EXCELLENT COMMENTS} On wet noodle demonstrations and other liberal delusions

Cute liberal demonstrator—embracing and being embraced by the status quo. With opponents like these, the plutocracy is trembling.

Looking at the liberal (comfortable) left. The engagement in zero-risk (fun!) demonstrations and Lesser Evil /identity politicking co-opts real opposition tactics leaving the status quo untouched. 

Regarding: Blum’s Anti-Empire Report: Why do they flee?

Filed by:
Peter Pavimentov

The compassion of this country is truly admirable with all the crocodile tears shed by the television announcers/commentators about the poor little brown children at its borders, kept in cages, jerked from their mother’s breast, exploited, starved and beaten and the many do-gooders that demonstrate against this utter, nay utter cruelty of the government. They all should be sent on a discovery trip to Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya where children are tortured, killed and not worth rescuing according to Albright. Those children would love to be interned and spread over the US with good food, games and medical care, not to speak even of the many starving children within the ghettos of this country itself. Greater hypocrisy of the official propaganda and its believing masses has never been recorded and surely a reckoning will come if one believes at all in karma.

10:55 a.m., Saturday July 7 | Other comments by Peter Pavimentov

Replies
Addison dePitt

Indeed. And we should bear in mind that the empire does not run on hundreds of major myths but just a handful, and they more than suffice if the media (and politicos) uphold them with strict discipline in their (already careerist) opportunistic ranks. Two areas of indecent mythology are never touched by the media: the goodness and immaculate conception of our foreign policy, and the idea that—admittedly flawed—America is still the best democracy around. The manipulated millions who keep shedding tears about these children at the empire's frontiers could gain much political insight and finally a path to the solution if they read articles like these, but they are not, are they? Because they have been carefully regimented in their intellectual and informational habits and practically never leave the reservation. And the Big Media will never tell the truth.

Says
Peter Pavimentov (07/10/18)

The liberal left in this country go on demonstrations where they celebrate their freedom to express her/his own thoughts (so they think, but which are often what they have been drilled to believe from kindergarten onwards). It is indeed fun to be with a large crowd, to sing, carry signs and ma rch along. It is a sort of cathartic movement whereby one can assume one’s normal work schedule the next day, refreshed by heaving off one’s shoulders any regret, anger or even faint feelings of guilt.

Others with a more radical bent go for the throat of the president with pejorative but entirely immature invectives such as ‘the orange beast’ and similar nonsense terms, not realizing that he gets his marching orders from the power blocs in banking and industry, whose rules he understands and feels comfortable with. None of his directives and executive actions are performed in a vacuum, which they apparently fail to understand.

It may look to the ‘Left’ like a dictatorship under Trump, but that is because he was given the leeway to uproot all conventional rules under which the system slowly started to wane and decline. The rulers are certainly keenly aware that the unrest of the populace which began at the start of Obama’s office would have increased and continued under Clinton. But they needed a firm hand to stay potential disruptions and got it with Trump. Any other assumption is simply political fantasy and basically ahistorical.

It is a prerogative of a bourgeois environment to protest because it thrives on what Derrida rightly has called the simulacra of the real. Protests relieve many if not all the frustrati ons in the system, while this continues without much input by the masses. If the outer symbols of the system, namely that what is unreal, are appeased and seemingly repaired, then the inner workings of its oppressive character can be ignored. One may demonstrate and obtain the small concessions to avoid increasing conflict, but the essential problem persists and festers.

It should be clear then that all these protests in regulated demonstrations and most of the leftist writing play into the hands of the status quo. Otherwise these would not be tolerated, and they form an outlet for the heaped-up steam of resistance. The bourgeois society plays along with the forced compliance needed to ignore most of the severe contradictions within such a society. If one concentrates conflicts towards bad water conditions in a former industrial town, the separation of immigrant children from their parents and similar ad hoc problems then the need for a total revolution is avoided.

It is hard to separate local concerns and distractions from such as identity politics, which tend to glut the airwaves and restrict movements for change. A workable tactic is direly needed to bring all the different factions of protest together in a mass revolt. Bundling centrifugal forces can only be reached by making real change attractive.

In a deeply liberal bourgeois society violent measures will not work as seen from the fate of the Weather Underground and Antifa. But every revolution is violent as it obliterates several layers of society. The choice remains then to either try to bring about gradual changes which leave the underlying rot intact or to deconstruct all the defunct shibboleths imposed onto the public. That will be a major task and it can only happen when the propaganda madness is cut off from its victims.