The rumble of revolution grows

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From solidarity to resistance …and beyond—

Americans have been indoctrinated to see good things in the word “revolutionary” when applied to electronics, cars, and the latest vacuum cleaner, but to conjure up horrors when applied to politics…who wins by this artificial fracture?  Can revolutionary be good and bad at the same time?

By Gaither Stewart

IN A COLUMN A YEAR OR SO AGO, Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of Treasury under Reagan (!), warned that unless Congress impeaches Bush and Cheney, a year from now the USA could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran. That suggestion prompted me to continue with my own ideas as to what should follow on the heels of popular resistance to the burgeoning police state.

Searching for the proper word for what might happen in America, I came on the old and perhaps outdated word, “mutiny.” At first mutiny sounds like much too little considering the present state of the Union. The 1954 film The Caine Mutiny with Humphrey Bogart depicts the mutiny against a paranoid naval Captain whose madness has nearly caused the destruction of the warship USS Caine. The theme of mutiny in fact runs through American history and literature—ship revolts as in Jack London’s Mutiny of the Elsinore and Melville’s slave revolts, and in the execution of the American Revolution itself.

Rebellion against unjust power remains a leitmotiv in the American imagination. With that tradition in mind the present rulers of America must wonder when and in what form the next explosion will arrive. For when the gap between rulers and people becomes unbridgeable and the scared people re-learn the sense of social solidarity and widespread Resistance sets in, what comes then? In an adult and mature people the passage from one step to the next in the dialectical chain above appears historically ineluctable. Once underway, such a process doesn’t just stop.

What if in the United States of America—shaky super power today, in decline and tottering on the brink of disaster—what if the next step by the people was mutiny against the long, gradual counter-revolution in America, as of yet little charted by historians? I have in mind the Great American Counter-Revolution, today at its high point.

Yet, the masses of America still appear surprisingly nonchalant about their lost freedoms. Many in fact criticize protest and snicker at suggestions of any kind of rebellion. Many still see America as the cradle of democracy and freedom. But there is always a breaking point. Enough is enough.

When enough people begin to say “enough” the idea of mutiny does not seem far-fetched. Is it science fiction, the idea of hitting power gone mad where it hurts most, in the pocketbook? Is it too much to believe that people could stop voting in “their” staged elections? What would it mean if next November only 20% voted? The image of people taking to the streets in a general strike is not an American image. Not yet. But that day may be just around the corner. In a situation like today’s in which the rulers crush the people under an avalanche of police state laws, what if the people were to bring the nation to a halt?

REVOLUTION

The romantic word Revolution is terrifying. There is just reason to mistrust it. It too has degenerated. Since the heroic times of the American and French revolutions and the Great Russian Revolution the word has degenerated and been misused. The student revolution of the 1960s, though leaving behind many lasting effects, petered out in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. China’s Cultural Revolution has not yet been digested. The so-called Orange Revolution in Ukraine comes to mind as an example of a political class abusing the very word.

If we discard the idea of armed revolution, at the same time let’s don’t confuse revolution with mere reform on one hand or with armed insurrection on the other. Insurrection is a local, usually spontaneous and one-issue matter. Reform on the other hand is adjustment made by the rulers in order to maintain power as happened time and time again in Tsarist Russia. As a rule, reforms are too little and too late, and besides are offset by negative developments in other sectors.

But mutiny? Is mutiny ever outmoded in situations of oppression and madness, of rupture between rulers and the ruled?

What caused the collapse of the Roman Empire that seemed as eternal as did its capital and its brainwashed citizens? The slaves and foreign vassals rose up and traveled over the roads of proud Romans to reduce its capital to piles of stones. And what were the trampled French people to do about an entrenched oppressive royalty?

And, again back at home, what about the conditions resulting in America’s two revolutions of 1776 and the Civil War?

Since drastic and radical social-political change should be the goal of thinking Americans today, everything that inhibits social solidarity, the blossoming of resistance and the creation of a rebellious mindset against a negative myth are obstacles to be overcome.

Wait a minute! A myth? What myth? In this case—the myth is America itself. For how can you battle a myth the Greeks wondered? In the aftermath of the fall of Troy, Menelaus stood before Helen with his sword raised: he the victor stared at her the traitoress and let his sword fall. He couldn’t kill her. Like a reflection in the water, Helen was a myth. Menelaus had to wonder how you can kill a myth without killing the water, too.

VIOLENCE

Born out of first solidarity, then resistance, the United States of America has always harbored violence in its soul. A parallel violent world lives within our society, one world atop the other, the violent world independent of the other. Most Americans have known violence at one time or another. In our land, violence and war are so much a part of our way of life that sometimes non-violent opposition to this inbred violence seems to be hopeless folly. Moreover, today’s organized violence in the USA originates on the extremist Right, from the KKK to secret militias and mercenary armies to CIA to the generals, from Waco to Oklahoma City to the violence of the World Trade Center. Radical Right has in turn mutated to government Right, a fascist Right of preemptive eternal foreign wars and increasing oppression at home, signals of the extreme Right’s predilection for total violence.

In comparison to America’s own terrorism and violence, al-Qaeda is stuff for babies: homegrown violence is always just a heartbeat away from mainline life. In comparison to today’s institutional violence-terrorism, past student protest with its slogans of non-violence or pistol-armed Black Panthers and Weather Underground insurrections appear as innocent as breaking plate-glass windows.

On the other hand it is good to keep in mind that though leftwing protest movements have been broken and scattered by Power, many of those people and like-minded others are still out there in society. The number of mature adults with eyes to see and ears to hear is apparently growing. Their answer to people who wonder what the resistance wants is simple: they want a just society.

But what are they to do?

That is the question.

The Argentine writer, Ernesto Sabato, says that the very worst social situation is the vertigo in which fear reigns and man becomes an automaton, no longer responsible or free. The most hopeless situation is that of a vertiginous humanity that ignores its own interests and continues to think childish thoughts and to play children’s games.

Out of unawareness or complacency, out of acceptance or passivity, and as a result of the pervasive cradle-to-grave brainwash, our society is placated by Power’s ready assurances that ours is the best way of life. While complacency is based on the illusion of freedom, the passive people are inoculated against external influences by an ignorance of history and flag-waving patriotism based on artificial threats by those who in brainwash language only “envy us our way of life.”

While Power has gone about creating its police state it has kept the masses of people asleep and apathetic, obese and content, with assurances that they are the happiest people on earth, and holding many millions of less fortunate in ignorance

Meanwhile, as the upper middle classes become gradually poorer and more dissatisfied, the use of fear to keep them in line is necessary. In the home of the brave the use of fear continues to intensify as seen in the new laws of a controlled society.

The fear of fear is a new American reality.

The fear is justified.

Naomi Wolf in her “10 easy steps to Fascism” recalls that a government can stop dissent very quickly with a little torture of the dissidents. The 10 easy steps to Fascism have already been made: creation of an external threat, ready secret prisons, formation of paramilitary forces, surveillance of citizens, infiltration of civilian organizations, arbitrary arrests, targeting key individuals, press controls, labeling criticism as espionage and dissent as treason, and subversion of the rule of law.

Everything—laws and the means of enforcing them—is already in place.

POWER

Studies show that the class of Power in the USA is surprisingly small, numbering in the tens of thousands. The potential opposition on the other hand is enormous, including above all those Che Guevara had in mind when he quipped, “If you tremble in indignation at injustice then you are my comrade.”

Though much of the small American ruling class is stashed away in corner offices on top floors behind batteries of secretaries, apparently in hiding, out of its vanity, I believe, it still wants to be seen. Surprisingly, I should say. But still, what is Power if no one knows YOU hold it? Most members of the Power class are visible on the scene of action each day, in TV, in Congress, in the military hierarchy, in diplomacy, multinationals, religions and in the universities. And the higher they ascend the ladder of Power, the more reactionary they become, the more entrenched they are in the corrupt Power system. More gung-ho.

However, those at the very top are in hiding, the rulers who really rule, and they are the most dangerous. They are the ones we do not know. But we can suspect who they are.

Since it often seems that the people, on the other side of the abyss, have abdicated, we tend to underestimate the Power of the people, all of whom have a stake in the land … in the world. One easily forgets that organized workers can bring a small city like Asheville in North Carolina or a metropolis like New York or a company like General Motors to a standstill in a matter of hours. But that seldom happens because people have forgotten their own strength.

That people don’t think about their strength is due to Power’s astute use of myth and illusion: the myth of freedom and the illusion of happiness. And in these times more and more out of fear! For now the new police laws are in place and warnings of widespread eavesdropping, control of e-mails, easy arrest, sophisticated torture and waiting concentration camps are constant.

Meanwhile mainline media stay in line and self-censorship has become common.

Though most seem to prefer ignorance, the “people” need to know the truth. Some people are learning to distinguish between myth and reality. During the student revolts of the 1960s, an elite resistance leadership developed revolutionary theories based on interpretation of world events like the Vietnam War on one hand and on local issues on the other.

For those with eyes to see, the international issues today are evident: the Iraq War, globalization, US imperialism, the images of preventive war and legalized torture and genocide, all in the name of freedom and democracy.

The local issues too are evident and pressing: they concern the new American police state.

For organized resistance the great lie about the superiority of  “the American way of life” should be a natural target. Solidarity with those who suffer is growing. Resistance spreads. The end result of extended and prolonged resistance is usually violence. Violence itself then has a multiplier effect: when Power steps in to target and taser dissenters and crush violence it intensifies resistance. An explosion becomes inevitable. First comes collective action, civil disobedience follows. Police state laws have changed ideas on legitimacy.  This time around the explosion can become something much more ugly than Power imagined. For as I said the people can shut down the nation without firing a shot.

The people! Who are the “people” and what do they want from life? The reality is that the American people are broken, too, fragmented and bewildered, devoid of unity of purpose, as there was, let’s say, during the Vietnam War. According to a recent study the vast majority of American people are unaffected by America’s ongoing permanent war. The discussion about whether 70,000 or one million Iraqis have been massacred has a certain theoretical-academic air about it. Not even the mothers of the American dead in Iraq can get organized.

However, since at the same time people have lost faith in the electoral system, some resisters have taken on the job of breaking down the natural passivity of the dissatisfied and fragmented people who, though in potential agreement with revolutionary analyses, are unused to resistance because of the illusionist spin conducted by Power. Not voting is a suggested antidote.

Again, there are the wars to be ended. There is vast poverty and social injustice to be resolved. There is a dramatic need for universal health care. There is a corrupt and cowardly and mean political class to be removed. There is every need to give power back to the “people”.

Grassroots organizer Abigail Singer, co-founder of Rising Tide North America and of a recent Southeast Climate Convergence conference in Asheville, NC, said in an interview that voting is not enough because the electoral process has been sold to the highest bidder and that people who get into positions of power have to sacrifice whatever principles they started out with to the point that systemic change is impossible. The idea is that real change comes from the grassroots.

At the same time, and on another front, more and more people are losing faith in nonviolence. Singer points out that Capitalism itself is extremely violent. “If you’re not nice and polite, some people consider that violence. But most violence is in business as usual and capitalism grinding on, killing workers, forests and oceans. We’re surrounded by normalized violence and don’t recognize it for what it is. Confronting this normalized violence in a direct way is not violent; it’s necessary.”

Yet, people still argue that you have to work within the system, that is, within the capitalist system. But it is a truism that you can’t have it all. You can’t have your air conditioning and not use up limited energy. You don’t have to be an economist to understand that endless economic growth is unsustainable. Climate change is a reality, so drastic change will come about whether we like it or not.

The modern activist seems to be mutating because the political climate has changed. The violence of government repression creates violent reaction in the same way war against Iraq creates new shahids, with bombs strapped around their waists. Actually violent resistance is nothing new: Black Power backed up the Civil Rights movement. The US government didn’t grant more workers rights back in history because it became good but because people rose up and demanded their rights. People organizing to defend themselves goes all the way back through the history of man. Today in America, here and there, some people are coming together and developing new ideas of resistance—and their number is destined to grow to the degree that government repression grows.

Yet, the reality is that there are not yet enough dissatisfied people willing to work to bring about the drastic social change necessary. The masses are needed. But the system is doing its dead level best to accelerate the process.

After my youth in America I have lived my adult abroad. Traveling to the USA today is to go abroad. Therefore I have acquired a double sensibility about my homeland. When I arrive there, abroad, but also at home, I feel double tensions in the air: the tension connected with the fear of losing “the American way of life” and the tension of a minority of dissatisfied people also fearful because it knows it is living a fantasy and that mutiny—so nebulous as to appear a chimera—will be necessary to change things.

In America I do not yet sense that undercurrent of change that one has felt in recent years in Spain, for example. Instead I sense both a fear of action and a fear of non-action. Perhaps it is also a fear of change, fear that things can only get worse. A fear like that of a people inhabiting the wrong house, or the haunting fear that the real house it once inhabited is today occupied by usurpers and has lost its soul.

One senses also a disturbing atmosphere of pragmatism and a depoliticalization coupled with widespread contentment with just analyzing the current situation rather than challenging it.

Radical change of direction presupposes an end to blind acceptance of Power’s fictionalized version of reality. It is comforting to learn that across the land grassroots activists like Abigail Singer are working to break down the phenomenon of indifference. Activists in fact no longer have to feel alone. Each person arrested in the September 15 anti-war demonstration in Washington acquired a new faith in resistance and each of them will create new converts. The tasering of the Florida student added a new unit of mutineers.

Acceptance of the legitimacy of Power, indifference to Power’s deviations, and passivity in the face of Power’s threats against external enemies at least seem to have peaked. Polls show that more and more people believe that Power gone mad has to be put aside. The eventual end of acceptance and passivity could result in a kind of explosion the world has never seen. Clash between people and corrupt system appears inevitable.

Yet, today, the clash is still more hope than reality. Hope that a new strategy of liberation from the oppression of illegal Fascism will mushroom. In other times, in an older language, that strategy would be called revolutionary theory. The old Leninist concept is apt here: there can be no revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory. The theory here, the strategy, must explain that it is not just George W. Bush, the system’s current representative, who must go, but the system itself run by that tiny minority at the top.

Yet, as a rule people don’t rebel easily. People do everything possible to avoid real social convulsion and upheaval, even compromising with a Fascist police state.

On the other side of the fence, today’s illegal government has to be aware that a spirit of mutiny is brewing. That is why it has armed itself with a set of illegal and anti-constitutional laws to crush it.

As Umberto Eco once said in an interview with me, don’t ask observers for a solution. The American people will have to decide that. I am however noting the most extreme problem of this century for mankind: the United States of America. Here, I too am restraining myself, and not saying things I know I should say. But I have to add this evident reality: at this point the alternative to ousting today’s corrupt system is a permanent police state, which if it becomes any more fixed than it is now just might last a thousand years.

Thus the real future belongs to those who resist, to the rebels who say ‘No!’ and to the mutineers at the grassroots who will bring about the drastic change a growing number of Americans know is necessary. Let’s leave ideology apart. Let’s simplify matters. Let’s drop the rhetoric. Let’s avoid the set phrases of the radical chic.

Meanwhile the role of the alternative media is to tell the truth. It has to be intolerant of liars. And it has to grow and expand and replace often reticent and aimless mainline media.

The aim of the alternative media is to prompt people to open their eyes and to inculcate in them a new way of thinking honestly and free of Power’s New-speak.

North Carolinian GAITHER STEWART currently resides in Rome. He serves as Senior Editor and European Correspondent for TGP and Cyrano’s Journal Today. His latest book is The Trojan Spy (Callio).