Imperial capitalist governance aims to preserve an America politic divided into Liberal and Progressive capitalists on one side and and conservative and reactionary capitalists on the other, counterbalancing each other, thus frustrating new legislation while the body counts overseas and the exploitation at home and abroad go on unimpeded. This is the perennial "Divide and Rule' of all empires.
Managed media constantly dramatize personalities in spectacular conflict, purposefully disorienting perception of a mechanically functioning political economy of desperate private capital accumulation and diverting attention from feelings of solidarity with fellow human beings slaughtered right in front of electronically enhanced eyes. Are progressives helping big media make it easy for those who profit from war to continue them by backing the Liberal president who has rehired war hawks and corrupt bankers?
Howard Zinn would often say that we must make it too difficult for those who are subjugating us to continue that subjugation. Are progressive apologists for capitalism standing in the way of public awareness of who and what is making America and the world suffer wars, massive injustice and hunger? Why is such a key but faceless leader over decades as David Rockefeller never even mentioned?
It behooves all within the peace movement to distinguish progressives who do not put halting the carnage above other concerns, from progressives who do. Distinguish between those who oppose and would shut down the private capital dictatorship in order to stop the wars once and for all, from those that limit criticism of a capitalist system that requires wars. Distinguish between those who would usher in a national government that would allow communities to develop in freedom from mega corporations and conglomerates, from those who call for modest reform of a national government of masters at arranging personal fortunes to trickle down to the confined majorities at home and abroad.
In our present tragic situation-comedy, these bloody and inhumane resource wars will end when the business community overreaches itself as it did vis-Ã -vis the burgeoning Japanese economy during the Vietnam war and not for any antiwar demonstrations. But fighting war is an immediate human obligation but should be seen as an initial step toward ending all wars and the capitalist system that requires them.
Howard Zinn patiently explained progress (the root word of "progressive') as people organizing against injustice, which can only be removed from the bottom up, when enough people become activists for justice and make life too troublesome for the perpetrators of injustice. We can choose between saving lives in six (and counting) Muslim countries on our way to ending capitalist imperialism, or accepting white Anglo-Saxon led world military dominance as presently fronted up by its first black Commander-in-Chief. In all due respect to progressive colleagues in alternate media journalism, that choice is also between progressive capitalism and peaceful nonviolent opposition to the wars of capitalism and its wars, and civil disobedience as it becomes necessary.
Confirmed non-capitalists and uncompromising anti-imperialists seem destined to expend greater time and effort arguing with their progressive peers who by and large wish, or feel the need, to work from within the pseudo democratic framework of a capitalist political economy that marginalizes them as a non-threatening non-interfering less than significant opposition convenient and useful as changes of course become expedient.
Instead of accepting their marginalization as an exceptional avant guard learned group singularly known for a preponderance of university professors from the arts and sciences criticizing the status quo from the wings, progressives could be taking a leadership role commensurate to their academic background as educators.
If progressives could come to merge with a smaller group of American scholars and historians who as socialist revolutionaries study, among other alternatives to capitalism, the successes of a Cuban society that the elected presidents of more than a half dozen, going on to a dozen, Latin American nations look to as a role model for uplifting their own nations from misery under imperialism, a real Left with national influence could arise in an America on the skids.
Such a strong Left would, as Noam Chomsky does, recognize the real widespread suffering that is the fertile ground in which an even more frightening proto-fascism is being planted, and provide an alternative understanding of events for the hard put upon people out there across the nation.
A united Left might act to diminish the power of a national media than keeps the general population in dangerous ignorance.
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