Red-Baiting Will Continue Until Rationality is Defeated

All too predictably, political debates, rants, and diatribes are increasingly ignited and fueled by divisive enmity about ‘capitalism vs. socialism.’ What is actually occurring, however, is entrapment: fascism, masquerading as free-market capitalism, is ruthlessly exploiting the irrationality and ignorance we the people seem incapable of overcoming in our understanding of political truth and reality. This mortal affliction of political myopia and the cognitive dissonance it manifests are widespread throughout the entire political spectrum and landscape, especially in USAmerica. With the rise of neoliberal globalism, moreover, it has spread pandemically around the world. While it is emotionally acute and intellectually chronic even among its fascist capitalist neoconservative ‘far-right’ victims, for whom it is a weapon of mass mental destruction, it is particularly disarming and disabling when it targets members and advocates of the so-called liberal or progressive ‘left.’

In his OtherWords article (February 12, 2020), “Who’s Afraid of Socialism?” Peter Certo, the editorial manager of the Institute for Policy Studies, clearly exposes and explains this epidemic of sociopolitical cognitive dissonance:

For decades, Republicans have painted anyone left of Barry Goldwater as a “socialist.” Why? Because for a generation raised on the Cold War, “socialist” just seemed like a damaging label.

And, probably, it was.

You can tell, because many liberal-leaning figures internalized that fear. When Donald Trump vowed that “America will never be a socialist country,” for instance, no less than Senator Elizabeth Warren stood and applauded.

The sobering truth is that all political systems are capable of either great violence or social uplift. That’s why we need resilient social movements, whatever system we use — and why we’re poorly served by propaganda from any corner.

Fascism is the epitome and pinnacle of social, political, and economic violence. Ruling and controlling through ultra-elitist wealth and power, fascism rejects the very of idea of a social covenant or contract between the rulers and the ruled. Its sole purpose and prime directive are to serve the rapacious self-interests of the elite at any and all costs by any and all means. The false dilemma juxtaposition of ‘capitalism vs. socialism’ is a malevolent sociopolitical meme and malicious trope that lures and snares the unwitting in a deathtrap to become raw human resources. Our status is that of merely material socioeconomic externalities to be exploited to exhaustion and death.

My blog post, “Making Ends Meet” (June 2, 2019) sought to awaken people to this informal logical fallacy of ‘Red-baiting’ or ‘reductio ad Stalinum’ — a permanent lie and political con game of capitalism vs. socialism’ rhetoric. In a later blog post, “Stakeholder Capitalism v Truthteller Realism” (February 4, 2020), I sought to awaken people to the Three-Card Monte version of the same logical fallacy, permanent lie, and con game. Run by the Davos ultra-elite of the inner circle of the elite 1%, the World Economic Forum’s Founder and executive chairman Prof. Klaus Schwab hosted the 2020 50th Anniversary gala in Davos last month. In truth and reality the event was a celebratory dirge for humanity’s death march into onrushing anthropogenic Mass Extinction Level Events on Earth - Round 6 (‘MELEE-R6). With Drum Major Schwab in the ideological lead, the global economy paraded straight out of its jaded “state capitalism” and “shareholder capitalism” plundering past into its new bright and shiny future thing, “stakeholder capitalism.” All along, some would say, that Three-Card Monte lady in hiding turns out to be the Biblical Whore of Babylon — the truth and reality of pandemic fascism in all its savagely rapacious 21st century USAmerikan form.[2]

MR FISH’s “TRACKING THE ELECTION” (above) accompanies Chris Hedges’ Truthdig article, “The New Rules of the Game” (Feb 17, 2020) to illustrate the nefarious backroom offstage conspiratorial villainy working against the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign. What FISH trenchantly illustrates as the Bloomberg & Biden “TWO BALLS AND A STRIKE” shtick will be a gaudy midway sideshow in a few caucus and primary stopovers as the Circus2020 Charade Parade rolls through to November. Hedges put it plainly:

If Sanders gets the nomination it will be due to the Keystone Cops ineptitude of the Democratic leadership, one that … replicates the ineptitude of the Republican elites in 2016. But this time there will be a crucial difference. The ruling elites, once divided between Trump and Hillary Clinton, with most of the elites preferring Clinton, will be united against Sanders. They will back Trump as the least worst. The corporate media will turn its venom, now directed at Trump, toward Sanders. The Democratic Party’s mask will come off. It will be open warfare between them and us.

At the end of the day, FISH’s illustrations and Hedges’ words are sending the same message: contrary to the adage usually attributed to POTUS16 Abraham Lincoln, it doesn’t matter how many people you can or can’t fool anytime or anywhere as long as you get away with fucking all of them over before they see it coming. The deadliest toxin in the venomous onslaught already attacking Sanders is the vile deception inherent in Red-baiting entrapment.[3]

Revived and revised from its earlier forms by paranoid sociopath Senator Joe McCarthy (1908-1957) and his wing-man Richard M. ‘Tricky Dick’ Nixon (1913-1994), who would later become POTUS37, “Red baiting” was a Cold War political witch-hunt that institutionalized all forms of anti-socialism, anti-communism, etc., in the USAmurikun political way to this day. MR FISH’s “TRACKING THE ELECTION” drawing above appears in Truthdig to illustrate an article by Chris Hedges, “The New Rules of the Game (Feb 17, 2020).” In the opening paragraph of his article, Hedges writes, “Donald Trump, if he faces Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar or Michael Bloomberg, will continue to be an amalgamation of Adolf Hitler, Al Capone and the Antichrist.” He identifies eight blatant Red-baiting attacks on Sanders by the elites and their corporate presstitutes, then explains the rational understanding of political truth and reality these attacks are locked, loaded, and aimed to destroy:

Despite the hyperventilating by corporate shills such as (MSNBC commentator Chris) Matthews and (New York Times weekly columnist Thomas) Friedman, Sanders’ democratic socialism is essentially that of a New Deal Democrat. His political views would be part of the mainstream in France or Germany, where democratic socialism is an accepted part of the political landscape and is routinely challenged as too accommodationist by communists and radical socialists. Sanders calls for an end to our foreign wars, a reduction of the military budget, for “Medicare for All,” abolishing the death penalty, eliminating mandatory minimum sentences and private prisons, a return of Glass-Steagall, raising taxes on the wealthy, increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour, canceling student debt, eliminating the Electoral College, banning fracking and breaking up agribusinesses. This does not qualify as a revolutionary agenda.

As glaring evidence of just how far into the theater of the absurd this cacophony of propaganda has gone, consider the recent article by New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman, “Bernie Sanders Isn’t a Socialist. But He Plays One on TV. That’s a Problem (Feb 13, 2020).” In his own commentary on Krugman’s hit piece on Sanders, former Massachusetts State Representative Tom Gallagher (“Paul Krugman on This Bernie Sanders and Socialism Thing,” Common Dreams, February 19, 2020) explains this absurdity:

The source of Krugman’s peculiar assertion that he understands Sanders’s political philosophy better than Sanders himself seems to be a strict equation of socialist politics with nationalization and central planning. What Sanders actually calls himself is a “democratic socialist”—a term that never appears in Krugman’s article—because he doesn’t believe that billionaires shouldn’t be running the show and the working people of the country should. Which is to say that our economy, like our government, should be subject to democratic control. At the core of socialism is the recognition that the nation and the entire world ultimately belong to us all, and we are all responsible for it all.

Odds are that if you search ‘sanders socialism’ on the web, the top results will heavily favor the anti-Sanders Red-baiting brigade of mainstream corporate meat-puppet presstitutes vomiting up a deluge of ad hominem and reductio ad Stalinem fallacious permanent lies in a tsunami of propaganda newspeak aimed at seducing us all into accepting the ruthless destruction of the Sanders 2020 campaign and all it stands for.

What do Sanders and his campaign ultimately stand for? If time remains for it to stand for anything at all, it stands for nothing less than the last desperate hope and slim chance humanity has to get a grip on reality in the 21st century and move rationally into the future. If it doesn’t happen here and now in USAmerica — despite our history of doing all and only exactly the worst and wrong things in the world — it’s the bottom of the ninth inning, we are not the home team, and the score is Nature infinity, humanity 0. As visionary climatologist Guy McPherson has been warning everyone he could reach for three decades, “Nature Bats Last” and she wrote the rules of the only game that matters in the end — the survival of the human species on Earth under the causal laws of the cosmos we inhabit.

Finally, if none of this or the other referenced materials on this blog and elsewhere are convincing, perhaps the views of arguably the most rational intellect of the past century will be more persuasive. In May 1949, Albert Einstein wrote “Why Socialism?” in the first issue of the socialist journal Monthly Review, and the article was reprinted in the journal in May 1998 and again in May 2009. In summary, Einstein argued as follows:[4]

According to Einstein, the profit motive of a capitalist society, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, leads to unnecessary cycles of booms and depressions, and ultimately encourages selfishness instead of cooperation. In addition, the educational system of such a society would be severely undermined because people will educate themselves only to advance their careers. This results in the "crippling of individuals" and the erosion of human creativity. Unrestrained competition in a capitalist society leads to a huge waste of labor and causes economic anarchy, which Einstein denounces as the real source of capitalism's "evil":

“The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil.”

Einstein predicted that under such a capitalist society, political parties and politicians would be corrupted by financial contributions made by owners of large capital amounts, and the system "cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society". The essay concludes with Einstein's analysis on how to solve these problems through a planned economy:

“I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.”

Einstein asserts that a planned economy that adjusts to production would guarantee a livelihood to every member of society:

“In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.”

In his final words, Einstein cautioned that "a planned economy is not yet socialism", since it may also be accompanied by an "all-powerful" bureaucracy that leads to the "complete enslavement of the individual".

Where are we now? Through the looking-glass from the actual world into an absurd world made to appear real by fascist capitalism. Its vaporous truth and delusional irreality are engineered and constructed to conceal totalitarian oligarchy and praetorian corporatocracy enslavement of humankind.[5] The real truth and reality thus obfuscated is the fascist heart of darkness kept beating to the new rhythms of a global economy “planned” according to Schwab’s “stakeholder capitalism.” Red-baiting entrapment is merely a permanent top-10 number in the Circus2020 song and dance hit parade distracting us from the omnicidal extinction into which we’re being obliviously herded.

This evil scheme will work unless we overturn that malevolent bandwagon and keep them from getting away with the murder of everything — if it isn’t already too late.

_______________
NOTES

[1] The drawings by MR FISH won’t make sense to readers not familiar with a classic trope from the early days of silent film and with the vaudeville slapstick comedy of Abbott and Costello revived in the ‘talkies’ some years later. For background, take a few minutes to watch this video explaining the “damsel in distress” trope and this clip from the Abbot and Costello “Who’s on First?” routine. Then compare MR FISH’s “TRACKING THE ELECTION” and “TWO BALLS AND NO STRIKES” drawings to the images below. Will handsome cowboy hero billionaire Tom Steyer come to Sanders’ rescue in the nick of time? Not likely. Will the slapstick Circus2020 comedy of Bloomberg and Biden keep us from seeing the nefarious villainy behind the DNC-RNC curtains? Quite probably. BTW, I have it on impeccable authority (from the artist himself) that MR FISH did not stoop to photoshopping the archival images below for his drawings as they appear at the beginning of this post (used here by his permission). No, he spent many hours of meticulous focus and diligent concentration rendering them from scratch by hand to create them — they are realistic original drawings based on these early 20th century archival photographs. Prints of these and many other Booth drawings are available through his website, CLOWNCRACK.

[2] Schwab claims to have had his “stakeholder capitalism” epiphany nearly half a century ago: “stakeholder capitalism is quickly gaining ground …. I first described the concept back in 1971, and I created the World Economic Forum to help business and political leaders implement it …. Now (in 2020), others are finally coming to the ‘stakeholder’ table.” This leaves one wondering why it didn’t appear in the Davos limelight until now, or at least made explicit and more stridently promoted in his relatively recent book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution (New York, NY: Currency, 2017).

[3] The adage is most familiar as, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time..” Its actual origin is uncertain, as it has been attributed to Abraham Lincoln, Jacques Abbadie, Denis Diderot, and even ‘Anonymous.’

[4] This summary quote is from the Wikipedia entry bearing Einstein’s article title, “Why Socialism?” The lines enclosed in quotation marks are from the original article as it appeared in the Monthly Review journal in May, 2009.

[5] The evil nature of the tyrannous corporatocracy referred to here is explicated in Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, Introduction by Chris Hedges, new edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).