Two, as the reading exercise just recommended will indicate, our prevalent ignorance is now challenged -- and again, new technologies are the vehicle by which this challenge is pressed. And to challenge American ignorance is more or less inevitably to challenge American empire.
Take note: Your Times-reading friends, all those addicted to the baby talk of NPR, the silliness of MSNBC, and the faux seriousness of CNN will proceed happily in the dark, having nothing to worry about because they do not know anything and do not want to be disturbed. No, it is the producers and consumers of independent media who are the concern of those elites defending themselves against the scrutiny of a threatening minority of people who have learned the value of thinking and seeing for themselves.
The War Then & Now
Those of a certain age should have no trouble recalling the extensive FBI and intelligence programs fashioned to infiltrate the left (as it was then), to plant agents provocateurs, to cultivate violence (just as the CIA did and does in nations it wishes to destabilize). The soporific suburbanites washing their cars were not the Cold War-era worry. Those with their eyes opened or opening were the worry.
This was the nature of the war then and it is the nature of the war now.
There is no left in our time -- there is only the "left." It is now mere fashion statement to identify oneself as "leftist." Gore Vidal once remarked, "We don't have politics in America. We have elections." To borrow and bend the phrase, We don't have a left in America, we have passingly stylish poseurs, almost invariably ill-educated and ill-read.
Given how lost these people are in the "woke" rubbish and all the bunkum attaching to identity politics -- an ignorance of another order -- our "left" is a sitting duck for those intent on leading it down harmless paths and away, far, far away from all questions to do with power.
Keep those flags flying, Tony: Bomb Syrians and sanction Venezuelans in the name of BLM and gay people. Tape pitiable people in the CIA's corridors as they spout all the coded language of identity, a language without meaning. Keep the poseur pundits and their audiences"I'm progressive," "I'm a leftist," "I'm a socialist," "I read The Nation," -- harmlessly preoccupied with the distractions they need to assuage the emptiness of their lives.
Keep everyone calm as you tell them that protecting them from the perilous impurities of free speech only looks like censorship.
This is the war some Americans, a few, wage against most Americans in the service of an empire that must be occluded so long as this is possible. This is how it is waged, and where. Understanding this is the first step out of our darkness and toward some flickering light.
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