(This is part one of a three-part series because, well, it’s a long process. Image credit)
I was not proud of me. I sometimes hated myself more than anyone else. There are things I’ve said and done that make me so ashamed. I think you can name some of them too.
In my misery, I’ve made other people unhappy. Especially my family.
I think I always had a good attitude, but never proper guidance. Things would’ve been ideal if I had that.
We’re not always right and we can never make amends for all the pain that we are responsible for. That would be impossible. And that’s why there’s a God.
And until two years ago, I was so sorry I wasted all that time.
So how did I make it up to myself and others? What motivated me to move and evolve?
First, we’ll sift through history to expose three major political lies that most of us have internalized as natural truths. This will aid us in extracting the dysfunctional social mirror from our present thought-patterns and help alter our reality maps to, second, get closer to the objective truth as we investigate our external world.
What I also intend to delineate is that we’re not rational beings in terms of what we ideally want as opposed to what we do; the small wiring in our left hemisphere has very little control and is usually dominated by the emotional centers and the limbic system and unfortunately, a highly sophisticated and corrupt political system has been able to tap into it and rewire us for their causes.
A bold statement. So let’s examine the evidence...
Lie #1: Communism = bad, Capitalism = good
After WW2, the US and USSR emerged as the only two superpowers. Each had a distinct political system; the former Capitalism and the latter, Stalinism (referred to as Communism. I’ll resolve the difference).
They grappled with each other to dominate the world by trying to influence as many countries as they could with their school of thought. They set off on bloody campaigns and proxy wars (cold wars) to incorporate their political ideologies in neighboring countries to increase their circle of influence.
Those attempts have shaped the current average Earthling’s mentality, and if you live somewhere close or in between, you’ve most likely been affected too.
Roughly, Communism, or Marxism to be more accurate, is described as being the political and economic theories of two German men named Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, later developed by their followers to form the basis for the theory and practice of Communism. Central to Marxist theory is an explanation of social change in terms of economic factors, according to which the means of production provide the economic base. In simple English, the community, specifically the proletariat (working class: people like you and me who have to work for a living and produce) influence and determine the political and ideological superstructure in the country as opposed to the few rich and sedentary. It’s like democratizing the workplace so that the workers or employees are involved in the decision making and profit-sharing too. Sounds like fair democracy right?
It was originated in reaction to the natural evolution of Capitalism, which I’ll detail in a few.
Stalin ruled as a dictator. He and his “comrades” made decisions so we call his dictatorship Stalinism rather than Communism. (Prior to Stalin, the Russians were controlled by the Czar and Lenin persuaded people to revolt based on Communist ideologies through the Bolsheviks’ party. Right after his death, however, and the usurping of power by Stalin, Russia turned into another autocracy under a communist banner).
Communism was viewed with disgrace because of people like Stalin, associating it with authoritarianism, fascism or even Nazism. Today, countries like China and North Korea project themselves as Communist countries although they’re run by authoritarian regimes and dictatorships.
To add insult to injury, the standard definition for Communism in modern-day textbooks has devolved into: countries with government controlled business activities, implying that a central authority allocate resources and stifle choices and variety. This caught on, in part, due to capitalist propaganda.
That is false. However, since it caught on and many think that way, we refer to the original communist ideology as Marxism.
Since the Russians felt betrayed at what they perceived to be a stark Communist regime, after it’s downfall in the early 90’s, Russia accepted Capitalism with arms wide open presuming it brought with it freedom and equality. Thus, the only superpower in the world wielding the greatest influence was solely the US and the dominating business activity worldwide was/is Capitalism. Keep in mind that even in those fake communist countries, it’s capitalism for the rich and a form of feudalism for the poor.
Marx and Engels predicted the revolutionary overthrow of Capitalism by the proletariat and the eventual attainment of a classless communist society. Unfortunately, several failed attempts have been made but thanks to CIA orchestrated coup d'états, pandemonium and chaos has predictably been the corollary to such attempts.
Why fight Capitalism? (You’re probably more like,”What does all this politics have to do with me?” I’ll come to it, bear with me please.)
Capitalism is an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state (i.e the community). The core business textbook definition is: a society in which private individuals have the freedom of handling business themselves. In fact, the other term used for a Capitalist economy is Free Market economy, and then there are explanations outlining why either/or economies cannot be self sufficient because they both lie on the extreme ends of the scale, i.e., Communism to the left and Capitalism to the right (it’s more complicated than that but this is valid and clear enough).
Of course throughout history, we’ve been ruled by elites who owned everything due to their “divine rights” and made their friends and family flourish. And until recently, some 200 years ago, those who were in favorable positions were able to hand down their fortune to the now politically and economically dominant. And the very few who permeate the rich class, i.e., the ruling class, are the ones who are paraded as naturals to Capitalism, when in reality, they’re a bona fide rarities that are idolized.
The main argument for Capitalism is the existence of a democratically elected government that will regulate the private sector’s activities to maintain social interests and public goods and thus, create a balance. This will be somewhat in the middle of the left-right scale.
However, even before the second world war, and the resurfacing of anti-semitic hostilities across Europe, Sigmund Freud became extremely pessimistic about human nature as he witnessed the outcomes of the first world war, and began advocating the idea that the public have to be controlled. His nephew, Edward Bernays, combined the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle with Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter’s crowd psychology and became one of the first to attempt to manipulate public opinion using the subconscious, but for the benefit of the Corporations that hired him. He was employed as a Public Relations person and in charge of selling their products by creating (sometimes dishonest) marketing campaigns, or what we know of today as commercials and advertisements.
This went to full throttle (and in the wrong direction) after the second world war and the emergence of the US as one of the two major superpowers.
This is where we converge with politics.
Bernays argued that the manipulation of public opinion was a necessary part of democracy in his book Propaganda (1928),”The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized....In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
The American oligarchy, that hired Bernays, did to Capitalism what Stalin did to Communism; they attempted to overpower the government’s influence and hijack authority.
Rather than herding the masses towards democratic ideals, Corporations with the help of Bernays, gave us the illusion of freedom and democracy by suggesting that Capitalism and Democracy are synonymous and that their companies represented man’s venture for progress. And with the amount of profit they made, they began buying congress. (There, it rhymes as well.)
So basically, the leaders of both superpowers fused their people’s ideologies to maintain a self-serving fiasco. Symbolically, today, the Russian Mafia control the big businesses.
The US corporations are no exception. With delicate, complex and effective campaigns, they’ve propagated their own causes and converted them into lifestyles. ALL mainstream media belong to a few people who want to further their own agendas: Newscorp, Disney, Time Warner, Viacom etc. With the money they pocket, governments have been swayed (think the recent financial crisis and the corporate bailing. Who took care of the redundant workers?).
Thanks to Wikipedia, I also found out that, “Bernays' most extreme political propaganda activities were said to be conducted on behalf of the multinational corporation United Fruit Company (today's Chiquita Brands International) and the U.S. government to facilitate the successful overthrow (see Operation PBSUCCESS) of the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. Bernays' propaganda (documented in the BBC documentary, The Century of the Self), branding Arbenz as communist, was published in major U.S. media. According to a book review by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton of Larry Tye's biography, "The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays & The Birth of PR", "the term 'banana republic' actually originated in reference to United Fruit's domination of corrupt governments in Guatemala and other Central American countries. The company brutally exploited virtual slave labor in order to produce cheap bananas for the lucrative U.S. market." “
If you’ve been educated within the system, you probably have a dilute sense of anguish about Capitalism’s “democratic” propaganda. If you're a business student, for example, you might argue that people have choices and can make their own decisions and that globalization creates job opportunities and helps the economy of a country by employing it's factors of production.
The above statements are true, but when contextualized with the status quo, relinquish their validity. Capitalism, today, is just another autocracy under a democratic banner. (Yes, even Obama’s America)
In a very enlightening documentary, John Pilger talks about what people are starting to wake up to: "Welcome to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund Conference in Bangkok. The aim of the conference is, and I quote, 'To find ways of eradicating poverty all over the world'. Alas, there are contradictions. You see most of the delicates are bankers. Now this is not to suggest that bankers don't care about poor people, it's just that somethings are hard to explain. Such as why the officials of the World Bank spend, in their pursuit of solutions for the poor, an estimated $45 million a year flying first class and staying in five star hotels? And why at this conference, chefs have been flown in especially from Paris to a country where children still die from malnutrition? And why they need to be shadowed by more doctors than most people in South East Asia see in a life time?
Fortunately, the people who can best advice them on how to eradicate poverty are just across the road! However, the bankers can't see them because a wall was put up to hide the poor people during the conference. The people responded by painting the wall in bright colours in order to attract attention. No doubt worried that the delegates might spot the odd poor person, the government then had buses parked in front of the wall! Most of these people are street traders, but in the build-up to the conference, hundreds of vendors were almost literally swept from the streets of Bangkok.
So here they sit, with their empty carts, hidden from view, unable to earn a living, until a conference discussing poverty moves on."
Not that these countries are poor, not at all, figurative international organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the UN are created to “regulate” trade and indirectly shackle poor countries with obnoxious debt and then, cut them some slack with very “lucrative” offers that bestow corporate control over vast amounts of resources. Capitalist/Private/Corporate control whose sole objective is acquiring more money. It also means using and abusing euphemisms like “globalization” and “externalities” [See Naomi Klien’s: No logo] to divert our attention from the fact that it means starving, underaged workers being paid by the hundredth of a second in sweatshops throughout the developing countries. To corporations, it’s profit at all costs and the ultra rich are protected from just about any crime they commit in a Capitalist system.
They set the conditions with which to create poverty and invariably benefit off of them. Also part of those conditions are indoctrinating us with the materialistic mentality that is so prominent nowadays and some other part is installing dictators with Western inclinations, specifically, Western corporate inclinations through out the world.
All we hear is 9/11, because the arms industry in the US needed a booster so they, along with the US government (which I hope that by now, is clear that they’re PA’s for corporations) created an excuse to continue with their operations and generate revenue and invariably maintain the US hegemony.
Prof Edward Said reminds us why the Middle-East has so much antagonism towards the US, "All 22 Arab countries are dictatorships who are in desperate need of US government patronage to support them. So we are not about to engage in a real dialogue and in that respect, the Arabs keep themselves collectively in a way that is subordinate and inferior to the West and in fact fulfills the kinds of representations that most Westerners have in their minds about the Arabs.”
By placing a bunch of puppets as heads of state who cripple their people into accepting "globalization" as a saviour and a God-send, the US corporations gain and the US government establishes itself as an authority in the region to further it’s hegemonic agenda. For example, the Gulf countries trade oil in US$, which means we only accept Dollars for oil and no other currency, and that creates a huge demand for the dollar paper money, and seeing as America can print it however they like, their currency monopolizes the financial status of international commerce (because most the countries in the world need oil, which is refined and used for all kinds of industrial purposes). The stooge Saddam Hussein considered selling Iraq’s oil for Euros. This links to a website that tracked the political escalations of the beginnings of the war against so-called ”terrorism” to remove the tyrant from power as soon as he made public his views on selling Iraqi oil for Euros.
In addition, the Gulf pretends to have wealth, when it’s really concentrated in the hands of a few, especially in Bahrain. And to Bush, we’re a “beacon” of democracy in the ME.
This is where the history lesson comes to end and reality emerges out of the ethers.
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