I forgot Trump had another mask to take off…

I’ve had a bit of a political journey over the last five years. I have the cringe-inducing memory of telling an anarchist that “I’d vote for an anarchist for president”, to actually having enough understanding to know that I’ll be a bit embarrassed by that for the rest of my life. There’s a problem I’ve noticed, and I’m pretty sure it’s not just “a me problem” – it’s far to easy to assume that my journey of understanding mirrors that of other people who’ve lived through the same world events. I’ve debunked fossil fuel propaganda more times than I can count in the last decade, to the point where it feels as though everyone must have seen through the lies by now. I’ve learned about fascism as it has become more relevant in the world, to the point where it must be obvious to everyone what’s going on in the US right now.

And now I’m at the point where I realize that no, it really has just been me and some number of other people, who’ve gone from being some breed of liberal, with a mild curiosity about the loud folks carrying red and black flags at a protest, to being one of the weirdos who won’t shut up about fascism. The world has not accompanied me.

To be fair, a great deal of the world has accompanied me. I think a lot of the people – particularly on the right – who claim that Trump’s movement isn’t fascist are either lying, or so deep in denial that they may lack original thoughts on the matter entirely. And so, for all it has been glaringly obvious to many of us, some people will have trouble coping with Trump’s recent declaration that:

“A massive fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the constitution.”

At this point, I doubt Trump will lose much support over this. The “mask” he wore of respecting the constitution and rule of law was already paper-thin and so full of holes you could see the swastika peeking through even when the hot air wasn’t on full blast. There were so many holes I forgot the damned mask was even there. Some people may denounce this, but I think we should not trust the displays of shock from anyone who supported him and his lies up till this point. The goals of Trump and his movement have never been clearer, and as they continue their genocidal campaign against LGBTQIA people, they will probably be increasingly open in their efforts to establish fascist rule in the United States.

It may be that the GOP leadership will finally deign to rule Trump ineligible to hold the presidency, though I doubt it, but it’s been clear for a while that the world they want is the same as the world Trump wants. As I’ve said before, the GOP is a white supremacist, Christian fascist party, and they will not stop unless they are forced to.

CNN calls out Biden admin on the rail strike, ignores its own contribution to the problem

One of the most frustrating aspects of the fight for workers’ rights in the United States, is the way that both governing parties, while claiming to be “the party of the working class”, will screw the working class every chance they get. This is possibly even more consistent when you look at media corporations.

Over this past few months, the various rail worker unions have been trying to get paid sick leave for the first time in U.S. history. I’ll say that again – rail workers in the United States have never had paid sick leave. The deal that was rejected by most of the unions also didn’t give paid sick leave, but it did give a raise that was not requested. This is doubly a problem because rail corporations have been laying off their workers wherever they can, while raking in billions in profit. The result of this has been over-work, and an inability to get time off for emergencies or illness. They have paid vacation time, but that has to be scheduled in advance, and may be denied if someone can’t be found to cover your shift.

Which is likely, because as I mentioned, they’ve been laying off as many workers as they can, to resounding cheers from Wall Street. Most of the coverage of this mess has been, in my view, criminally biased in favor of the bosses. Remember Rutger Bregman’s description of Tucker Carlson? “A millionaire funded by billionaires”? Yeah, that’s not just that particular fascist, or even Fox News. That’s every major news corporation, and that describes their attitude on reporting anything to do with labor disputes. They love to ask rail workers if they’re “ok” with causing billions in economic harm, just for a few sick days, while ignoring that they currently have zero sick days, and ignoring the vicious greed of the bosses.

That’s why it was kinda shocking to see Jake Tapper actually calling out the Transportation Secretary over the Biden administration’s decision to weigh in on the side of the bosses.

As I’ve said, this is a consistent problem, so it’s nice to see it getting attention on corporate media. On the other hand, I strongly suspect that this segment aired when it did, because it had pretty much no chance of affecting the outcome. Too little, too late. Maybe I’m being too cynical, but it’s frankly shocking how often the bosses end up getting their way from both parties, while some politicians claim they did their best, even though they never actually fought for a better outcome. CNN did everything they could to maintain the situation that Tapper’s talking about, and I think he should do a segment on that as well.

I’m not going to hold my breath.

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Barbadian call for reparations targets a fortune built on slavery and murder

Whenever the subject of reparations for slavery and colonialism comes up, the objections are almost always framed to pit the “white working class” against those to whom reparations are owed. This is, of course, a dishonest framing, rooted in the lie of capitalist meritocracy. Those opposing reparations tend to believe (or claim to believe) that the atrocities in question are in the distant past, part of a different system from the one in which we live, and therefor entirely divorced from the fortunes and struggles of our era. The slave owners are all dead, so they say, and so any reparations would be paid for by people who had no role in maintaining or profiting from slavery. It’s an effective bit of propaganda, and like all such misinformation, it’s re-used over and over again, no matter how many times it’s debunked.

The reality is that the era of colonialism and chattel slavery was the foundation of capitalism as we understand it today, and the inequalities and injustices of that era were built into the infrastructure of our current economy. A number of major corporations that exist today profited off of chattel slavery, though some of those fortunes have been laundered by buyouts, mergers, and the like. More than that, since reparations were primarily paid to slave owners for the loss of “their property”, there are a great number of extant individual fortunes that also tie directly to those atrocities.

That can’t be too surprising, right? We live in a world where the Windsor family still holds the British crown, and the billions in resources that come with that, and other “noble” families, still retain vast fortunes, even if they’re not always directly involved in government. These are fortunes built on conquest, genocide, and slavery, but when the question of reparations comes up, suddenly we’re told that those demands are being made of the working class? It’s such obvious bullshit that you’d think it wouldn’t fly, and yet that same social infrastructure of white supremacy serves to lend undue credence to the lies.

Fortunately, some people are fighting back. A little over a year ago, Barbados ended its relationship with the British Monarchy. Now, they are suing to get back some of the wealth that was stolen from them by a powerful family within the former British Empire:

The government of Barbados is considering plans to make a wealthy Conservative MP the first individual to pay reparations for his ancestor’s pivotal role in slavery.

The Observer understands that Richard Drax, MP for South Dorset, recently travelled to the Caribbean island for a private meeting with the country’s prime minister, Mia Mottley. A report is now before Mottley’s cabinet laying out the next steps, which include legal action in the event that no agreement is reached with Drax.

Barbados became a republic a year ago after it removed Queen Elizabeth II as head of state.

The Drax family pioneered the plantation system in the 17th century and played a major role in the development of sugar and slavery across the Caribbean and the US.

Barbados MP Trevor Prescod, chairman of Barbados National Task Force on Reparations, part of the Caricom Reparations Commission, said the UN had declared slavery to be a crime against humanity: “If the issue cannot be resolved we would take legal action in the international courts. The case against the Drax family would be for hundreds of years of slavery, so it’s likely any damages would go well beyond the value of the land.”

Countries in the Caribbean community (Caricom) have been campaigning for the payment of reparations by former colonial powers and institutions which profited from slavery. This is the first time a family has been singled out.

This is wonderful. They’re taking it directly to the people who profited from the unpaid labor of the Barbadian people. I’m sure there will still be some who oppose this, of course (aside from the Drax family, whose opinions should be disregarded), but it’s impossible to argue that Drax has not benefited from his family’s history of theft and murder. I will happily accept the argument that Richard Drax should not be subjected to the kinds of punishment that might be due to his ancestors, but that does not mean that he has a legitimate claim to the wealth they took.

Among the plans being considered are that 17th-century Drax Hall is turned into an Afro-centric museum and that a large portion of the plantation is used for social housing for low-income Bajan families. There is also a recommendation that Richard Drax pays for some of the work.

David Comissiong, the Barbados ambassador to Caricom and deputy chairman of the task force, said that besides Drax, other families whose ancestors benefited from slavery are being considered including the British royal family: “It is now a matter that is before the government of Barbados. It is being dealt with at the highest level.

“Drax is fabulously wealthy today. The Drax family is the central family in the whole story of enslavement in Barbados. They are the architects of slavery-based sugar production. They have a deep historical responsibility. The process has only just begun and we trust that we will be able to negotiate. If that doesn’t work, there are other methods, including litigation.

“Other families are involved, though not as prominently as the Draxes. This reparations journey has begun. The matter is now for the cabinet of Barbados. It is in motion. It is being dealt with.”

Drax came under the spotlight in December 2020, after the Observer revealed he had not declared his inheritance of the 250-hectare (617 acres) Drax Hall plantation. He did so only after official documents surfaced which named him as the owner. He had inherited the plantation, valued at Bds$12.5m (£5.25m), from his father, Walter, in 2017.

Drax, 64, lives at the family’s mansion in Charborough Park, Dorset. He and his family are worth at least £150m and own 23.5 square miles in Dorset, and an estate and grouse moor in Yorkshire. The family also own 125 Dorset properties personally or through family trusts and a £4.5m holiday villa on nearby Sandbanks.

Drax’s ancestor, Sir James Drax, was one of the first Englishmen to colonise Barbados in the early 17th century. He part-owned at least two slave ships, the Samuel and the Hope.

The Drax family also owned a plantation in Jamaica, which they sold in the 19th century. When slavery was abolished across the British empire in 1833, the family received £4,293 12s 6d, a very large sum in 1836, in compensation for freeing 189 enslaved people.

Prescod added: “The Drax family had slave ships. They had agents in the African continent and kidnapped black African people to work on their plantations here in Barbados. I have no doubt that what would have motivated them was that they never perceived us to be equal to them, that we were human beings. They considered us as chattels.”

As we fight for a better world, it’s important that we push back against the all-too-common lie that history is “in the past”, and so not relevant to questions of justice going forward. I hope it’s obvious to you, dear reader, that justice has not been served when the family of slavers is still rich and powerful, while those they enslaved still deal with poverty and over-exploitation. It’s frankly disgusting that Drax still owns anything in Barbados, let alone the plantation where his family enslaved and tortured people.

I don’t know where this goes from here. The history of countries like Barbados trying to get justice is not particularly uplifting, and for all the British Empire is no more, England retains a disproportionate amount of global influence, as a result of its era of conquest. The same is true of all the colonial empires, including the United States. That will continue being an obstacle to justice for as long as those countries are governed by the same people and philosophies that created the problem in the first place.

I’ll try to keep an eye on this story, and I hope to see many more like it in the coming years. More than that, I hope to see success beyond simply seizing back the stolen land. I suppose there’s a chance I may be proven wrong about this, but I think that if these struggles for justice are to be successful, it will require the people living in the countries in question to apply organized political pressure to their own governments. That means organizing, of course, and pushing back against attempts by people like Drax to conflate their fortune with that of their country’s working class. It also means paying close attention to the people to whom reparations are owed. This struggle will probably need the help of white folks, but it does not need our “leadership”. Our role is to make sure that those who wish to keep their ill-gotten gains can’t rely on distance and racism to protect them from justice.

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Video: The Continually Escalating Anti-LGBT Rhetoric

Jessie Gender is a good source of information on trans issues and Star Trek. She has done a number of deep dives into the propaganda and misinformation surrounding trans people and the movement for trans rights, and this video is no exception. The United States (and that country is not alone) is currently in the midst of a murderous campaign to erase queer people from existence. Obviously, I think there’s validity in pointing to hypocrisy, inconsistency, and projection from conservatives, but it’s far more important that those of us who support trans rights understand what’s happening. The violence we’ve seen is the goal of this rhetoric.

This will not go away by itself. Genocide is the right word for this project. The goal here is exterminationist mass murder, and it’s up to us to stand up to the fascists, and to take away their power to do what they’re doing. This video is a good breakdown of the whole situation, in my view, and worth your time.

Conservative projection: a rule to live by

By now it’s an overused trope: The conservative pundit or politician who rants the most about the evils of homosexuality will turn out to be either gay or bisexual. It’s happened so many times that you can rely on it being brought up in response to most homophobic rants, and it goes far, far beyond just that one issue. Likewise, the people who have been pushing us toward the genocide of trans people in the United States by claiming they’re “groomers” all seem to have a record of things like advocating for shit like child marriage, supporting people with a record of preying on children, or themselves being involved in the assault of children, or in covering up said assault.

When I was a kid, a classmate did a science fair presentation on the dangers of smoking. I didn’t know it at the time, but at that point she had been smoking cigarettes for a year or two already. I’m often struck by the immaturity of thought among conservatives, and this is no exception. They accuse others of their own crimes, because they think it helps hide said crimes. What’s worse, is that conservative “followers” seem to fall for the lie every single time. I don’t know of a way around this problem, short of just building the power we need to win, because it honestly seems that these people are incapable of learning this lesson.

I’m sure some of them genuinely care about children, in their reflexive, unthinking way, but when they participate in these moral panics, they fill the air with so much bullshit, it acts to obscure the real harm being done. Why is this energy not being aimed at, for example, those known to have associated with Jeffrey Epstein?

It seems like their hatred outweighs whatever actual concern they have, and they’re willing to hurt children if it also means hurting the people they hate.

 

Video: Beau of the Fifth Column on why it’s important to understand US capabilities

I am generally of the opinion that it’s good to have an accurate understanding of the world, whether or not that understanding is uplifting or encouraging. If the situation is bad, that’s not great, but pretending it’s better than it is doesn’t seem like a good way to get to a better situation. While I don’t think that war is a good response to it, the U.S. empire is a problem, and a lot of that has to do with the primary tool of that empire – its armed forces. The unfortunate reality is that the U.S. has actually been getting something for the trillions it has spent on its capacity to wage war. Anyone who wants the kind of global change that we here at Oceanoxia are seeking, will need to consider that.

Some More News: Moral Panics And How To Spot Them

I feel like this video is a good follow-up to Renegade Cut’s Halloween video that I posted earlier this month. Moral panics seem to be both a persistent phenomenon in human societies, and a valuable tool for unscrupulous, usually powerful, people. They’re used to distract from real problems, often at the cost of destroyed lives and livelihoods, and often to protect those aforementioned powerful people from accountability for their misdeeds. I also think it’s telling that, in the Tucker Carlson clip right near the beginning (you knew that fascist shit factory had to be involved here, right?), he equates losing your sex drive with losing your soul. That kind of breathless, hyperbolic ranting isn’t new, but it’s a big part of what’s driving the current moral panic(s), with white supremacist fascism as the goal.

Moral panics convince people of absurd stories that make little to no sense if you dig into them – absurdities, if you will – to hide something that’s ongoing by burying it in noise (say, throwing around the accusation of “grooming” so much that people tune it out when evidence of your own sketchy views or behavior arises). If it’s not that, then it’s to build support for new atrocities.

Absurdities, atrocities, and the murder-clowns of fascism

The fact that I’m writing this is, in itself, evidence that things are not going well in the United States. Nick Fuentes is a despicable fascist weirdo who, ideally, none of you would ever have heard about. He’s a holocaust denier, a white supremacist, calls openly for dictatorship, all that jazz. I’ve been aware of him for a while because a few youtubers I follow have talked about him on occasion, but he never seemed worth my writing about. In most ways, he’s still not worth writing about, except for the fact that he’s managed to attach himself to someone far more famous.

I think one thing I never realized about fascist leaders, growing up, was how deeply strange they all are. I suppose that’s partly my fault, given that they’re famous for murdering people over absurd lies, but I think some of it also has to do with the mythologizing of Nazis in U.S. media. They’re portrayed as relentlessly competent, caring only about efficiency and results, capable of great feats of engineering and blah blah blah. The reality is that many of their so-called accomplishments were little more than propaganda. The Autobahn, for example, existed before Hitler rose to power, and he just claimed credit for it.

If I had to guess why this propaganda persists in our society, I’d say it’s probably because of how close fascism is to capitalism in general, and neoliberalism in particular. I might have felt a need to explain that statement a decade ago, but now I feel I can just point to the GOP. They’re not much different from how they’ve been for my whole life, which is why they’ve been able to go so far, with so much support. Likewise, the Democrats aren’t much different from the Republicans, with their efforts to create the mass incarceration crisis, their opposition to universal healthcare, and their habit of going far harder against the left than the right. And that’s ignoring the decades of U.S. support for fascism abroad.

There’s just a little too much coziness there for anyone in power to want the public to have a clear idea who and what fascists are.

For those who are somehow unaware, Kanye West has started openly peddling anti-Semitic and other right-wing propaganda, and in turn has been warmly embraced by a succession of odious people. The two most recent are Milo Yiannopolis (also a fascist – has been filmed singing with saluting neo-Nazis, had a password referring to The Night of the Long Knives, and the list goes on), and Nick Fuentes.

The three of them just had dinner with Donald Trump, and while it apparently didn’t go well, Trump was supposedly very impressed with Fuentes. To me, that means that we’re likely to see more of that piece of shit, so it’s worth knowing who he is. I’m sharing two videos today, because I don’t particularly want to write about him, specifically, again. I feel that these do a good job of covering who he is, who he appeals to, and why it’s not good to have him closer to the halls of power.

I have a bit of a confession to make. During my time as a lurker around the periphery of the New Atheist movement, I frequently heard a Voltaire quote – perhaps you’re familiar:

Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.

Until the last few years, I didn’t really get that. I knew that a great many horrible acts had been committed in the name of beliefs I considered absurd, but the same is true of good acts. I still think society would be better if religion was entirely removed from governance, but I think I now have a more complete idea of what that quote’s about. Fascism arose from liberal democracy, and both systems came centuries after Voltaire, but looking at what they believe right at this moment, I’ve gotten a bit more perspective on the scale of absurdity that’s available. These are deeply silly people, who will happily justify torture, murder, terrorism, and genocide.

Fascists are the killer clowns that keep showing up in pop culture. I don’t like the trope, because I’ve known a number of professional clowns in my life, and they’ve all been wonderful people, but I think it’s the best illustration of the problem. Trump, Fuentes, Yiannapolis, Kanye – fascists, including their leaders, tend to be deeply ridiculous people. In some ways, that’s their superpower, not just because it means they’re not taken seriously at first, but also because they seem to be fueled by humiliation. They attract ridicule to themselves like flies to a pile of shit, and they can’t handle even the smallest amount of it. They cannot function in a world where people make fun of them, so they want to murder everyone who does, rather than considering why they might come across that way.

They believe absurdities – more and more of them every year, it seems – and based on those absurdities, they want to murder or enslave most of humanity. As with everything else they do, it might be funny, if our political and economic system didn’t keep giving these people the power to ruin lives.

I don’t think Kanye will ever be president, but this does seem like a way into more “mainstream” politics for those who’ve attached themselves to him, as someone who will reliably get press attention. The GOP’s big divide isn’t between fascism and fash-adjacent neoliberalism, but between which brand of fascism they think will get them into power. By all accounts, Trump loves sycophants, and that seems to be consistent among authoritarians. For those of you who knew nothing about this douchebag when you started reading this post, I’m sorry to have inflicted him upon you. Unfortunately, it’s likely that he and other bozos like him will remain a mutual affliction for as long as fascism is viable in the United States.

 

“When a movement is selling an image of exceptionalism and strength, their design is to attract patrons who are unexceptional and weak.”

Yanis Varoufakis on Elon Musk’s place in the rise of technofeudalism

It is unfortunate that while almost everything about Elon Musk is fake, his power in our society is very real. I don’t think he had any clear idea what he was going to do with Twitter, but for all some of the wealth of billionaires is illusory, I think Musk has more than enough to survive this debacle. Lives and livelihoods are being destroyed, but the person responsible will be fine. Musk may be more incompetent and foolish than most billionaires, but not by much, and that much wealth is too good of a safety net for him to be put out of our misery.

That said, it’s worth paying attention to what he’s doing, because of that power, and what his motivations might be. Yanis Varoufakis has been saying for a while that he believes capitalism more or less ended in 2008, and since then we’ve been in the early stages of “technofeudalism”. It’s as good a name as any, and it has long been pointed out that feudalism is the inevitable result of neoliberal/libertarian capitalism, but what does that actually mean?

Feudalism was based largely on control of land, but while plenty of billionaires do own a great deal of land, the “techno” of technofeudalism serves as a reminder that control over physical territory and the people therein is not the whole story. The power that Bill Gates has over me has much more to do with the computer I’m using than with the farmland he owns, and similar things can be said about Bezos, and the other oligarchs who are better at staying out of the spotlight.

So, what’s going on with Elon Musk, if we consider him through the technofeudal lens?

Unlike old-fashioned terrestrial or analogue capital, which boils down to produced means of manufacturing things consumers want, cloud capital functions as a produced means of modifying our behavior in line with its owners’ interests. The same algorithm running on the same labyrinth of server farms, optic fiber cables, and cell-phone towers performs multiple simultaneous miracles.

Cloud capital’s first miracle is to get us to work for free to replenish and enhance its stock and productivity with every text, review, photo, or video that we create and upload using its interfaces. In this manner, cloud capital has turned hundreds of millions of us into cloud-serfs – unpaid producers, toiling the landlords’ digital estates and believing, like peasants believed under feudalism, that our labor (creating and sharing our photos and opinions) is part of our character.

The second miracle is cloud capital’s capacity to sell to us the object of the desires it has helped instill in us. Amazon, Alibaba, and their many e-commerce imitators in every country may look to the untrained eye like monopolized markets, but they are nothing like a market – not even a hyper-capitalist digital market. Even in markets that are cornered by a single firm or person, people can interact reasonably freely. In contrast, once you enter a platform like Amazon, the algorithm isolates you from every other buyer and feeds you exclusively the information its owners want you to have.

Buyers cannot talk to each other, form associations, or otherwise organize to force a seller to reduce a price or improve quality. Sellers, too, are in a one-to-one relation with the algorithm and must pay its owner to complete a trade. Everything and everyone is intermediated not by the disinterested invisible hand of the market but by an invisible algorithm that works for one person, or one company, in what is, essentially, a cloud-fief.

Musk is perhaps the only tech lord who had been watching the triumphant march of this new techno-feudalism helplessly from the sidelines. His Tesla car company uses the cloud cleverly to turn its cars into nodes on a digital network that generates big data and ties drivers to Musk’s systems. His SpaceX rocket company, and its flock of low-orbit satellites now littering our planet’s periphery, contributes significantly to the development of other moguls’ cloud capital.

But Musk? Frustratingly for the business world’s enfant terrible, he lacked a gateway to the gigantic rewards cloud capital can furnish. Until now: Twitter could be that missing gateway.

It’s not that he wants to own Twitter, as such, but more than he needs to own a domain of cloud “real estate” that befits his wealth and fame, if he wants his power to be durable, and reliable. Twitter doesn’t need to be what it was, it just needs to be big and influential, and it’s unlikely that Musk’s incompetence can change that. I don’t know if it’s “too big to fail”, but I think the concept applies here, at least to some degree. It’s not the most important infrastructure of the internet, but it is a part of that infrastructure, and it has momentum.

Again, this framing gives Musk a bit more credit that I’m willing to provide, but when someone has this much power, it’s worth thinking about his use of it.

The liberal commentariat is fretting over Donald Trump’s reinstatement. The left is agonizing over the rise of a tech-savvy version of Rupert Murdoch. Decent people of all views are deploring the terrible treatment of Twitter’s employees. And Musk? He seems to be keeping his eye on the ball: In a revealing tweet, he confessed his ambition to turn Twitter into an “everything app.”

An “everything app” is, in my definition, nothing less than a gateway into cloud capital that allows its owner to modify consumer behavior, to extract free labor from users turned into cloud serfs, and, last but not least, to charge vendors a form of cloud rent to sell their wares. So far, Musk has not owned anything capable of evolving into an “everything app” and had no way of creating one from scratch.

For while he was busy working out how to make mass-produced electric cars desirable and to profit from conquering outer space, Amazon, Google, Alibaba, Facebook, and Tencent’s WeChat were wrapping their tentacles firmly around platforms and interfaces with “everything app” potential. Only one such interface was available for purchase. Musk’s challenge now is to enhance Twitter’s own cloud capital and hook it up to his existing Big Data network, while constantly enriching that network with data collected by Tesla cars crisscrossing Earth’s roads and countless satellites crisscrossing its skies. Assuming he can steady the nerves of Twitter’s remaining workforce, his next task will be to eliminate bots and weed out trolls so that New Twitter knows, and owns, its users’ identities.

In a letter to advertisers, Musk correctly noted that irrelevant ads are spam, but relevant ones are content. In these techno-feudal times, this means that messages unable to modify behavior are spam, but those that sway what people think and do are the only content that matters: true power.

As a private fief, Twitter could never be the world’s public square. That was never the point. The pertinent question is whether it will grant its new owner secure membership in the new techno-feudal ruling class.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Twitter will collapse in the coming months, and not return. Whether that happens or not, you can be sure that our overlords will want what Twitter offers them, and they will continue working to shape society to fit their interests. As that happens it’s worth remembering that their “success” is the result of having virtually unlimited wealth and power, so that even when their endeavors fail, they can just try again, or spin what happened until they can claim it was their genius plan all along.

After all, if the King doesn’t deserve his power, why does he have it?

A video and some thoughts on propaganda

Whenever anyone starts discussing the accomplishments of communist governments, someone is likely to pop up to point out that those governments are authoritarian. The example I see most often is that someone on the left will point to Cuba’s high literacy rate, and the rebuttal is to say that that was just part of their efforts to propagandize the population. Now, I’m far from an expert on Cuba, but this is one of those subjects where I actually have at least a little relevant experience.

In 2001, I was invited to be a travelling companion for a friend who felt called to visit the Cuban Quaker community. New England Yearly Meeting, to which we belonged, has a sister relationship with Cuba Yearly Meeting, and exchanging visitors is fairly common, though the ability to do it has varied depending on the whims of politicians. At that time, I spoke effectively no Spanish, and didn’t really have the time or inclination to learn. That was, in hindsight, rather bad manners, but I was going there to keep my friend company, and she had actually been studying the language.

It was an interesting trip, but the thing I want to focus on here is Cuban propaganda. There absolutely was a lot of it. Some took the form of murals and slogans, but the primary medium was the Cubavision channel. It had content 24/7 (as did the other channel, which carried pirated movies and soap operas), including speeches by Fidel, cartoons about Cuba being a thorn in the foot of the U.S. (The U.N. were portrayed as cowardly worms, subservient worms, if memory serves), and other patriotic events. At that point in time, I saw Cuba as pretty unambiguously Authoritarian™, with little clear idea of the island’s history. I did want the embargo to end, and saw it as a big problem for the Cuban people, but I think considered Castro to be as much of a problem. I’m still a bit uncertain on the subject, but it’s less clear-cut to me these days.

I also noticed, as I paid more attention to U.S. affairs, how much our own political pageantry paralleled that which was condemned as authoritarian when communists did it. That could be the patriotic displays at sporting events, the ubiquity of heroizing military recruitment ads, the requirement that all politicians always remember to say that “America is the greatest country in the world”, or political rallies with jingoistic rhetoric and political songs and musical numbers. Fidel had six-year-olds singing about The Revolution, and Bush had six-year-olds singing about him and American greatness. Ditto Obama and Trump, and it was gross in both of those cases too. The enraging reality is that to live in the United States is to move through a miasma of propaganda.

Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions.

Again, this is not unique to the United States, but it’s necessary to point this out and discuss it because USians, as a rule, tend not to believe they’re subject to propaganda, or when they do believe it, they tend to see it as “that which supports the opposing side” more than anything. I think part of the problem there is the way the development of capitalism has worked to hide who holds power, by separating economic and political power (at least in terms of rhetoric), and reshaping the law so that the greatest power tends to be held outside the government. That power is wielded through campaign donations, direct advocacy and messaging, lobbying, and the other forms of corruption with which we’ve become so familiar.

It is also wielded through the media – not just the more obvious news and political commentary, but also through entertainment media. I’ve shared some material on “Copaganda” here, but while this is part of Skip Intro‘s Copaganda series, this video is about the Top Gun movies, and the Pentagon’s involvement in Hollywood. This isn’t a comprehensive dive into that subject, but it’s a dive worth taking regardless.

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