The longer a dictatorship is in place, the more brutal it tends to get. The United States has had an oligarchy for decades if not centuries, and that fact shows itself these days spectacularly. Around a hundredth of the American population hasn’t always been incarcerated through a racist and inhumane criminal justice system. All of our electronic communications have not always been monitored so that a corporate-controlled intelligence community can censor and prosecute dissidents. Most Americans haven’t always been regressing to a third world lifestyle while eight men hold as much wealth as the bottom half of the world population. The U.S. hasn’t always had more than eight hundred military bases around the world while most taxpayer money goes to funding several perpetual wars at a time.
And our culture hasn’t always been engineered toward making these things seem acceptable. The transition into the current state has been carefully lined with deception and concealment, with facts and history beings systemically obscured whenever an oligarchical takeover is made. The effects of this on ordinary people are of course always appalling, but there’s a spectrum of how far the corporate state’s propaganda reaches into someone’s mind.
Some support the assault on the poor, the militarization of society, and the other oligarchical practices with open zeal and a malice toward those being hurt by those practices. But zeal comes from consciousness, which endangers the dependent thought that elites want to cultivate among the population. What the oligarchs seem most comfortable with is a citizenry that passively and unthinkingly accepts what they’re told, which can be found in the current political “center.”
The system’s horrors aren’t celebrated by this type of propaganda. They’re almost always made to look trivial or hidden from the discussion entirely. Corporatist trade deals are enacted, causing millions of people in the now post-industrial areas to lose their livelihoods and then in many cases turn to drugs or suicide; pro-establishment Democrats are told that this is the inevitable result of globalization. An unprecedented seven wars are overseen by the Obama administration, slaughtering large populations, driving many of the survivors to poverty and emaciation, and causing babies near the depleted uranium attacks to be born with cracked white skin and bulging red eyes; Obama loyalists deny this happened because their leaders never tell them about it. Atrocity and injustice are given an air of emotional detachment, and those who point it out are called naive or mistaken.
This pathology is unsurpassed in the physical danger it poses, because it’s how the unelected bureaucrats that are now driving us toward an apocalyptic war with Russia rationalize their actions. There’s no way of tearing those elites away from their cold, hyper-imperialist mindsets. They’re far too deep into a system so corrupted that it seems able to rule all on its own. We can only stop this system from turning the planet into a smoldering atomic heap by letting it destroy itself. By exposing the system’s failures to those caught up in “centrism” and the other dangerous worldviews; by building economies, agricultural arrangements and media outlets apart from those of the corporate state; by simply sitting back as the federal government, Wall Street, and the U.S. military empire expectedly become too dysfunctional to maintain their power in the coming years.
And most of all by tearing down the reputation the political establishment and the “center” has tried to give itself of something authoritative or respectable. This system is based on, to put it so honestly, lies-lies about the results of elections and the beliefs of the populous, lies about what the designated geopolitical enemies do and how to treat them, lies about corporate capitalism and what it does, lies even about how humans should relate to each other and the world. The truth, meanwhile, can’t ever be identified as certainly as lies can, but it’s all that can save us from extinction, and it’s what the future will be based on.
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