From Smirking Chimp
Rumors of war and the lexicon of war permeate the culture of empires, and the US empire is not an exception. In a concomitant manner, the spectre of violent death pervades the imagery of the US's entertainment industry and stalks the citizen's dreams.
Present circumstances merge with the sleeping monster of history: Close your eyes and images of cross burnings, lynchings, mountains of bison skulls, flaring veils of napalm and blooming mushroom clouds rise from within.
All the bristling, military armaments of the Pentagon cannot turn back the raging storm.
The mere existence of vast arrays of weapons, deployed or not, does great harm to the soul of a nation. US Americans are fearful, day and night. We would not feel secure if we ensconced ourselves in an armory.
An empire, built on the backs of slaves, both actual and de facto, with its expansion across the continent expedited by genocide, has conjured internal Furies -- raging apparitions, borne of the nation's collective soul and of nature's fury, that cannot be repelled by weapons of any make.
Amid the empire of the feckless, we on the Left have been rendered all but voiceless. We wander in a wasteland of resentment, marginalized, denied a voice in cultural discourse. Online, we gibber and snarl at each other and curse our predicament like Dante's figures of the damned in pits of the Inferno. By all indications, we are bereft of the knowledge of where and how to even begin the dialog.
Yet: Recently, by a resounding margin, Venezuelans vote to retain socialism. (The nation's citizenry are fully cognizant that US imperialist subterfuge is the root of their nation's troubles.)
Concurrently, polls of former citizens of the fallen USSR reveal, the majority favor delivering capitalism to the landfill of history and reestablishing communism. (Unlike all too many US Americans, they know they have been bamboozled.)
Although: Across Europe, the hard, racist right is in ascendancy. A predictable phenomenon, due to liberal's serial betrayals of the middle and laboring classes in behalf of their capitalist vampire benefactors. The more undiluted the form of capitalism -- the greater the levels of deprivation and attendant fear and displaced anger evinced by a power-bereft citizenry. The only factors that have saved capitalism from itself, on an historical basis, have been measures of progressive reform and piecemeal, socialist policies.
And that is the reality that frightens the capitalist overclass and motivates them to set into action their scheming, prevaricating operatives and propaganda-bandying sh*t-kickers. To wit, their ruthlessness knows no limit in regard to preventing capitalism's exploited multitudes from gaining an even glancing degree of awareness of: The system was, from the get-go, designed to benefit a ruthless few and to the detriment of the many.
Thus we discover, the reason capitalism's elite invest so much time, effort, and money rigging the game, from the political structure to mass media. It is the reason one could never have an honest dialog with the beneficiaries of the system. Where would be the profit for them in risking their litany of lies being countered and their false mythos exposed as the life-negating fraud that it is? Honesty and openness were not among the factors that enabled the capitalist elite to ascend to a position of dominance.
Wilful and belligerent ignorance comprises the brick and mortar of the capitalist system's mental architecture; the structure stands on a foundation of lies. But the phenomenon presents dissidents with an opportunity because what appears to be an implacable barrier is but a collective mirage, a vapour of the mass mind. What appears to be an all-powerful system is but a group hallucination, a join dream of interior phantoms. This is the reason, when we attempt to fight back, we appear to be flailing into empty air.
To dissipate the undead nightmare, we must reimagine the image and do so from within the living landscape of the imagination; otherwise, we are mistaking a mirage for terra firma.
As for myself, I'm a member of the Nambia Liberation Army. The calling of a poet is to make the invisible visible.
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