Annotated by Patrice Greanville
In this episode The Finnish Bolshevik provides an excellent overview of the liberal mentality, its good points and bad points; essentially its dangerous limitations grounded in bourgeois delusions, opportunism, and plain political cowardice, all of which make most liberals de facto collaborators with the imperialist status quo. He also notes Jimmy Dore's brave struggle against the "synthetic left", and his own evolution toward more radical positions consistent with genuine socialism.
Personally I find his critique of liberals and their mythologies refreshing in an ideological field deliberately brimming with confusion to the point of incoherence. His dismantlement of the notion that America has devolved into the oligarchic tyranny we witness today, rather than it having been an oligarchic tyranny all along, the inevitable outcome of the natural dynamics of a capitalist order, is especially welcome. I have been agreeing with that assessment practically all my adult life.
In 1996 I wrote an essay on the disgusting performance of the American media pointing out that those who spoke wistfully about Cronkite and Murrow as some sort of Golden Age of mainstream US journalism were simply fooling themselves (and anyone who believed them). My argument was simply that if the press and media in general had really functioned as its liberal apologists adduce, telling it like it is without "fear or favor" (as the New York Times' self-flattering motto proclaims), and supplying the US population 24/7 with reliable flows of information free from the constant anticommunist, pro-oligarchy and pro-imperialist lies and omissions that poison all their product, then the history of the world for the last 75 years would be unrecognizable.
In sum, my theorem argues that with a mass media committed to aggressively and pro-actively serving the people, not the corporate oligarchs, and thereby with a population armed with a far better and more sophisticated understanding of world history and social processes, the following things and events would not exist or would have never happened, as an enlightened American public would have never permitted it. We would be facing a completely different reality. Maybe not full-fledged socialism yet, but moving towards it. And the world would be a cooperative world mostly at peace.
Note: My arbitrary catalog starts with the close of WW2 in 1945. The events, entities and processes mentioned below are but a small sampler of what has gone wrong, usually listing just the most emblematic items in each category:
The Cold War, and ensuing encirclement of Soviet Union, China, etc.
The Demopublican duopoly
Rise of the oligarchic kakistocracy
Rise of US imperial hegemony and neocon defense of world supremacy by any means necessary
Rise of military Keynesianism and the permanent war state
The CIA plus alphabet soup of similar "national security agencies
Overthrow of Iran's PM, Mohammad Mosaddegh, installation of Shah dictatorship (1953)
Interventions in Central America (Overthrow of pres. Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954); El Salvador (1970s-80s), Nicaragua (1970s/to date)
Interventions in other parts of LatinAmerica (Overthrow of Chile's Socialist Pres. S. Allende (1973); support for Argentine Junta dirty war (1970s); support for Brazil dictatorship; hybrid war against Venezuela and Cuba. Support for Colombia's brutal oligarchy, etc.
The Korean War
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