Category: politics

Dunes

Men erect
edifices, imagining
we’ll look on them and despair.
But these are houses built on the sand–
one day, they’ll crumble, like sand castles, and be dunes.

One tears
up the trees, imagining
the plant life of the Earth is limitless.
But when grass no longer grows, and green turns brown,
those castles made of sand will turn into barren dunes eventually.

One wages war
and heightens heat, imagining
that gold and paper green will last forever.
But these are worthless colours without the green of the ground.
Dunes will one day make us look on these works of the wicked, and despair.

Leftist Fundamentals

Photo by AXP Photography on Pexels.com

I: Introduction

We leftists tend to be our own worst enemies, far more so in many ways than the ruling class are. Instead of banding together in solidarity and planning how to overthrow the ruling class, we far too often would much rather bicker and argue over relatively minor issues of doctrine or political analysis.

We tend to forget, it seems, that the ruling class are far more united in the implementation of their agenda than we are. Sure, liberals currently are all in a dither over the recent reelection of Trump, wringing their hands and acting as though the world is about to come to an end, just as they did in November of 2016. I’d say, however, that all of this rending of garments is more of a media melodrama, meant to distract us all from how it’s more the political system is just continuing down the same neoliberal trajectory it’s been going along for the past forty years than it is some kind of imminent Night of the Long Knives.

We know the media is manipulating us, yet we don’t know. Each new outrage that gets thrust into our faces, be it the latest Israeli atrocity, updates on the Ukraine war, or Project 2025, is presented to us in a way meant to rile our anger, though not to unite us–rather, to get us to fight with each other over the ‘correct’ way to interpret what’s happening. The ruling classes laugh at us as we fight each other instead of fighting them, because the attempt to get ego gratification over ‘winning’ an argument with another leftist is far easier than setting aside our petty differences and fighting the real enemy.

None of this is to say, however, that there are no legitimate differences of opinion among leftists that can be safely disregarded. Unity on these fundamental points, the subject of this article, must be respected if we’re to move ahead and organize to overthrow the capitalist class. As for the petty issues so often bickered about, those can be dealt with once the revolution has been successfully achieved, and a socialist society is being built.

Photo by Ehsan Haque on Pexels.com

II: The Fundamentals

The following are the basic points we leftists should all agree on. There may be variation on how to interpret what these points exactly mean, or how they should be put into practice, but here they are, and they are not negotiable:

The complete replacement of capitalism with a state-planned, socialist economy. No social-democratic compromises with the market, please. We’ve tried that before, with the welfare capitalism of the post-war period, 1945-1973; when attempts like this are made, so that capitalism is ‘more comfortable’ for the working class, it’s only a matter of time before the ruling class gets sick and tired of paying higher taxes and negotiating with unions. Then they start seducing the public with the allure of ‘small government’ and the ‘free market,’ which will lead us right back down the Reaganite/Thatcherite path to the neoliberal nightmare we’re in now.

The only scenario in which a socialist state can tolerate a market economy is when a developing country needs to pull itself out of poverty by building up its productive forces, as countries like China and Vietnam have done. Once these productive forces have been fully built up, though, the left-wing factions of their communist parties should regain their preeminent influence, and guide the nation beyond the primary stage of socialism.

Now, I know any anarchists reading this will wince at my advocating a socialist state. As a former anarchist myself, I can understand how they feel. My suggestion to them is to use dialectical reasoning to resolve the contradiction between having and not having a state. A sublating of this contradiction would be to have the kind of state that withers away. I also recommend reading this.

Stalin was committed to the idea of advancing socialism to the point of a centralized state eventually dying out…when it would be possible to do so (not when there was the threat of a Nazi invasion, and not when the Americans had the atomic bomb). The obstacle to such an end goal was not his ‘tyrannical lust for power,’ contrary to imperialist propaganda (Stalin asked to resign from his position as General Secretary of the Soviet Union no less than four times, but was refused, contrary to the myth that he was a dictator with absolute power; for further reading of a defence of state socialism, anarchists can go here); that obstacle was imperialism’s relentless attempts at sabotaging socialism. This leads me to my next point.

Photo by Travel Photographer on Pexels.com

Commitment to opposing imperialism in all of its forms. The wish to free ourselves from capitalist exploitation must not be limited to the Anglo/American/NATO-allied countries of the First World. The entire globe must be liberated. No one is free until all of us are free.

The modern stage of capitalism, coming to reach a zenith from around the mid-to-late-19th century in such forms as the Scramble for Africa, has been imperialism. This consists of, as Lenin observed, the concentration of production and monopolies, the new role of the banks, finance capital, the export of capital to other countries, the division of the world among the capitalist powers, and competition between the great powers over which will dominate and be the greatest exploiter of the world.

A crucial element of imperialism is colonialism. One starts with the idea that one supposedly has the right to move into the land where someone else–the indigenous community–has lived for many, many generations, if not centuries, then supposedly has the right to take over and kick the indigenous population out. If they don’t like that, one can simply kill them. This is the basis of the imperial problem: that one can steal the land from those who lived there first.

This is the settler-colonialist foundation of the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and many other countries. From this dubious foundation, the settler-colonialist imagines he has the right to go into other sovereign states and steal their natural resources to enrich himself from them. So from settler-colonialism, one proceeds to imperialism.

Just as the boss imagines he has the right to exploit his workers and steal the fruits of their labour to enrich himself, so does the imperialist, a natural outgrowth from the settler-colonialist, imagine he has the right to exploit the indigenous peoples and steal their natural resources. He can achieve this exploitation and theft militarily or through neocolonialism–an indirect control of the dependent country by such methods as financial obligation through international borrowing (think of the IMF and the World Bank).

Other forms of imperialist control include interfering with the political process of the dependent countries by fomenting coups d’état to remove democratically-elected heads of state to replace them with leaders who will be puppets of the empire. There are many examples of this slimy tactic: Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1954; Chile, 1973; and Ukraine, 2014 are just a few examples.

Yet another form of imperial control is the manufacturing of consent for war to further the interests of empire; this manufacturing of consent is achieved through the deceitful media that works for empire, which leads to the next point.

Photo by Leon Huang on Pexels.com

One must recognize imperialist propaganda for what it is, never trust it, and always oppose it.

The managers of empire are relentless in their efforts to teach us who they want us to love, who they want us to hate, who to despise, and what we’re supposed to dismiss as ideas thrown into the dustbin of history. Hence, TINA and the “end of history.”

Imperial propagandists are fond of telling us of those heads of state regarded as ‘evil dictators’ who must be removed from power for the sake of preserving ‘freedom and democracy.’ Examples of such undesirables from the recent and more remote past include Stalin, Mao, Milosevic, Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, Yanukovych, the Kims, Putin, Xi Jinping, etc.

This is not to say that all of the names above are completely beyond reproach. It is just that we should not feel antipathy towards them merely because the Anglo/American/NATO-allied empire says they are all bad men. For whatever wrongdoing these men are…or are not!…guilty of, the Western empire is guilty of much more wrongdoing.

A detailed discussion of the sins of capitalism is beyond the scope of this article, but if you want to delve deeper into that, Dear Reader, you can look at this and this, the latter being something I wrote back in my then-naïve anarchist phase, but scroll down to the fourth section, marked “Capitalist Crimes.”

The point to be made here is that the Western imperialists always need to have an enemy, a political scapegoat on whom they can project all of their vices. Starting around seventy-five years ago (as of the publication of this article, of course), that enemy was communism, which the imperialists were desperate to discredit out of a fear of leftist revolution.

The last great taboo to be broken in leftist thinking is the defence of Stalin, who–thanks to decades of having our heads pounded in with anti-communist propaganda–is portrayed as a kind of left-wing version of Hitler. The idea is as absurd as it is offensive, given that Stalin’s leadership of the Red Army–who did most of the work fighting off the Wehrmacht, with a sacrifice of about 27 million Soviets–was crucial in defeating the Nazis. One is normally called a hero for doing that.

Apart from the fact that the deaths under Stalin are wildly exaggerated and taken out of context (and imperialist propaganda is so pervasive that only Marxist-Leninist sources will offer a different perspective), one should consider how even in recent years, large percentages of Russians, who haven’t lived under a socialist government in decades, still have a high regard for Stalin and look back on the Soviet years with nostalgia. If people are worried about the admiration of dictators, they should worry about all the people out there who still admire Hitler.

But more importantly, what is the real reason Stalin is so vilified? The fact is, his leadership demonstrated that one really can stand up to the imperialists, successfully fight off a vicious fascist invasion, and build socialism in one’s country (i.e., provide free education, healthcare, housing, full employment, etc.). He took a backward society made up mostly of illiterate peasant farmers and transformed it into a modern, industrialized, nuclear-armed superpower by the time of his death. This all was achieved within the space of about twenty-five years. That is nothing short of impressive. The capitalist West felt nothing short of threatened.

The Western media couldn’t let such achievements be spread around freely, inspiring Western leftists to want to bring about socialism in their respective countries. So a propaganda Blitzkrieg had to be unleashed all over the capitalist West, terrifying people with a narrative that communism not only ‘doesn’t work,’ but also leads to brutal totalitarian dictatorships, even though the CIA secretly knew that the Gulag was nowhere near as bad as the media were claiming it was.

Of course, the western propagandists had a lot of help from ‘dissident leftists,’ like George Orwell, Milovan Djilas, Noam Chomsky, Leon Trotsky, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Nikita Khrushchev, the last of whom denounced Stalin and his ‘cult of personality’ in a secret speech in 1956. Such traitors as these have given us leftists the “unkindest cut of all.”

After the counterrevolution was complete by the early 1990s, and the imperialists as the only superpower could do anything they wanted to any other country with impunity, it was time to look for a new enemy to draw attention away from the discontents felt in the imperial core, and in the 2000s, that enemy became Islamic terrorism. Though there was considerable opposition to the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 to steal from the country, the notion of regime change to remove ‘brutal dictators’ and further the cause of ‘freedom and democracy’ has been the accepted rationale–thanks to the corporate media–for all the banging of the war drums since.

Of course, having Democrats in the White House has made it a lot easier to manufacture consent among liberals, hence the Obama administration’s destabilizing (with France’s help) of Libya–with virtually no protest from those who’d protested Bush’s invasion of Iraq–to remove Gaddafi, all because–apart from Sarkozy’s financial entanglements–the Libyan leader wanted to establish an African currency, based on gold, that would free Africa from being chained to the IMF and World Bank, something the Western imperialists would never abide.

Then the imperialists went after Assad, their real reason being, again, to steal their oil, while using the media to lie to us about Assad ‘gassing his people’ and other such nonsense. They‘re still stealing Syrian oil (and wheat), by the way.

Yanukovych wanted to partner with Russia to help Ukraine deal with its financial problems without having to be dependent on the IMF, but such a decision was unacceptable to the West, hence his ouster, to be replaced with a government and military including Russophobic Neo-Nazis. This anti-Russian attitude leads us to the next enemy of the empire.

Russia is reviled not because ‘Putin helped Trump win’ in 2016, a baseless accusation that just fueled the fire and helped manufacture consent for the needlessly bellicose attitude that has led to this awful war in Ukraine, taking away billions of dollars that could be used to help the American poor and fix their country’s crumbling infrastructure. The recent Russophobia and Sinophobia are really because Russia and China, as objects of American hate, are getting stronger (i.e., the BRICS alliance) while the Western empire is deservedly dying.

Still, the Western media, mostly owned by the top oligarchs and, as capitalists, have interests fully entwined with those of imperialism, have convinced a huge swathe of the Western population into believing that Russia and China are our latest enemies, as well as Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, etc. For us to believe such nonsense is, of course, far more convenient than to believe the far more uncomfortable truth, that it’s our leaders, both conservative and liberal, who are the problem.

Photo by Nico Becker on Pexels.com

We must stop hating only one half of the ruling class. It’s the entire system–DNC and GOP, Tory and Labour, Tory and Liberal, etc.–that must be opposed. We must give up on such things as Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s so ridiculous–and hypocritical–that liberals are up in arms whenever Trump does something admittedly awful, such as rounding up ‘illegals,’ putting them in cages via ICE, and kicking them out of the country, but when Obama or Biden did more or less the same thing, liberals largely ignore or rationalize the problem.

On the other side of the coin, Biden and Harris are rightly despised for their support of Israel and its ‘right to self-defence’ (translation: its apartheid, genocidal policies), but little thought is given to the fact that Trump will be every bit as supportive of those policies when he comes back into office in 2025.

Enough of the black-and-white thinking! In the larger scheme of politics, the ideological differences between conservative and liberal are petty. Both sides are capitalist and imperialist: that’s what matters, not the minutiae that they disagree about. That their squabbles are mere right-wing infighting is especially true in a neoliberal world in which income inequality is at an extreme, homelessness is an epidemic in many parts of the world, most mainstream politicians, conservative or liberal, support the US/NATO proxy war of helping Ukrainian Nazis to fight Russians, thereby provoking the danger of a possibly nuclear WWIII, and most of these politicians support Zionism.

We cannot expect real change when we get upset if a party representing one side of the capitalist class, the side we don’t personally like, wins, but we rest on our laurels when the party representing the side we do like wins. The entire system must be dismantled. The only way to achieve this dismantling is through revolution, not through voting, which is meaningless and only perpetuates the system.

As Mao said, “Revolution is not a dinner party.” Revolution isn’t ‘nice.’ It is violent, it is forceful, it is difficult, and it requires planning and organization. People like voting because it is easy; the ruling class likes voting because it takes the people’s minds off of revolution.

A true left-wing revolution, as opposed to mere liberal, social-democrat reforms, will guarantee such things as these:

–the means of production are controlled by the workers
—private property is abolished
–commodities are produced to provide for everyone
—elimination of class differences, leading to…
–…no more centralized state monopoly on power, and…
–…no more money (i.e., replaced with a gift economy)
–an end to imperialism and all the wars it causes
–an end to the huge gap between the rich and the poor
–an end to global hunger in the Third World
–free universal health care 
–free education for all, up to university, ending illiteracy
–housing for all
–equal rights for women, people of colour, LGBT people, disabled people
–employment for all, with decent remuneration and hours
–a social safety net in case of job loss

Conservatives abominate such changes. Liberals speak of gradual, gentle nudging in the left-wing direction without ever really delivering. When some progress has been made in the leftist direction, the right-wingers complain, liberals tend–in varying degrees–to cave in, and we move back in the rightist direction, as we have for the past thirty to forty years. Small wonder Stalin once said, “Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.”

Does that quote sound too extreme to you, Dear Reader? Consider how the Social Democratic Party of Germany opposed the failed communist German Revolution of 1918-1919, favoring instead the Weimar Republic, upon whose foundation it took only a decade and a half thereafter to lapse into Nazism. Consider how the Democratic Party, about five years after the dissolution of the USSR, gutted welfare, created the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (merging the American media into six corporations), and interfered with the 1996 Russian election to keep pro-US Yeltsin in power. Finally, there’s of course the Biden administration’s pouring of money into Ukraine.

Photo by Alexander Popovkin on Pexels.com

III: Conclusion

That list you saw a couple of paragraphs ago–those are the leftist fundamentals, right there. I just had to expand on some of them, and make a few more important points to show how indispensable these ideas are to eliminate capitalism and imperialism once and for all.

The point is that once a revolution has been achieved, that isn’t the end of the struggle. The forces of reaction will do everything in their power to restore capitalism, and we have to have a strong defence against that. This is why a socialist state is needed: not only to implement the transition (the dictatorship of the proletariat, or a workers’ state–true democracy) from capitalism to full communism, but also to protect the gains of the revolution; otherwise, our efforts will all be in vain.

Whenever a socialist state was either weak or non-existent, the revolution was short-lived. The Paris Commune and the Spanish Revolution of 1936 are noteworthy examples of such nobly lofty, but ultimately failed, revolutions.

In today’s perilous times, we can’t afford to be soft leftists (translation: liberals); we have to be HARD leftists, always wary of backsliding into liberalism. That means that in today’s imperialist stage of late capitalism, we can’t stop at being Marxists: we have to be Marxist-Leninists.

To be this way, we must advocate a state-planned socialist economy; we must oppose all forms of imperialism, but especially in its current Anglo-American-NATO form as the contemporary, primary contradiction (though if, in the future, any of the emerging powers from BRICS grow to be substantially imperialist, they must then be opposed, too); we mustn’t trust the mainstream, corporate media and its pro-empire propaganda; and we must oppose the entire system of capitalism/imperialism, not just get upset if, for example, the GOP wins, but be content if the Democrats win (or vice versa).

There are no quick and easy answers. Our enemies are far too well-equipped militarily, and far too adept at using the media and modern tech to play mind-games on us and surveil us, to keep us compliant. We must similarly undergo training–that is, our young and able-bodied comrades–and we must learn to organize and plant seeds of revolution in the minds of as many fence-sitters out there as we can. This latter is what I try to do here on this blog.

Let’s do it, comrades.

When Tech Is Dreck

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

As a Canadian expatriate having lived in Taiwan for the past 28 years (as of the publication of this post), I have seen many instances of the locals’ fetishization of the latest in technology. They typically link high-tech with ‘convenience,’ which of course is its ostensible raison d’être.

One time, perhaps about fifteen to twenty years ago, I was a guest teacher in a class of high school English students. I was doing lectures on topics based on newspaper articles chosen by the regular teacher of the class. She typically chose articles on the topics of science and technology, since her students were probably mostly going to go into STEM fields.

Such choices of topics were fine with me, but at one point I suggested news articles based on current events in politics, which I thought would not only be far more interesting to the students, but also an important way to immerse the kids in the goings-on of other countries, as well as getting them to be more aware of the major political issues affecting the world. After all, I had noticed something of an island mentality among far too many of the locals, a tendency to be insular and show no interest in the world beyond Japan, South Korea, and mainland China.

That teacher was adamantly opposed to the idea of current events as lecture topics. I found her opposition utterly baffling. Apart from suggesting she get someone other than me to do the lectures for the class (for my apparent belabouring of the change in subject matter…!), she gave the following as her reasons: classrooms in general avoid discussions of current events, for such avoidance is “common sense.” It’s sensible to avoid the topic, because everybody else avoids it.

???

A discussion of political issues in class, far from being inappropriate, could be made into practical English conversation practice, in the form of debates in which students can be put into teams and argue the various points of view, regardless of whether or not they actually hold such points of view. But no: making students in any way politically literate was a no-no. We just stuck to topics on technology.

As an English teacher here, I’ve noticed over the years that kids in the Taiwanese education system are generally geared towards careers in engineering, computers, semiconductor and cellphone manufacturing, and that sort of thing. It’s about getting them to have jobs in high tech in order to make lots of money, in other words. One is totally indoctrinated into the capitalist system, never to question it. After all, TINA.

Now, my political leanings as of those years hadn’t yet drifted to the left (so I wasn’t trying to impose my personal political opinions on the kids), but the education system here shows no desire whatsoever to instill any kind of political consciousness in the kids, be it right-wing, left-wing, or centrist. As a result, all that’s left for the kids to espouse is the default worldview: neoliberalism, treated as if it were the universal truth, an ideological ‘end of history,’ in which prostrating oneself to the mercies of the all-mighty market is the only way to live. It isn’t even an ideology: it’s just ‘the truth.’

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Further Taiwanese fetishizing of high-tech can be seen with the locals willingly buying things with their smartphones instead of using cash. Oh, boy–we have another excuse to play with our phones! It’s so convenient! Oh, really? Standing there, fumbling around with your phone, clicking things, making mistakes here and there, then clicking on them again…somehow, this fiddling around is more convenient than taking cash out of your wallet, giving it to the cashier, taking your paid-for items and change, then promptly leaving the store?

Using smartphones instead of cash to pay for things is leading to the idea of a future cashless society, something many of us have a legitimate fear of. Paying digitally increases our dependence on the internet. What if there’s an outage? What if we’re hacked? What if we, for some reason, get locked out of our accounts and cannot buy food or other necessities? What if our being locked out of them is because we’ve expressed an opinion that the snooping government doesn’t like?

In this imagined, and very possible, future scenario, we can see the duality of a fetishization of technology vs. a total lack of engagement with what’s happening in the world politically. But the problem doesn’t end with digital payment.

The latest technological trend, of course, has been AI, and in recent months I’ve seen the TV news here in Taiwan awash with stories on Jensen Huang and his company, in my opinion aptly named Nvidia (Invidia, a Latin word from which we get envy, means ‘looking at (someone) with the evil eye, with hostility.’). The locals are treating Huang like a celebrity, not least of all because he’s Taiwanese-American, but also, of course, because of their ongoing fetishization of the newest in technology.

Now, AI can be a good or a bad thing, depending on how it’s used. Put another way, AI can be used to do all of our work, which, depending on which economic system we have, can be a good or a bad thing.

If we have an economic system in which commodities and services are provided to fulfill everyone’s needs, then AI will be the great liberator of all of humanity. That is, if everyone around the Earth was provided with and guaranteed access to food, housing, education, healthcare, and all other forms of wherewithal, we’d never have to work again to survive. We could all actually enjoy life.

But, in our current economic system, in which commodities and services are here to maximize profits, with no consideration given to the needs of the poor, then AI taking our jobs away from us would be an absolute nightmare. I see no indications of our current economic system changing from a capitalist one to a socialist one any time in the foreseeable future. The shift from the US/NATO alliance to a BRICS one will still be largely of countries with a capitalist economic system.

It’s been argued that old jobs lost to AI can, in some cases, be replaced with new jobs operating the AI. Not everybody losing the old jobs, however, will have the ability, the desire, or the finances to be trained to do the new jobs. As an English teacher here in Taiwan, I’m very worried that, in the next few years, I’ll be replaced by a robot in at least some, if not most or even all, of my classes; and since the beginning of all the Covid hysteria, I’ve been chronically underemployed as it is.

Photo by luis gomes on Pexels.com

Furthermore, AI can be used in aid of surveillance by the government and corporations, eroding our right to privacy. It was bad enough to know what Edward Snowden revealed about the NSA’s snooping around with our cellphone calls and email messages years ago. What is Facebook, but a large profile of each and every person’s likes and dislikes, political opinions, geographic location, friends and family, etc.? Then there’s surveillance through such things as Google. Our constant use of smartphones makes it easy to track us. AI is only going to make this monitoring easier, more meticulous, and more thorough.

Big Broadband is watching you. All of this surveillance, being expanded into such things as smart TVs, smart cars, and smart cities, is eerily Orwellian. Indeed, that smart TVs have cameras installed in them, so the watcher becomes the watched, reminds me of the telescreens in Nineteen Eighty-four. Now, while Orwell’s dystopia was meant as a satire of totalitarianism, and of Stalin in particular, we shouldn’t be so dull-witted as to think that any of this oppressive new technology is in the service of socialism–quite the contrary.

First of all, contrary to the alarmist right-wing nonsense we hear in the media (including the verbal flatulence we hear from the puckered mouth of Trump), our society is not being inundated with Marxist ideology. If anything, Marxism is moribund. The only Marxist-Leninist governments in the world currently are Cuba, North Korea, and (arguably) China, Vietnam, and Laos.

What the far-right idiotically calls ‘extremist, far-left, Marxist’ politicians are typically just liberals. A genuine communist would push for revolution to help the poor, not vote Democrat. Leftists are anti-Zionist, unlike any politician in the mainstream. Etc., etc.

But more to the point is that all this high-tech surveillance is in the service of capitalism and imperialism, not socialism. Right-wingers have to get over this cretinous idea that if the government does something, it’s automatically socialist, and that any form of political corruption is also socialist. There is such a thing as capitalist government, and it’s every bit as capable of being huge, bloated, and bureaucratic as a socialist state can be.

The kind of government we find in the vast majority of countries in the world are those supportive of the neoliberal ‘free market.’ Their governments intervene in and regulate the economy in ways that help the big corporations, which are capitalist—‘corporatism’ is needless verbiage used by right-wing libertarians to deflect responsibility away from themselves for having supported an economic system that has been, especially over the past 45 years, an unmitigated disaster.

Anyway, the state will use all of this AI surveillance, as well as the eventual disappearance of cash, to seek out and punish anyone who tries to make the people rise up in revolution and attempt to overthrow the capitalist system that continues to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Much censorship of Facebook and Twitter posts is for those who, for example, protest the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians. Support for Israel is extremely important to the Western empire and the maintenance of the so-called ‘rules-based international order.’ Some have argued that the liberation of Palestine will lead to a toppling of the capitalist/imperialist system. We who want that liberation are thus seen as a threat to the system: as AI surveillance and cashless societies flourish, we will surely be punished with far more than mere censorship.

The surveillance serves the interests of the bourgeois state because, of course, it also serves the very interests of the bourgeoisie itself. Most of us have surely seen by now that any time we show an interest in this or that product online, similar ones pop up in ads on our devices when we, for example, are scrolling on Facebook. Big Business is watching you.

Photo by panumas nikhomkhai on Pexels.com

At the beginning of this article, I wrote specifically of the Taiwanese fetishizing of technology not to suggest that only the locals where I live have this problem, but rather that seeing specifically the locals’ adoration of AI et al is just something I see right before my eyes. There’s little doubt in my mind that there’s at least a comparable, if not sometimes even greater, fetishizing of high-tech elsewhere, all over the world. As a symptom of a very global neoliberalism, fetishization of technology is a manifestation of what Marx called the fetishization of the commodity.

The worship of things, as opposed to acknowledging their origins in the workers’ production process, that is, focusing on things instead of on people, is what keeps us all, whether here in Taiwan (i.e., lectures on tech instead of on the current events that affect us all) or anywhere else in the world, under the spell of the ruling class. It’s one of many ways they keep us under their control.

There’s the brute force, surveillance, and gaslighting as depicted in Nineteen Eighty-four that is used to keep their power over us secure and intact; there is also the seducing and distracting of us with pleasure, as depicted in Huxley‘s Brave New World, with drugs and sexual indulgence. In our world, those drugs can be literal narcotics or the metaphorical opium of the people–religion. The sexual indulgence can come in the forms of internet porn, OnlyFans, or those countless photos of curvaceous beauties in string bikinis we see as we scroll down our Facebook feeds. The ruling class keeps us in check through bullying (militarized police, imperialist invasions, coups d’état), high-tech surveillance, propaganda, or addictions to pleasure.

I tried to allegorize all these issues in several short stories I’ve written over the past several months. In particular, these include “The Harvest,” “The Portal,” and “Neville.”

In “The Harvest,” reptilian aliens come to Earth and take over a town guised as doctors and nurses who take advantage of sick people and drug them so they can harvest all their organs. In “The Portal,” a young woman–while high on acid–stumbles into a portal that takes her to…a spaceship, or an alien planet?…where she discovers that aliens are working with human collaborators to conquer the Earth as part of an alien agenda of imperialism and colonization, enlisting the help of powerful human organizations like DARPA, with such forms of oppressive technology as robot dogs. In “Neville,” aliens invade Earth by impregnating women (through great sex!), having them give birth to half-alien children–all identical-looking and unusually large, growing fast–who hog all the food, starving the rest of humanity.

In these stories, I was using the invading aliens as personifications of imperialists who kill and plunder the Third World for resources. The use of drugs and sex in the stories was meant to represent how the ruling class uses these forms of pleasure to distract and control us.

Caitlin Johnstone made a comment that I assume to be a passage from one of her many articles, which I cannot for the life of me find so I can link it here. But to paraphrase the essence of what she said, it was that, while the potential for abuse of all of this new technology (digital payments, AI taking our jobs, surveillance through AI, smart TVs, cars, and cities, etc.) should be cause for alarm, the greatest form of control the ruling class has is through the control of our narratives via propaganda. Propaganda is a modern form of manipulative know-how.

Part of our liberation from all of these oppressive forces will be through the transforming of our narratives from ones that keep our eyes shut–dreaming all the time, as it were–to waking us all up. Addictions to pleasure–the drugs of religion or the literal ones, pics and video of beautiful nude or seminude women, video games, Hollywood movies (with CIA approval!), etc.–keep us asleep. Waking us all up, though, threatens the ruling class. Perhaps that’s why the political right speaks disparagingly about being ‘woke’? So, apparently, it is smarter to remain asleep?

Photo by Junior Teixeira on Pexels.com

On my blog, Infinite Ocean, I try to weave new narratives that can raise people’s political consciousness to lead to our liberation. I do this in the form of political articles like this one as well as, whenever applicable, my analyses of literature, film, and music.

We need new, liberating narratives. We need to find ways to take this new tech and use it for our benefit, not that of the ruling class. Most of all, we have to stop fetishizing tech and other commodities at the expense of the people; we need to start caring about the welfare of our communities, for while the ruling class are few, WE ARE MANY. If we take control of tech–to liberate us from work instead of depriving us of it, or having its pile-up of garbage destroy our Earth–then tech will no longer be dreck.

‘African scholar on trial in Paris for “genocide denial” while the West turns a blind eye to the present genocide in Palestine,’ from Dennis Riches’s Blog

African scholar on trial in Paris for “genocide denial” while the West turns a blind eye to the present genocide in Palestine

Scholar Charles Onana is being falsely accused of genocide denial, with regards to the tragedy in Rwanda, while his Western accusers look the other way as the genocide in Palestine continues.

Analysis of ‘Commando’

I: Introduction

Commando is a 1985 action film directed by Mark L. Lester and written by Steven E. de Souza, after a story by Joseph Loeb III, Matthew Weisman, and de Souza. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rae Dawn Chong, with Alyssa Milano, Vernon Wells, Bill Duke, Dan Hedaya, James Olson, and David Patrick Kelly.

The music score, noted for its use of steel drums, was by James Horner, and the film ends with a song by The Power Station called “We Fight for Love,” when Michael Des Barres replaced Robert Palmer as lead singer.

Here‘s a link to quotes from the film.

Giving the film a rating of 67% based on reviews from 36 critics, Rotten Tomatoes aptly describes Commando in its consensus as having a “threadbare plot, outsized action, and endless one-liners.” In other words, it’s a crowd-pleaser with all the gratuitous violence, swearing, and cheesy puns that a movie-going philistine could ever want.

So, Dear Reader, you’re probably wondering why I’m wasting my energy with this Hollywood schlock. Well, apart from the fact that the philistine in me finds this mindless entertainment amusing (the nostalgic memories of watching it as a teen in the 1980s being a big part of that amusement), the flash and excitement that Commando delivers is a distraction from the political undertones that I feel should be discussed.

II: A Brief Digression, If You’ll Indulge Me, Please

As should be obvious to anyone watching the film with his or her brain turned on, Commando contributes to the mythology of the US as the great saviour of other countries from tyranny and despotism. I’m not saying this as if it were a great revelation to you, Dear Reader: I bring this up because I want to discuss the social effects of movies like this, and how they brainwash Westerners, Americans especially, into cheering for US/NATO imperialism.

I was trying to do such commentary on another film aptly starring right-leaning Schwarzenegger, Conan the Barbarian. The reader response to that analysis was mixed: while one positive responder understood my intentions, to alert people to the hypnotizing danger of passively accepting Hollywood action films as US imperialist and right-wing libertarian propaganda (an example of the kind of thing Michael Parenti analyzed in his book, Inventing Reality), two others blasted my Conan analysis for seemingly opposing reasons.

The first negative responder was a woman who went out of her way to be as insulting as possible, saying my analysis was ‘so superficial as to be silly,’ and that during the Reagan era, pretty much all movies reflected a right-wing ideology, so apparently there’s no insight to be gained from describing Conan the way I did. First of all, many 1980s movies did obviously reflect a right-wing stance, but many others didn’t–take They Live, for instance, as an anti-Reagan film. Secondly, only someone with a right-wing bias (as I suspect she has) would see no value in critiquing Conan‘s right-wing agenda, since a left-wing sympathy would see that value. I’d say it was her reading of what I wrote that was “superficial” and “silly”: I suspect she read only the first few paragraphs, snorted and called it ‘stupid!’, then jumped to conclusions and made her snarky comments without bothering to read any further.

The second commenter took the opposite view, seeing my discussion of a right-wing libertarian, anti-communist allegory in Conan as “the most half-baked review” of a movie that he’d ever read. Then he ‘corrected’ me by pointing out something I myself stated, however briefly, in my analysis: that the film is about determination in rising up against one’s obstacles (speaking of pointing out the obvious, hence my brevity in stating it). Never mind that I flooded the analysis with links to prove my point about the allegory (i.e., the director’s right-wing leanings as well as those of Schwarzenegger’s, a link stating that Nazi salutes were done on the set, etc.). And what I wrote wasn’t a review (my saying whether or not I liked the film), but an analysis, stated plainly in the title (a discussion of themes, symbolism, allegory, etc.). So, was I stating the absurdly obvious, or was I going off on some “half-baked” tangent? I’m not sure.

My point in bringing up the Conan analysis and its negative responses is to say that this one of Commando is one of many articles in which I’m not just saying what I like or dislike about a film. The film analyses are about relating the content of the films with either political issues (typically from a Marxist-Leninist viewpoint) or with psychoanalytic ones (usually Freudian and post-Freudian, but recently, more and more Jungian).

That kind of analysis is what I do here on this blog; so if that’s not your thing, please read no further (I gave just such a warning at the beginning of my Conan analysis, which as I explained above, went unheeded at least twice). If, however, you do like how I relate film, literature, and music to leftist politics and psychoanalysis, then by all means, read on, Dear Reader.

III: Some Rather Needless Killing

The film begins with three men assassinated, all former members of the unit of US Army Special Forces Colonel John Matrix (Schwarzenegger). The first victim is shot by two men posing as garbagemen; the second of these two killers, Cooke (Duke), then kills a car salesman by running him over right in the dealership with the car he’s supposedly interested in buying; and the third victim, Bennett (Wells), is supposedly blown up in a boat, though we later learn that his death has been faked.

Matrix, it seems, is next to be assassinated.

As it turns out, though, he isn’t to be killed, but rather to be forced to assassinate the president of a fictional Latin American country, Val Verde, this man being someone Matrix originally helped put in power there, having ousted Arius (Hedaya), a brutal dictator who wants to be reinstated. If Matrix doesn’t cooperate, Arius will have his men kill Matrix’s pre-teen daughter, Jenny (Milano), whom they’ve kidnapped.

Here’s my point: why were those two men killed at the beginning of the film, with Bennett’s death faked? Apparently, Arius’ men (including Bennett) mean to agitate General Franklin Kirby (Olson) and get him to go to Matrix’s home to warn him personally that he’s probably next to die, and in the process Kirby will unwittingly help the bad guys know where Matrix lives.

This is an absurd way to get to Matrix, whose address (somewhere in upstate California, in the mountains) is presumably private for his and Jenny’s protection. Would Kirby be stupid enough to go there personally, risking leading the assassins right to Matrix? Couldn’t the killers just find another way to find him (e.g., paying someone in the army a handsome sum to disclose the address, etc.)? Wouldn’t it be better to catch Matrix off guard in a surprise attack?

It’s obvious that the killings at the beginning were just an excuse to have excitement for its own sake, to lull the audience in, to make them passive recipients of more pro-US propaganda.

IV: Matrix and Jenny

Of course, Schwarzenegger as tough guy Matrix is supposed to personify how ‘indestructible’ the American empire is (an empire that, incidentally, failed to defeat North Korea, lost against Vietnam, and similarly left Afghanistan with its tail between its legs). The liberals, however, can’t have their big hero be just a cold-hearted killer; we have to see his sensitive side, so during the opening credits and before Jenny’s kidnapping, we see some father/daughter quality time between Matrix and her.

While they’re eating sandwiches at home, he makes a cliché joke about gender-bending Boy George. Then he refers to his life as a boy in East Germany, and how the communists said that rock ‘n’ roll is “subversive.” While communists back in the 1950s and 1960s were probably much more socially conservative (as were, obviously, at least half of Americans back then) than in recent years (a lessening of conservatism that can’t be reasonably be said of those half of all Americans!), we’re meant to deem this old judgement of the communists as an example of how ‘repressive‘ they were and are. Matrix’s later quip that “Maybe they were right” is meant to be flippant, yet it tells us which people still have the repressive attitude…still by the 1980s and since then. Putin may not be sympathetic to LGBT people, but he hasn’t been a communist in decades.

Now, we’ve acknowledged that Matrix is of German background (presumably to rationalize Austrian Schwarzenegger’s undeniable accent), yet his name sounds utterly English, since we don’t want our American hero to seem inordinately Teutonic (shouldn’t his name be more like ‘Johann Meetrichs’?).

Given the film’s obvious agenda to glorify Anglo/American/NATO imperialism as comprising the ‘good guys,’ as against anyone who would dare defy said imperialism (Arius et al), the idea of having a German-American hero fighting those defiant of that imperialism (who, in real life, tend to be left-wing) strongly suggests the enlisting of fascists, at least symbolically. Matrix would have defected from East Germany early on, and the real purpose of the Berlin Wall, or Anti-fascist Protection Wall, as the East Germans called it, was just that: to keep the West German fascists out (i.e., those ex-Nazis who, rather than be punished for their war crimes, were given cushy jobs to fight the ‘commies’), as well as to keep East Germany from losing needed skilled workers.

Matrix’s leaving of the socialist state would have stemmed from an ideological hatred of socialism. Germans who hate socialism have historically leaned towards fascism as a protection against Marxism. The capitalist class has always used fascism to protect themselves against left-wing revolution, as have the petite bourgeoisie. The film’s negative portrayal of Latin Americans reinforces the idea that there’s a Nazi racist undertone here, as there was in Conan, as I argued in my analysis of it (see link above).

So what we see in German-American Matrix is a personification of the continuum between liberalism and fascism. He’s the sensitive father, as I discussed above in his relationship with Jenny at the beginning of the film, but she can be seen as personifying his threatened class interests when she’s kidnapped, making him ruthless in his lawless, bloody, and murderous quest to get her back. The fact that she’s a sweet, helpless, and sympathetic girl shouldn’t deflect us from seeing that cynical reality. Her sweetness, taken from an allegorical perspective, is being used as propaganda to justify all of his killing. More on that later.

My point is that liberals, seeming progressive in their goals on the surface, will betray that progressive agenda in a heartbeat if their class interests are at stake, and that’s what’s represented in Matrix’s quick switch from sensitive father to unflinching killer, thief, destroyer of property, kidnapper (however briefly, of Cindy [Chong]), etc.

Stalin once said that “Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.” (Note that social democracy is the furthest left of liberalism.) His words may, on the surface, seem extreme, but put in their proper historical perspective, they are clearly understood. He said them in 1924, just five years after the social-democratic Weimar Republic had used the right-wing Freikorps to crush the Spartacist Uprising‘s attempt at a communist revolution in Germany, murdering Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The Weimar Republic’s soft and ineffective rule would lead to great dissatisfaction on both the far left and far right, one thing would lead to another, and by the early 1930s, you-know-who would rise to power in Germany.

If the ‘far left’ of liberalism can lead to fascism, so can more ‘moderately left’ versions of it. We easily backslid from the welfare capitalism of the era of post-WWII economic prosperity to the ‘free market’ capitalism of the Reagan/Thatcher years, and thence to the far-right nightmare of recent decades, all thanks to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which meant that a large welfare state was no longer needed to ward off the danger of proletarian revolution in the West. We’d reached ‘the end of history,’ and the ruling class no longer felt threatened by the working class.

That liberals today are supporting literal fascists in Ukraine and Israel should help you see the truth in Stalin’s words, Dear Reader.

V: Making Matrix Aid Arius’ Revolution

We never learn of Arius’ political ideology; we only know that he’s a brutal dictator, who’s “tortured and killed” those who have resisted him. But is he on the left, or the right?

He’s a Latin American, a former ruler of Val Verde, as I mentioned above. We know that Matrix helped overthrow Arius and put a new president, Velasquez, in power. Here’s the funny thing, though: the US army, CIA, etc. like putting brutal right-wing dictators in power in Latin America.

Indeed, the American government has a history of intervening in other countries’ political affairs, typically replacing democratically-elected heads of state with ones that further the capitalist/imperialist interests of the US/NATO countries. Examples include Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973…and more recently, Ukraine in 2014, and Bolivia in 2019, as well as attempted coups in places like Venezuela. One should look into US support for Operation Condor, too.

Of course, the Western corporate media likes to portray these interventions as ‘triumphs of freedom and democracy,’ when actually they were anything but. So we shouldn’t be surprised to see the ousting of Arius and replacement of him by US-backed Velasquez in Commando as portrayed as a good thing. It’s all just part of the propaganda used to make the US look like the good guys, while men like Arius are vilified.

So the very idea of the American military, as represented by Matrix, as not wanting to help spearhead a coup and install a dictator is ludicrous. Pinochet was the Arius of Chile in the 1970s, responsible for the deaths and disappearances of thousands of dissident Chileans, including dropping some of them from helicopters. The CIA helped put Pinochet in power, a “scumbag” who “tortured and killed” many, yet I doubt that any in the US military would have applied Matrix’s words to Pinochet the way Matrix applied them to Arius.

So Matrix not wanting to overthrow a Latin American government and replacing it with that of a brutal right-wing dictator is sheer denial on the part of the propagandists making this film. Moviegoers who see this film, knowing little if anything about the true political state of affairs in the world, will just eat up this propaganda uncritically, absorbing it and imagining that what the film portrays more or less corresponds with what the US government’s role in world affairs really is: the ‘policemen’ of the world, fighting tyranny and oppression everywhere, rather than the cause of so much of it.

This is a dangerous message to send to Western audiences, reinforcing a myth of our supposed superiority, which in turn is used to justify more and more imperial conquests, killing more and more innocent people. This urge to impose ‘freedom and democracy’ has led to possibly a million Iraqi deaths, and the destruction of Libya, changing it from a prosperous nation that took care of its people to a failed state with a slave trade. The current wish to bring ‘freedom and democracy’ to Russia and China could lead to a very nuclear WWIII, killing everyone on the globe.

Since Commando was made in the mid-1980s, I wonder why the film didn’t portray Arius as a left-wing dictator, but just as a generic one. Surely portraying him as a ‘commie’ would have made for effective Cold War propaganda, wouldn’t it have? Perhaps they didn’t specify his ideology because they knew enough left-wing critics still existed in the 1980s to trash the film for being even more obvious right-wing propaganda than it was and is. Still, for the reasons I’ve given above, it makes more sense for Arius to have a left-wing, rather than right-wing, ideology, so we’ll just go with that, remembering that his vilification, as well as the dehumanizing of his troops, is all part of Commando‘s obvious right-wing agenda.

VI: The Female Factor

Getting Cindy, an off-duty flight attendant, to help Matrix without there being any sexual chemistry between these attractive male and female leads seems as if this film is an example of the emerging kind that is trying to show more respect to female characters (her firing a rocket launcher correctly…on the second try; her flying a seaplane, etc.), especially since she’s a POC. Still, there’s plenty of sexism against women to keep Commando far behind more recent action films, which are sure to include women kicking lots of ass.

Poor Cindy is frequently treated like a whore, even explicitly called one by predatory Sully (Kelly, whom you’ll recall clinking those bottles together at the climax of The Warriors), leaving her in a huff for not letting him have his way with her. Later, without asking for her consent, in Sully’s motel room and waiting for Cooke, Matrix opens her top to make her look easy, that is, having indeed let Sully have his way with her. Even a cop, who’s later helped apprehend Matrix for trying to rob an army surplus store, sees her in a car next the cops’ truck and assumes she’s a “hooker.”

Earlier, Sully–asshole that he is–jokes in the airport about having “a little more time with” kidnapped Jenny. At the end of the film, Matrix carries her on his shoulder as if this damsel-in-distress were a prize he’s won after killing everyone else.

But the crowning piece of sexism in the film is the gratuitous display of a woman’s large, shaking breasts in a motel room next to Sully’s during Matrix’s fight with Cooke. It’s a completely unnecessary moment of titillation mixed with humour, meant as one of many examples of Commando‘s use of visuals to dazzle and distract the viewer as he or she absorbs the pro-US propaganda without thinking.

(By the way, Ava Cadell, who played the woman in the motel scene, has since become a therapist with a doctorate from Newport University, California. She has written a number of books on sexuality, has done lectures, and given counseling to couples on personal issues. Here’s her website. As we can see, she’s risen far above doing mere cheesecake roles in schlocky Hollywood movies.)

VII: Rescuing Jenny

Rescuing a damsel in distress is more acceptable in the modern world, of course, if she’s a child. Our sympathy for her is what makes the wiping out of everyone else on the island where she’s being held hostage seem perfectly justified.

Commando, however, is just a movie. It isn’t reality. As a piece of American propaganda, it causes us to transfer our desensitizing of the brutal killing of all the dehumanized Latin American soldiers to the killing of any other people in the world, be they soldiers or civilians, who in any way stand between the US/NATO empire and the achievement of its goals.

Part of ensuring the audience’s desensitizing to the deaths of the soldiers is a showering of contempt on them and their worth. Bennett tells Arius that his “little pissant soldiers…are nothing.” This sort of devaluing of them makes it all the easier for the audience to watch them all die.

On the other side of the coin, Matrix’s killing of them all comes with nary a scratch on his body, for he personifies the invincibility of the American empire. Indeed, one of the particularly ludicrous aspects of Commando is how Matrix can single-handedly wipe out so many dozens of soldiers, and not even one of them can get a lucky shot and give him a significant wound, let alone kill him.

The tool shed scene, apart from showcasing gratuitous violence for the sheer fun of it, demonstrates that shaving off the top of a man’s head with a small buzzsaw blade thrown like a Frisbee (in the director’s cut, a second buzzsaw blade hits a guy in the neck), the stabbing of an axe into a soldier’s balls, and the hacking off of a man’s arm with a machete are not horrifying sights to see, but exciting ones.

The message given throughout the film is that, since Matrix can break one law after another with impunity to save Jenny, and since he personifies American military might, then the US government, military, and intelligence are free to disregard international law, UN Security Council Resolutions, etc., to achieve their objectives and maintain their global hegemony.

Let’s see how these issues translate into the politics of the real world. Israel, properly seen as an extension of Western imperialism into the Middle East, has been given carte blanche by the US government to kill and maim as many Gazans as they like. The rationalization?…to rescue a number of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas on October 7th of 2023, rather like the kidnapping of Jenny. Where all those killed in Commando are soldiers, most, if not almost all, of the Gazans being killed are innocent civilians, including women and children.

Israel has made incursions into the West Bank, and the detonating of pagers in Lebanon–as well as airstrikes on several buildings in Beirut–has killed and injured many there, too, though there’s a similar rationale…the need to wipe out Hezbollah. The UN has, by the way, acknowledged that the armed resistance of fighters like Hamas is legitimate against an occupying force like Israel, but to the Zionist apologist, Hamas and Hezbollah are ‘terrorists’ whom he or she would surely sneer at as “little pissant soldiers” who “are nothing.”

Elsewhere, the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up by the US, with the help of Norway–an act of ecoterrorism practically confessed to by the American government. Seymour Hersh, the acclaimed investigative journalist who exposed the My Lai Massacre back in 1968, found conclusive, detailed evidence of how this crime was committed, yet the mainstream, corporate, imperialist media absurdly blamed the attack on Russia. How predictable. The motive behind this terrorist act, apart from the usual Russophobia/anti-Putin agenda (their ‘unprovoked’ invasion of Ukraine), was to stop Germany from buying cheap Russian oil and forcing the country to buy American oil.

Needless to say, the US government hasn’t been punished, nor will be, for this crime any more than Israel will be for her crimes against humanity. We, the general public, shrug these crimes off, or at least are expected to, just as we do the excesses of Matrix’s violence, all to rescue one little girl, who personifies his threatened class interests as I said above, and who is carried on his shoulder at the film’s end as a kind of trophy.

When Kirby, who has arrived with his army at that time, asks Matrix what he’s left for them, he callously says, “Just bodies.” Matrix then refuses to resume working for Kirby as a soldier, wanting instead to be the nice, sensitive father to Jenny; but as with any liberal, being the nice guy comes only when one’s class interests (symbolic ones in Matrix’s case) aren’t being threatened.

VIII: Confession, Projection, and Denial

In a conversation with Cindy in Sully’s car on the way to the motel to confront Cooke, Matrix explains why he has to rescue Jenny. In the process, he goes into a kind of confession of guilt, not only about how he, constantly on assignment as a Special Forces man somewhere on the other side of the world (Laos, Angola, Lebanon, Pakistan, etc.), has never had time to be with Jenny, but also about how he did “things you don’t want to know about,” and which he wishes he didn’t know he’d done.

Bennett, we learn, was kicked out of Matrix’s unit for being excessively violent (and this is why he, wanting to get revenge on Matrix for his expulsion, is willing to help Arius “for nothing,” to get a chance to get at Matrix). Yet given what we know Matrix has implied in his confession to Cindy, and what we know of his brutal killing of so many in this film…including his killing of Bennett, to get him to “let off some steam,” it’s hard to imagine Bennett being all that much more violent.

It should be obvious that, Matrix representing American militarism and seeing Bennett and Arius as far worse than he, the film’s pro-US propaganda tries to excuse American violence by projecting it out to other countries. Bennett, significantly, is Australian–just listen to his accent. Arius is Latin American. These latter two are so awful, apparently, that Matrix, and therefore the US, can’t be all that bad.

So in giving his brief confession, implying the awful things he’s done, while projecting far worse guilt onto people from other countries, Matrix–in spite of his constant violence and lawlessness, like that of the US, as I’ve explained above–can still be regarded as the liberal ‘good guy,’ as politicians like the Clintons, Obama, Biden, and Harris can be seen. One can safely deny being as bad as the antagonists are, and the protagonists’ guilt will be ignored and forgotten about by moviegoing lovers of action films.

Another thing that will be ignored and forgotten in Commando is the political ideology that Arius must have, as is typical of any Latin American head of state that opposes American imperial hegemony and ends up being ousted in a coup d’état. Such an ideology is glossed over and disregarded: all we know is that Arius believes the people of Val Verde need “an understanding of discipline,” which sounds unsettling coming from a generic ‘dictator,’ whom many in the audience would imagine to be a left-wing one, as I’m assuming Arius is.

Now, Marxism-Leninism does have an understanding of party discipline, but it isn’t anything brutal, as Arius is implying in Commando‘s propagandistic script. It’s about organizing the working class to rise up in revolution and defeat the ruling class, thus liberating the people from oppression, not subjecting them to oppression, the latter of which is what US puppets like Pinochet did to their people. As for how “extremist” a left-wing political ideology is, just read the <<<link. You won’t know the truth of the matter by watching Arius’ caricature of it.

IX: Conclusion

I hope, Dear Reader, that if you’ve read this far, that you understand my intentions in writing this analysis of Commando. I know it’s no Earth-shattering revelation that the film has a right-wing agenda: my purpose is to explore the political ramifications and social effects of said agenda, to warn of its dangers on a public not aware of how consent is manufactured for war and its atrocities.

The ‘tangents’ I went off on in elucidating these political and social implications, far from being “half-baked,” are the whole point of the article. People need to be conscious of the political wool being pulled over their eyes, not to be told, “Oh, come on, it’s just a movie. Lighten up!”