CULTURAL SAVAGERY

GABRIEL ROCKHILL—It is often presumed that intellectuals have little or no political power. Perched in a privileged ivory tower, disconnected from the real world, embroiled in meaningless academic debates over specialized minutia, or floating in the abstruse clouds of high-minded theory, intellectuals are frequently portrayed as not only cut off from political reality but as incapable of having any meaningful impact on it. The Central Intelligence Agency thinks otherwise.

DAN COHEN—In 1985, Colombian President Belisario Betancourt and the FARC rebels negotiated a peace accord to end nearly three decades of armed conflict. The agreement formalized the creation of the Patriotic Union and saw ex-guerrillas join with communists, trade unionists, communal action boards and leftwing intellectuals to form a party that would integrate the FARC into the electoral political system. As negotiations were underway, Patriotic Union members were being killed. In May 1986, Liberal Party leader Virgilio Barco won the presidency. Shortly after he took office, the pace of assassinations of UP members skyrocketed. A whopping 400 members were assassinated in the first 14 months of his term.

CALEB MAUPIN—Some free market conservatives and libertarians argue that even Nixon’s 1973 reforms went too far. Sue Lowden, a conservative candidate for Congress in Nevada argued that the insurance companies created by the state were unnecessary, because prior to that Americans were free to barter with their physicians. She said “You know, before we all started having health care, in the olden days, our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor. They would say I’ll paint your house…. In the old days that’s what people would do to get healthcare with their doctors. Doctors are very sympathetic people. I’m not backing down from that system.”

PAUL EDWARDS—We are a blinded, despised, bamboozled people.  To keep us so is the purpose and intent of the system that rules us.  From its beginnings, America was a Capitalist racket run on manipulation and exploitation of its people.  From Shea’s Rebellion to Citizens United it has jammed one vicious, rank perversion of justice after another down our throats.  Lincoln knew better—as his letters reveal—than to laud a government of, by, and for the people.

GLEN FORD—Although there is no intrinsic contradiction between the three most-voiced demands of the current movement — community control of police, defunding the police, and abolition of policing as we know it – only proposals for community control of the police directly confront the issue of power in the here and now, and also address demands for direct democracy and Black self-determination.