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How Destructive Global Capitalist Policies Create
Nationalists, Racists, Neo-Fascists
By Frank Scott
Al-Jazeerah, CCUN,
September 5, 2017
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A car attacking protesters, in Charlottesville, Virginia, August
12, 2017 |
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While neo-liberals fight neo-conservatives in a war between
roommates, the landlord and bank keep collecting rent and mortgage
payments and are hardly noticed by most of the battling tenants. The
lesser evil political system we call a democracy in which only a
minority actually votes for winning Demublicans simply perpetuates its
political economic foundation, which is crumbling not only in the USA
and Europe but all over the world. Or the planet, to use the brand name
popular among many wishing to bring about change but too often
manipulated into finding it in the sex, skin tone, religion or sales
pitch of the individual alleged changer. The present episode of Trump as
villain president is a typical case - if more serious than any in recent
history - as millions are programmed into opposition to him, while
remaining unaware of the anti-social capitalist roots of the problem
which bring the austerity, inequality, wars and environmental
destruction which have been going on since the 19th century but at a
much faster pace since the 1970s. What is both positively and
negatively labeled Nationalism is often human reaction to capital
forcefully transforming people and earth to promote private profit with
no regard for communities in process of being destroyed by that economic
system. What would identity group labelers call Indians, Palestinians,
and others whose lives became commodities for colonial capital and who
rebelled against them? Xenophobes? Nationalists? Racists? That’s what
they might look like from the high rise, the hilltop or the ivory tower,
but at street-level things are very different from the
theoretical-academic vantage point of that economic high ground where
many, if a dwindling number, are privileged to reside.
Derogatory labeling of people as neo-fascists is often the practice of
those who do quite well in that liberal democratic state in which great
majorities never vote for the neo-lib-con professional class who
strengthen capitalism with essays and term papers about change read by
their peers while rarely if ever being activated if what they propose is
radical. These treat majority workers in missionary fashion as under
educated and even lesser human material - unless they are of politically
correct chosen people of the moment -only speaking of and about them and
rarely if ever to them. Whether fundamentalist worshippers at the church
of market forces or more sophisticated language manipulators of control
techniques useful in maintaining class privileges, the same divisive
social forces at work now were those that helped the downfall of the
Russian revolution and the triumph of fascism in Germany.
Sometimes sincere advocates of change who were at best unable or at
worst unwilling to communicate with the great mass of the population
which, in the first place attempted a revolution eventually destroyed by
forces within and outside the nation - including invaders from the USA
-, and second, allowing an arch-reactionary force to make more sense to
those suffering the failings of capitalism. Whether consciously or not,
too many still work to help division with politics that reduce all
others to enemies and perpetuate the minority wealth that reduces people
to consumers of material and intellectual waste, when they are left with
enough means to consume anything at all in a credit based economy which
could burst at any moment when a majority cannot pay its bills or worse,
nature forecloses on a society and culture not just breaking but
savaging its laws. Those incapable of stopping the slaughter of
Muslims in their homelands rise in anger against those who fear Muslim
retaliation and support barring their entry into the USA. But the crisis
that destroys nations, murders people and reduces so many to refugee
status is the primary problem, not those reacting in fear that sometimes
leads to hateful ignorance. End the first injustice and there will be no
possibility of the second. Instead, the willful or helpless perpetuators
of murder label the reactors who pay for it as neo-fascists, racists and
worse. Those whose jobs are lost to cheaper immigrant labor and
who absorb the social costs that bring greater profit to capital – the
backbone of this economy since immigrants came here in the 15th century
– are labeled derogatorily in the same fashion and in the same
reactionary spirit. But if instead of lower economic end Spanish
speaking immigrants from the south we had millions of English speaking
upper end professionals entering the country from Canada, the reaction
would likely be the same though coming from different economic strata.
If we could get lawyers for 25 dollars an hour, teachers for 12.50 and
doctors for 30, many Americans would be delighted while those of
formerly upper middle incomes would be reduced to screaming about job,
property and status loss – with good reason - and a few at the extremes
might soon be parading about with shaved heads and swastika tattoos. The
economic system that sets people apart by bringing great benefits to
some only at great cost to others goes unquestioned. Only the
divisiveness and labeling is highlighted. Armed to the teeth
under “fascist” Trump? We spent 600 billion on warfare under alleged
peacenik Obama and started a multi billion-dollar program to upgrade
nuclear weapons and further arm Israel in its democratic humanitarian
suppression of Palestinians. Of course, the Palestinians are all
nationalist-identitarian-xenophobe-racist-neofasicsts. Trump is a big
individual problem, as is any CEO of this imperial corporation but the
political economy of war capitalism is the much bigger problem, and its
supporters, servants and willful or innocent constituents are not simply
found on the right. Fascist-populist-hate labeling brings
comfort to some who can afford the high end marketplace community but
can be demeaning to those carrying the social burdens at the lower end
neighborhood of that same mall, though both play a role in maintaining
the profits of private capital in divided groups which should be working
together to make the entire community better for all its people. In this
way, economic class barriers grow larger, more divisive and less
visible, playing right into the identity group conflicts which are more
easily seen and used by our rulers to keep democracy a word without
meaning. The political economy that lavishes billions of dollars
on warfare and pet care while millions of its people live in poverty and
lack health care and even housing is liberal and conservative, not
either one or the other. It’s people who are of color, no color, some
color, straight, gay or bent. It isn’t simply a good or bad person,
however good some us think ourselves and however bad some of us are. We
are part of a system that needs to be changed, radically, not simply
part of a fake democracy which shuffles representatives of minority
wealth every couple of years. Labels, including hate speech simplifiers,
are used to manipulate us into continued buying of a stale and rotten
product. It’s time we learn to understand the substance of our society
and not just the words we are programmed to use, and abuse, in belief in
its individualist myths and in opposition to one another.
Nationalism, like resistance to gentrification or immigration, is often
the reaction of communities being radically changed by outside forces
with no input from the people of those communities or nations. Are those
who resent development that changes their high crime-low income
community to a higher income-lower crime community all nimby
”not-in-my-backyard” types? Or do they express political economic
protest, even if limited to only their own immediate surroundings, over
having their survival further threatened? Are protesters
against immigration which takes jobs from their communities and
transforms those places in language and culture, with absolutely no
voice in that transformation, all guilty of hate? Or are they just like
anti-gentrification folk, with economic and other protests against
change in their lives and communities over which they have no control?
Labeling protesters against immigration changing communities over
which they no longer feel at home as evil nationalists or racists - as
though immigrants were another race - makes perverted sense only if
supporters of gentrification and immigration were labeled
capitalist, globalization
supporting colonialists for their anti-human policies that bring profit
to those outside those communities and loss to those within. Ignorance
and hate are not the best ways to stand against ignorance and hate.
Ultimately, we need to see the community we all inhabit – that rebranded
“planet” – and all its inhabitants as dwellers on and in a common space,
in a common time of great stress in which humanity must, and finally
can, come to democratic practice in running the political economy by
changing it from the destructive path the current form is on to a new,
more positive and hopeful road that will assure a future for all, and
not just a privileged few. If conditioned product-commodity label
identification is imprinted in our heads, it’s long past time to change
that label from an identity group minority “them” to the majority group
humanity “us”. *** email: fpscott@gmail.com
Frank Scott writes political commentary and satire which appears
online at the blog Legalienate:
http://legalienate.blogspot.com
***
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