Written in 1916, nearly two years after the start of World War I, these are the words of the revolutionary thinker and activist Rosa Luxemburg, who rightly called attention to the atrocity that is the economic system of capitalism, which we, in 2013, are still grappling with despite our witness today to "its hideous nakedness."
Capitalism, the economic system that promotes permanent war and austerity, that promotes death and suffering, starvation and desperation, takes hold of our minds. We not only forget the cannon fodder rotting on the battlefields; we not only forget the "beggars" and the "misery"; we forget the "flourishing" of capitalism "wading in blood and dripping with filth."
Where are the "shamed" and "dishonored" capitalists?
Look through your museums, at your park statues, look for them resurrected in your children's textbooks. Read the bestsellers written by contemporary capitalist moguls. Everyone does in order to read about how it is done. How does one follow in the footsteps of the multinational corporate CEO?
The corporate capitalists have learned to throw crumbs toward the masses of the workers and the poor, those settling for trickled down policies, aided in the liberalization process of the once "shamed" and "dishonored."
"Who loves you, Baby?"
The Corporations! The Corporations!
We are now the "shamed" and "dishonored," taught to forget as a way of life. Denied even the right to be or think, we only thrive on what is fed to us, what is good and patriotic. We cannot remember for our own sake, our own survival, unless we risk the right to exist.
Thanks to capitalism, we are not encouraged to learn from those who really honored and loved this Earth and respected all living forms on it. We do not know what it means to honor, to love, to respect.
So we mistrust and deny ourselves the memory of Crazy Horse, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, or Amilcar Cabral, and others who remain out-of-bounds as models and likewise as subjects for study at our corporate institutions for "higher" learning. You have to ask yourself why certain ideas are demonized? Who declares certain thoughts off limits? Who benefits from the censoring of revolutionaries and whistleblowers? Why is Bradley Manning tortured and kept behind bars? Why are Julian Assange and Edward Snowden hunted by this powerful US Empire while Bush II celebrates the opening of his library?
***
What Rosa Luxemburg observed behind prison walls was the business of war, from the amassing of profits to the production of propaganda, from the return of the disillusioned and the maimed physically and psychologically, to the confiscation of land and resources, to the shattering of the dispossessed. It is the business of the US Empire today--war. The Empire's business is frantic and brutal.
Those in government, those attracted to a capitalist orientation, are guiding this nation, step-by-step, through draconian laws and unjust policies, toward imperialist domination. On the land, in the air, in the production of food and basic necessities for sustaining life, in the airwaves, in the cyberspace of cable communications, and in the minds of the people, everywhere, we see the insanity of the iron heel.
Years
ago, George S. Messersmith, U.S. Consul General at Berlin to the Under
Secretary of State, William Phillip, in a letter dated 26 June 1933,
described a similar display of this insanity.
"With few exceptions," he wrote, "the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere. Others are exalted and in a frame of mind that knows no reason. The majority are woefully ignorant and unprepared for the tasks which they have to carry through every day. Those men in the party and in responsible positions who are really worthwhile, and there are quite a number of these, are powerless, because they have to follow the orders of superiors who are suffering from the abnormal psychology prevailing in the country.
Is Messersmith's description of those who believe in the establishment of a fascist state so different from the way we might describe those who serve the US government as facilitators for US imperialist domination?
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