Corrode
Your Conformity: Big Brother Doesn’t Practice Fraternal Love
By Jason Miller
26 October, 2006
Countercurrents.org
“Non-violence is
a weapon of the strong.”
---Mahatma Gandhi
It is with regret that
I pronounce the fatal truth: Louis ought to perish rather than a hundred
thousand virtuous citizens; Louis must die that the country may live.”
---Maximilien Robespierre
October
17, 2006 is a watershed date in the epic struggle between oppressors
and oppressed. Events of that day undoubtedly prompted Marx and Engels
to awaken from their eternal slumber and spin violently in their graves.
A mere swish of the pen by a conscienceless swine effectively transferred
absolute power into the hands of a relative handful of rich and powerful
individuals and corporations.
Happy birthday, Big Brother!
Over two centuries ago, 25,000
intrepid souls sacrificed their lives to free the American Colonies
from the clutches of a ruthless empire and to found a nation based on
democratic principles. Tragically, on 10/17 the tattered remains of
freedom for which American Revolutionary soldiers spilled crimson rivers
were reduced to mere abstractions by a miniscule volume of ink.
How ironic that in a nation
obsessed with beating ploughshares into swords, a pen was the weapon
used to finalize the subjugation of the masses.
Lamentably, the American
Revolution was not a final triumph for human rights and democracy. Gaining
independence from Great Britain was merely one victory in the perpetual
war between humanity’s “haves” and “have-nots”.
While many of America’s
revolutionaries believed they were fighting for their natural rights,
there were moneyed men amongst them who simply wanted to reap the material
bounty of the Colonies without paying tribute to the British Empire.
Contrary to the great American
myths, all of the founding fathers were not created equal. Men like
Thomas Paine, the intellectual catalyst of the American Revolution,
argued for the abolition of slavery, social justice, democratic principles,
and human rights. Others, such as John Adams and Alexander Hamilton,
harbored contempt for populist notions and pressed for a government
dominated by pecunious individuals.
Intense debate coupled with
significant compromise eventually resulted in the ratification of the
US Constitution. To minimize the diminution of their affluence and dominance,
America’s aristocracy insisted on the Electoral College, the recognition
of the legality of chattel slavery, and the limitation of suffrage to
white propertied males, who comprised a mere 10% of the population.
As a means to appease the masses, they reluctantly agreed to include
the Bill of Rights.
Faced with annoying constraints
like the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, and the Bill
of Rights, and bearing the burden of preserving the illusions of liberty
and equality that kept the “mob” at bay, the ruling elite
struggled to find ways to consolidate and enhance their power.
As the mercantilism that
had made the American Colonies so indispensable to Britain slowly developed
into Capitalism, the plutocracy rushed to embrace and nurture a system
that afforded them the means to manipulate and exploit their “subjects”.
Propitiously, Capitalism
thrived and enabled the elite to leverage their power. Throughout the
history of the United States, a seemingly perpetual torrent of fortuitousness
has rained down upon the monetarily well-endowed.
Treated as animals, Black
American slaves provided the labor that contributed mightily to the
exponential growth of a rapidly emerging economic juggernaut. Yet even
when the abolition of slavery deprived the blue bloods of four million
unpaid laborers, the pecuniary gods continued to smile upon them.
The advent of the Industrial
Revolution spawned large scale mechanization, the urbanization of a
once largely agrarian society, the rise of the corporation to the status
of legal personhood, and a serious decline in the number of skilled
artisans and self-sufficient farmers. Rife with opportunities to exploit
the working class, the United States continued its ascent to economic
supremacy.
Rewarding the pathologically
greedy and selfish, Capitalism in the United States thrived like a tape
worm in glutton’s intestines as it morphed into a bloated and
grotesque perversion.
Mirthless human beings living
on slave wages toiled in filthy, perilous environments until their health
was wrecked and ruined. Robber barons amassed outrageous fortunes on
the backs of dehumanized and broken men, women and children. Transcending
the political freedoms they had begrudgingly given “We the People”
in the Constitution, the power elite imposed a post-Feudal form of economic
serfdom.
Bleak visages of children
whose impoverishment forced them to abandon school and seek employment
in textile mills and coal mines revealed the truly merciless and despotic
nature of Capitalism in the United States. Morally bankrupt men had
raised Adam Smith’s brainchild to be a merciless and brutish soul
crusher.
Consider this excerpt from
progressive reformer John Spargo’s The Bitter Cry of the Children
he wrote in 1906:
The coal is hard, and accidents
to the hands, such as cut, broken, or crushed fingers, are common among
the boys. Sometimes there is a worse accident: a terrified shriek is
heard, and a boy is mangled and torn in the machinery, or disappears
in the chute to be picked out later smothered and dead. Clouds of dust
fill the breakers and are inhaled by the boys, laying the foundations
for asthma and miners' consumption.
I once stood in a breaker
for half an hour and tried to do the work a twelve-year-old boy was
doing day after day, for ten hours at a stretch, for sixty cents a day.
The gloom of the breaker appalled me. Outside the sun shone brightly,
the air was pellucid [clear], and the birds sang in chorus with the
trees and the rivers. Within the breaker there was blackness, clouds
of deadly dust enfolded everything, the harsh, grinding roar of the
machinery and the ceaseless rushing of coal through the chutes filled
the ears. I tried to pick out the pieces of slate from the hurrying
stream of coal, often missing them; my hands were bruised and cut in
a few minutes; I was covered from head to foot with coal dust, and for
many hours afterwards I was expectorating some of the small particles
of anthracite I had swallowed.
Even as early as 1795, Thomas
Paine witnessed economic forces of inequality and oppression savaging
the humanitarian principles woven into the Declaration of Independence
and US Constitution. Principles for which so many had sacrificed so
much.
Paine wrote of the abuse
of economic power prior to the maturation of rapacious Capitalism. “Agrarian
Justice”, his final pamphlet of wide acclaim, included his observations
on the gross injustice of people suffering the affliction of poverty
in a society with ample resources to provide for all of its members:
…On one side, the spectator
is dazzled by splendid appearances; on the other, he is shocked by extremes
of wretchedness; both of which it has erected. The most affluent and
the most miserable of the human race are to be found in the countries
that are called civilized.
Paine decried the brutality
of governments that caused or allowed its citizens to experience indigence:
Despotic government supports
itself by abject civilization, in which debasement of the human mind,
and wretchedness in the mass of the people, are the chief criterions.
Such governments consider man merely as an animal; that the exercise
of intellectual faculty is not his privilege; that he has nothing to
do with the laws but to obey them; and they politically depend more
upon breaking the spirit of the people by poverty, than they fear enraging
it by desperation.
Exposing the sophistry that
persists to this day, Paine advanced a convincing argument against the
contention by predacious capitalists that those possessing wealth are
somehow exempt from the interdependence to which “ordinary”
mortals owe their very survival:
Personal property is the
effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire
personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make
land originally.
Separate an individual from
society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot
acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the
means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do
not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore,
of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived
to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice,
of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back
again to society from whence the whole came.
Asserting a just society’s
obligation to lift (or to provide the means to lift themselves) the
less fortunate from their wretched conditions, Paine wrote:
It is not charity but a right,
not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for. The present state of
civilization is as odious as it is unjust. It is absolutely the opposite
of what it should be, and it is necessary that a revolution should be
made in it. The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting
and offending the eye, is like dead and living bodies chained together.
Paine may have been offended
by the “contrast of affluence and wretchedness”. But gross
inequalities obviously didn’t bother the wealthy elites, in Paine’s
time or as Capitalism eclipsed Mercantilism. Federal laws eventually
eradicated many severe abuses like the child labor Spargo described.
And publicly funded programs like Social Security have helped to alleviate
destitution. Yet were it not for wars, powerful social movements, economic
depressions, fears of widespread social unrest, and the vexing Constitutional
rights afforded to “We the People”, those wielding the punishing
cudgel of economic domination would have maintained the status quo.
Each time the opulent surrendered
a degree of power or afforded additional rights to the underclass, they
became increasingly restless and insecure. They realized that exploitative
Capitalism, their principal mechanism for exerting and maintaining their
dominance, was under siege.
Marx and Engel’s Manifesto
calling for the abolition of private property and a revolution of the
working class scared the hell out of the Bourgeoisie. To counter the
“Red Menace” in the United States, they waged war on organized
labor, initiated the Palmer Raids, so demonized Socialists that their
political influence was virtually extinguished, and imprisoned or ruined
thousands of suspected Communists during the McCarthy Era.
Reactionary forces wielding
powerful tools of psychological manipulation have trained most US Americans
to reflexively reject virtually any publicly funded programs that would
be socially beneficial, idealize material success, and embrace grossly
exorbitant military spending as “necessary”.
Endless rhetoric and propaganda,
the Cold War, free trade, and a multitude of murderous military interventions
resulting in the deaths of millions of innocent human beings have kept
the world safe for the “democracy” that serves as cover
for remorseless seekers of profit at the expense of others.
Having suffered years of
pained silence under the yoke of neoliberal economic policies emanating
from the United States, the presence or action of the US military, and
ruthless dictators supported by the “leader of the free world”,
individuals and factions in the Developing World are finally resisting.
Some are employing asymmetric
warfare to counter the overwhelming military power of a bellicose nation
that invades nations preemptively and dismissively refers to murdered
civilians as “collateral damage”. Others, like Hugo Chavez,
are empowering and uplifting their poor, terminating the exploitation
of their resources by multinational corporations, and forging alliances
with other nations to challenge the regime in Washington.
Not surprisingly, those who
rule by virtue of the size of their bank accounts have reacted to the
latest threat to their stranglehold on power in a manner reminiscent
of their attacks on Communism. The “War on Terror” has already
claimed hundreds of thousands of victims and billions of dollars worth
of civilian infrastructure. And on 10/17, the Bush Regime celebrated
its crowning victory.
Mass hysteria generated by
an Orwellian onslaught of propaganda paved the way for the passage of
the Military Commissions Act of 2006. When Bush signed the Torture Bill
into law, America’s de facto noblesse realized their dream. They
finally attained the means to eliminate the perpetual tension between
a political system “marred” by democratic components and
the tyrannic natures of their brand of Capitalism.
It took 230 years, but an
authoritarian regime predominated by the patrician class and corporations
has finally seized the means to exercise absolute political power. Their
“War on Terror” enabled them to slay their most persistent
adversary. The Constitutional Rights of their own people.
The Bush Regime can now truthfully
crow about a “mission accomplished”.
Yet like the victors in the
American Revolution, they may have won the battle, but the war is far
from over. Men like Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin
are long deceased, but the immortal words born of their dedication to
freedom from oppression are trumpeting a clarion call to the world:
We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed
by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these
rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of
Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the
People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying
its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such
form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Whether the People follow
the example of Gandhi or Robespierre, a revolution is imperative and
inevitable.
Liberté, égalité,
fraternité, ou la mort!
Jason Miller
is a wage slave of the American Empire who has freed himself intellectually
and spiritually. He writes prolifically, his essays have appeared widely
on the Internet, and he volunteers at a homeless shelter. He welcomes
constructive correspondence at [email protected]
or via his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.
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