Terror: noun
ter· ror ˈter-ər ˈte-rər
plural: terrorsViolence or the threat of violence used as a weapon of intimidation or coercion
— Merriam-Webster, 1828
While the Western elites continue to pour money and materiel into their terrorist proxies in Kiev and Tel Aviv American society is grappling under the iron heel of a different kind of siege. Indeed, two of the deadliest truncheons in Washington’s war on the American people are the weaponization of heath care and the weaponization of education. The hijacking of these two indispensable institutions by demonic corporate forces is antithetical to democracy and has played a critical role in spawning this anarchic dark age of neoliberal barbarism.
In any civilized society it must be accepted as self-evident that good public health care and education are rights and not privileges. Once these two institutions fall under the aegis of the latter democracy is no longer sustainable. As it is presently constructed, American education exists to cultivate indentured servitude through the generation of student loan debt (currently in excess of 1.7 trillion dollars) while relentlessly fomenting philistinism, tribalism, blind obedience, consumerism, overspecialization, Zionism, biofascism, humanitarian interventionism, Russophobia, unfettered capitalism, the cult of careerism and the myth of the meritocracy.
As Samuel Beckett warned in Gnome, the growing utilitarian trend in education portends a profoundly ominous future:
Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through a world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning.
Without an education system anchored in the humanities students are increasingly raised in a culturally, intellectually, and morally impoverished world where nothing is valued except money and one’s career.
The multicultural curriculum and identity studies have usurped the position of the humanities and constitute an anti-humanities curriculum, as the foundational building blocks of America’s heritage are now routinely vilified as “racist,” a ruse for the cultivation of extreme forms of anti-intellectualism and sectarianism. However, just as a broken clock is right once during the day, the neoliberal obsession with “white supremacy” has backfired with regards to the Zionist entity, as in this particular instance this is, in fact, a classic case of white supremacy where an authoritarian settler colonial regime relentlessly oppresses natives of color.
One of the most striking aspects of the multicultural society is the prevalence with which one encounters Americans with prestigious degrees who can speak at length about a highly specialized thing in the visual arts, performing arts, medicine, academia, STEM, or finance yet are incapable of seeing the forest for the trees outside of their narrow area of focus. This phenomenon is readily observed with physicians who can speak tirelessly about a subspecialty such as brain tumors or hematology without having even the most rudimentary understanding of the deplorable state of informed consent and the absence of single-payer, let alone the Ukraine war, or the recent wars in Libya, Syria, or Yugoslavia. This transforms what was once a reasonably educated middle class into an army of technocratic automatons.
I once attended a wedding during the George W. Bush years and bumped into an acquaintance who was working as a corporate lawyer at the time. The Military Commissions Act had recently been passed and I asked him what he thought of it, to which he replied, “I haven’t been following it.” This is someone who has degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Chicago. Lamentably, overspecialized sociopaths with the most advanced degrees that are operating intellectually at the level of a kindergartner has become an integral feature of neoliberal America.
That the most indoctrinated Americans often have the most elite degrees should come as no surprise if we acknowledge the fact that blind obedience is extolled and rewarded while the humanities and critical thinking are relentlessly heaped with scorn, ridicule, and contempt. The violence that has been meted out to the anti-Zionist college protestors, often with the full support of their universities to which they pay obscene tuitions, underscores academia’s disdain for the peasantry and these brave students that have heretically strayed from their ideologically designated reservations.
Between the destruction of the humanities, horrendous overcrowding, and the loss of any semblance of discipline the inner city public schools have been degraded to the point where many of these schools function more as juvenile detention centers rather than centers of learning. Upon arriving at the front gate students routinely encounter metal detectors and armed guards. How can “education” take place in such an environment? It is no coincidence that these schools invariably fail to teach their students classes in civics.
Increasingly, American youth are immersed in an appalling environment of moral degradation, nihilism, and historical erasure, a prison of the soul where students are inculcated with the pernicious idea that success can only be measured with regards to dollars and cents leading to a dissolution of reason and compassion, without which a human being is nothing more than a burned-out husk, an amorphous phantom in the night.
Deleterious health outcomes and serious socio-economic problems tied to a lack of a humane nationalized health care system include millions of medical bankruptcies, patients postponing care they cannot afford, an ever-present fear of losing one’s job and one’s insurance along with it, Americans trapped in toxic marriages where one spouse is dependent on the other for their health insurance, doctors taking money and gifts from drug companies leading to an erosion of informed consent, the regulatory capture of health care agencies and medical journals by pharmaceutical companies, patients forced to work with doctors they do not wish to work with, Medicaid patients that are not allowed to earn more than a few thousand dollars per year, a deranged system of hundreds of different health insurance plans exacerbating alienation and atomization, millions of Americans that are compelled to abandon their health insurance each year as their jobs and incomes change leading to incessant disruptions in doctor-patient relationships and patients that are suddenly unable to obtain medicines indispensable to their well-being.
Regarding this last point: try talking to almost any American doctor about your fear of losing your insurance or of being chronically under-insured. You are speaking with someone who is living on another planet, as they are accustomed to always having one of the very finest plans, rendering the world in which the average American inhabits utterly alien to them. Can a country with such extreme forms of inequality even be called a real society?
One of my high school classmates has become the director of one of the biggest human rights NGOs, and I see her posting Russophobic propaganda on Twitter from time to time. The point here is that her keeping this prestigious position is contingent on her parroting whatever the mass media says. Who in such a coveted job wants to learn all about the Banderite putsch and the siege of the Donbass, start openly questioning NATO designs in Eastern Europe, and then lose a great income along with one of the best health insurance plans? The same could be said of the doctors who intuitively sensed that “the science” behind the Branch Covidian coup was nonsense, but were afraid to risk their jobs which they need to pay off hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans while maintaining their excellent health care coverage. In neoliberal America, the line between “success” and selling hot dogs in Central Park is very fine indeed.
The perversion and defilement of these two healing professions, so vital to solidarity, knowledge, and the cultivation of the human spirit into instruments of subjugation and control has destroyed any semblance of a humane society and serves to further terrorize a population already reeling from grievous assaults on the First Amendment and bodily autonomy, along with a catastrophic crisis of household debt.
It is noteworthy that the authorities in Donetsk and Lugansk maintained nationalized health and education systems during their eight year war with the Banderite junta prior to the Russian military intervention, and this was achieved at a time when they existed in an existential no man’s land, being neither a part of Russia nor Ukraine. This deep state hijacking of education and health care, institutions which have been crying out for nationalization for decades, is indicative of a ruling class that has abdicated any sense of social responsibility towards its citizens.
Ultimately, American health care and education are not run by incompetents but by rapacious and despotic oligarchic forces. That these hallowed institutions have been transformed into tools of oppression is a monstrous demonstration of their barbarism. The horrors this has unleashed threaten civilization itself.