Thursday, 28 March 2024

Montoliu: Do we have the freedom to fight corporate fascism?

Politics and big business are dirty occupations, not meant for dreamers or idealists. When politics, business and the military merge, when the military-industrial-political complex becomes all powerful and takes control of our nation, and war is business and the business of our nation is war, how do our leaders sell their wars to us?


By invoking the highest possible ideals, such as freedom, democracy, respect for human rights, while knowing full well that the expansion of American power and influence through force (that is to say imperialism) is the greatest threat to our democratic principles and our freedom ... it is ironic, yet they also know the public is educated to be idealistic, to answer the clarion's call without questions and in an instant, and to believe that the most powerful leaders of our society represent these ideals, they are educated to believe the president and his entourage walk on water.


But the only freedom these hard nosed leaders focus upon is that of what they call the free market, and the only democratic principles they are willing to send America's too young sons and daughters to the battlefield to kill, die and be maimed for are those claimed by special interests, corporate interests. Of course it would be a hard sell to declare war for profit, so doing just this is called "defending American interests abroad," a euphemism meant to sweeten a bitter pill by using an indefinite, fuzzy concept.


There is nothing fuzzy about the bottom lines of business and war, but the public does not need to know any of the true facts or motivations, as it is judged that it could not handle them, so it is made to live in a fantasy world of warm ideas, such as freedom and democracy ... who would ever argue against these time honored ideals?


Meanwhile, as in communist China, union leaders are tortured, imprisoned and killed in "democratic, liberated" Iraq by the Iraqi government, and there is no urge on the part of our corporate-controlled administration to insure the freedom of unions, which might be good for the ordinary Iraqi citizen, the one we are said to fight for, but would be bad for business.


Seriously, does anyone really believe America would spend hundreds of billions of dollars to free Iraqi shepherds? No, we supposedly went there to find WMDs and prevent the rise of mushroom clouds based on the deliberate distortion (editing) of intelligence findings ... we also went there because our "Decider" and his cohort decided and stated Iraq was connected to 9/11, after which he decided and stated, while under pressure from the media which had temporarily recovered some part of a backbone it has been missing for some time, that Iraq and 9/11 were not connected whatsoever, and that we were in Iraq to spread democracy ... apparently through chaos and in a state of civil war.


Of course no one knows or remembers, in these "United States of Amnesia" to quote Gore Vidal, that just prior to "chock and awe," Saddam Hussein was going to nationalize the Iraqi oil industry ... and the media is conveniently not noticing Bush bullying the "free and sovereign" Iraqi government to accept a deal turning over at least a third of Iraqi oil to US and British corporations' control. This is apparently what is meant by freedom, the freeing of Iraqi oil from Iraqis ... as Kissinger himself said, "oil is too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs"... especially the ones who do not play by our corporations' rules.


On certain occasions, such as after 9/11, positive ideals are not enough, fear must be used to the fullest possible extent to convince the American public of the viability of an absurd and impossible strategy, even after such specific strategy was denounced by the vice president as a certain recipe for failure years earlier. To paraphrase, Dick Cheney mentioned, after Desert Storm, that to go into Baghdad and try to take out Saddam Hussein would have produced a quagmire. He then went on to explain, very logically and accurately, the reasons why it would not work, in effect prophesizing our present situation.


Anyone with a minimum knowledge of the history of the region would have come to the same conclusions, but then a minimum of citizens, including journalists, would have to know a minimum of the history of the world in order to properly assess our foreign policy, and this is not going to happen anytime soon, not as long as people get their higher education from television.


Our present foreign policy is modeled after the radical ideology of "Project for a new American Century,” a neo-imperialist program developed by a private think tank that is in no way accountable to the public, and whose ideas are to very aggressively insure and expend the unilateral dominance of the United States over the entire world, using the American war machine to further US corporate interests and the control of diminishing natural resources (oil today, water tomorrow).


So is there anything really bad about this? Not if you believe in the law of the jungle and in the survival of the fittest, which are corporate "ideals" as well as the lone "ideals" of rats, apes, viruses and criminals ... but these strategies have nothing to do with democracy, with freedom, with human rights and human dignity, or with anything remotely idealistic or human, except for greed and survival.


Because our nation has been radically changed, by these neo-con extremists, from one which was thought to be and revered as a force for good, a highly idealistic nation that inspired hope throughout the world and particularly among the oppressed, to one that has become a power cynically and ruthlessly looking out for itself and to the detriment of poor and weaker nations, we all have to decide if we still have the minimum freedom required and the time and opportunity as citizens; whether we still want to participate and re-take control of this government "by the people"; or let the military-industrial-political complex win its struggle against democracy and against freedom in the name of what has been called corporate fascism.


Before we decide, we should understand that large successful corporations match the psychological profile of psychopaths, that is to say that they are completely devoid of any trace of human conscience, meant to be exclusively profit machines. Do we really want the world run by psychopathic forces backed by the mightiest military the world has ever known? Do we want a new Roman Empire? This is a simple question, the only real and relevant question today, which is also directly addressing renewed ecological destruction by these same forces.


On a personal note I would like to be proved wrong, and I truly hope I will be. For years I had no interest in politics, but it has proved difficult to live under this "in your face" administration which does not care about public opinion and openly caters to the elite and special interests, transforming this nation from the inside out and tearing its soul apart, trampling democratic principles and individual rights, and clawing at the Constitution like a rabid beast. The problem, here, is not capitalism, as

some on the far left appear to think, but capitalism without a conscience.


Raphael Montoliu lives in Lakeport.


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