"Know Your Enemy" by Paul Edwards

 

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Know Your Enemy

By Paul Edwards

Upton Sinclair said that it was hard to get a man to understand a thing when his paycheck depended on his not understanding it. There is a parallel to that idea at work in American people today.

Americans live uneasily, in the illusion of democracy, under the most powerful, and determinedly evil, government as has ever existed. Most may not read on, outraged in moral certainty the assertion is insane. Moral certainty has gotten us where we are.

For those who wished to know the truth of America’s Capitalist Empire and were capable of facing it, it was always available, and it continues to be. To cite the America’s criminal history would take volumes, and those volumes already exist, for those with courage to peruse them. The Empire’s catalogue of criminality is not in question by the informed. It is indisputable: a given.

The vast mass of the ignorant have been made so by scientific propaganda, and they have lost their capacity for independent thought. They were powerless to prevent the creation of their opinion, and they are sure their views about America are their own, individually arrived at. That makes them hard to modify.

Unamuno said that all learning requires admission of ignorance, which is why it is so assiduously resisted. There is a prevailing idea that adults should be ashamed to admit ignorance, which prevents most from learning anything, but there is another factor yet more powerful. To admit he is wrong about a deeply held, core belief not only exposes his error but also challenges his very essence as a man. To admit one was wrong in saying the Steeler’s won the Super Bowl is not hard; to admit one has been indoctrinated with a totally false understanding of one’s own country is not possible without great anxiety and shame.

Positive revitalization of the propagandized American mind will not occur. Not now; not ever. Facts or events that challenge the existing complex of American’s prejudices and certainties will effect no change in entrenched, received opinion. The captivity of the American conscience is total and permanent.

The long history of The Empire’s purposeful, cynical erasure of American’s ability to know the truth of their government’s villainy has trained them to eagerly embrace the agents and causes of their betrayal. This is tragic on a monumental scale because The Empire’s crash will be paid for most punishingly by its people.

The poisonous propaganda was never partisan. It was not an exclusive product of a party or political ideology, of left or right, liberal or conservative, progressive or reactionary. It is a quasi-religious dogma that exalts the dominion and hegemony of a Super Race that has exploited and enslaved the world for its profit. As in every historic empire, stimulation of human vanity insures that the mass feels its identity with the controlling power, feels at one with it, even as it is absolutely subjected by it.

This is a process as old as history. It was refined and reinforced by terror in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but it was so perfected by the American Empire that bloody, flagrant terror was not needed. What Orwell wrote of presciently has been fully instituted. Americans, left and right, liberal or proto-fascist, are irretrievably in the thrall of Capitalist dogma, and happy to be.

In its period of greatest stress, the Soviet Union employed what it called War Capitalism. That term defines our economic system, now permanent. The Empire depends entirely on production for war; it dwarfs all other sources of profit for its giant corporate owners. America is a War Machine, whose people support it unreservedly. The Empire could not continue if it were not so.

Consider these obscenities. The last seventy years of wars with no benefit at all to Americans. Fifty years of wage stagnation and inflation with no legislation for working people. The greatest wealth gap between super rich and average Americans in history. The most expensive, inadequate health care of any major nation, in which millions go broke and die while drug companies gouge them. An education system run for profit, not content or quality. A justice system that jails the poor and enables rich criminals. A political system in which the elite select figureheads and placate the hoodwinked electorate by permitting it to endorse them.

These, of course, are general indictments. There are specific horrors to expose. The Empire, having enriched its War Machine with decades of profitable failures—in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria—is pursuing two egregious crimes against humanity at once, in Ukraine and Israel. In one it goads and funds a vicious neo-Nazi regime in a brutal farce fueled by slaughter of its own people for the sole purpose, ludicrous on its face, of “weakening Russia”. In the other, it aids and supports a neo-Nazi regime in extermination of the race it raped and dispossessed to entrench its vicious military tyranny. In neither of these evil enormities is there an iota of moral justification, or a scintilla of benefit, to the deluded American people. But it pays for them.

As empires decay, their governments exude the odor of death, and so it is with ours. The pretense of competence, or even of a minimal capability, can no longer be sustained by it. In the next Presidential election, a gross, boorish, criminal buffoon will face a senile, lying, criminal clown. The Senate is a geriatric rest home and hospice for the moribund, and the House is a ululating zoo of queer fauna, loony, furious and irreconcilable, and with no sane keeper. Agencies and bureaus are staffed and managed to subvert and betray the functions they were designed to perform.

There is a general malaise, an amorphous dissatisfaction among the people but it has no substance, no unifying principle; only a brute sense that something is wrong. The people simply can not conceive that everything is wrong. Baffled victims of their evil system, they rage, storm, and cheer their chosen idols, unable to comprehend that their only truly invincible enemy is themselves.

Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net