(Article changed on February 3, 2014 at 10:34)
In a recent, well-received OpEdNews article (click here), I asserted that right-wing gun nuts, who incessantly laud America's outmoded Second Amendment as our foremost stay against tyranny, are bats-without-sonar blind to the tyranny America now faces.
This was inevitable, as all today's acts of despotic oppression are perpetrated by, or on behalf of, plutocrats. In America's open class war, our lock-and-load patriots have firmly taken sides--as rich tyrants' slobbering lapdogs. Even when their acts of tyranny threaten humanity's very survival.
But right-wing "patriots" worship plutocrats ("job creators," in their brainwashed lingo), though curiously demanding of them no civic or patriotic duties--least of all, job creation!--beyond staying filthy rich. Lest anyone think talk of worship is exaggerated, simply ask why the right so strongly favors the social Darwinist "death to the weakest" aims of the rich over the radically opposite priorities of their supposed God-incarnate, Jesus Christ. To such an extent that they stigmatize Pope Francis as Marxist for simply teaching exactly the views, on the subject of rich and poor, Jesus emphatically held.
(Right-wing Mammon idolaters should realize that Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain regarded Marxism as a Christian heresy; that would scarcely have been possible if Jesus and Marx hadn't taken the same side in humanity's perpetual class war. Nor could liberation theology, in its overdue quest to free the global poor, have so forcefully united arguments from Jesus and Marx.)
But no facts of Gospel teaching, let alone any facts of science, disturb the minds of America's tamest "tyrants' worst nightmares." But don't let their lapdog licking of plutocrat butts fool you; these lapdogs harbor an inner viciousness, and can turn pit bull in a heartbeat. They just won't harm the oligarch masters who've trained them to sit up and (literally) beg. But even slightly disrespect those masters, and you'll witness the bared, snarling teeth. And oppose their masters' most tyrannical initiatives--like the Keystone XL pipeline--and they may turn "gundogs" who'll help hunt you down.
See, if the political left, in our quest to follow reason, make any big mistake, it's our lamentable lack of passion. I personally view this as not merely an emotional, but an intellectual, failing; if you wish to follow psychological theories recently all the rage, consider it a failure of emotional intelligence. And it strikes me that if right-wing gun-packers bereft of fact and reason can turn frothy-lipped faster than Pavlov's dogs over imagined injustices, we of the left must "foment at the mouth" over real ones. Accordingly, we must learn to adopt the proper, outrage-charged moral description for overweening assaults on the common good like the Trans-Pacific Partnership or the Keystone XL pipeline. We must brand them acts of tyranny.
For indeed, the perennial fact of class war, perhaps the sharpest lens available for scrutinizing human history, has taken on an apocalyptic seriousness it never previously held. The international "oiligarchs" pushing the XL pipeline (like the morally scabrous Koch brothers), now literally possess--if world-renowned climatologists like James Hansen are right--the power to end human civilization. That strikes me as incomparably more serious grounds to cry tyranny, by many orders of magnitude, than the right wing's little hissy-fit over Benghazi. Yet where do we find leftists who are matching them in passion?
To me, the political right's misguided passion is very like the "alternative reality" mass passion dominating the twentieth century's worst fascist regimes, being equally a product of economically arduous times and jingoistic, scapegoating propaganda. I see absolutely no reason not to mention the Koch brothers in the same breath as Goebbels, nor to equally fear the mass of mental lapdogs they've created. For those lapdogs will never bite the hand that feeds them propaganda, but, on plutocrat orders, they'd greedily mangle the flesh of the scapegoated "traitors" who'd resist by civil disobedience the tyranny of the XL pipeline.
I don't know whether Barack Obama will approve that pipeline, but a deeply corrupted State Department environmental impact study has just given him "cover your ass" clearance, and the pressure to do so from the international plutocrats he routinely serves will be staggering. And, if the pipeline is approved, the "oiligarchy" probably won't need its pistol-crazed lapdogs to gun down the "tree-hugging America haters" perversely subverting "our energy independence" by civil disobedience. (In fact--though right-wingers invent their own facts--most tar sands oil is for export.) But don't doubt for a second their bloodthirsty willingness.
Instead, all the plutocrat regime will need is its lapdogs' readiness to denounce our nation's--and our planet's--truest patriots as traitors and terrorists; and in this their Fox News/ Rush Limbaugh dog training won't fail. Especially when our plutocrat-lapdog mainstream media will equally heed its masters' whistle. With public opinion, militarized police, universal spying, and FEMA detention camps in place, we could witness bloodbaths. Which is why we must mount passionate resistance against the pipeline even being approved. I personally suggest top environmental organizations drive a sharp wedge between Obama and Democrats by pledging to vote Green in this November's election if Obama approves the pipeline. A pledge I would instantly take.
It strikes me as extremely curious that leaders of the big environmental organizations, like Bill McKibben of 350.org or Michael Brune of the Sierra Club, haven't already urged a mass voter exodus of their Democrat members and supporters to the Greens if Obama approves the pipeline. Sure, I can understand their wish to avoid seeming partisan, but in our desperate, losing war over climate, surely effectiveness must trump all other considerations. Democrats have a huge stake in this November's elections, and surely losing is a price they deserve to pay for enabling Obama's spineless acts of climate treachery. And forcefully signaling Democrats that environmentalists will no longer tolerate the "fossil fuel tools" in their camp would set an invaluable precedent, especially with Obama-on-steroids tool Hillary Clinton now waiting in the wings.
Or perhaps, knowing the mammoth stakes both the planet and global plutocrats have in the pipeline--and the brutal suppression Obama condoned with Occupy Wall Street--they'd prefer to see their more heroic members jailed, beaten, and killed. Is angrily, vocally blackmailing Democrats really more unthinkable than risking activists' incarceration (perhaps indefinitely, on black sites) or violent death as terrorists?
To cite one of humanity's great poets, William Butler Yeats, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity." It's no accident that those iconic lines come from a poem titled "The Second Coming." If the left, armed with both science fact and the social compassion enshrined in the world's great religions, don't start showing some conviction, Yeats may prove prophetic, and our planet's feature film will soon be Apocalypse Now.
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