -- use it here without apology as the most linguistically apt,
definitively correct, emotionally accurate English noun to describe what
our Masters are doing to us: the methodically nazified socioeconomic
miasma in which most of us are slowly being drowned and through which
all surviving 99 Percenters are to be enslaved.
3Of
course I am aware there are many female capitalists. I am also aware
that capitalism -- at its core a greed-fueled, wealth-based,
white-male-supremacist death-cult -- is a subset of patriarchy, which
itself is nothing other than maximally weaponized misogyny. Thus (real)
feminists damn female capitalists as traitors to their gender; (real)
socialists condemn all capitalists as traitors to the entire 99 percent;
as traitors to our species; and as traitors to our Mother Earth. Thus
when a female labels herself "capitalist," what she is really doing is
declaring herself an ecogenocidally predatory male; when a male labels
himself "capitalist," he is declaring himself a deadly enemy of the 99
Percent, an enemy of our species and most of all an apocalyptic rapist
of our Mother Earth.
4The Ford Translation (Elite Minds Inc.: 2009-2010), is the only version I could find that was not censored by collector pricing. While I have no way to evaluate the publisher's claim their Mein Kampf is the most accurate English translation to date, the braggadocio of their firm-name leaves me suspicious of who and what they might be. Moreover I know Mein Kampf to be amongst our most tedious reads; I first read it c. 1954-1955 as part of my late father's know-our-enemy education. Then as now, it is the most difficult reading I have yet encountered. To be sure, that's partly because no translation can improve the semi-literate wretchedness of Hitler's jailhouse German -- but the real reason Mein Kampf is so painful to read is it is a window on pure evil, in any language the terrifying examination of a monstrous Malleus Maleficarum mind that could as easily be a modern hybrid of Augusto Pinochet, Ayn Rand, Ted Bundy and James Fields. )
(Next: Human Societies Were Not Always Competing in a Death Race)
LB/18-29 July 2022
-30-
