I don’t know if you have seen Bernardo Bertolucci’s movie The Last Emperor. I saw it a long time ago and, by now have forgotten most details of the story, but there is one scene that never leaves my mind. I think the scene has stayed with me because politics in the United States quite often remind me of that scene which continues to spook me out to this day.
Pu Yi, the last Emperor of China is being held prisoner as a traitor and a war criminal in the People’s Republic of China. While in detention, he encounters a peasant one day who recognizes him. Instead of assailing the Emperor, which would have been the natural reaction of an oppressed subject to the encounter with the parasitic dictator-turned-Japanese- collaborator, the peasant kneels down to tie the Emperor’s shoes.
How many times have we seen this scene repeated in American politics? Didn’t we vote for Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats to deliver our antiwar message to Congress only to be stabbed in the back by them? And what about when we told Congressman John Conyers and others that the impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney should be on the table? Do we have any idea why, despite our protests and manifestations, both the Democrats and Republicans plan to continue squandering our much needed tax dollars by dragging on the Iraq War and perhaps even expanding it to Iran, Syria, or Lebanon? Why don’t we, the informed citizens hold our “representatives” accountable for their actions?
Would this be the residue of a culture of slavery which continues to linger on in America? After all, of the tens of thousands of southerners who fought with the Confederate army and gave their lives to preserve slavery, only a small handful was actual slave-owners. The majority were poor, ordinary citizens conscripted or brainwashed to consider it an honor and a duty to fight for and sustain the southern plantation way of life.
I think, however, the problem goes beyond that. The tragedy of many American liberals and some in the left, in my opinion, is their persistent denial of the existence of classes in the society and the role of class war which continues to dominate and shape the American politics as in any other society.
A natural outcome of such a denial is that the crimes and acts of hostility of the owning classes towards the people are then often taken as “misinformed”, “misguided”, or “mistaken”. That’s when you hear silly comments such as: “I can’t understand why despite our economic woes, President Bush insists on tax breaks for the rich” or “I am so shocked to find out that Nancy Pelosi had been aware of the practice of torture against Guantanamo detainees.”
“We just don’t understand why Democrats don’t stop the government’s spying on US citizens”, and a million dead Iraqis later, Bush is still not a mass murderer who is acting on behalf of America’s corporate interests but a confused and incompetent president who “mistakenly” believes that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, and of course, Adolf Hitler was just some mad man …
Today, America is left with an economy in shambles. The neoconservatives (who by the way, did not just fall from the sky) have greatly eroded our personal liberties and made a mockery of the Constitution and the concept of separation of the branches of the government. Our educational infrastructure is in dire condition. The country’s healthcare system is near collapse and quite unaffordable to millions of Americans. Thanks to the neoconservatives, America is now viewed and hated as a symbol of torture, arrogance, and thievery around the world, and on and on, and yet there are those in our progressive midst who naively believe that Hillary or Obama are going to bring about significant changes. Imagine President Obama or Clinton carrying on the legacy of the Bush signing statements or initiating the bombing of Iran to appease Israel.
Can a system that does not even allow a presidential candidate to say that the people are “frustrated and bitter”, which is quite an understatement, in any way reflect the aspirations of the majority of the American people?
Don’t get me wrong. I myself have often voted for many of these Democrats, in hopes of creating some breathing space for the common people and as a tactic for bringing about divisions among the owning classes, and I do believe that there are genuine differences between the Democrats and the Republicans, but looking at the picture from the perspective of “us versus them”, I view the Democrats, just like the Republicans, as true representatives of the corporate and the owning minority and therefore not friends of the American people. They might utilize different methods than the Republicans, but when it comes down to class interests, they sell us out without hesitation as they always have in the past. To paraphrase this, in a good cop, bad cop performance, the Democrats have generally played the role of the good COP.
How meager are our aspirations for the future of our country! Would we be content with someone who can perhaps close down one or two of the many torture chambers for which the US is now infamous, bring back a portion of our troops from Iraq, or maybe sink us even deeper in the Middle East, and continue snooping through our phone calls and email messages while increasing the dictatorial powers of the government in the name of “war on terror” and “national security”?
Today’s world is facing some unprecedented and life-threatening challenges: the crisis with fossil fuels, the global warming disaster, the resulting poverty, disease epidemics, and the imminent decline of an empire. The Republican and Democratic response to these challenges is international belligerence theorized under the so-called “War on Terror” and tightening the screws inside the United States: increased spying activities against US citizens, eroding personal liberties, internment camps, and drastic cuts in public spending. Needless to say, such policies can only increase the gap between the rich and the poor, augment social tensions, and bring about further worldwide insecurity. The only ones benefiting from such policies are a handful of corporations that control the media and other pillars of power, the likes of Halliburtons, KBR, Blackwater . . . . The people in their millions, on the other hand, will be condemned to a life of increasing austerity and misery.
When the citizens of France sent Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to the guillotine in 1793, theirs was not an act of savagery but one of culture and resistance, for you either witness the majority of the masses at the bottom get crushed while the society sinks into a culture of corruption and despair, or you help crush the few at the top and hand power to the people. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and the French were able to rise up to the occasion.
More than two centuries later, here in America, the people are in the grips of yet another despot, much more brutal, corrupt, and destructive than King Louis XVI: American corporatism. This one is bent on destroying, not only America but the environment and the world with it. Just like King Louis, the corporate rule has to be dealt with to save the humanity.
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in November 1787. Six years later, the rising masses in France took up similar slogans when they rebelled against the tyranny of the King.
This is by no means an invitation to violence of any kind, for I am a man of peace, but it is the people’s inalienable right to decide the type of society they would like to live in, its economic infrastructure, and the culture and democratic institutions that go with it. I realize this is easier said than done, especially since the “when” and the “how” is not so clear and still needs to be worked out, but as long as our focus is the farcical electoral process, we will never be able to strategize any meaningful and far-reaching changes.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with going to the polls and voting for your favorite candidate – the one that you think can do the least amount of harm, but as Noam Chomsky put it in one of his interviews, “the election is a marginal affair, it should not distract us from the serious work of changing the society and the culture and the institutions, creating a democratic culture.”
Unfortunately, America has sustained enormous damage during the years of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush administrations. With the merger of corporatism and the government, we are well on our way down the slippery slope of dictatorship and fascism, American-style, as much as many of us hate to admit. It is only in this light that the actions of the US intelligence agencies in spying on Americans, the suspension of personal liberties, and the establishment of internment camps (under the pretense of apprehending “illegal aliens”) can be viewed and understood. We should not accept such a dismal future for our children. We cannot swallow the big lie and remain silent. With every passing day we are losing our ability to reverse the mishap more and more.