As evidence to the power of information and language, many voices in the media increasingly lament over words used by public officials apparently no longer holding any meaning. But this is not exactly the case, because while the pen remains mightier than the sword, all weapons exist merely to envision their most dastardly effect. And so, words wielded like weapons today do hold meaning, though increasingly these meanings become the very opposite of all previous connotations said words have ever before maintained. Before, geeks were persons too smart for school, whereas today they are dumb enough to fall for any and every marketing campaign. Revolution does not originate from within the status quo. Progressive pertains in no fathomable way to the well-being of the legal gambling that is the stock exchange. Populism is neither dependent upon or representative of the upper crust floating atop the blood, sweat and tears of the masses. Sleep is for rich people because the pitchforks and torches only ever come out at night.
The most compelling example of this, to the chagrin of anti-war protesters ever since just as elected leaders seem to take it more and more literally from one year to the next, was the proclamation in Orwell’s 1984 novel, War is Peace.
Symptomatic of this end was a recent bit of melodrama initiated by Paul Joseph Watson, an inflammatory British commentator whose politics are certainly on the farthest right of the spectrum, who coolly made the claim that Orwell himself would have been deeply opposed to antifascist efforts. When historian Mike Stuchbery corrected him by reminding the web that Orwell literally fought against fascists himself in the Spanish Civil War, Watson’s online followers proceeded to attack Stuchbery, insisting that reality was indeed the opposite of what it was.
I wrote ago about how the entire political spectrum has taken steps to the right in recent years, save for the actual left itself. Yet today we find legions of social networking cacophonies asserting that the “alt-left” is solely responsible for the worst violence across the planet. Which again is the opposite of reality, with those holding on to their leftist politics possessing neither the numbers or resources to impose any challenge upon the many policies shared by today’s Neoconservatives and Neoliberals. Still, when antifascists gather at fascist rallies, they are loudly condemned as being the troublemakers, the instigators of drama and divisiveness. And truly vexing is how these same condemnations often come from self-described anti-war activists. Neoconservatives and Neoliberals are vehemently in favor of war, strictly for the profit that may entail. There simply are no genuinely leftist politicians at the federal or even state level to be found in the US today, with modern American politics having long-since become merely another for-profit industry.
There is no such thing as a millionaire leftist.
So the notion of the left being responsible for any oppression or suppression is contrary to reality. The actual left are not the ones who have killed or wish to kill. They are not the ones demanding for others to be enslaved for economic exceptionalism or nationalistic glory. There were no major voices among the “far left” that promoted the Muslim travel ban induced by President Trump, or who favored his wall across the Mexican border. If these antifascists were to hold back and mind their own business, then those voices thus freed to speak uninhibited want such things as the travel ban and walled borders, and far, far worse.
They actively want the subjugation of others. Yet those opposed are castigated as presenting an even greater threat, for questioning the logic of enabling madmen with superiority complexes to profess murderous hate speech or to wield firearms in public. But then these self-affirmed anti-war protesters so bothered by antifascist movements would not wish for universal free speech or the right to self-defense to also apply to persons opposed to the subjugation of others. And they can find no irony to this deeply rooted contradiction. Perhaps because there is no irony, and the defenders of fascists are in fact closeted themselves. People object to abolishing the whip just in case they can ever manage it themselves, just as people object to abolishing capital markets just in case they can ever be filthy rich themselves. Persons wishing for Klansmen to go unobstructed harbor buckets of bile themselves for their own neighbors. It really is that simple no matter how their objections get spun.
Most persons objecting to war see no logic in stockpiling atomic or nuclear arms, because if the mere presence of nukes were truly an effective deterrent, then what of the dozen or so nations that have accumulated their own since the US first launched against Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Were they deterred? Then why would this be any different for guns around the house? If anti-war protesters laugh at the idiocy of over-funded men in uniforms believing that War is Peace, that any level of peace might come from tools employed purposefully, relentlessly, for the rampant murder of innocent civilians, then how can they unironically believe that unregulated guns might build something different? If the vast machinery of war could never lead to peace, then how would private gun ownership possibly do so? How can so many embrace so easily such broadly polar and conflicting ideological ends?
Franklin Foer‎ has recently written some sharp observations addressing this very thing, the ease in which so many can willingly be swept up into thinking and doing things contrary to their own ideals. And how none of it is remotely incidental. The world without mind he charges can also be found in the 5000 or so bicycles left behind by the scenesters of this year’s Burning Man festival, where all concern for private property and the well-being of the environment was completely lost in the shuffle of make-up and selfies and social networking updates. One of the wealthy entrepreneurs proactively responsible for this virtual landscape can outright confirm that the short attention spans and skewered worldview his own industry perpetuates is leading society down the toilet, and yet those legions of cacophonies persist in wasting everyone’s time, primarily their own.
So I make the charge that a person who concedes that any military might enforcing its will upon others is wrong yet who also maintains the belief that gun ownership is anything but an example to that effect, is fundamentally hypocritical, to dangerous extents. And without exception such a person serves as a mere example of the effectiveness of the marketing from the Military Industrial Complex, where half of the US revenue streams come expressly from propagating weapons, and much more than half of all US expenditures gets blown onto weapons in turn. Violence can at least leave opposing parties something to think about after the fact, whereas the lethal force coming from potential murder weapons can only transform the gunman into the absolute worst kind of person. Possessing the means to enslave or kill others is not a right.
The national debt of the United States has in actuality just crossed the 20 trillion dollar threshold. Much of this is spent on the subjugation of others, domestically and internationally, a task which left-leaning political ideals stand alone in refusing to embrace. No other nation in the recorded history of the Earth has ever owed so much, and to so many. No singular Presidential administration is solely responsible, as they all ultimately serve the whims of Capitalist cult-leaders, the oligarchs and plutocrats of the western world.
Of the debt, 2.3 trillion mysteriously vanished the day before the 9/11 attacks. And since then, another 8.5 trillion cannot be accounted for by the Pentagon. A separate 8.5 trillion has been gifted to the banking elite, the investors and profiteers of war, since they triggered the market collapse of the last decade. A former official from the Government Accountability Office, an agency which has clashed with both Presidents Obama and Trump alike, asserts the total debt is three times greater than the publicly-acknowledged numbers. Which amounts to another 40 trillion that was probably not spent on feeding the hungry or housing the poor, as such leftist initiatives are always the first to get cut whenever there is a spending freeze of reconsidering the debt ceiling for our leaders to grant themselves more time to supposedly payback more and more monies borrowed. But all money has only ever gone in one direction.
There is not another nation that deals in such astronomical figures. But for so many voices online to not make the connection, that trillions at stake are quite more than enough to induce the most powerful weapon, information itself, to be warped against itself, to contort logic and reason into blasphemies of themselves and to vilify the few voices that genuinely are fighting and protesting to not enable the subjugation of anybody, is insane. Preventing any party from infringing on the rights of others is by no definition an infringement of that party’s own rights. And any frame of thought which denies that is leaving the door open, decidedly or incidentally, for the subjugation of others.
And this is my cause for severing all ties to Amber Seree.
The establishment is not a small group of men in pricey suits. It is large swathes of the population who have been led to believe that there is nothing wrong with how their lives get conducted for them or with the self-possessed, plastic choices they make to cope with the fact. Emblematic not only of a generation, but of the vast majority of modern denizens eager to find distractions from how they wasted their life savings on a jalopy of a worldview. Entirely reliant on the world around them whilst ironically projecting the grief of their own shortcomings on the underdogs trying to make it not so; depressed by the night and so calling it a day for the world apart. Liberation is never about joining in on a gang-rape.