Cui bono?

Great 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?
.
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. An informational ghetto has been created in America, partly to maintain the illusion that free speech still matters. In extreme cases, home dissidents 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.

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 a raging fraud, 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 clear to anyone with a modicum of common sense. 

MAIN IMAGE: The American Way, by Margaret Bourke.