America’s Secret Planned Conquest of Russia
by Eric Zuesse
The U.S. government’s plan to conquer Russia is based upon a belief in, and the fundamental plan to establish, “Nuclear Primacy” against Russia — an American ability to win a nuclear war against, and so conquer, Russia.
This concept became respectable in U.S. academic and governmental policymaking circles when virtually simultaneously in 2006 a short-form and a long-form version of an article endorsing the concept, which the article’s two co-authors there named “nuclear primacy,” were published respectively in the world’s two most influential journals of international affairs, Foreign Affairs from the Council on Foreign Relations, and International Security from Harvard. (CFR got the more popular short version, titled “The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy”, and Harvard got the more scholarly long version, which was titled “The End of MAD?”.)
This article claimed that the central geostrategic concept during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, Mutually Assured Destruction or “MAD” — in which there is no such thing as the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. conquering the other, because the first of the two to attack will itself also be destroyed by the surviving nuclear forces of the one responding to that attack — will soon be merely past history (like the Soviet Union itself already is); and, so, as the short form of the article said, “nuclear primacy remains a goal of the United States”; and, as the long form said, “the United States now stands on the cusp of nuclear primacy.” In other words: arms-control or no, the U.S. should, and soon will, be able to grab Russia (the largest land-mass of any country, and also the one richest in natural resources).
Neither version of this article mentioned the key reason why nuclear victory is exceedingly dangerous even under the most favorable conditions, which reason is the concept (and the likely reality in the event of nuclear war between the two superpowers) “nuclear winter” — the scientific studies showing that a resulting sudden sharp cooling of the atmosphere after all those enormous explosions would produce a global die-off. America’s aristocracy and its vassal-aristocracies controlling the U.S.-allied nations (billionaires, centi-millionaires, and their top agents in both the public and private sectors) are buying and building deep-underground nuclear shelters for themselves, but they wouldn’t be able to stay underground and survive on stored feedstuffs forever. (As for everybody else, those other people are not involved in geostrategic decisionmaking, and so are being ignored.) However, many of America’s (and associated) elite are paying those bomb-shelter expenses, but none of the West’s elite are condemning the path toward nuclear war that their governments are on. So: buying or building nuclear-war shelters is more acceptable to them than is stopping America’s planned conquest of Russia. The higher priority is to conquer Russia.
A far less influential scholarly journal, China Policy, published later in 2006 a critical article arguing against nuclear supremacy, but that article has had no impact upon policymaking. Its title was “The Fallacy of Nuclear Primacy” and it argued that, “American nuclear supremacy removes the root source of stability from the nuclear equation: mutual vulnerability.” It presented a moral argument: “U.S. leaders might try to exploit its nuclear superiority … by actually launching a cold-blooded nuclear attack against its nuclear rival in the midst of an intense crisis. The professors discount significantly the power of the nuclear taboo to restrain U.S. leaders from crossing the fateful threshold. If crisis circumstances grow dire enough, the temptation to try to disarm their nuclear adversaries through a nuclear first-strike may be too strong to resist, they argue.” The concept of “nuclear winter” wasn’t even so much as just mentioned (much less dealt with) in this article, just as it was ignored in the two that it was arguing against.
The co-authors of (both versions of) the article that had proposed and endorsed nuclear primacy, then published in 2007 (this one also in International Security), a response to that critical article. This reply’s title was “U.S. Nuclear Primacy and the Future of the Chinese Deterrent”. But it had no more impact than did the obscure article it was arguing against.
Thus, nuclear primacy has become U.S. policy, and MAD no longer is U.S. policy (though it remains Russian policy). The U.S. government is planning to take over Russia (basically, to install a puppet-regime there). That’s the reality.
Central to the nuclear-primacy concept is that of what’s variously called a “Ballistic Missile Defense” (BMD) or “Anti Ballistic Missile” (ABM) system: a system to disable or knock out Russia’s retaliatory nuclear weapons so that a U.S. blitz nuclear attack won’t be able to be met by any nuclear counter-attack.
As “The End of MAD?” put it: “Russia has approximately 3,500 strategic nuclear warheads today, but if the United States struck before Russian forces were alerted, Russia would be lucky if a half-dozen warheads survived.”
In other words: America’s establishment aren’t necessarily hoping to protect all of the U.S. population from a counter-attack, but are willing to sacrifice perhaps a few million Americans here and there, in order to achieve the intended result: conquest of Russia.
That article then says that a BMD-ABM system wouldn’t necessarily indicate America’s determination to pursue nuclear primacy against Russia, because it could instead be intended purely and authentically defensively, to protect against nuclear attack from Iran, North Korea or some other country. However: “Other U.S. nuclear programs are hard to explain with any mission other than a nuclear first strike on a major power adversary. For example, the decision to upgrade the fuse of many SLBM warheads (the W76s) to permit ground bursts makes sense only if the mission is destroying hundreds of hardened silos. One might argue that ground bursts could be useful for a variety of other missions, such as destroying North Korean WMD bunkers or remote cave complexes housing terrorist leaders. The United States, however, already has a large number of highly accurate, similar-yield warheads that would be ideal for these purposes.” The article even notes that: “Other analysts have noted that the current U.S. nuclear force looks surprisingly like an arsenal designed for a nuclear first strike against Russia or China.” And, “A group of RAND analysts agrees: ‘What the planned force appears best suited to provide beyond the needs of traditional deterrence is a preemptive counterforce capability against Russia and China. Otherwise, the numbers and the operating procedures simply do not add up.’” So: the co-authors here are claiming to be merely giving a name, “nuclear primacy,” to America’s existing strategic military policy — not to be inventing or creating it. They are, above all, saying that this is the reality now in U.S. policy-making circles; that MAD no longer is.
And their article has, indeed, described the guiding strategic-planning objective not only of the George W. Bush Administration, but also of Barack Obama’s — as will now be documented.
U.S. President Obama has always been saying that the reason why America is installing anti-ballistic missiles (“ABM”s, otherwise known as ballistic-missile defense or “BMD”) in Romania, Poland, and other nations that border (or are near to) Russia, is in order to protect Europe against Iranian missiles that might be aimed against Europe. He says that this is purely defensive, not aggressive, and that what it’s defending from is Iran, not Russia — so, Russia has no reason for complaint about it.
But then, Obama reached his nuclear deal with Iran; and this deal ended, for at least ten years, any realistic possibility that Iran would develop any nuclear-weapons capability — Obama himself emphasized that this was the case; he wasn’t denying it.
So: Obama’s claimed reason for installing ABMs in Europe was now, quite simply, gone. (Not that it had been credible anyway, since Iran didn’t have any nuclear weapons. It was merely a pretext, not honestly a reason.)
Here is how Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, stated the matter, at that time, during the meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club, on 22 October 2015:
The use of the threat of a nuclear missile attack from Iran as an excuse, as we know, has destroyed the fundamental basis of modern international security – the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The United States has unilaterally seceded from the treaty. Incidentally, today we have resolved the Iranian issue and there is no threat from Iran and never has been, just as we said.
The thing that seemed to have led our American partners to build an anti-missile defence system is gone. It would be reasonable to expect work to develop the US anti-missile defence system to come to an end as well. [But] What is actually happening? Nothing of the kind, or actually the opposite – everything continues.
Recently the United States conducted the first test of the anti-missile defence system in Europe. What does this mean? It means we were right when we argued with our American partners. They were simply trying yet again to mislead us and the whole world. To put it plainly, they were lying. It was not about the hypothetical Iranian threat, which never existed. It was about an attempt to destroy the strategic balance, to change the balance of forces in their favour not only to dominate, but to have the opportunity to dictate their will to all: to their geopolitical competition and, I believe, to their allies as well. This is a very dangerous scenario, harmful to all, including, in my opinion, to the United States.
The nuclear deterrent lost its value. Some probably even had the illusion that victory of one party in a world conflict was again possible – without irreversible, unacceptable, as experts say, consequences for the winner, if there ever is one.
He called Obama there a “liar,” and that’s a blatantly truthful characterization of the situation. But Putin missed there saying what’s even more basic for an understanding of what Obama was doing in this matter — and which makes that “lie” from Obama particularly heinous: Putin missed saying that an anti-missile system can be at least as important as an aggressive weapon as it is as a defensive one, because if a first-strike attacker wants to eliminate the defender’s ability to strike back from the attacker’s first-strike attack, then an anti-missile system is the weapon to do that, by eliminating the defender’s missiles before those strike-back missiles can reach their targets. It nullifies the other side’s defense — and to do this is enormously aggressive; it strips the victim’s retaliation. The whole distinction between offensive and defensive can thus be pure propaganda, nothing having to do actually with aggressive and defensive. Whether the use will be defensive, or instead offensive, won’t be known until the system is in actual battlefield use. Only the propaganda is clear; the weapon’s use is not.
So, Putin understated the heinousness, and the danger to Russians, that was actually involved in Obama’s tricks. All that Putin did was to vaguely suggest an aggressive possibility: “It was about an attempt to destroy the strategic balance, to change the balance of forces in their favour not only to dominate, but to have the opportunity to dictate their will to all.” Most people don’t relate to such abstractions as “strategic balance.”
Obama and other agents of the U.S. aristocracy know that their public have been trained for decades, to hate, fear, and despise, Russians, and especially the Russian government, as if it were the Soviet Union, and as if its Warsaw Pact and communism still existed and Russia hadn’t ended its hostility to the U.S. in 1991 (though the U.S. continued its hostility to Russia — that rump remaining country from the former communist empire — and during Obama’s second term the hostility soared). So, for example, at the conservative website Breitbart, when that statement quoted here from Putin was posted as part of an honestly written and presented article titled “Vladimir Putin: U.S. Missile Defense System Threatens Russia”, almost none of the reader-comments indicated any ability or inclination of the readers to sympathize with the plight for Russians that Putin had just expressed. Instead, to the extent that the comments there were relevant, they were generally hostile, such as:
“Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday he has concerns that the U.S. ballistic missile defense system threatens Russia’s nuclear capability.”
Vlad, its supposed to, its called defense. The only way it could harm your nukes is if they were shot down…………….after you launched them!
and
How can a defense system threaten anything? Like Obama would attack Russia. That is laughable.
Most people’s minds are straight-jacketed in bigotries of various sorts, preconceptions such as that a “missile defense” system, and a “Defense” Department, can’t be aggressive — even extremely aggressive and war-mongering. The first thought that comes to mind about anything that’s ‘defensive’ is that something else must be ‘aggressive’ or ‘offensive’, and that whatever is ‘defensive’ (such as an ABM) is therefore good and even necessary. That’s thinking, and receiving the term “defense,” like thinking just one move ahead in a chess-game, but this is the mental limit for most people, and every propagandist (such as the people who professionally design propaganda or PR slogans and campaigns) do precisely what Obama and the rest of the aristocracy and their agents do in order to deceive their gulls: they phrase things for one-move-ahead-limit thinkers, like that. The cardinal rule in the deception-professions is therefore, first, to find people with the desired prejudices, and then to play them as that, with one-move-ahead-limit sales-pitches, which are directed to precisely those prejudices. This report at the Breitbart site was instead presenting a high-quality news-report, to a low-quality audience, and so the reader-comments it generated were few, and generally hostile.
Obama is a master at deception. Another good example of this was 26 March 2012, during Obama’s campaign for re-election, when he confidentially told Dmitry Medvedev, “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this can be solved, but it’s important for him [the incoming President Putin] to give me space. … This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.” Obama was privately communicating to Putin (through Medvedev) that Obama was pushing the ABM installations only so as not to be politically vulnerable to charges from the knee-jerk Russia-haters, Republicans, and that Obama’s fakery regarding the supposed ABM-target’s being Iran was only in order to appeal to yet another Republican bigotry (against Iran), and so Obama was intending to back away from supporting the ABM system during his second term.
But actually, Obama had had Russia in his gunsights even prior to his coming into office. Two specific objects in focus were Moscow-friendly leaders of nations: Assad of Syria, and Yanukovych of Ukraine. America’s strategy, ever since 24 February 1990, has been to strip Russia of allies and friends — to leave Russia increasingly isolated and surrounded by enemies. When Obama entered the White House on 20 January 2009, there already was a plea in the pipeline from the Syrian government for urgently needed food-aid to address the all-time-record drought there, which had decimated Syrian agriculture. Obama’s Administration never even answered it. Well before the Arab Spring demonstrations in 2011, Obama was hoping for turmoil in Syria and the overthrow of Assad — lots of starving Syrians would be just the thing.
Moreover, the planning for the February 2014 coup to overthrow the Moscow-friendly democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, started in the U.S. State Department by no later than 2011.
So: when Obama told Medvedev and Putin, on 26 March 2012, not to worry about Obama’s intentions toward Russia, he was lying. He wanted his intended victim to be off-guard, unprepared for what was soon to come.
On Obama’s way out the door, he did two things that significantly advanced America’s ABM-BMD threat against Russia.
On 10 December 2016, ‘Defense’ Secretary Ashton Carter stated, burying it in a speech he gave in Bahrain — site of a major U.S. military base — “just this week, we reached an agreement for Qatar to purchase a 5,000-kilometer early-warning radar to enhance its missile defenses,” and he said nothing more about it, as if this announcement weren’t the bombshell it actually was. Alex Gorka headlined about that at Strategic Culture, “US-Qatar Deal Threatens Russia: Reading News Between the Lines” and he explained that this system “is designed to be used as an early warning system against strategic offensive assets – something Iran does not possess.” Near the start of Carter’s speech, Carter had said that he would be talking about “checking Iranian aggression and malign influence, and helping defend our friends and allies,” including Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia. Gorka noted, “The announced range of 5,000km (3,100mi) by far exceeds the requirement to counter a missile threat coming from Iran,” and, “[t]here is no other reasonable explanation for the choice, except the fact that the AN/FPS-132 can monitor large chunks of Russian territory,” the objective being “to surround the Russian Federation with BMD sites and neutralize its capability to deliver a retaliatory strike if attacked.”
One of Obama’s last actions as the U.S. President was to sign into law a bill that had been quietly passed in Congress, which included a key change in U.S. law that would enable the government to spend unlimited funds on realizing former President Ronald Reagan’s dream of a space-based ABM system, “Star Wars.” On December 22nd, David Willman of the Los Angeles Times, headlined “Congress scrapped this one word from the law, opening the door to a space arms race”, and he reported that the eliminated word was “limited.” Willman explained that, “The nation’s homeland missile defense system is designed to thwart a small-scale, or ‘limited,’ attack by the likes of North Korea or Iran. As for the threat of a large-scale strike by China or Russia, the prospect of massive U.S. retaliation is supposed to deter both from ever launching missiles.” He noted: “The bill awaits action by President Obama. The White House has not said what he will do.” Willman also noted that on an earlier occasion, “the Obama administration criticized the changes in the Senate bill, saying it ‘strongly objects’ to removing ‘limited’ and to placing anti-missile weaponry in space. The statement stopped short of threatening a veto.” But then, the next day, on December 23rd, Willman bannered, “President Obama signs defense bill that could spur new space-based arms race”. Whereas Obama’s public rhetoric portrayed himself as being the type of person who had deserved to win the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, almost all of his actual decisions in office were the exact opposite — and here was a superb example of that.
Whether Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, will continue with that longstanding (ever since 24 February 1990) plan to conquer Russia, or instead finally end the Cold War on the U.S. side (as it already had ended in 1991 on the U.S.S.R.’s), isn’t yet clear.
This is what happens when what President Eisenhower called “the military-industrial complex” takes over the country, and everything (including the ‘news’ media) serves it, rather than the military-industrial complex’s serving the public.
It fits in with the massive data which indicates that the U.S. government is run by an aristocracy or “oligarchy”, instead of run by people who represent the public — a “democracy.” Obama as President fit right in.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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“So long as Esperanto is disregarded, all these things must be.”
“Mr. Britling Sees It Through” by H. G. Wells
……………………….GAMMA’ SOLDIERS…
I wondered why, I asked the sky, how infantry can justify, their peace with war where infants die..in a never-
ending, game of soldiers?
“With a mind half-tracked”, the sky shot back, “by exponent-driven heroism, through atavistic thoughts misgiven to fathers bias in denial..of a never-ending, game of soldiers:
Take uniform and flag and schism, make oath and troth to rags and isms, leave numinous sloughed up in prisons..of the never-ending, game of soldiers:
Dehumanize and demonize, they’re only targets win that prize, you don’t repent you rationalize the never-ending. game of soldiers:
Strike a light ignite that fuse, confirm to peers..ignis fatuus!.. let ignorance be your excuse for the never-ending game of soldiers:
It’s all right son you’ve done your best, pin this tin medal to your chest, good folk are all congratulating, another batch of graduating, fully baked indoctrinated… dead set brainwashed..GAMMA’ SOLDIERS:
If the “U.S. Government”, whoever they are exactly (the Pentagon? the P.N.A.C. monsters?), have such a plan, then one can only assume they are either seriously deluded or just plain insane. The very concept of nuclear supremacy is, at base, seriously flawed, due to the very nature of current technologies that assure a retaliatory capability following a pre-emptive first strike, and this fact has been recognised since at least the mid-1960’s. According to most sources, Russia at this time actually has a (slight) advantage in deliverable nuclear weapons, but even if this were not the case and the U.S. had a huge advantage, this demented dream of “conquering Russia” would still just be that and nothing more.
No one ever has, or ever will be able to, conquer Russia, as anyone who knows anything at all about Russians will be able to tell you, so I have to wonder about these so-called elites who seem to think they can wait it out in a bomb shelter for the smoke to clear (what would they find upon returning to the surface? Would it be a case of the living envying the dead?). None of this makes any sense, on any level, even if one makes the unreasonable assumption that any attempt, by anyone, to “invade Russia” would not be resisted with all force, up to and including the use of strategic nuclear weapons. This whole scenario is sheer fantasy, of the very worst kind, so if there really are people in the U.S. Government who take nonsense like this seriously, we should be far more concerned about them rather than any snowballs-chance-in-hell that such a deeply flawed plan could actually work.
No, I won’t lose any sleep over this. If anything it is yet more evidence (if any more were actually needed) that those in charge of the American Empire are aware, at least on a sub-conscious level, that their ‘dream’, which was a nightmare for everyone else, is close to being over. All of the signs of decadence and decay are there for anyone to see, and it is often the case that those in denial of the reality of the situation will go to extraordinary lengths to maintain the delusion of strength and vitality. The U.S. will soon go the way of the U.S.S.R., and it will be a just outcome as far as I’m concerned. I can’t wait for it to happen, and if there were anything I could do to hasten it, I would – gladly!
Reblogged this on Taking Sides.
StAug, Norman, thank you for a very interesting conversation. You’ve both given me some very nutritious food for thought. And from an Eric Zuesse article! Who could have imagined?
Was there an Eric Zuesse article about? Oh, my . . . ( 😉 )
Without the conquest of Siberia the global empire will fail inevitably.
Carthage Syndrome! Water & Carbon Empire!
http://geoarchitektur.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-carthage-syndrome-water-carbon.html
desert fracking & farming
Then it will fail, because they’re not getting Siberia. If they make an attempt, their ‘indispensable’ country will be turned into a desert of radioactive, vitrified glass overnight.
It only makes sense when you consider who the ruling US oligarchy are (Js), what they want (world donination), and what they think of the lives of the non-Js (subhuman/snakes/animals according to the Talmud).
Eureka! now it makes sense why a few million western lives is a small price to pay, to overcome Russia. Mr Zeusse never seems to mention this in his articles though.
I really do believe that far more than just “a few million Western lives” would be lost in any nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Russia: there would almost certainly be no one left alive on Earth, even those who managed to find fallout shelters. The occupants of the I.S.S. would be the only ones, and they would have front-row seats to the entire spectacle.
Why did you even mention the Talmud? What does that have to do with the topic discussed?
At least there’ll be no more lawns to mow…no prols to mow ’em either.
A retirement village for expat Refuseniks ?
Here we go again, my, how the powers that be missed the Russian Bear. In the lull in the Cold War (’91 to say ’15) the controllers in Washington and Westminster (and the other nominal power centres) had to invent an external threat (called variously al Qaeda or Daesh) to keep us in line – but they couldn’t quite carry the clout of Armageddon. As soon as Russia was ready to develop a credible presence on the world stage – the nuclear arms race takes off again – only this time it goes hypersonic.
I usually like Eric’s articles, but my impression of this one is that Dr Zeusse needs to up his meds. His quoted policy documents are way out of date; Obama was never a “master at deception” – he was a liar and he took no one in. In the meantime the technology has moved on – the ABM-BMD is soon to be scrap – rendered obsolete by Russian and Chinese hypersonic delivery systems (soon to go into production and operational by 2020?) So the window to implement this super secret plan (that we all just read) is 2-3yrs – is that what you really want us to believe, Eric?
More generally, I get why the corporate media push the ‘strategy of tension and fear’ – but I question why the progressive media has to fall into the same trap. (Controlled opposition in the manufacture of the consensus would be the obvious answer?) The M$M pushes the recently remastered Cold War rhetoric – “Look, we’ve fallen behind, we’re susceptible to a hypersonic attack, we need more money to restore our MAD parity, or we’ll all die!!!” – Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Thales etc lick their lips and the sheeple kotow to their slavery. Right, well does anyone want to believe this sh_t again?
I know there are crazies in the Pentagon and elsewhere, and the strategy of tension can lead to confrontation and an accidental triggering (Cuba ’62, Able Danger ’83 – we’ve managed to avoid Syria ’17 for the moment) – but I question whether turning the planet into a fireball would ever be the design? There are no winners in a nuclear war – and the plausibility of the conquest of Russia by conventional means is just a joke, right?
A quick trip down the memory hole might be illustrative. When the Soviets were still allies, they were supplied with key components (heavy water, aluminium tubing, graphite, etc) for the bomb. They also got key intel (including the complete blueprint for the ‘Fat Man’ bomb) out of the oh so top secret Manhattan Project (via the double agent Klaus Fuchs.) No great conspiracy yet, but the gamechanger for me was that when the Soviets could not develop the capacity for multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs) – in ’72 Kissinger sold them the technology. It would be MAD to sell a sworn enemy the technology to annihilate you, wouldn’t it? (Or to sell the rights to a strategic weapons resource like uranium – as Kissingers friend $hillary more recently did.) So maybe that is not the point?
(If you like a conspiracy – Kissinger has been advising Trump and Putin lately – on the same day, within hours they both announced the ‘new’ nuclear arms race (which has been going on for years) – wow, pure coincidence? Pure theatre more like.)
So while the puppetmasters try to pull the strings, the M$M try to put the hype in hypersonic, the MIC try to justify their existence and celebrate the big no-bid contracts and dear Eric tries to whip up a storm in a teacup about WWIII – this sheep is not buying it. Life is not for living in fear.
…..WHAT’S A NUTATION MUMMY?…
The polar, melted-mass migration, will deviate the earths nutation, and alter plates of isostasy, and inundate all state and nation:
Ice-cubes in rjts’ half-smart glass, ignores an Archimedian art, where melts are not displacements part, but dilettantes should still have heart:
In Hervey Bay there’s whales in May but don’t say, “Global- Warming”..and very soon no snow in June with a more portentous warning..
.That when poles unweigh, then Terra will sway, and you’ll soon get the gist of this.
But don’t run to church when you feel that lurch,
it’s a global, axial, shift:
Informed people are ushered into a reality where they see that their humanity has set them and their children up for nuclear genocide, as it’s clear this planet is run my psychopaths who have no respect for human life.
As RTJ 1211 puts it, we need to take extreme actions against them (the main directors of the insanity do not number more than 10,000) and let them know they and their progeny will be exterminated unless they show convincing alternate plans — letting things progress will be writing our own death sentence.
Further, Mr Putin has given many hints about what he will do about the aggression against Russia. He vowed to destroy the BMD system if it ever looks like going live.
It is now live. However Russia has in the meantime developed various counter-measures, so perhaps they do not need to keep that vow. But wait! Putin now says that the BMD ‘defensive’ missiles could easily be replaced by nuclear offensive missiles, which so close, would in a first strike cause massive damage to Russia.
I therefore recall Putin’s relating how he learned conflict on the streets of Leningrad — and that the best policy was to hit first. A Russian king-hit should not be ruled out; it might be the only tactic the West has left them.
LOL, considering United States of Mass-Murderers couldn’t even properly handle 3rd world state Iraq properly, only a lunatic would hope to win a war with giants like China and Russia.
All the idiots in the world: SPREAD THE WORD! It is impossible to win any such war, and it will end with loss of BOTH SIDES.
All the intelligentsia in the world: You know what to do! It’d be out of place for me to teach you!
The USA, despite massive military superiority, was unable to beat the Vietnamese, and their efforts to get rid of Mr Assad in Syria(using mercenaries) was thwarted by the Russian Air Force. I think the “gun-slingers” in the Pentagon had better wake up to these facts before they start thinking about war(conventional or nuclear) with Russia.
“History has shown, there are no invincible armies”
Yeah but the US elite won both wars. Victory may not be what you think it looks like.
America “Won both wars”? Are you a 10 year old?
“We lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of Guerrilla war. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose, the conventional army loses if he does not win. The North Vietnamese used their armed forces the way the bullfighter uses his cape- to keep us lunging in areas of marginal political importance”….Henry Kissinger.
In case you haven’t noticed, Mr Assad is still Syria’s leader.
No. I’m not a ten year old, sir.
Nor, sir, are you a part of the US elite.
Please take the time to read my comment.
My apologies. “Elites” sorry, I ‘misunderestimated’ what you said….
Gotta watch the reactionarism eh Brian? might end up being urged to war?
I think what he meant was that the American elite still made money profiting off the wars fought. They always do.
Of course, he’s right. I just misread him, in haste…….
Talk to some Vietnam vets who have snapped out of their denial and military dogma Brian..they will tell you That America never intended to win a war in Vietnam..that “war”..was an exercise in ordnance consumption. The boogyman of WW111 started after WW11..its buisness model is perpetual war. The raison d’etre of the exponents of the big three is to make a profit and survive the strategies and tactics of the exponent-driven programmes….of a self-culling, global, never-ending, game of soldiers:
See also:
“US Power Elite Declared Bio War on the Southern Hemisphere, East Asia and all Non-Western Countries in September 2000”: https://wipokuli.wordpress.com/2016/03/13/us-power-elite-declared-war-on-the-southern-hemisphere-east-asia-and-all-non-western-countries-in-september-2000/
All the best for the New Year!
„Thanks to my Readers – Dank an meine Leser“: https://wipokuli.wordpress.com/2017/01/01/thanks-to-my-readers-dank-an-meine-leser-3/
Regards
It’s interesting and rather depressing, that our media is full to bursting with stories about the threat we face from terrorism, which, looked at rationally and without emotion, are acts that are actually designed to fit into our news flow, like a hand in a glove; they are media stunts that work. Yet, the real threat from nuclear weapons, which is growing because changes in nuclear doctine are moving the threshold for their use closer and closer, so these weapons are now on a ‘hair trigger’, is almost totally ignored and passes virtually without debate in our media, even though the threat is so much more real and massively more devastating than these terror attacks.
You’d think that the journalists, who despite appearances, are humans and have families, loved ones and children, would be somewhat concerned that the cities they live in risk being turned to smoking ruins and that modern nuclear weapons hare so mind-bogglingly destructive making the bombs dropped on Japan look positively puny in comparison. One surviving Russian submarine firing its all its Mirvs has the capacity to wipe almost every major American city, in a devastating counter-attack, off the map… permanently. That a war like this is really a form of mutual suicide pact, for civilization followed, by a catastrophic nuclear winter and entire continents covered by vast radioactive nuclear deserts, even that doesn’t seem to exercise the minds of our journalists, who almost act like they are immune and lead charmed lives. Levels of self-delusion, studied ignorance, conformity and lack of imagination, are difficult to explain or understand. The colossal irrationality, really a form of madness, at the heart of our military strategy, which is also criminal on a vast scale, is difficult to believe, yet it passes with barely a murmur of dissent or protest.
No journalist can work being a journalist, so they are mouthpieces. No lecturer at college can work if they warn students about this. No one in the military can question policy higher up. No politician will be funded to run on a humane platform.
The time is ripe for a people’s revolution and the only question is how many US citizens the madmen/women are prepared to kill to keep power.
Millions is my judgement.
Decide how many children/grandchildren of those in power you will kill to make them back down. Obama has to know his daughters will die. Blankfein must lose his children, so must Dimon, so must every arms lobby company on the Hill. They must be the ones who suffer and it must be suffering that wipes their bloodline out.
Stop treating them the way they demand, instead implement US foreign policy against them.
See how they like it…….and how seen they start squealing like little cowards for mercy…..
Steady on there. Your rhetoric steers very close to the wind, and in times like these too.
Indeed. I’m not fond of slinging clichés but one will be “playing right into their hands” if one’s rhetoric slides from expressing mere indignation or contempt to what could, conceivably, be parsed as a call to violence of any kind.
Steven,
With all due respect, and don’t take this personally, but if the psychopaths on high can openly threaten and what is worse, even openly plan and prepare and instigate the liquidation of innocent people in their millions, who is inciting who, exactly?
Fuck ’em. If they don’t like the fact that I truly want to see them strung up for the crimes that they have already committed, let alone see them prevented from committing even more slaughter, they can kiss my fucking arse.
I myself can’t stop them. But “we” in our numbers most certainly can. And “we” need to say it among ourselves, as often and as boldly as we can, to help ourselves shake off what in effect is a profoundly complicit lethargy and apathy.
What are they going to do? Arrest me? Have me disappeared? And if they start down that road in their own house, so to speak, what will they not be inviting by way of an incipient populist reaction, a reaction that is already afoot, regardless.
And we think we play into their hands by merely voicing our outrage in terms equivalent to their own rhetoric? We should tell it to their victims.
How many more innocents shall we allow them to extirpate before we begin to give appropriate voice and body to our outrage?
Do they or don’t they murder children? Innocent men and women? Wreck entire nations?
Why should it be incumbent upon me, then, to encourage them in their delusion that they will always be able to carry on with their wars as they do now with impunity?
For it is a delusion.
They should take heed now while they might still have the chance. They need to beware indeed of the growing anger among the people. It is real. Increasingly palpable. White-hot even as it merely bides it’s time.
Surely, they must know that. And if they don’t, we are only actually being gracious in giving them a heads up, in letting them know how the collective mood might be souring.
Brecht once suggested that it was his hope that without him, the rulers would be more secure.
Why should any of us who are aware of what is being done in our name aim for less?
Norman! I’m definitely sympathetic to your outlook on this, but we aren’t the ones capable of shutting down websites, are we? They are. I think it’s tactically wiser to make Them work a little harder, and take a little longer, at obstructing us/ our sites because the time is coming, without a doubt. And are They less or more secure if we give them any excuses to shut us down even quicker…?
Glad to see the contingency plan of, inciting them to violence so we can turn them loose on each other (with put-options on the bullets of course).. in classic, divide and rule strategy, has no effect on you, Norman Pilon?…. Beware mate!, they control the horizontal and the vertical. Protect you and yours by all means but, watch the hands you are being delt…….even in these forums. And perchance…your own shift as a dealer:
“Meet the new boss!”………..”Same as the old boss!”
The media people probably also have access to the bunkers and think they will survive themselves!? They have deserted America along with all those elite traitors!! Its really sickening already!! They must be stopped!
In short – Caliphate of Chaos and Kingdom of Genocides must be destroyed to preserve life on this planet. How are we going to do that is irrelevant but it will be done.
I disagree. “How” is absolutely crucial. It’s called organization and proselytizing. And as V.L. once put it (I’m paraphrasing), “you can’t have a game without a game plan, nor a game plan without a rule book, eh.”
Until people start coming together in earnest, understanding that stories about the effectiveness of non-violent civil disobedience are just that, stories designed to stymie serious challenges to minority establishment rule, everything remains little more than empty gesture and bluster. Outrage by itself wont do it anymore than a blind populist upsurge.
A certain amount of institutionalized, centralized, collective intelligence to direct and coordinate the actions of such a challenge, though not a guarantee, is a prerequisite for getting the job done. I mean, if people were ever to decide to get serious about this . . .
“Until people start coming together in earnest, understanding that stories about the effectiveness of non-violent civil disobedience are just that, stories designed to stymie serious challenges to minority establishment rule,..”
I totally disagree with this, Norm. They love violence, they know exactly how to deal with it and they are ready for it… they even encourage it. They know, for example, that the majority of adult Serfs out there aren’t even fit enough to dare being violent for more than a few minutes; it’s not that society at large is full of jungle commandos… lots of the people clever enough to be dangerous, physically, aren’t up to it. What They aren’t ready for is people refusing to participate in “society”… people refusing to go to work and buy petrol and i-phones and so forth. Marching and all that is harmless ceremonial display… but organizing massive targeted boycotts would rock The System to its core. Imagine if all the Serfs managed to organize to the extent that the vast majority didn’t show up to work for a month? The Change, when it one day happens, will happen in hours, not months or years… when people just stop participating. That’s the absurdity of our situation… none of the evil bullshit we loathe about the World would be possible if people simply stopped supporting it. It would require some thinking and lots of organizing and some sacrifice (and stockpiling supplies) but it could be done. And without throwing one fucking rock!
Have you ever read Chris Harman? Whoever hasn’t, should, in my humble opinion.
A good place to start would be with this chapter from his short book, How Marxism Works (May 1979), and titled: How can society be changed?
And if you like what he had to say in that chapter, you might want to read the whole of that small book.
“. . . none of the evil bullshit we loathe about the World would be possible if people simply stopped supporting it.”
No. Sooner or later, if sufficient numbers balk and disengage, the police, the military, and the judiciary are mobilized against the dissidence, and then boycotts as such, just like strikes or even the wrong government being elected, can be counter-boycotted by the establishment, as exemplified by “factory closures, flights of money abroad, hoarding of necessities, inflationary price rises,” and so on, exactly as is happening in Venezuela and as has happened time and again in history.
On the assumption, of course, that I might have piqued your curiosity about it, do have a look at chapter 8 of Harman’s little book when time permits and the mood takes you. At any rate, I reference it to you as both my reply and an elaboration of at least one rationale for objecting to your proposed strategy of resistance.
Norman!
I’ll have a look!
Okay! So, I’ve read that chapter, and, first: I’m not advocating a “reformist” application of strikes. I’m not saying we should hold their feet to the fire until we force a few cosmetic concessions like longer paid vacations or whatever. I’m saying that if we just STOP being The System, The System is history. It requires the collaboration of millions of Serfs to make this thing function. My second point flows from that. When Harmon writes:
“The parliamentary electoral system contains built-in secret ballots and cooling off periods. For instance, if a government is brought to its knees by a massive strike, it is likely to say, ‘OK, wait three weeks until a general election can resolve the question democratically.’ It hopes that in the interim the strike will be called off. The workers’ confidence and unity will then fade. Employers may well be able to blacklist militants. The capitalist press and the television can begin functioning normally again, hammering home pro-government ideas. The police can arrest ‘troublemakers’.”
…he’s not really arguing against the effectiveness of the concept I propose, he’s arguing against the concept as it might be applied within the range of certain limits: how many Serfs and for how long. I’m saying that those two x-quantities make all the difference. What is required are millions of Serfs who know they’re Serfs (and will no longer fall for the “well, maybe I’ll be a one-percenter, too, myself, one day, when my ship comes in”) and who are no longer so attached to The System that grinds them for fuel that they can walk away from it. The infrastructure, btw, can remain… The System is not the infrastructure. Just like Soylent Green, The System is people. It is largely us. We can opt out to the extent that the whole thing grinds to a halt. It’s a question of numbers. Which is a question of knowledge.
Harman writes: “A new state, Marx and Lenin said, was necessary if the working class was to impose its dictates on the remnants of the old ruling and middle classes.”
Well, you’re not going to like this, but I never believed in the concept or intention of Marxism. Karl Marx, from the Ruling Class, who was nurtured at the very bosom of the Oppressor? Another clever illusion. In our never-ending hunger for heroes, we are too often duped. No movement is possible without leader(s). A movement of Serfs will need to be led by a Serf.
“Karl Marx, from the Ruling Class, who was nurtured at the very bosom of the Oppressor? Another clever illusion. In our never-ending hunger for heroes, we are too often duped. No movement is possible without leader(s). A movement of Serfs will need to be led by a Serf.”
Wow, talk about an ultra-superficial dismissal of Marxism! You talk as though the working class isn’t in need of a concrete class-based analysis of their exploitation, and as though the most important thing about Marx (and, by your allusion, Marxism) is that he was born from the ruling class rather than that he developed a framework pointedly denouncing their very existence. It’s really not that difficult to work out that Marx’s dream wasn’t for the workers to prop up Goldman Sachs. Your criticism might hold some validity if Marx only wanted the workers to push for some mild reforms while staying under the boot of the capitalists, but we’re talking about someone who actively sought to rouse workers for their complete emancipation against the capitalists. I don’t know how you extract from that “He’s in the ruling class’s pocket”. With such lamentable and massive blind spots, your “critique” starts to sound more like a right-wing nativist jab at Marxism, of the sort that is obsessed with defending the prerogatives and privileges of private property – in other words, a total vulgarization of social emancipation.
Also, who said that “Marx” was going to lead the “serfs”? He’s been dead for quite some time, you know. But his analysis lives on. That’s the point.
Nice!
More like boilerplate, Norm. Do you know anything about Karl’s admiration for the ideas of Charles Darwin, btw….? Interesting period, the mid-19th century. We’re still living with so much of it.
Why don’t you enlighten me?
Who wrote the following, Norman?
“We are firmly convinced that it is not the practical Attempt, but rather the theoretical application of communist
ideas, that constitutes the real danger; for practical attempts, even those on a large scale, can be answered with cannon as soon as they become dangerous, but ideas, which conquer our intelligence, which
overcome the outlook that reason has riveted to our conscience, are chains from which we cannot tear
ourselves away without tearing our hearts; they are demons that man can overcome only by submitting to them.”
Or, no, forget that for now. Let’s go after a less-revered figure… maybe it will be easier to see, then… Andreas Gottschalk (“He was a member of the Cologne community Communist League. He was an exponent of the “Left” sectarian tendencies of the German working class movement.”):
“In Cologne itself, Gottschalk headed a very large workers’ association—something like every one in three adult males in the city belonged to it—but to be honest it would be fair to describe him and his mentor Moses Hess in contemporary terminology as “airheads”—fabulists who believed that everybody was in favor of communism, and all you had to do was wait a little while in order for communism to emerge on its own. Gottschalk was notorious for refusing to take part in political campaigns. He sabotaged the elections to the German National Assembly by calling the democrats bourgeois frauds and calling on workers not to vote, thereby allowing the Cologne conservatives to dominate the election.”
Now, there are two ways to read that. One is naive.
You write:
Norman, you wrote (with no reply button left, above):
“Why don’t you enlighten me?”
That’s a very familiar rhetorical sneer there, Norm.
But I wrote that in response to a question you put to me: “Do you know anything about Karl’s admiration for the ideas of Charles Darwin, btw….?”
My question to you can be interpreted in one of two ways: a) that no, I don’t know about Karl’s admiration for the ideas of Charles Darwin, at least not in terms of the possible relevance of “that” to what you seem to be wanting to imply about Karl, namely, that he’s some kind of bourgeois agent set upon disrupting and demobilizing the efforts of the working class to rid itself of the parasites ruling over it; or b) I do know, but only want to set you up to engage in a bit of trolling with you.
From where you sit, it could be either one of those things, but from where I sit, there is but slight bemusement at why you are bringing into this exchange “Karl’s admiration for Chucky.” Could it be, then, that the more naïve way of reading my question to you about your question to me is a better approximation to my original intent?
And then on top of that slight bemusement, you throw two quotes out of context at me, presumably written by Karl, and that as they stand, as I am left to myself to surmise, are supposed to be knock-down indictment of Karl’s honesty and integrity and, thereby, grounds for dismissing everything that was ever written by the man as worthy of being taken seriously by anyone disgusted with the regime of capital.
Now what am I supposed to think, Steven? To be charitable, I’ll put it down for now to you having had a long day and being in no condition to think — at least for now.
As for Marx and his analytical output, I actually have the temerity to arrogate to myself the right to judge his arguments and observations on the basis of my own ability to reason and observe, as admittedly limited as that might be.
Big names and big reputations may impress you, Steven, but I can’t say that that is much of an inclination or weakness of mine.
I mean, I do have sense enough to recognize when I’m being intellectually outclassed (not by you, Steven, but by someone like Marx) and that, therefore, a possible opportunity to actually learn something has by some good luck presented itself to me — which is only another way of saying that I also have sense enough to roughly recognize the limits of what I actually know as well as what I actually understand in what someone else has written.
It was “Ultra Superficial” because it was a sentence long. As I said: I’m not going to go into all that here. It’s as pointless as arguing with Jehovah’s Witnesses. I just happen to be fascinated with Revolutionaries who set out to destroy the Established Order… yet were shown astonishing clemency by The Powers That Be. You know… like Marx, Hitler, Castro…?
“but we’re talking about someone who actively sought to rouse workers for their complete emancipation against the capitalists.”
Yes, because the stated goal is always the actual goal! Laugh. Sweet.
Norman, you wrote (with no reply button left, above):
“Why don’t you enlighten me?”
That’s a very familiar rhetorical sneer there, Norm. I’m not going to waste any more of the precious hours of my life laboring over the crafting of sacrilegious comments the great bulk of which Believers will skip over or deliberately misread in order to preserve their cherished beliefs. You’re “radical” and “dissident” to the extent that you question the things that “radicals” and “dissidents” are schooled (and allowed) to question, but, do you ever question who first schooled you in your “radical beliefs”? I mean, I think you and I can both agree that Believers in Chomsky-Style Radicalism, with their 9/11 Denialism, are being led down a particular path for a particular reason, right? Is it possible they’re not the only ones…?
Our Oldest Beliefs are the ones we cling to most tenaciously. This applies not only to the people we debate but to ourselves, as well. For example, I’ve always had a soft spot for John Lennon, but I can see quite clearly that his greatest hit, “Imagine”, could easily serve as the soundtrack to a commercial directed by George Soros. Did Lennon deliberately write a NWO anthem? Probably (i.e. I hope) not. But he lived within the same vast and dense Propaganda Bubble we all live in, and he questioned some of its tenets while swallowing others whole.
One day it hit me that I had to question everything I thought I knew… not just the things I felt comfortable questioning. But that has led me to posting highly unpopular anti-Clintonite/ anti-Obamaite comments in the heart of the virtual “Liberal” Community as well as posting comments questioning, for example, the absurdity of the Castro myth, in the heart of the “Radical” virtual community, too. Nothing but time-wasting efforts. Cognitive Inertia is a force to be reckoned with.
An intellectually curious person, with no brand allegiance to a particular football team in this arena, might ask, “Really? I’d be curious to see your info on that.” Many years ago I believed in the “Global Warming” trope. Someone I knew disagreed with it, so I asked for the info. Then I made a judgment based on my knowledge and experience regarding which “side” of the debate would profit most from lying.
Ditto with the Cold War relic of the “Apollo Space Program”. I was a total believer until someone showed me the first few fractals of logic and data that called it all into question; one close look at NASA’S own photo of the supposed LEM (which looks like it was assembled from spare parts in the neighbor’s garage, including foil and tar paper) is good for a real belly laugh if one isn’t a Believer type. There are Believers reading this who will jeer at that; they will mock and fume. I don’t give a dusty fuck.
See ya,
S
“Yes, because the stated goal is always the actual goal! Laugh. Sweet.”
Using this “logic”, if it can be called that, everyone is an agent of the “powers that be”. However, you ignore that the “powers that be” (the capitalists and their state) have fought Marxism bitterly for decades, with invasions (the imperialist attack against Bolshevik Russia, which sought to “strangle the Bolshevik infant in its cradle, as Churchill put it), war, economic strangulation, propaganda, an arms race and coups, but from this you’re somehow extracting a lesson about Marx being an agent of the people he provided a concrete systematic analysis of. Laugh. Sweet.
“Do you know anything about Karl’s admiration for the ideas of Charles Darwin, btw….?”
Which ideas of Darwin’s in particular? And why should we lament this? You don’t say; you just present Darwin as someone we’re supposed to dislike. Marx did celebrate Darwin’s theory of natural selection for its overthrow of teleology. Perhaps this is what you don’t like: it cuts into philosophical idealism and replaces it with a philosophical materialist explanation of the world. You’re starting to sound like a traditional right-wing populist of the nativist/religious sort. It’s no wonder that you prefer to look at shadows rather than basic structures of exploitation.
“Yet were shown astonishing clemency by The Powers That Be. You know… like Marx, Hitler, Castro…?”
Pretty despicable to throw Marx and Castro in with Hitler, but its a valid point – if it actually had any validity. Marx was shown “clemency” because he was living in England, which prided itself in being tolerant of dissidents. No doubt a lot of other dissidents were being shown similar “clemency”, as were people of your ideological take, which by your logic must mean that you’re being “nurtured at the very bosom of the oppressor” (yes, I know, it’s always someone else). He had been thrown out of Germany, however. Unless you want to claim that this expulsion was worked out as part of a ploy wherein the “powers that be” (German? English?) thought to themselves, “Hmmm…here’s someone we can use”, then your argument doesn’t have a leg to stand on, straight convoluted drivel. Hitler was shown clemency because the white nativist/populist reactionary forces in Germany were already in play, and he was riding the wave. Castro was going to be executed but was saved at the last minute by a sympathetic officer. He was the target of numerous assassination attempts by the CIA once he was in power, and Cuba was targeted for years with terrorism, biological warfare against its agriculture, and economic warfare. Put it this way: if he and Cuba hadn’t been targeted in this way, you’d be using that as evidence that he was useful to the “powers that be”, but since he and Cuba were targeted in this way, you…come to the exact same conclusion. This is what’s known in science as an unfalsifiable hypothesis: a proposition for which nothing can count against it. This makes it a worthless hypothesis.
“Yes, because the stated goal is always the actual goal! Laugh. Sweet.”
On this again, I should also mention that it cravenly ignores that many of Marx’s followers put this into actual practice – the Bolshies executed the Russian royal family and held the capitalists at gun point, while the Chinese communists booted out the comprador bourgeoisie and feudal landlord relations embodied in the form of Chiang Kai-Shek’s regime and its collaborators – and wasn’t simply putty to be molded into whatever shape the rulers desire as you snidely. You don’t have to LIKE what happened in Russia or China, you simply have to acknowledge that a class of privileged exploiters were forcibly ejected or put in front of a wall. This lineage of theory to action provides concrete examples of the stated goal being the actual goal. No surprise, really, when you consider that Marx hailed the Paris Commune and the Commundards as the first class-conscious revolutionary salvo of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and its state – an odd thing to celebrate if one supposes that the ruling classes who were terrified by this salvo saw Marx as a useful tool. The Russians and the Chinese heeded his call and made salvos of their own. But such points are lost on those who eschew class analysis in favor of moping about Darwin.
“Your latest comment is so full of weird logic that I can’t even begin to untangle it, and after this I’m done even trying.”
No, this describes how I felt about your post, with its weird as hell belief that Marxism is a capitalist ideology and conceptual framework.
“Uh… obviously? Che wasn’t a mole, Fidel was.”
Errr…but Che was more of the Marxist, and Marxism, according to you, is itself something conceived of and deployed in a “mole” role. Also, there’s no evidence whatsoever that Fidel was a mole. The US initially thought he was going to be just another bourgeois nationalist they could bend to their will; when they found out that he was more MARXIST than he had been letting on, the assassination attempts and terrorism commenced. Again, this doesn’t jive with your conception of Marxism as a Trojan Horse. If flies violently in the face of it.
“Che is the one who died. Difficult to comprehend? Yes, TPTB wouldn’t particularly care for any guerrilla who was genuinely fighting for Marxist principles, no. And my argument is that if Marx’s actual goals had been consonant with his stated goals (and lined up with the ideal of Marxist principles as stated), things would have been very different for both Marx and the world. It’s not a complicated paradox… it’s the paradox of The Fake.”
What Marx was WRITING was clearly dangerous to the bourgeoisie. Witness the revolutions inspired by his writings, and the fact that his analysis of capitalism provoked the invention of a new branch of economics in order to deny his contributions and steer it back to a pro-capitalist narrative that denied the exploitative core of capitalism that he systematically talked about. If you’re drawing a distinction between his writings and Marx the man, why obsess over the latter? You seem to shift the goal-posts whenever it’s expedient for your argument: when you want to deny that Marxism is the way for the workers to analyze the world, you point to Marx as the guy “coddled by the ruling class”; now that you point to Che the Marxist as a threat to the system, you talk about “Marxist ideals as stated” and (I’m presuming) how Che subscribed to them while Marx didn’t (even though Marx formulated them in the first place). You seem to be talking out of both sides of your mouth: one side saying “Don’t trust Marx or anything he said; he was coddled by the ruling class and his ideology was and is a tool in their hands”; the other side says “Che was a genuine believer in Marx’s principles, and was assassinated for his troubles by the ruling class.” The common theme spoken by both sides is that Marx the man was a phony, but your mouth seems to be confused about whether the CONTENT of what he spoke about is a threat to TPTB. You can’t seem to make up your mind on this score.
“Also: are you under the impression that the Bourgeoisie and The Industrialists are the same class? Because your latest comment seems to be using the terms interchangeably.”
I’m using the term to refer to the capitalist class (which can include also merchants, money capitalists – rentiers and money-lenders – as well as industrialists). I do realize that the term more properly refers to the urban middle class, but this is also largely aligned with the way I’m using the term, given that capitalism had its genesis in the urban centers and capitalists occupied a “middle” stratum between the aristocracy and poor city dwellers. The term has stuck even after the capitalists became the ruling class at the expense of the aristocracy.
“If you read Marx closely, you’ll find some very strange paradoxes in his arguments that can’t have derived from a failure of thought, since, as we know, he was a brilliant man. My claim is that he was a brilliant man who was working for The Industrialists to whom he was connected and that one of his projects was to alienate the Bourgeoisie from The Proletariat. If you read his essayistic “journalism” for the New York Tribune, you’ll spot not only strange tinges of anti-Proletariat Darwinism (“Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existences it breaks down than an earthquake regards the houses it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.”) but efforts to actually scare his Bourgeois readership re: the workers.”
This sounds precariously close to trolling. Otherwise, I think it’s you who’s confused about “bourgeoisie” and “industrialists”, and embarrassingly so. Also, quote-mining without context is worthless. That quote in the New York Tribune could easily be a description rather than a prescription. Marx could well be lamenting this “silent revolution”, but you don’t give any context even about what this “silent revolution” he’s referring to entails. Or he could be talking about a historical process that he sees as beyond the ken of subjective factors to alter but as entailing the objective forces of production, competition etc. From this small quote alone: who knows?
“I mentioned Marx’s erstwhile colleague Gottschalk’s very successful efforts to fuck up the semi-organized working class of the Cologne community Communist League… this is usually ascribed to Gottschalk’s ineptitude but I think the more likely reading is that Gottschalk set out to do exactly what he did.”
Right, you “think” the “more likely reading” is that he set out to do what he did. I don’t find this very compelling.
“Do you not think there were Management Class infiltrators in the American Labor Unions of the mid-20th century?”
Yes; none of them Marxists. But by your lights, even revolutionary states are simply “moles”, so I guess you’d throw everyone into the same bag.
“You think they were too stupid in the 19th century to use this effective technique?”
No. It doesn’t follow that Marx and his colleagues were among them.
“We are all born and bred by and in The Right and we are fed Rightist propaganda from the beginning of our thinking lives.”
Such as that Marxism is bunk, you mean? Because thats kind of been a huge thing in the US for many decades, and people were born in those decades. Maybe you think that the US is outside the realm of the Rightist’s control?
“You are a deeply-indoctrinated, lifestyle ideologue”
No, but this describes you very handily. You express to a tee the outlook of the petty-bourgeois individualist, crushed by the big bourgeoisie but unable to escape its conceptual terms, as evidenced by the fact that “solution” is a pipe-dream with no prospect of success under even the most favorable circumstances.
“with very fierce attachments to your Saints and Relics.”
AGAIN, a very handy description of you, with your fierce commitments to the saints and relics of petty-bourgeois idealism, individualism and evisceration of class analysis in favor of perpetual and omnipotent conspiratorial cartels.
“The mere suggestion that someone questions your ideological presets triggers you!”
That you choose one of the alt-right’s favorite taunts, perhaps as a humorous aside, only shows how utterly bourgeois, shatteringly alienated (and system-safe) and, I’m starting to suspect, chauvinistic your outlook really is.
“Your belief in Marx and “Communism” are no different from others’ beliefs in Jesus or Satan or the “free market”.”
I suppose that your professed lack of ideology puts you into the realm of something close to nihilism, then. You have no ideological take on what the masses should actually do other than to “wake up” – a prescription that you merely “hope” they’ll heed. And if they can’t spontaneously achieve that, they’re shit out of luck, but your own admission. That’s the “solution” you propose: more nihilism and aimless. What are you waiting for? Pleasure and hedonism await you, courtesy of TPTB that you think you “oppose”.
“Free-Thinkers (in a mass) are dangerous.”
But…but…Che was operating in a small guerrilla band. How could he, by your lights, have been dangerous, especially given that his belief in Marx and Communism were “no different to others’ belief in Jesus or Satan”?
“You are the opposite of dangerous. You are perfectly under control and giving all the “proper” responses.””
So the proper responses range all the way from denouncing capitalism to not denouncing it. Gotcha. With this sort of concrete analysis that you provide, the working class has a bright future. Oh, wait. Not it doesn’t. It has more aimless wandering with no prospect of emancipation. At this point, you might as well just say that you think Trump prescribes to Marxism.
“A million of you functioning together in a lifestyle bloc merely help to maintain current conditions.”
But when a million of us (well, not me personally, but many others) knock down a bourgeois state and get invaded by capitalist imperialists, we’re…still merely helping to maintain current conditions. Hmmmm. I think you logic needs a bit of tweaking here. One things’s for certain: you sure have a lot more faith in the invincibility of capitalism and the capitalists than the revolutionary workers of past struggles did. When they do succeed in conquering state power, all you can do is mope, perhaps resentful that this moping has not yet conjured up a single revolution or even tangible benefit to the working class. All you can do is snipe from the sidelines at those who HAVE succeeded, pontificating about who’s on the secret pay because they haven’t been assassinated, and offer nothing whatsoever in the way of a concrete strategic plan for the working class to overthrow capitalism.
“Whereas a few of my type (the intellectually deviant), together or apart, are absolutely irrelevant. Which doesn’t bother me… I’m not status-hungry.”
Again, showing up your petty-bourgeois outlook: you project those things that you think are important (status) and boast about your supposed virtues (you’re “intellectually deviant”, yet admit that you’re “absolutely irrelevant”, “together or not” with other “intellectual deviants”. Well done: you’ve just admitted that you have nothing of value to say, which calls into question your claim to being an “intellectual deviant” in any relevant sense). None of this “bothers” you, however – and why should it? The object of your bother, as you stated, is your personal posturing over status rather than your failure to help build a mass movement.
“My theory about Marx (and Castro and Jesus and Obama, et al) is not necessarily right… it could be totally wrong (it’s probably half-wrong, as these things usually go)! I’m not attached to it or any particular theory or idea; I’m merely trying to make sense of what I see as consistent patterns of internal contradictions in many of the Guiding Narratives we’re fed.”
Fair enough, but my point here is that not being “attached”, as you put it, to any idea is a sure way of having no position that could possibly help the working class.
“Well, as we know, it’s the dance between the few at the very top and the billions at the very bottom that actually means anything.”
True, but what is a dance without some idea about how to do it? Maybe the masses are dancing the wrong dance (right now, they certainly are), but they still need to turn their dance into a fight. You profess no “attachment” to any ideas. This intellectual nihilism is no intellectual contribution at all. You seem to relish your individualism and separation from the masses above all else, and refuse to be part of any “dance” because you view all dances as being coordinated in any case by the few at the very top. Your proud anti-ideology has led you straight into an ideology of capitulation and self-glorification (but do feel free to bestow the masses with your brilliant theoretical insights, “intellectual deviant” who “isn’t bothered” that he’s “utterly irrelevant” because he doesn’t care for “status”).
“Also, who said that “Marx” was going to lead the “serfs”?”
Well I certainly never said that anyone did. Ah, the beloved Strawman maneuver. Yawn.
“Also, who said that “Marx” was going to lead the “serfs”?”
No one did, so why bring him up a dead guy in the first place? That’s my point. Someone who has READ Marx might well lead the serfs. If that’s what you’re disputing, then be clearer next time.
@Sorry Not Buying It
“You don’t have to LIKE what happened in Russia or China, you simply have to acknowledge that a class of privileged exploiters were forcibly ejected or put in front of a wall. ”
Naive reading. As if all capitalists, across all national boundaries, represent one mutually chummy collective of like-minded entities: would you be shocked if Apple were delighted if a calamity befell Microsoft? Can you imagine any circumstance under which Warren Buffet might be delighted to see George Soros put in front of a wall? I can.
This generally naive reading of yours… this sort of Sunday School Effect… like children reading from The Bible… is the problem. It’s not natural… I think you’ve been trained NOT to read between the lines… to take a text’s surface as Gospel.
The real question would be: in what way did Marx fuck up or in some way hinder the goals of his sponsors? Ask his Uncle.
Re: “Castro was going to be executed but was saved at the last minute by a sympathetic officer.”
Yes, more scenes from the legend of Fidel’s charmed life! You really eat that stuff up, yes? It’s quite romantic.
“Put it this way: if he and Cuba hadn’t been targeted in this way, you’d be using that as evidence that he was useful to the “powers that be”, but since he and Cuba were targeted in this way, you…come to the exact same conclusion. ”
Thanks for inventing a position for me, then refuting it! Laugh. But my feeling is: I’d believe in the Fidel myth if Fidel had been deposed or assassinated (as happened to all the actual mortals like Chavez… or Che)… or if maybe Fidel had managed to raise a cadre of Revolutionaries capable of taking over when he got a wee bit too old. I mean, what else could Cuba be CERTAIN to produce, had the project been what it claimed, if not a cadre of Young Revolutionaries prepared to take the helm? The fact that Fidel’s feeble old brother stepped in, instead, is quite a fucking red flag if you’re not a starry-eyed Believer. Big IF.
“As if all capitalists, across all national boundaries, represent one mutually chummy collective of like-minded entities: would you be shocked if Apple were delighted if a calamity befell Microsoft?”
Naive reading, as though capitalists didn’t share certain fundamental class interests related to preventing the workers anywhere from rising up and threatening capitalism more generally by spreading class-based understandings with an explicitly internationalist call (it’s not for nothing that the bourgeoisie has often referred to Marxist revolutionary politics as a “virus” that must be “inoculated” by force against or reformist accommodations with labor). “Workers of the WORLD, unite!” was Marx’s cry, not “Workers of [particular company or country] unite”. The workers in the former British Empire were part of the world. The workers in England were part of the world – and the rulers there would have met a less than happy fate if the English proletariat had succeeded in carrying through Marx’s stated aim. The British bourgeoisie had to scramble and make many concessions in order to PREVENT a more revolutionary outcome being forced on them by the workers. The British ruling class sent an expeditionary force to intervene on behalf of the Russian bourgeoisie and reactionary classes that the Bolsheviks were OVERTHROWING, which flies smack bang in the face of what you’re implying. Again, such points are lost on people who have little inclination to understand things in terms of class relations or that there are simultaneously contradictions and convergences within the bourgeoisie. Witness that in the Middle East and North Africa, the US had overthrown and is in the process of overthrowing economically-nationalist states, and these were/are “merely” states with no Marxist aspirations (they stand for anti-imperialism and a generic type of “socialism”, not overthrowing basic class relations, which are the focus of Marxist revolutionary politics). These regimes cut off or diminish opportunities for imperialist capital to make inroads; the Marxist vision is even more terrifying for the imperialist bourgeoisie, who must contend not only with the possibility of being ejected or denied opportunities for reinvestment of their capital in a particular country, but of a socialist system that pointedly denounces their existence and inspires other toilers to do likewise.
“Can you imagine any circumstance under which Warren Buffet might be delighted to see George Soros put in front of a wall? I can.”
Me too, and so could Marx when he talked about the bourgeoisie being a “hostile band of brothers”. It’s also irrelevant to your point because you utterly ignore the flip-side: convergence of class interests centered around preventing disturbances to the system of accumulation in which these capitalists are embedded.
“This generally naive reading of yours… this sort of Sunday School Effect… like children reading from The Bible… is the problem. It’s not natural… I think you’ve been trained NOT to read between the lines… to take a text’s surface as Gospel.”
If only you could take the blinders off, get off your smug high horse, and apply this same logic to yourself, you might be half-way to a cogent argument, but instead, given your aggressive lack of class analysis or proper placement of the capitalists within the capitalist system, these things wash right over you. You seem to have very little grasp of what imperialist interventions are even actually FOR, the class interests they represent, and why they are necessary for the imperialist bourgeoisie. Indeed, you seem fundamentally confused about a great many things.
“The real question would be: in what way did Marx fuck up or in some way hinder the goals of his sponsors? Ask his Uncle.”
Well, everyone “fucks up”. This is meaningless unless you ascribe some god-like attribution to Marx. Please try to do better than bashing together contingent events and human mistakes into a mangled narrative. You’ll accrue fewer contradictions along the way. The story you seem to be telling is indeed convoluted garbage, right-wing detritus dumped on the heads of the working class to convince them that Marx isn’t their friend and that they’d best look elsewhere…like in some magical spontaneous “decision” to “stop being the system”. At this point you might as well just admit that your vision extends to nothing more “radical” than having Ron Paul as president. We’ll be back to square one in no time at all if your “solution” was the one dangled in front of the “serfs” you ostensibly want to liberate. Heck, maybe YOU’RE the bourgeois set-up? After all, no one’s assassinated YOU.
“Re: “Castro was going to be executed but was saved at the last minute by a sympathetic officer.””
“Yes, more scenes from the legend of Fidel’s charmed life! You really eat that stuff up, yes? It’s quite romantic.”
Talk about a commitment to worthless retorts! (“charmed life”? This is real life, not a Hollywood film. Castro’s rule was in reality – as all Cubans know – systematically undermined for decades by US instigation of anti-government groups, espionage, and economic warfare directed against the island, all designed to make him and his revolution LOOK BAD).
“But my feeling is: I’d believe in the Fidel myth if Fidel had been deposed or assassinated (as happened to all the actual mortals like Chavez… or Che)…”
Errr…Che was a hard-line Marxist who felt that Cuba was veering off the correct path. He was an admirer of Stalin and Mao, two other hard-line Marxists who you want to pretend were merely representatives of another “Microsoft”. So you’re saying that “the powers that be” “allowed” HIM to be killed, even though he was MORE hostile to the capitalist system than Castro and MORE in tune with Marx’s basic points. But if he’d succeeded in Bolivia, you’d hold that up as evidence that he was in fact “allowed to live” by “the powers that be”. Those powers that be sure are omnipotent, aren’t they? If they try to assassinate someone (Castro), it’s only because they want us to BELIEVE that they’re trying to assassinate someone. You ascribe no possibility of THEM “fucking up”, as though they don’t belong to the category of humanity ( a nasty category, no doubt, but certainly not endowed with any superhuman abilities). This is par for the course when you eschew class analysis and think of things simply in terms of shadow men controlling everything, pacing everyone precisely where they want them to be and controlling events with perfect forecasting.
“or if maybe Fidel had managed to raise a cadre of Revolutionaries capable of taking over when he got a wee bit too old.”
Who are you to say who’s “too old”?
“I mean, what else could Cuba be CERTAIN to produce, had the project been what it claimed, if not a cadre of Young Revolutionaries prepared to take the helm?”
What’s with this simplistic go-to assumption about the revolutionaries having to be “young” in order for them to be genuinely revolutionary? The reason that a leader might be old, as understood by communists, is that he/she may need to stay in power for a long time because he/she has embodies the correct political line through the accumulated experience of “concentrating” the experience of the masses by extracting their lessons and formulating a proper revolutionary line to be transmitted back to the masses. Now, that might not be something you subscribe to, or it might not work in practice, but the degree of revolutionary fervor embodied in the leadership need have NO relation to their youth or lack thereof. You don’t assign leadership roles to someone – let alone that at the helm – based on their youth. You assign them based on how firmly and concretely they can judge the situation, form a revolutionary summation, etc, and this is gauged by their lifetime of work in revolutionary politics and organization. Again, there’s no requirement for YOU to agree with this system, but it’s how communists have conceived of it. Your fetish for “youth” is simply a petty-bourgeoisie confusion about the nature of leadership.
The fact that Fidel’s feeble old brother stepped in, instead, is quite a fucking red flag if you’re not a starry-eyed Believer. Big IF.”
The only red flag here is that Cuba has serious deficiencies as a communist state (in the form, among other things, of an over-reliance on paternalistic figureheads). But hang on: you’re pointing to Cuba’s LACK of Marxist revolutionary zeal (and hence being “not really” a serious target of US imperialism) while ALSO trying to convince us that Marx was an agent of the bourgeoisie? Let’s look at a different opposite case: Mao and China. Mao did raise a revolutionary cadre to take over after his demise. So by YOUR logic, this must mean that Mao – champion of MARX and anti-imperialism, who developed the theoretical framework of Marxism (rather than petulantly dismissing it) and who has been denounced up and down by the bourgeoisie and its academics, writers and historians for having been a Marxist leader – was the real deal. Of course, you won’t entertain THAT notion with a ten-foot pole, because it would require you to stop bleating about Marx being a bourgeois set-up (and of course, since Mao wasn’t assassinated, this must “by definition” means that he wasn’t genuine). Also, you point about Castro not being assassinated is bizarre given that he was the target of many assassination attempts. Failure to carry out a plan doesn’t negate the existence of that plan. Your sniveling scoreboard of who gets assassinated and who doesn’t, and using it as the panacea for judging who deserves their “myth” to be believed, is a pretty dreary undertaking and certainly meager gruel for the working class. Ironically, it’s another symptom of the times: shattering alienation, a retreat into anti-reason, and a fetish for individualism (hence no systemic analysis).
@Sorry Not Buying It (can’t find any more reply buttons)
Your latest comment is so full of weird logic that I can’t even begin to untangle it, and after this I’m done even trying.
“So you’re saying that “the powers that be” “allowed” HIM [Che] to be killed, even though he was MORE hostile to the capitalist system than Castro and MORE in tune with Marx’s basic points.”
Uh… obviously? Che wasn’t a mole, Fidel was. Che is the one who died. Difficult to comprehend? Yes, TPTB wouldn’t particularly care for any guerrilla who was genuinely fighting for Marxist principles, no. And my argument is that if Marx’s actual goals had been consonant with his stated goals (and lined up with the ideal of Marxist principles as stated), things would have been very different for both Marx and the world. It’s not a complicated paradox… it’s the paradox of The Fake.
Also: are you under the impression that the Bourgeoisie and The Industrialists are the same class? Because your latest comment seems to be using the terms interchangeably.
If you read Marx closely, you’ll find some very strange paradoxes in his arguments that can’t have derived from a failure of thought, since, as we know, he was a brilliant man. My claim is that he was a brilliant man who was working for The Industrialists to whom he was connected and that one of his projects was to alienate the Bourgeoisie from The Proletariat. If you read his essayistic “journalism” for the New York Tribune, you’ll spot not only strange tinges of anti-Proletariat Darwinism (“Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existences it breaks down than an earthquake regards the houses it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.”) but efforts to actually scare his Bourgeois readership re: the workers. I mentioned Marx’s erstwhile colleague Gottschalk’s very successful efforts to fuck up the semi-organized working class of the Cologne community Communist League… this is usually ascribed to Gottschalk’s ineptitude but I think the more likely reading is that Gottschalk set out to do exactly what he did. Do you not think there were Management Class infiltrators in the American Labor Unions of the mid-20th century? You think they were too stupid in the 19th century to use this effective technique?
My premise is that The Very Powerful do what they have to in order to protect and increase that power, and if they’re not averse to murder (or even genocide), they’re certainly not averse to subterfuge. In any case, let’s just call The Industrialists/ The Super-Powerful… “The Right”. I don’t think there’s been any point in living memory that one faction or dynasty of The Right has not been in power in the Industrialized world or in any of its satellite territories. We are all born and bred by and in The Right and we are fed Rightist propaganda from the beginning of our thinking lives. We are indoctrinated in such a way as to minimize the amount of resistance we might offer… this is even truer as technology develops subtler, more powerful tools. The Serfy objects of indoctrination prior to Mass Media were much freer thinkers, I think.
You are a deeply-indoctrinated, lifestyle ideologue with very fierce attachments to your Saints and Relics. The mere suggestion that someone questions your ideological presets triggers you! Your belief in Marx and “Communism” are no different from others’ beliefs in Jesus or Satan or the “free market”. Free-Thinkers (in a mass) are dangerous. You are the opposite of dangerous. You are perfectly under control and giving all the “proper” responses. A million of you functioning together in a lifestyle bloc merely help to maintain current conditions. Whereas a few of my type (the intellectually deviant), together or apart, are absolutely irrelevant. Which doesn’t bother me… I’m not status-hungry.
My theory about Marx (and Castro and Jesus and Obama, et al) is not necessarily right… it could be totally wrong (it’s probably half-wrong, as these things usually go)! I’m not attached to it or any particular theory or idea; I’m merely trying to make sense of what I see as consistent patterns of internal contradictions in many of the Guiding Narratives we’re fed.
Not attached to any theories, but what I am attached to is being able to Think and discuss the results. But I can’t so much as mention a Heresy about (e.g.) Hillary Clinton or Karl Marx without enraging their respective Believers and subsequently spending my time engaged in the shit work of correcting sloppy readings of my premise or just dealing with the same old boilerplate “defenses”, which are usually merely product descriptions: I attack Hillary, her followers counter-attack that Hillary is “for women and minorities!” I attack Marx, his followers counter-attack with the lyrics to revolutionary marching songs… which is proof of nothing. Interesting discussions are rare. Nothing changes.
Well, as we know, it’s the dance between the few at the very top and the billions at the very bottom that actually means anything. All this talk occurring in the fragile realm of the sliver of the lower-middle is irrelevant anyway.
There’s an interesting book you should read, by Jonathan Sperber, but you have to read the contradictions it highlights as telling (as in Real Life), rather than anomalous (as in hagiography), to get the most out of it. “Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life”. It’s just one door in.
Also, read Marx’s collected quasi-journalistic writings for the bourgeois American newspaper the New York Tribune… in some passages, Marx’s project (alienating the bourgeoisie from the proletariat by scaring his readership… the bourgeoisie) is quite striking. But here’s a quote regarding the Sperber book:
“In a speech to the Cologne Democratic Society in August 1848, Marx rejected revolutionary dictatorship by a single class as “nonsense”—an opinion so strikingly at odds with the views Marx had expressed only six months earlier in the Communist Manifesto that later Marxist-Leninist editors of his speeches mistakenly refused to accept its authenticity—and over twenty years later, at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Marx also dismissed any notion of a Paris Commune as “nonsense.”
Agree with my point or not (NOT, I know), I’ve done quite a bit of concentrated reading on this particular matter for more than five years. The stuff I’d already read… much earlier, in school… I had to throw out. I had to start from scratch with an Adult’s life-experiences behind me as I approached the texts.
“No doubt a lot of other dissidents were being shown similar “clemency”, as were people of your ideological take, which by your logic must mean that you’re being “nurtured at the very bosom of the oppressor” (yes, I know, it’s always someone else). ”
If you’re suggesting that I come from a family of wealthy industrialists (like Marx himself)… nope. Your “logic” regarding my logic is flawed by your need to win a comment thread battle. I was far from nurtured by the oppressor: I was demonized at birth as a non-white Serf. Next…?
Re: “Clemency”: I have not known any historical cases in which real “enemies of the state” weren’t summarily executed or jailed for life or so thoroughly smeared that they were utterly neutralized. Name one and then let’s have a CLOSE look at the project.
Nobodies like us are pretty safe. Controlled Opposition like Chomsky (or Amy Goodman): safe. Blackwashers like Alex Jones: on the payroll. Michael Parenti is just marginalized enough to survive. But the list of people who fell afoul of Power and got buried (or were never found) is very, very long and bloody. So many of them are framed as accidents or suicides. Do you really think that Aaron Swartz, after kicking TPTB ass re: CISPA, hung himself over a minor court case?
Anyone with a massive platform who supposedly speaks Truth to Power who isn’t being seriously hindered (and then dead) comes under suspicion. That, my friend, is Realpolitikal Common Sense. It’s not for schoolboys and their various giddy passions… it’s a thing for Cynics and Adults and I am both.
“There’s an interesting book you should read, by Jonathan Sperber, but you have to read the contradictions it highlights as telling (as in Real Life), rather than anomalous (as in hagiography), to get the most out of it. “Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life”. It’s just one door in.”
Contradictions abound in all areas of life and across all ages, and will persist for all of human existence. Marx’s contradictions are telling – of a man living in a particular historical context. Acknowledging this, however, should not commit me to buying into your flights of fancy painting Marx’s focus on class relations and conflict as being conducive to making him loved by the bourgeoisie, an unhinged and preposterous notion if ever there was one. If the bourgeoisie are as farseeing, cunning and jealous of their interests as you allude to, they’d surely know that Marx’s focus on class didn’t only pose a potential threat to their business rivals (at home and abroad) but also to their own dominions given the all-encompassing breadth of his critique. They’d therefore have been wary of knowingly cultivating this virus as something to unleash lest it bite closer to home. That’s just obvious. only right-wing detritus gets in the way of appreciating that.
Your choice of “Apple vs Microsoft” to illustrate divergence of interest between different capitalists was comically ill-conceived, by the way. Both of these are American enterprises, so for your analogy to be useful, we would have to imagine Apple somehow unleashing “Marxism” upon Microsoft. Obviously, these companies do compete with one another, but through the mechanisms of capitalist accumulation and marketing, not by fostering social revolution and calling for those mechanisms to be done away with. If there was a Marxist-inspired revolution in the US, how in the hell do you imagine Microsoft containing the harm to Apple? If this isn’t what you’re going for by mentioning Apple and Microsoft, why bring it up in the first place? (note that neither “Microsoft” nor “Apple” have ever actually funded or unleashed “Marxism” against one another in any way). Also, please explain why, when during the midst of the Russian Civil War, the British imperialists along with a dozen other capitalist states intervened on the side of those fighting those inspired by Marxist ideals?
One could imagine a national bourgeoisie, or even an individual company, nurturing an ideology to spring upon an extra-national competitor, but if that ideology can’t be AIMED because its central feature is its generality – if it explicitly calls for the total overthrow of the system in which BOTH bourgeoisies operate, AND calls for the workers of ALL countries to unite against these bourgeoisies and the conditions upon which they depend – then your allusion becomes less than worthless except in the sense of showing up how your understanding of thing has actually reverted, and to a pro-bourgeois (i.e. alienated, individualist and class-analysis lacking) perspective at that. Your reduction of Marxism to Marx the man, and the evisceration of all else, is clearly getting in the way of your evaluation of the former.
Thank you! And brilliant, by the way, each and everyone of your comments, down to the last!
@Norm
“Now what am I supposed to think, Steven? ”
I should only hope that your curiosity might be piqued, Norm. None of the sentences I quote are supposed to represent the entirety of the case I think can be made. Just food for thought. Nothing more or less.
Steven,
Quotes are fine if either you yourself contextualize them so that your reader can get a fix on the point(s) you are aiming at by means of them, or they very obviously and logically merge as elements in an ongoing exchange as supports for some contention being upheld.
In this respect, your allusion to Darwin and your two quotes fell well short of your intended mark.
And by the way, if Marx admires Darwin, it is exactly as Sorry, Not Buying It put it, that Darwin’s theory dispensed once and for all with the metaphysical mystification of teleology in both of the disciplines of natural and human history, and not, as you seem to have wanted to imply, because he understood it could be leaned upon as a perverse rationalization to justify the brutal neglect and oppression of the working class in the name of profits. To insist otherwise betrays either a willfully malicious distortion or an ignorant incomprehension of the spirit of what Marx actually committed to print, a deeply humane concern for the plight of all of the wretched victims of capitalism, without distinction, among women, men and children.
And this is what I now think: Sorry, Not Buying It very accurately lays bare all — (I can’t think of any he might have missed) — of the contradictions evident in your commentary.
If you are serious about wanting to escape the snares of your childhood and ongoing indoctrination, an indoctrination to which we have all been and continue to be equally subjected, you should pay him (or her?) some heed. I sincerely hope that his effort to disabuse you of a few of your very manifest delusions might in this respect, and out of respect, be repaid.
Regards,
–N
Norm, like far too many comment thread warriors, you make the classic errors of A) making common cause with the first bog-standard (and doctrinaire) commenter who agrees with you and B) you pad your arguments with spurious appeals to sentiment… very much like The Normals who shut down discussions about Sandy Hook by claiming any such discussion is “offensive/ outrageous/ intolerable” because “children died!” But what if no children died? Which question being the point. Too bad if it’s just too, too much for you to bear, Norm! You’ll get through it.
So your embarrassingly mawkish “To insist otherwise betrays either a willfully malicious distortion or an ignorant incomprehension of the spirit of what Marx actually committed to print, a deeply humane concern for the plight of all of the wretched victims of capitalism” … doesn’t do anything to dispel the question: was Marx’s project what he claimed it to be? “Malicious” or not, that’s my question.
I’m not interested in whatever juvenile banners you choose to drape yourself in. I don’t believe in your saint and I’ve acquired a fair amount of textual evidence, in five-ish years, to support my skepticism… not regarding his “goodness” (who gives a fuck?) but regarding his actual project. While you were gobbling down the glorious advertizing (propaganda) for the work (like most), I was reading the work. And much else. Match Marx’s “deeply humane concern for the plight of all of the wretched victims of capitalism” to some of BHO golden speechifying and you’ve got a great big bundle of wondrous talk, Norm. Throw in some wonderful talk from Gandhi and Mother T while you’re at it, too. And please don’t forget the Pope.
[ I suppose Marx for you is like Abraham Lincoln for The Normals; well, guess what? Laugh. Read carefully through creepy old Abraham Lincoln’s voluminous writings… the primary sources are astonishing in that they are freely available. They don’t need to be hidden, because most people don’t or can’t read, or won’t read in a direction that takes them away from The Happy Place (insert smiley).]
I spent two months arguing with gullible, star-struck Clintonites who know nothing about the Clintons and I’m not about to make the same mistake with a couple of soi disant Communists over Marx. Great slogans you’ve got, though! Those slogans plus a nickle (as we used to say) will buy you a nice cold cup of Kool-Aid.
Here’s another question: do you really think the “color revolutions” are a new trick? Vicky Nuland bragged about funneling 5 bil into the Ukraine project… how many millions were funneled to the Bolsheviks? And by whom? Those aren’t even entirely unanswerable questions… but they may as well be, right?
Whatever. I’m back to more interesting things now… I’ll leave you to your “violent revolution” (just don’t forget: you’re going to need a Capitalist to finance it)…
S
Bye, bye, Steven. I’ll miss you.
I’ll be sure to keep your advice about financing in mind, but above all, the criteria by which you have reliably and habitually come to differentiate between authentic and inauthentic revolutionaries, that only the murdered ones were ever truly worthy of being followed, leaving all who yet live or have died of natural causes deserving of only contempt and mistrust, for somewhere in this prescription of yours, it’s almost as if an irony was lodged, as well as an admission on your part that maybe, just maybe, the way forward might indeed entail having to confront a ruling class that does not scruple to murder. So you see, in one respect at least, it’s almost as though we saw eye to eye.
–N
I’m done with the topic of this flamewar, not the OffGuardian, Norm! You’ll see me commenting on other threads, I’m sure.
Wow, talk about a sulky retort! Naively, I actually wasn’t expecting that, but I have to say that I’m impressed in how easily you’ve given up. I noticed that you didn’t address a single thing I wrote in my last couple of posts. You just threw a tantrum where you proclaimed that you have “more interesting” things to do than to be engaged in a debate with “a couple of soi disant Communists over Marx”. But..but…I thought you were hear to disabuse us of our erroneous notions about Marx? Could please tell us what you have in mind that’s “more interesting” than that, given your admitted “irrelevance” and intellectual nihilism, and concession that “probably half” of what you’ve said is “wrong”?
“Great slogans you’ve got, though! Those slogans plus a nickle (as we used to say) will buy you a nice cold cup of Kool-Aid.”
Again, you whip out your demonstrably nonsensical and delusional retort about Marx’s project being confined to the realm of “slogans”, as though a momentous revolution inspired by Marx’s ideas hadn’t taken place in China. The Chinese masses didn’t experience Marx’s project as mere “slogans”; they experienced it through years of bitter class struggle, social transformation and by absorbing imperialism’s and reaction’s bullets, indifferent to whether YOU might pontificate about it from you comfy chair in an air-conditioned office in the First World. By your own logic, wouldn’t the Chinese masses have been correct in calling you a paid-for phony, given that many Chinese had died in this struggle against imperialism, while you haven’t? You seem to have a lot of hatred for actual revolutions that actually happened and a lot of love for those that have haven’t (and, I hate to break it to you: never will). Again, you don’t have to like what happened in China (I suspect that you actively hate it, either through jealousy or simple contempt for mass struggle; either motivation aligns neatly with your your divorced-from-the-masses, individualist petty-bourgeois outlook). You simply have to acknowledge that what transpired there and elsewhere throws a wrench in your bleating.
“No. Sooner or later, if sufficient numbers balk and disengage, the police, the military, and the judiciary are mobilized against the dissidence, and then boycotts as such, just like strikes or even the wrong government being elected, can be counter-boycotted by the establishment, as exemplified by “factory closures, flights of money abroad, hoarding of necessities, inflationary price rises,” and so on, exactly as is happening in Venezuela and as has happened time and again in history.”
Doing that to Venezuela is one thing… but a paralyzing, long-term, nation-wide walk-out at the very heart of the Empire is something very different, I think. In any case, any blanket retaliation They could mount against people striking/ boycotting/ opting out They could just as soon (or much sooner) unleash against your violence-based solution as well. Of course, either way, one couldn’t expect Them going without a fight. But being that Their military (domestic and externalized) consists overwhelmingly of Serfs, you see, the crux is always going to be: how many Serfs can you enlighten enough to stop acting against their own greater interests? The King is not the King by himself. The King is a wizened pantomime head atop a massive body of conscripted Serfs. Just like Money itself (the spiritual embodiment of The System), it’s a game that only works because we all agree to play it. Fiendishly fundamental paradox.
Why do you suppose the heliocentric model was a heresy so severe that it could get its believers burned at the stake a little more than a few centuries ago? Belief is the key. Perception is everything. We’re each encased in many thick layers of Belief that They invest a large chunk of Their resources into building around us. Belief is clearly even more at the root of Their power than Their armies, because Their armies wouldn’t exist without it.
Hi Steven,
I’ll briefly address both of your comments here:
You write:
“…he’s not really arguing against the effectiveness of the concept I propose, he’s arguing against the concept as it might be applied within the range of certain limits: how many Serfs and for how long.”
Actually, he very much is arguing against the idea that the ‘system’ can be challenged beyond a few cosmetic changes on the expectation that the establishment will not ‘react’ with the instruments of violent repression that are already in their hands,i.e., the police, the army, the air force, and the navy.
That’s the lesson, for example, to be drawn from Chile, the reason why that ‘peaceful by-the-ballot revolution’ failed (to quote Harman):
And do note that in Chile in 1970 and thereabouts, it was no longer a matter of the serfs being in sufficient numbers aware enough “to stop acting against their own greater interests.”
The problem was that they failed to take into account the possibility of a violent counter-revolution by those who yet held “real” power in Chile, i.e., the bourgeois generals and police chiefs and magistrates and court judges and the owners of the means of production and distribution.
And indeed, to quote you: “ I think. In any case, any blanket retaliation They could mount against people striking/ boycotting/ opting out They could just as soon (or much sooner) unleash against your violence-based solution as well.” Yes, and that is the point, isn’t it. Therefore, that particular “violence” absolutely must be taken into account by the serfs if they hope to achieve their ends.
You write:
“. . . the crux is always going to be: how many Serfs can you enlighten enough to stop acting against their own greater interests? The King is not the King by himself. The King is a wizened pantomime head atop a massive body of conscripted Serfs.”
Yes (and no). And you will recall, contra E.N.O., for whom the “how” is apparently irrelevant, I wrote that to the contrary, the “How” is absolutely crucial. It’s called organization and proselytizing.” Revolution, if it is to happen, will require a variety of organized efforts, not the least of which will be “education,” the sort of thing here being undertaken by Offguardian, as but one instance of what will need to happen on a widespread and concerted basis until the Serfs begin to understand their predicament in sufficient numbers to be able to do something about it. (And as for the ‘no’ in this part of my reply: The King is no pantomime head. He is a ruling class, highly organized and occupying all of the heights of ‘our’ institutions, both public and private, as well as all government bureaucracies, both repressive and administrative.)
You write:
“Well, you’re not going to like this, but I never believed in the concept or intention of Marxism. Karl Marx, from the Ruling Class, who was nurtured at the very bosom of the Oppressor? Another clever illusion. In our never-ending hunger for heroes, we are too often duped.”
You mistake “reading” Marx for hero worship. And judging from your brief and dismissive comment, either you have read and misunderstood what the content of his analysis is about, or you haven’t really read Marx. (For my take on what the old man is about in a nutshell, see here and here — and do note that I interpret Marx as being less prescriptive about what the fix for capital needs to be than being about demonstrating why capital is inherently a crisis ridden economic system.)
You write:
“No movement is possible without leader(s). A movement of Serfs will need to be led by a Serf.”
A contradiction in terms: a “movement” without leaders is impossible. But even you sense this by asserting that the movement of Serfs will need to be led by a (sic) Serf.
So you understand that you can’t have group action without some kind of coordinating activity, and given that humans don’t communicate by telepathy, something akin to an array of coordinating committees issuing orders to cadres tasked with well-defined objectives according to an overall plan of action formulated as ‘policy’ is necessary. You can’t have the kind of mass action that you have in mind without leadership, not as a cult, but as a practical necessity.
Engels, who is not a demiurge of revolution, has some interesting things to say about the aversion that I’ve noticed to be rather prevalent among Americans and that you yourself put here manifest, but that he addresses as also being a particular penchant among so-called anarchists: On Authority
Regards,
–N
P.S. I would have liked to go into greater detail but for being pressed for time. Hopefully, I managed to get the gist of what I wanted to say across to you.
Norm!
We could go around and around on this, and that would serve no purpose… we simply fundamentally disagree on a few points. But that’s no problem as long as we’re not working together! Laugh.
But I’d like to clear this one up: the last thing I believe in is the possibility of “changing The System from within”. Certainly not in ‘peaceful by-the-ballot revolution’. But I also don’t think you’ve shown, really, that The System (in the US, say) can somehow continue to control/ oppress anything if no Serfs continue, internally, to support it. The “King” is a pantomime head because “he” is powerless (in every sense) without Serfs as agents asserting the King’s will upon other Serfs. Kings aren’t magical beings… yet. In a hundred years maybe they’ll each carry a Special Button in a fancy briefcase for manifesting Kingly wishes without Serfs having to do the dirty work. As of today, however, Real Power is still based on a trick of mass psychology requiring only counter-psychology to neutralize it.
Re: leaders: it’s more than a matter of education and organization. There is a thing called Charisma and it’s essential to the aiming of the energies of the masses to a focal point. Prospective Serf Leaders with Charisma keep getting themselves killed or discredited, strangely.
And I’ve read quite a bit of Marx (that close relative of the founders of the Philips Dutch Electronics Giant; that scion not of the Bourgeoisie but of Industrial Oligarchs) and I’ve read a bit of Lamarck; of the two, Lamarck, for me, is the most worthy of reconsideration and the least deserving of suspicion. I think the Americans you’re thinking of who aren’t amenable to Marx’s avuncular input are against what they assume KM represents, but I’d say they’ve been mislead. Not that I want to get into all that here and end up in another swashbuckling thread (like I did re: Castro). I just think that there are Alternative Readings, available, for all and every of the texts that we have been raised to believe were Sacrosanct. Call me Heretic… but only because I see the Devil’s footprints nearly everywhere (… and for any JudeoChristianites reading this: sorry! Only a metaphor…!)
erratum: “misled”
Well, we agree and don’t agree. Power as inhering in psychological operations has to do with indoctrination, inculturation, education and propaganda. That certainly is one facet of it, and we both agree that any way forward must take that aspect of social control into account and attempt to devise appropriate ideological counter-measures. That’s where argument and counter-education and counter-information have a role to play in any strategy of resistance.
But ‘power,’ social control, isn’t all just what exists and plays out in the realms of the ideological or cultural.
Institutions matter, i.e., organizations implying varying degrees of disciplinary adherence to assigned tasks make the difference between group actions that are effective and those that aren’t.
At any rate, he state, in the effectiveness of its organizational structures, is resistant to both external and internal ideological disruptions, and its repressive arms in the form of the military, the police and the judiciary need to be taken into account every bit as much as the reality of the purely ideological dimensions of the ruling elite’s power. This is the point that I am making.
If progressives and activists think they can impose the change they want without having to factor that issue into their calculations, good luck to them.
The system, however, exists by virtue of its monopoly on violence. Until this monopoly is somehow subverted, expect mass murder of innocents worldwide to continue just as it has from the very dawn of this thing we call capitalism.
Furthermore, the state as it exists will fight for its survival by all means available to it, violent repression having always been the mainstay of its supremacy.
And you think people can just opt out? What to make of the phenomenon of imperialism, then, as it spreads over the entire globe incorporating millions who have nothing at all to do with the system, whose original condition was one of non-participation in the system, of non-support for the system?
As much as people think they can just withhold themselves from the system, the system, until smashed, won’t let them.
And when you are king?..what does dominion do with dialectical materialism?
There is a fundamental misconception in this plan; it is the fact that – no matter what the mass murdering monster in the White House fantasises – eradicating Russia’s arsenal will be impossible, simply because land based immobile missiles are supplemented by submarine and air launched, as well as mobile land based missiles. Also, as Arthur C Clarke pointed out as long ago as 1986 in a critique of Reagan’s Star Wars, it’s easier to jam and evade anti missile defences than it is to destroy missiles. Also, as he also pointed out, since nobody wants to waste expensive missiles, they’d be “salvage fused” – triggered to explode if attacked. What do Obama’s European slave colonies think of the idea of hundreds to thousands of Russian nuclear warheads exploding on their cities?
(And that’s not even mentioning the Dr Strangelove option of defence; I hope everyone’s getting ready to eliminate mineshaft gaps.)
Russia also has rail mounted ICBMs. I presume these cannot all be located and destroyed in a first strike. Then, there are the multiple re-entry ballistic missile systems. Can’t see you how they can be well-defended against. Similarly, decoy missile launches could be effective in using up Western defences.
It seems that submarine launch of nuclear weapons is going to be virtually impossible to protect against. They won’t be eliminated in a first strike, and can hang around as long as food lasts (6 mos+) before launching their strike backs.
Most scientists thought Reagan’s Star Wars approach was impossible. Has this really changed?
Let us not forget – Israel would also “love” to nuke Iran – off the table.
… to rebuild their temple and god knows what else. take over the world… whatever.
This is so nasty and wrong and evil and satanic – i just hope Russia’s Military can develop it’s advanced new stealth-nuclear cruise missiles fast enough (they said 2020) to keep those crazy power-addicts from sacrificing 50-80% of mankind.
and let us also not forget… if you drop a nuclear bomb… this place will be inhabitable for HUNDREDS of years. Just look at Chernobyl – it is still not inhabitable.
So if mankind is stupid – it is solely our problem – the universe and nature will not care about such “clever” species going extinct because of their own “cleverness” = suicidal stupidity…
PS: Germany is not allowed to help Russia – whatever the US embargoes – stupid Merkel is embargoing as well… after “showing up” with Putin at Car shows. An US-BigBrother is watching you. http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/putin-visibly-amused-by-topless-femen-protest-in-germany-a-893128.html
… while at the same time giving billion-usd-worth-nuclear-capable-submarines to ISRAEL.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/israel-deploys-nuclear-weapons-on-german-submarines-a-836671.html
… which they loaded in 2012 with nuclear warheads…. mankind is truly insane. thanks israel – you are contributint MASSIVELY to that. Yeah i say sorry for my grand-daddies holocaust – (he was actually not involved… but involved into the offensive against Russia… and many more insane operations) – but maybe we should look closer at the Bankers and Wall-Street and Profiteers of all this madness…
Don’t forget, its not ‘habitable’ either, or is that what you meant?
If you look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people still live there. What they fail to mention in this article is that there’s a strong possibility that Russian nuclear power plants might fail to shut off automatically and/or they might get destroyed in an attack. At the same time few remaining russian subs could have their rockets aimed at US nuclear power plants to maximize the fallout.
The technology of nuclear weaponry is quite old these days (albeit very powerful) and quite expensive and I saw a speech by Putin about this. He was saying that Russia had decided long ago that it could not keep up with US spending on nuclear and had started to look into other ways to defend against nuclear attack. He seemed quite happy with what they have to neutralise the apparent imbalance with a different avenue of technology. He could be bluffing or maybe not – do you feel lucky, punk?
This was very interesting. The policy shift is enormous and something we the people should shove in the faces of our ‘leaders’ who yammer on about national security. Nothing shows more clearly what they mean by that than this sick game playing – riches for the strongest – that is played at the people’s expense. They are literally planning to sacrifice people, like so many pawns, in this demonic geopolitical game.
This article, I think, goes into my blog’s list of Important Articles By Others.
an aside: “‘Comments on Eric Zuesse’s Christ’s Ventriloquists” – http://bit.ly/2jbSbte
I think military strategists should be compared to economists; they both tend to lay down finely detailed plans which nearly always come to grief when they are tested in the real world. To quote Robbie Burns, ”the best-laid plans of mice and men oft gang aglay.” In a similar vein, it was the German military strategist Helmuth Von Moltke who pointed out that “No Battle Plan Survives Contact With the Enemy”. History is littered with all these grandiose and vainglorious battle plans which more often than not end in disaster for the planners. They always seem to miss the obvious flaws, overestimate their own abilities and underestimate their opponents.
Let’s have a look through the history books. in 1916 the British and French high command decided on a huge push to finish off the German Army on the western front. This became known as the battle of the Somme, the bloodiest battle in history. An Anglo-French sustained artillery barrage was going to smash the German front line and our troops would simply walk in unopposed. In the event, British casualties on the first day were almost 60,000 with 20,000 dead. This battle dragged on decisively for months with no clear winner and total British, French and German casualties in excess of one million.
Skip forward to the next conflict to another ill-thought out strategic theory: This time the fabled Maginot Line: a line of concrete fortifications, obstacles and weapon installations that France constructed on the French side of its borders with Switzerland, Germany and Luxembourg during the 1930s. This was to form a bulwark against any possible German invasion. Great in theory. Didn’t work, however. The problem was that the Maginot Line had two major failings – it was obviously not mobile and it assumed that the Ardennes was impenetrable. Any attack that could get around it would leave it floundering like a beached whale, which is exactly what happened. The similarity between this and anti-missile defence systems should be obvious.
Then there was operation Barbarossa. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. According to Hitler this was going to be a cake walk. ‘We have only to kick the door in and the whole rotten structure will come tumbling down.” Well this little episode led to the Red Army planting its flag on the Brandenburg Gate in 1945.
The British defeat and the fall of Singapore in 1941. Surely the shore batteries pointing out to sea would obliterate the Japanese naval forces. Yes, but the Japanese army came down the Malay peninsula and over the causeway where there was no British artillery. Whoops!
Going back even further when 3 crack Roman legions comprising 20000 men invaded what is now northern Germany they were caught strung out on the march in the dense Teutoburg Forest and ambushed and wiped out by a large force of Germanic warriors in a battle that took place in the year 9 AD. It was perhaps very unreasonable of the defenders not to let the Romans get into their battle formations, the dreaded testudo, but that’s what war is like. Expect the unexpected.
Like the US Pentagon planners, the author seems to think that Russia and China are going to sit around and wait to be annihilated by a US nuclear first-strike. This seems very unlikely. For every reaction, there is a counter-reaction. And it is also entirely possible that both the Russians and Chinese are not showing their full hand.
So the whole insane venture is very high risk. Or course given the hare-brained stupidity of the Anglo-Zionist war machine, they might still try it, but I think we can rest assured that nobody is going to win such a conflict.
Amen to all comments. Economic development with Russia and China and military co operation with them to remove radical ideolgies would be so much more productive for our global future. However, the current bankrupt financial system wants war rather than give up its power grip on nations.
then we – the people – should move fast – to become independent from this evil-monetary system… create your own system – try hard to grow your own food 2017 – purify your own water – and say “fuck you” to the USD and € imperialism. The only way how they can not afford to pull off what they are about to do… NATO just got a new HQ… wtf?
Whilst I totally agree with you on the need to detach as much as possible from a dysfunctional system (and this excellent article only discusses one aspect of the dysfunctionality) there are signs that the US government is beginning to persecute the ‘prepper’ community for exactly the reason that it represents a threat to its power. See https://www.sott.net/article/291196-Government-officials-all-over-America-are-cracking-down-on-preppers. Of course this is not a reason to stop – it is a reason for encouraging more people to join the cause. There is still (some) safety in numbers.
Hmm. What happens to all those nations that either are independent or are on their way to becoming independent?
Do you believe that the empire would permit people in significant numbers to claim their independence from the system while it yet existed? That’s why, if people are ever to gain something resembling freedom, the “system’ must fall.
“Helmuth Von Moltke who pointed out that “No Battle Plan Survives Contact With the Enemy”.
That reminds me of Mike Tyson. “Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face”