The One Percent?

With the fall of the Soviet Union, it soon became obvious that, for conservatives, we were entering a carpe diem moment, a rare, perhaps never to be repeated historical window of opportunity for opponents not just of communism but of a full spectrum of political philosophy--from our own homespun New Deal liberalism to socialism in all of its various forms.  Ironically, these efforts have been so frantic and strenuous that they actually betray a left-handed acknowledgement that such ideas cannot be buried forever.  The plan is nothing so delusional or ambitious.  The architects of this regimen are too sophisticated to be so detached from historical reality that they believe this is possible.  Instead, they buy as much time for global capitalism as they can by burying left wing thought in so deep a hole that its resurgence will take heroic time and effort.

      Of course, there is nothing entirely new in this.  The powerful have throughout history taken every measure they can to preserve their power.  While power is never reluctant to employ brute force and oppression to achieve its goals, covert control of social institutions, euphemism, outright lies and propaganda have all been violence's constant companions, even much to be preferred when possible.  Not since the French Revolution, however, was there so great a global threat to power and privilege (as current coinage would have it, an "existential" threat) as that posed by the now defunct revolutions in Russia and China.   (Our own revolution had no Robespierres, no aristocrats guillotined. In keeping with its DNA, it was driven by business concerns rather than class hatred and thus benign, largely off the radar of those fearing real revolution.) It might be kept in mind that conservatives had an earlier carpe diem moment in the aftermath of Great Britain's defeat of Napoleon.  As a result, Metternich's Concert of Europe lasted until World War I and the 1917 Bolshevik revolution to which it helped give birth.  It took exactly two hundred years, from 1789, the onset of the revolution in France, to 1989, the fall of the Berlin wall, at which time the right rushed to conclude, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn proclaimed on the front page of The New York Times, that, finally, it had been demonstrated that equality, fraternity and liberty were oxymoronic, incapable of coexistence.   Solzhenitsyn, it appears, was one writer who truly believed that French idealism could now be buried forever.  Conservatives everywhere would now begin a strenuous programme of "dig we must."  The first target and victim of their efforts, in a flurry of what may be seen as a linguistic form of shock therapy, was language.  As Orwell and many other thinkers had long been aware, control the minds of the masses and their bodies will follow.
      We now find ourselves live in a period in which double-speak, double-think, the wholesale giving over of language to all forms of twisted logic and, to use the polite expression, the mind-bender have become the go-to weapons of first choice for those assigned with the task of hiding unpleasant realities from the citizenry.  Though it is never entirely true to say that "it is all about language," when political speech is debased, trivialized and cleansed of it original meaning, logic and intent, it creates an Alice in Wonderland fantasy world that makes change and resistance far more difficult.  When innocent victims become "collateral damage," when powerfully armed nation states slaughter innocent victims in what amounts to the massacre of thousands or tens of thousands or even millions and it is written off as "asymmetrical warfare," exercises of power barely deserving to be described as "wars" at all, those nation states clothe themselves in veils of impunity. 

      
      

On Putin as a "Thug"

For some time now, but perhaps particularly after the events that took place in Ukraine this year, it has become nearly impossible to read any account of Vladimir Putin without finding him described as a "thug."  Though the adjective is liberally applied to other personae non gratae both current and historical, it is mandatory in writing about President Putin.  In what dark recesses of the American propaganda ministries these terms originate it is hard to say, but the creation and then obsessive repetition of such "truths" is a hallmark of how this country treats its perceived foes.  It is difficult to determine by what moral standard Putin earns such treatment while Americans who the rest of the world views as virtual war criminals, men like George Bush and Dick Cheney who gave us illegal wars, torture and preventive detention, just to head up the list, escape similar treatment.  One way of enhancing an indictment of thugishness is to impute ties to a local mafia.  Here, too, the lack of "clean hands" when it comes to those who indict others seems easily brushed aside.  Where Cheney and the Bush family are concerned, matters like the Enron or savings and loan scandals, to cite just two examples, are supposedly atomized in the general public amnesia.  We likewise reserve terms such as oligarch and plutocrat ( or its variant, kleptocrat) purely for our enemies, the reality of living in a glass house essentially owned lock, stock and barrel by a tenth of one percent of our population not serving as a deterrent against throwing stones ourselves.
        The American right wing, particularly the University of Chicago zealots with whose tactics we have become more painfully familiar with each passing year since the onset of the Reagan/Thatcher era, is fighting nothing less than a holy war.  Its enemies are demonized in a fashion highly reminiscent of the Muslim fatwa, a construct made infamous some years back when it was applied as a virtual death sentence to author Salman Rushdie for his having "blasphemed Islam" in one of his novels.  In this respect, as has often occurred in history, the two sides have come to resemble one another.  What is remarkable is the extent to which a "party line" seems to be so easily established in a land where there is a supposedly free press, freedom of expression and a free flow of ideas.  In this, too, the resemblance between what is done here in the U.S. and our caricatures of how the other side operates become almost indistinguishable.