American Brainwash: Guess what, Ma, capitalism is not Americanness!

Cui bono?

[dropcap]G[/dropcap]reat political benefits can be reaped from this kind of sleazy political legerdemain. For by successfully equating loyalty to capitalism with loyalty to the motherland (a ruse that reminds us uncomfortably of another system that continually elevated loyalty to the motherland and its underlying supremacist system as sacred), the ruling orders can more easily whip up support and legitimacy for policies which chiefly safeguard their interests.

Did the French revolution deny the French some of their precious "Frenchiness"?

Besides invading the notion of "American nationhood," like a giant, Alien-like parasite, US capitalism has also embedded itself behind "freedom". One of its most popular deceiving masques, "the Free Enterprise System" exudes unconditional love for freedom. But is this so? The record again hardly supports such claims. For if "free enterprise" is so respectful of individual liberty and human rights, why does it thrive under Nazism? In the postwar world, US-style "free enterprise" also flourished (and flourishes) in dozens of nations that could be easily cataloged as dictatorships or outright tyrannies: Indonesia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Guatemala (an old example that also boasts genocide of its native people), Brazil, of course, with similar features, and many other countries marching to the tunes of the IMF and World Bank, and given political, diplomatic, propaganda, and military support by the US regime, regardless of White House occupant, as support for US imperialism is a fully bipartisan project. In this unsavory category, Gen Pinochet's Chile and his "Chicago Boys" still remains one of the best known examples of how undiluted libertarianism destroys a nation's economy, an economy which was already gravelly ill due to its long history of capitalist mismanagement.
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The ploy has been particularly effective in the area of foreign policy, where the global interests of American business and the native plutocracy have long been sold to the public as those of the nation. 

As anyone can easily infer, this has often served to silence and isolate critics, who have been thus conveniently smeared with the brush of disloyalty, suspicion, nuttiness or even treason. For dissidents, an informational ghetto has been created in America, partly to maintain the illusion that free speech still matters. In extreme cases, opponents of capitalism have been carted away under charges of "sedition," ingrates "intent on subverting the hallowed political system of the United States,'' and similarly dubious statutes and charges.

Given the success of these grand manipulations, there is little doubt that the American ruling class has carried the art of mass deception to truly unprecedented heights. No other western nation would have the audacity of requiring loyalty to capitalism--however camouflaged--as a prerequisite for good citizenship. Only in a nation where political illiteracy is high, and kept artificially that way  by the powers that be, can such a fraud be propagated without too much challenge or any challenge at all. Indeed, why should a historically transient system such as capitalism, one frequently suspect and deservedly despised by large numbers of people, be equated with the more enduring essence of the nation, itself an extraordinarily elusive and historically ephemeral concept?

The fact that in the 21st century a cancerous capitalism is essentially eating away the very substance of the nation, a concept it finds narrow, inconvenient and outmoded to its compulsion for transnational depredation, does not reduce the need to dismantle this noxious myth, as it is still American capitalism, and its monstrous military muscle, that remains the linchpin in the imperialist global effort. It is capitalism's dynamic that feeds Washington's mad push for global supremacy at any cost, and it is capitalism again which stands to gain by imposing fascism on a semiconscious world.

Hunting "Un-Americans"

The reigning fraud implicit in equating "Americanness" and "patriotism"—two very vague concepts to begin with—with loyalty to capitalism as essential to the good health of the American republic has seen vile eruptions that match anything found in openly fascist countries.  Consider, for example, the HUAC, which, incidentally, from beginning to end was largely staffed and piloted by Democrats. This is what the Wikipedia says. Note the damn committee, like all malignancies birthed by the US ruling class, from wars to persecutions at home, go on practically forever. In this case the HUAC lasted almost four decades, and many of its powers were then transferred to the House Judiciary Committee, where,  we assume, like any convenient ghoul, they rest but can be rapidly brought back to life to haunt new generations of social change activists.

The HUAC in the 1940s conducting one of its infamous autos-da-fé. The purpose was to intimidate the population.

Since no one ever bothers to point the obvious, that capitalism and Americanness—whatever that is—are not the same thing,  and that such notion is merely a cynical political stratagem, we should stress for the record that the concept does not have the remotest iota of validity. And that even sixth-grade logic can prove it. In fact, here's a simple set of questions for capitalist propagandists:

• Will Americans be less "American" it they choose for themselves another social system?
• For that matter, were the Russians certifiably less  "Russian" after their October Revolution?
• Did the French revolution deny the French some of their precious "Frenchiness"?
• Are the millions of Italian communists less quintessentially Italian because they cherish Marx instead of Adam Smith?
• Are pro-Castro Cubans verifiably "less" Cuban than those living in exile?

The answers should be obvious to anyone with a modicum of common sense.