On Liberalism and Fascism, vs Communism

I: Introduction

A week or two before I started work on this article, I shared a post on Twitter that said, “Liberal response to fascism,” under which was a photo of Neville Chamberlain, Edouard Daladier, Hitler, and Mussolini, among others in a room just before signing the Munich Agreement in 1938, to allow Nazi Germany to annex the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. On the same post and to the right of that photo was the iconic one of a member of the Red Army holding a Soviet flag on the Reichstag building in Berlin, after they defeated Nazi Germany in 1945; above this photo, it said, “Communist response to fascism.”

You can call the use of the two photos ‘commie’ or ‘tankie’ propaganda if you wish, Dear Reader, but it’s also basic history, far from being a pair of insignificant details. The liberal West was appeasing fascism right up until the Nazi invasions of Poland and France, whereas Stalin had been strenuously trying, with no success, to create alliances with the capitalist West against the fascists. After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June, 1941, some of the bloodiest fighting in military history happened between the two sides (i.e., the Battle of Stalingrad), and in the end, about 27,000,000 Soviets died in the fighting against Naziism, ultimately doing most of the work liberating Europe from fascism (even bourgeois historians acknowledge this fact).

I mention all of this as a reaction to a response to my Twitter post from some shit-lib who imagined they were providing “context” to it. This “context” was another post mocking the one I’d shared, with a photo of Western Allies dropping bombs on Germany, above which it said, “Liberal response to fascism,” and beside this, a photo of Stalin shaking hands with Joachim von Ribbentrop after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact; above this photo, it said, “Communist response to fascism.”

[Incidentally, the needed context behind the treaty between the Soviets and the Nazis is that it wasn’t an alliance or a ‘friendship’ of any sort: Nazis and communists have always hated and opposed each other. The treaty was a non-aggression pact, which means, “If we don’t get in your way, you won’t get in our way.” A full explanation of why the treaty was agreed on can be read here, but I’ll give you a few key points: the Soviet Union needed to buy time in order to complete their industrialization and prepare for war, since they knew all too well that the Nazis could not be trusted, and they’d invade soon enough; also, many Western capitalist states also signed treaties of the sort with Nazi Germany, not just the Munich Agreement–these included Poland, France, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Albania, Slovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria.]

I wanted to respond to this blatant liberal propaganda, but the response to my post was set up not to allow me to do that, so I was furious, and this is why I’m writing this article now. It should be always remembered that Twitter is owned by a man who brazenly and shamelessly did a Nazi salute on TV during Trump’s inauguration. Musk didn’t do that out of ‘social awkwardness,’ as some in the liberal media tried to portray it: he’s known for having far-right sympathies, and he was clearly demonstrating to the world that the American government had removed its liberal mask and exposed its fascist face; we were meant to understand that there is nothing we can do about the current resurgence of fascism in the West, and so my article here is about the close relationship between liberalism and fascism, and communism’s diametrical opposition to the two sister ideologies.

II: Of Horseshoes and Fish Hooks

Most people in the West subscribe to the liberal belief in the horseshoe theory, which holds there to be a nearness between the far left and the far right, in spite of the fact that the two ideologies are at diametrically opposite ends of the political spectrum. The liberal centre is regarded as a comfortable middle point between the two extremes, which makes liberalism seem more attractive as an ideology–a convenient appearance for it to have, something those who espouse liberalism must surely, and smugly, be happy about.

Now it is of course true that fascism is an extreme and ugly ideology to support–you won’t get any disagreements from me on that point, I assure you, Dear Reader. As for Marxism-Leninism being regarded as another unwanted “extreme,” well, while it is true that communists have taken a hard line against those who oppose their goals, they have had far better reason to do so than fascists ever did. There were and are pressures put on communists, by such things as capitalist encirclement, that forced them to resort to authoritarianism, and decades of Cold War anticommunist propaganda has wildly exaggerated the violence communists used against their foes, as well as taken much, if not all, of that violence out of its proper historical and political context, as I’ve argued elsewhere, in one form or another.

Furthermore, it is crucial to understand what make fascism and communism polar opposites, so much so that the horseshoe theory–as implied by that second Twitter meme mentioned above–is such a slap in the face, not just to communists, but also to leftists of any stripe. Consider the goals of fascism, as opposed to the goals of communism. Fascists want a militarily strong nation well-protected against what is perceived as the threatening presence of foreigners; this belief naturally leads to racial and ethnic prejudice and bigotry, xenophobia, and violence against anyone deemed the “other.” Communists want the means of production to be controlled by the workers, not by bosses, an abolition of private property; such a change would result in a democratic workplace where workers receive the full fruits of their labour; furthermore, communists want this change to be global, since capitalists of other countries would push for a capitalist counterrevolution in any country that has had a socialist revolution.

Fascists are nationalists; communists are internationalists. Fascists see their own as naturally superior and worthier than the “weak,” “uncivilized,” and “backward” foreigners and other “undesirables” (e.g., LGBT people, etc.), and therefore fascists regard all of these people with utter contempt. Communists see all of humanity, regardless of race, ethnicity, country of origin, colour, sex, sexual orientation or identity, ability or disability, etc., as of equal worth and thus deserving of equal rights and of having all of our basic needs met (food, shelter, healthcare, education, employment).

Yet somehow, because of “authoritarianism,” liberals cannot tell fascists and communists apart.

Finally–and now we come to the more important point to be made, and which should remove all of this confusion–it is fallacious to think of political life, or any aspect of life, really, as being in a state of permanent stasis. The point shouldn’t need to be made, but it does. As Heraclitus once said, “Everything flows.” A central idea in Marxist philosophy is dialectical and historical materialism, which contends that contradictions in the physical world have collided throughout history (e.g., the rich vs the poor), forcing change in the form of sublations (going from ancient slavery to feudalism, then to capitalism). So that liberal “centre” doesn’t just stay in that “reasonable” place forever.

Anyone who has carefully observed political history should know that, in spite of and often because of, worker agitations to push our world in the more egalitarian left direction, the ruling class has relentlessly pushed our world in the rightward direction. Since the ruling class, by definition, has the power, their efforts have always been far more successful than those of the people. Facing such formidable difficulties is why we on the left must take a hard line against any reactionary elements even within our own ranks. These difficulties force us to be authoritarian, when we’d rather just liberate the world. Fascists, on the other hand, are authoritarian because they are bullies.

So the above should explain why the horseshoe theory is at best inadequate, and at worst an outright lie, for showing the relationship between fascism and communism. The only way to do a comparison between the two opposing ideologies is to see them in a dialectical relationship, that is, in the context of the unity of opposites.

Now, one mustn’t confuse the unity of opposites with an identity of opposites, which is an idiotic, ridiculous idea. I years ago wrote an article called Everything Flows, in which I discussed the dialectical unity of opposites, yin and yang, Heraclitus, Hegel‘s philosophy, and all of that sort of thing. After sharing the article on a page on Facebook, some bitch trolled me about it, saying she hated all ‘that yin and yang shit’ (her words, more or less), and absurdly claiming such an idea would require us to see good in something like leukemia: talk about the most moronic of reductio ad absurdum arguments, which only demonstrated a total ignorance of how dialectical thinking works.

One is not trying to say that black is white, or good is bad. One is saying that we cannot have a sense of black without one of white, or one of good without one of bad. The unity lies in a continuum of varying shades of lighter and darker grey, and of all the intermediate points between good and bad. One extreme reacts against the other.

As I discussed in my article, The Ouroboros of Dialectical Materialism, fascism’s rise in the 1920s was a reaction against the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the attempted communist revolutions in Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Romania in the 1910s and early 1920s. When fascism was defeated (or more accurately, suffered a setback) at the end of WWII, socialist states proliferated in East Europe to replace the fascist ones. That is the dialectical unity of the opposites of fascism and communism in action in history. The unity is a movement between opposites: everything flows.

Anyways, a far better representation of the relationship between fascism, liberalism, and communism is the fish hook theory. If you click on the link and look at the picture, you’ll see one of a fish hook lying on its side. On the left is the end that’s to be attached to the fishing line, and the hook begins to curve up from the centre, with the far right hooked around at the top, and the barbed end pointing back at the centre. Obviously, the left is communism and socialism in general, or anti-capitalism; the centre is liberalism, and the far-right hook is fascism.

Here we see the true relationship between liberalism and fascism: the former leads towards the latter, and the latter falls back on the former when necessary. The left, on the other hand, is left out.

III: Examples of the Truth of the Fish Hook Theory

To start off, we need to recall a quote from Stalin that I’ve used a number of times, but will now quote in its entirety, so that its meaning is clearer: “Firstly, it is not true that fascism is only the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie. Fascism is not only a military-technical category. Fascism is the bourgeoisie’s fighting organisation that relies on the active support of Social-Democracy. Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism. There is no ground for assuming that the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of Social-Democracy. There is just as little ground for thinking that Social-Democracy can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie. These organisations do not negate, but supplement each other. They are not antipodes, they are twins. Fascism is an informal political bloc of these two chief organisations; a bloc, which arose in the circumstances of the post-war crisis of imperialism, and which is intended for combating the proletarian revolution. The bourgeoisie cannot retain power without such a bloc. It would therefore be a mistake to think that “pacifism” signifies the liquidation of fascism. In the present situation, “pacifism” is the strengthening of fascism with its moderate, Social-Democratic wing pushed into the forefront.” –J. V. STALIN, from , “Concerning the International Situation,” 1924.

In this quote, when Stalin says “Social-Democracy,” we can read the word liberal, for social democracy is as far left as liberalism is willing to go to appease the working class: we see manifestations of this tendency in Bernie Sanders, AOC, and the rest of the Squad. Any liberal who is less left than that, or more centrist, is simply closer ideologically to fascism, in spite of how “anti-Trump” he or she sounds.

More importantly, though, we can read in Stalin’s quote an explanation of how the fish hook theory works. Both liberalism and fascism support each other: the former is (objectively) the moderate version; the latter is the extreme version. The former wears a mask of benevolence; the latter, lacking the mask, shows its ugly face.

Both ideologies serve capital, just in different ways. Only socialism and communism are a challenge, and a threat, to capitalism, and that’s why liberalism and fascism oppose the left. Liberalism is willing to make a few concessions here and there to the working class, to keep them at bay; but if the working class still insists on socialist revolution, then the gloves are off as far as the liberals are concerned. The fascists are then let off their leashes.

An example of social democratic opposition to communism, in favour of the capitalist status quo, was when the Majority Social Democratic Party (MSPD) of the Weimar Republic used military force (i.e., the Freikorps) to crush the Spartacist uprising in January, 1919. The SPD had wanted Germany to stay in WWI, which the German far left had opposed, leading to a split between them and the SPD centre left; furthermore, the far left–led by people like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht–wanted Bolshevik-style revolution as against SPD reformism.

The crushing of the Spartacist uprising, which included the extrajudicial killings of Luxemburg and Liebknecht by members of the volunteer Guards Cavalry Rifle Division, done with the tacit approval of the MSPD, further established the split in the German left, leaving them all too weak to stop the rise of the Nazi Party a decade later. So the centrist Weimar MSPD was “left” in theory and pro-capitalist reactionary in practice. In all of this, we can see a prime example of how social democratic liberalism enables fascism, in spite of its paying lip service to opposing racism. Now the Stalin quote’s meaning should be clear.

In the US, Teddy Roosevelt, the “Progressive,” could be seen as an example of the country moving in a social democratic direction, to redistribute the wealth in a non-revolutionary way. Elsewhere, though, was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which paved the way for US imperialism in Latin America, interfering in their political affairs if those southern countries do anything the US government disapproves of. This means that whenever a Latin American country elects a left-wing government, as Guatemala or Chile did, the US and their CIA intervene, bring about a coup d’état, and replace it with a far-right government to ensure US-friendly policies. Once again, social democracy leads to fascism–Stalin’s quote rings true.

After WWII, when liberal agendas in many parts of the Western world echoing the New Deal of FDR (who also put Japanese-Americans in internment camps during WWII, recall) were in effect, with such social democratic reforms as welfare capitalism, strong unions, and the like, other, sinister things were going on in the shadows. As I said above, fascism wasn’t really defeated at the end of WWII: it merely suffered a major setback. While some ex-Nazis were tried and punished for war crimes, many others were given government jobs in the US (Operation Paperclip), including work in NASA and NATO, and in the West German government.

The capitalist West knew that, during the Cold War, there was no one better at fighting communists than fascists. Such an alliance between the socially-democratic-oriented West with fascism also included Gladio in Europe, and Operation Aerodynamic with Ukrainian fascists, a precursor to the war going on there now with Russia.

Indeed, ex-Nazis in West Germany made East Germans nervous enough to build the Berlin Wall, or Anti-fascist Protection Rampart, as the GDR called it. Contrary to popular belief (which was spawned by Cold War anticommunist propaganda), the purpose of the Berlin Wall was not to cage people up cruelly inside a “totalitarian” state (though there was a legitimate concern about “brain drain,” that is, the GDR feared losing their much-needed scientists, doctors, engineers, professors, and other highly-skilled people to the temptation of high wages in West Germany and West Berlin); most East German workers were content to live in a country with lots of workers’ benefits, and in fact, there has been much nostalgia and regret among workers in the former GDR over the loss of those benefits, as has also been true in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Bloc. The Wall’s existence was mainly about keeping the West German fascists, the ex-Nazis, out–hence the East German name for the Wall. West Germany’s 1955 inclusion in NATO–clearly an enemy and a threat to global communism–heightened the tensions and need for protection.

Going back to the US, while LBJ in the 1960s was concerned with the War on Poverty and the Great Society, again a kind of social-democrat agenda, his administration also used the Gulf of Tonkin incident (a lie, incidentally) to justify more American involvement in the Vietnam War, which involved maiming and napalming poor Vietnamese who had, a number of years back, just shaken off the yoke of French colonialism and were now trying to achieve self-determination. Elsewhere in the mid-1960s, the CIA helped Suharto to overthrow Sukarno, and the former’s new regime then also killed between half a million to a million Indonesians who were either leftists or suspected of it. Suharto would rule Indonesia with an iron fist for many years, like a true fascist. In these incidents we can see yet again a marriage of liberalism with far-right-wing violence.

Next, we have another liberal, President Jimmy Carter, under whose administration Zbigniew Brzezinski helped the mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight Soviet influence there, leading to the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s, as so propagandistically portrayed in the movie, Charlie Wilson’s War. A genuine attempt was being made, with the aid of the Soviet Union, to modernize the country, establishing socialism and helping to improve women’s rights in Afghanistan, for example; yet the US, fearing the influence of “commies,” preferred having the country ruled by reactionary religious fanatics, leading ultimately to the Taliban and a setting-back of women’s rights far into the past (not to mention setting the stage for bin Laden et al).

[Note that as I go through all of this history, I’m being selective with my examples, since there are so many more out there that also prove my point, yet limited space won’t allow me to include them all. This is, after all, just a blog post, not a book. Still, my selectiveness is caused by such constraints; it’s not about excluding any supposed anti-fascist liberal tendencies.]

IV: The Liberal Conditions That Gave Rise to Trump’s Fascism

Liberals, in their collective delusion that they all share ‘progressive’ values, like to imagine that Trump’s election was something that suddenly appeared out of nowhere, that there had been no political precedent to his supposed deforming of the system. As I have argued in other posts, though, such an idea is as far away from the truth as anything could possibly be. Trump is no aberration…he’s the culmination of a system that has always been the problem.

Trump personifies the truth of the fish hook theory: that liberalism enables and inevitably leads to fascism; by using Trump as controlled opposition, the fascism of the system also relies on liberalism to steer the people away from supporting a truly revolutionary politics by getting them to rely on leaders who promise change, but who ultimately lead the people back to voting for one of the mainstream parties. Sanders and AOC are two examples of such sheepdogs of the left; that civil meeting between Trump and Mamdani in the Oval Office before reporters should also raise a lot of red flags…and I don’t mean the Soviet or the Chinese kind.

To see how we got to Trump via liberalism, I’ll make a summary of the major events from the dissolution of the USSR to the present. We already know of all of the Cold War anticommunist propaganda used to discredit Marxism-Leninism, all while using social-democratic welfare capitalism to make life reasonably comfortable for the Western working class. That was the two-pronged first step in liberalism’s gradual slide towards today’s fascism…though few saw it coming.

The next steps were taken during the Clinton administration in the 1990s, after the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union had been achieved. Many Russians, immediately disillusioned with the return to capitalism and its empty promises of a “free market” horn of plenty, wanted a return to the Soviet system, and were ready to vote for communist Gennady Zyuganov in 1996, since Yeltsin was so unpopular (and for very good reason). Clinton, however, intervened, and his help ensured the reelection of Yeltsin. Indeed, this blatant foreign interference in Russia’s democratic process was frankly acknowledged in Time magazine…and liberals hypocritically complain about Putin’s supposed interference (which never happened) in the 2016 US election, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton.

So getting rid of communism, and keeping it away were necessary first steps in liberalism’s gradual slide towards fascism. Wiping out free-market resistor Slobodan Milosevic, fracturing the former Yugoslavia in the process in the US/NATO “humanitarian war” of 1999, was another early step. Bill Clinton also killed welfare, and enacted NAFTA (which has continued harming the local Mexican economy to this day) and the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Clinton may have started off with talk of how he’d raise taxes and deal with the problem of the American healthcare system, and he even spoke of allowing gays into the military, but such promises to a great extent didn’t materialize as hoped. Instead, apart from the issues I mentioned above, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 resulted in mergers and acquisitions in the media, leading in turn to about 90% of American media being controlled by six huge corporations. This means that the information most Americans have access to is decided on based on the agenda of the rich, not on what’s relevant to the needs of the people.

So when the American empire has an enemy (translation: there’s a country out there not willing to bow to the agenda of the empire), the media is used to smear said country with fables of oppressing its people in order to manufacture consent for war. The control of media narratives is used for this manufacture of consent. This is what happened in the former Yugoslavia, in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Russia vis-à-vis Ukraine, and now Iran, causing much more mayhem in the areas than the purported intent to end such mayhem. They want to do the same to China via Taiwan.

Of course, it would be unfair to blame the entire problem on the Democratic Party, since George W. Bush’s administration did some awful things, too (the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay, etc.). But when Obama became president, all of his promises to “spread the wealth around,” and undoing what Bush did (“Change we can believe in”) ended up just being more empty talk. The capitalist class did very well under the Obama administration in spite of right-wing nonsense that he was a “communist” promoting “socialism.” He signed legislation to extend the Patriot Act’s surveillance provisions, the kind of things Edward Snowden blew the whistle on. Obama was also the “Deporter-in-Chief,” using ICE to deport huge numbers of immigrants, showing that as bad as Trump is now, he’s not alone in perpetrating the evils. Obama was a liberal leading us to Trump’s fascism.

As for the Biden administration, we must not forget that it was with him that the Gaza genocide began and was allowed to continue. In spite of the hot air that AOC blathered about the administration working “tirelessly” to bring about a ceasefire (a word that means absolutely nothing to the Israeli government and military), not a finger was lifted by the US government to stop the Zionist killing rampage, which has included the killing of south Lebanese. Instead, American weapons kept being sent to Israel, as has been the case with the current Trump administration, which is proposing another 2.8 billion-dollar arms sale.

Biden never made his Zionism a secret. He also explicitly gave the reason for American support for Israel in a speech in 1986, saying that the Jewish state’s existence was “to protect [American] interests in the region.” Yes, Israel works for the Western empire, not the other way around, and the antisemites would have us all believe.

All mainstream liberal politicians support Israel every bit as much as conservatives do. This includes such liberals as Sanders and AOC, who pay lip service to the need to stop sending weapons to Israel, and who criticize Netanyahu and the IDF. Our former Canadian prime minister, the Liberal Justin Trudeau, proudly declared his Zionism in a speech while the Gaza genocide has been going on; he had only criticisms of ‘antisemitism,’ which is usually just anti-Zionism, the perfectly legitimate stance, as Israel has always been a fascist, racist, apartheid ethnostate.

The communist position, in contrast to that of liberals, conservatives, and fascists, is anti-Zionist. There was only one exception to their position, when regrettably in a momentary lapse of reason and a case of realpolitik, the USSR supported the creation of Israel out of a hope that the new Jewish state would be a socialist one, giving international communism some leverage over the Middle East, geo-strategically an extremely important area (hence the Western capitalists’ support of Israel); but when Israel showed itself clearly to be a bourgeois ally of the US, the Soviets quickly came to their senses, resumed their principled anti-Zionism, and maintained solidarity with the Arabs.

So in their unflinching support for Israel, liberals have once again showed how easily their ideology slides into fascism. Biden’s pro-Israel policy during the Gaza genocide easily and seamlessly became Trump’s policy.

V: Conclusion

Liberalism’s professed support of progressive values and causes is only a superficial one. They’ll have ‘girl-bosses,’ black bosses, gay bosses, etc., but no replacing of bosses with workers’ collective ownership of businesses, as communists would have. Liberals will have the rich taxed, but never expropriated, as the communists will have it. Some charity will be given to the poor by liberals, but an ending of the class conditions that cause poverty will never be considered by liberals, as it would be by communists.

Liberal “humanitarian war” helped normalize imperialist war and regime change in recent decades. Liberals’ extension of Patriot Act surveillance and ICE deportations have smoothly moved over to Trump’s more blatant forms of these. Liberal Zionism has enabled the current bloody, fanatical version. Social-Democratic crushing of communism enabled the rise of fascism, past and present. Liberals may back progressive legislation for whites in one’s home country, then back the fascistic overthrow of leftist governments abroad.

The ruling class uses liberalism and fascism as a “good cop, bad cop” routine, respectively to keep the populace at bay during good times, and to beat the working class back during bad times. Liberalism maintains the illusion of democratic freedom of choice; fascism is a removal of the illusion when the masses refuse to be fooled by the liberal mask.

The only way the international proletariat will ever be liberated from oppression is when they throw away the liberal illusion for good; educate, agitate, and organize, and keep fighting tirelessly to end the bourgeois charade forever.

Gloria

G-L-O-
R-I-A Gloria
worked for the CIA.
Gloria don’t make me
feel alright. Gloria move
the left to the right. R-E
-S-P-E-C-T…just for
the bourgeoisie.
Gloria
put
a stake deep in
her
he-
art.

Basic Decency

I: Introduction

When the scapegoat of a toxic family tries to confront them about their constant emotional abuse, one of the many forms of invalidation that the narcissistic parent and his or her flying monkeys respond with is to trivialize and minimize the pain and trauma they’ve put the victim through.

One manipulation tactic they may use in the service of this trivializing and minimizing is to say that one cannot hold the abusers up to some lofty and unrealistic standard of moral perfection: the narcissistic parent, after all, was never “given an instruction booklet” on how to deal with every single problem that inevitably comes along when raising children.

Never mind that the victim never required such unattainable ideals of parental and familial perfection. All the victim ever wanted was to be treated with basic, common decency.

As every reasonable person understands, even in the best and healthiest of families, there will sometimes be fighting, there will be moments of frustration, and otherwise beloved family members will have certain quirks and foibles that will drive us a little crazy. There is nonetheless a certain baseline that any decent family will not go under, despite those frustrating moments that are otherwise unavoidable.

I wish to discuss those things that a decent family would never do…or if they every now and then did lapse into such nastiness, they would snap out of it soon enough, apologize, and work hard not to repeat such nastiness. I write this as a guide that I hope will help anyone out there who may be in an emotionally abusive family, or suspects him- or herself to be in one, and who would like to have a kind of yardstick with which to measure whether or not he or she is in a situation sufficiently bad to need to plan an escape from it.

Naturally, as the scapegoat of my own family-of-origin, I’ll be using examples of my own experience of them to illustrate what I mean by those lows that go beneath the level of basic decency that one should expect from one’s family, that it–however imperfect–wouldn’t be a case of lowering itself to emotional abuse.

Families of basic decency won’t be consistently guilty of the following habits:

II: Gaslighting You Into Believing You’re Less Capable Than You Really Are

Your family is supposed to have your back, and while some criticisms of you, when necessary and appropriate, are unavoidable, being truly supportive of you means that they should be, under normal circumstances, helping you to build your self-confidence, not undermining that building of it.

Imagine being in a family with a narcissistic mother who tells you, a child, that you not only have autism, but that the psychiatrists who evaluated you had you do an IQ test on which you’d apparently scored in the early 60s. She tells you such a score means you’re retarded; yet, by “a miracle from God,” you turned out to have normal intelligence, that this “miracle” pulled you out of retardation.

She’s emphatic in stating that the psychiatrists recommended locking you away in an asylum and throwing away the key. She says she didn’t know if you’d even make a good garbageman–as long as you were happy. She says, on another occasion, that prior to the “miracle” recovery, she’d worried about herself and your aging father, decades into the future, having to continue caring for “a forty-year-old moron.”

It doesn’t matter that she said you’d grown out of your “retardation.” The damage has been done: you have been associated with the mentally deficient, and that’s damage enough for an impressionable child to have to grow up with.

Then, decades later, you learn, bit by bit, through therapy sessions with other psychiatrists and having done the Autism-Spectrum Quotient questionnaire, that you don’t, in fact, show any signs of autistic symptoms, not even the mildest, high-functioning ones. (Read this for the story in full detail.) You realize that you weren’t merely misdiagnosed as a child: your mother had been lying to you.

That happened to me. I was about nine when those lies were first told to me. Imagine the effect such lies have on the psyche of an impressionable child…heard from the mouth of my own mother! That’s an example of what I mean by a lack of basic, common decency.

Now, add to this psychological damage that a child suffers the constant verbal taunts, insults, and four-letter abuse coming from the mouths of his elder siblings. He gets called, for example, “You dip!” over and over again…on his thirteenth birthday, right at the party when he receives the cake; and thus begins a constant verbal barrage of being called “dipstick,” and “dork,” again and again, throughout his teenage years, those fragile years when a kid’s identity is just developing. Talk about undermining a kid’s ability to develop basic self-confidence.

Those taunts, of course, are just the mild end of the spectrum, for the kid is also being called “stupid,” “idiot,” “asshole,” and “you little shit!” any time those elder siblings are in a bad mood. And the kid is just a teenager, during an already emotionally confusing time in his life.

Now, while all of this, among other forms of bullying, is going on–much of it right in front of the narcissistic mother–she does nothing to stop it. She doesn’t help the bullied scapegoat, except in the rarest of exceptions, when she deems the bullying has ‘gone too far.’ Somehow, all the ‘moderate’ forms of bullying are acceptable to her. Well, naturally: they serve the same purpose as the gaslighting and lies: to control the victim.

III: Bullying

The bullying isn’t limited to verbal abuse and constant insults. There is physical intimidation going on, too. At least one elder sibling is threatening physical violence on the victim, if not actually hitting him. Sometimes the elder sibling orders the victim around, even calling him “slave.” Sometimes, the bully spits on the victim, then laughs.

Of course, the bullies will rationalize the awful way they treat the victim, listing his many faults: he ‘doesn’t care about anybody but himself’ (somehow, bullying is an example of caring about others); he’s ‘lazy and poorly motivated’ (hating him will surely fix that). Let’s consider a hypothetical situation: certain children have a problem with rhinotillexomania, which one understandably finds disgusting (will hitting them keep their fingers clean? Incidentally, the filthy childhood habit has been explained [as are other body-focused repetitive behaviours] as one not merely being an ignorant ‘pig,’ but as a way to reduce anxiety…oh, such children would never feel anxiety in an abusive family!). And, of course, there are many other such flaws used as convenient excuses for bullying.

Being mad at the victim for having this or that annoying habit or fault is far from the only reason he is being bullied, though…by the very people who are supposed to love him. The bullies frequently, freely admit to him that they do it for the sheer fun of tormenting him. And the narcissistic mother does nothing to stop the bullying. It’s as if she were telling the bullies, “Go ahead, throttle the little bastard, see if I care.” Indeed, one gets the sneaking suspicion that she’s been secretly fanning the flames of the bullies’ hate.

It’s well-known that narcissistic parents will pit their sons and daughters against each other, goad them into competing–and even fighting–each other for the parent’s (very conditional) love…to seem ‘the worthiest’ one of having that love. Though sibling rivalry is a reality in even the best and healthiest of families, any reasonable parent will do his or her best to minimize any feelings of jealousy among siblings. Narcissistic parents, on the other hand, thrive on that very jealousy, enjoying the ego trip they get from it, and so will intensify that jealousy at every opportunity, pointing out–right in front of the siblings–which one he or she supposedly favours the most.

This inflaming of jealousy can be a powerful motive to bully a sibling. That narcissistic mother I was talking about…mine…who lied about a mental condition I don’t have, who was capable of such mendacity, would have been all the more capable of telling my elder brothers and sister all kinds of lies about not only my faults–either exaggerating them, taking them out of context, or mixing in false faults with true ones–but also lying about preferring me to them, making them want to hate and torment me all the more. If that was true about her, in every detail, and I have every reason to believe it was all true, then she was being especially cruel to me.

Knowing the whole time that the bullying was going on, and doing nothing about it, she’d sigh and act as if it were just an inescapable reality, when a few sharp reprimands from her–given the respect she commended as our mother–my three elder siblings would have chilled right out…immediately. You see, one could make the argument that older siblings’ bullying you when you and they were kids is simply a matter of them having been immature at the time; yet even there, it was still the parents’ responsibility to intervene and stop the bullying. So many years having gone by with this abuse going on, without any substantial parental intervention, is simply a matter of childhood emotional neglect.

It thus still demonstrates a total lack of basic decency.

IV: Teaching a Child One’s Bigotries

One form of emotional abuse that shouldn’t be ignored is when a parent teaches his sons and daughters his bigoted attitudes. Again, an impressionable child is having his or her world view distorted by a parent’s biases and prejudices, thereby stunting the child’s growth and development, making him or her as ignorant and ill-informed as the parent.

I’ve written at length over the years on this blog about how I was emotionally abused by my mother and three elder siblings, with little complaint about my father’s contributions to the problem. In doing so, I haven’t been all that fair. It’s high time I discussed how he, too, contributed to messing my mind up.

He was a right-wing reactionary who justified his attitude with his euphemistic self-description as “conservative.” Just about every “ism” applied to him: racism, sexism, antisemitism, anticommunism, homophobia, etc. He not only had these attitudes, he also expressed them with a bitter, angry vehemence and vitriol. He was, to be perfectly blunt, a mindless, bigoted old fool; he was Archie Bunker with a Master’s degree in history–the one subject that, if anything, should have taught him to have leftist sympathies, had the subject been taught properly to him.

As a young man with liberal tendencies at the time (in the early 1990s, as I was attending university), I tried to resist his reactionary thinking, which even included defenses of evangelical Christian fundamentalism (not that he ever attended church or read the Bible for moral guidance, mind you; it was all just an excuse for supporting authoritarian thinking). But just as mainstream media saturations of bourgeois propaganda sooner or later tend to influence the thinking of the masses, I eventually was swayed, for a time, to his way of thinking…not completely, but to far too great an extent, anyway.

Indeed, from about the mid-1990s to about the late 2000s, I went through a period of lost years, growing increasingly reactionary in my own thinking, in part due to my own personal frustrations at the time, but also due in great part to his toxic influence. First, I became stridently antifeminist. Then, during the early 2000s as a reaction to 9/11, I went full neocon for several years, even supporting the Iraq invasion and Israel (yes, I sank pretty low).

It took a slow, sad and disappointed realization, confronting how the Bush administration had lied about Iraq’s “WMDs,” to turn me around; their bailing out of the banks in 2008 was the last straw. Since then, I’d slowly resumed a socially-liberal/fiscally libertarian stance; and after Dad’s death in 2009 and some temporary grieving of him, I felt psychologically liberated from any need for his approval of my political beliefs, and I thus embraced leftism.

And here I am now, a total commie red, with no qualms about it at all.

V: The Toxic Influence of the Petite Bourgeoisie

One thing related to my father’s bigotry, and also linked to my family’s toxicity (as well as, I imagine, the bigotry and toxicity of many families out there), is the issue of class. I’m the only member of my family–to my current knowledge–with any left-wing sympathies (and recall, my own sympathies in that way are only a little over a decade long as of this writing, and I’m 56 going on 57); none of the rest of those in my immediate family has a socialist bone in his or her body, which should tell you something, Dear Reader, as far as their empathy levels are concerned.

As owners of a Smitty’s Pancake House restaurant in the 1980s and early 1990s, my parents were petite bourgeois, and with that social position come the values and politics of such a class. The worker was looked down on by my father as a “lazy lout” (his exact words), and anyone receiving welfare was just mooching off the government and taxpayer. Just as my dad had tried to influence my political thinking rightward, so did my sister, J., though more liberal herself, try in the early 1990s to stamp on my identity that I’m “an upper middle-class young man.” No, J.: as a teacher of English in East Asia, I’m a worker, a proletarian.

When I was a teen and doing some of my first work in the mid-1980s, which in this case was some jobs here and there for the family restaurant, I was working for…$1 (Canadian). My father tried to drive into my head, “Oh, if you wanna make that dollar, you have to work really hard for it…” as if that precious dollar was a mint of gold or something. Later, as a young man and without work with sufficient pay that would allow me to leave home and live independently, my father, rationalizing that “You have to pay your way in this world,” made himself my landlord, requiring me to give him some of the meagre pay I was making for ‘rent’ each month. Granted, it wasn’t as high a ‘rent’ as one normally would pay, but still, this was my father, with his Attila-the-Hun right-wing mindset. One normally expects a more charitable attitude from one’s own family.

My mother was also somewhat more liberal than my father, though as a comparison to him, “somewhat liberal” isn’t saying much. She fiercely supported Israel to the point of flipping out on me one day in the restaurant for appearing there wearing an Arab scarf, something I’d bought on my university campus and–being too young and politically naïve to know anything about the Israel/Palestinian conflict–was wearing it just to be fashionable. In her hissy fit, she shouted that the scarf–looking like Yasser Arafat‘s black-and-white keffiyeh–made me look like a supporter of the PLO; she spoke of how awful it was that Palestinians throw rocks at the IDF, yet it didn’t matter at all to her how the latter have always brutalized the former, with state-of-the-art military technology provided by the US and other countries. My father had nothing kind to say about Zionism, of course, but that was because of his hatred of Jews, not from sympathy for the Palestinians, whom he called “murderers.”

Getting back to my sister, I mentioned in another blog post (I forget which one) how she was annoyed with the politics in Bruce Cockburn songs, in particular, “Call It Democracy.” She’d sneer at the title, imagining the singer “takes himself way too seriously.” Well, J., if you’d ever gone to Third World countries like Guatemala, as he did in the 1980s, and seen the appalling poverty there, caused in no small part by US imperialism, you’d understand why “democracy” in the West is and always has been a sick joke.

All of these examples show the connection between the microcosm of family toxicity and the macrocosm of toxicity in capitalist imperialism, the political gaslighting involved in the narcissism of capital. Capitalism causes alienation, causing in turn the lack of empathy easily seen in toxic families ruled by narcissistic parents. Accordingly, the use of psychological aggression by parents on their kids in the US (the bourgeois country par excellence) is almost universal, according to a study.

VI: Explosive Anger

Now, speaking of “psychological aggression,” one of the defining features of emotional abuse in toxic families is the propensity towards explosive outbursts of anger, happening all too frequently, and typically provoked by only minor offences. Everyone flies off the handle every now and then, even the best of people; but in toxic relationships, frequent explosive anger is a tool of control, meant to terrorize the victim to keep him or her in a state of timid submission.

I’ll now give some examples of sins a victim may have committed “to deserve” to be yelled and screamed at psychotically by a narcissist:

Being late with a birthday gift.
Interrupting someone.
Treating someone’s birthday as if it were of only minor importance.
Not bringing a bottle of milk home.
Eating all of the cereal (on multiple occasions).
Failing to respond when called to make tea for someone.
Slamming doors a few times too often.
Opening a package of ice cream incorrectly.
Rhinotillexomania (and messing up the furniture with the greeners).
Failing to wash the dishes when required to.
Failing to say ‘thank you’ for a ride to school.
Listening to music that others don’t like.
Saying someone does nice things for others only to get attention.

Granted, it isn’t easy to be patient with people who do these kinds of bad things, but surely one can deal with such problems in a healthier manner than by yelling and screaming at the offending party. Such excessive reactions won’t improve the behaviour of the offender by a long shot, either; in fact, the bad behaviour is likely to get even worse.

Such over-the-top reactions demonstrate clearly a lack of basic decency.

VII: Making the Bad Even Worse

That yelling and screaming at someone will make his or her offending behaviour, in all likelihood, worse rather than better leads me to my next topic.

The rationalizations often used for pressuring the victim in a toxic relationship to conform to more desired behaviour is that it’s meant “to help” the victim, “to improve” him or her in some way. Yet it is the very nature of abuse, abuse being by definition doing bad things to someone, to do the diametrical opposite of helping or improving somebody.

A common tactic used in attempts to deter undesirable behavior is to dump shame on the offending individual. The–frankly–Neanderthal logic behind using shame is that the offender will not want to be thus shamed, and so presumably he or she will be motivated to break the bad habits.

A modicum of understanding of human psychology, however, will demonstrate that the very opposite of the desired effect will result from shaming. The fact is, shaming the offender will only cause him or her to feel such self-loathing that he or she believes that it is in his or her nature always to be of such a defective nature…so the bad habits can never be stopped.

Object relations theory helps explain how one’s early experiences with caregivers and others in a child’s everyday life create a kind of blueprint, or template, if you will, for how just about all of one’s later relationships will be with others. So a healthy and happy early relationship with one’s parents and siblings should generally result in similar relationships with most other people, and the same goes with negative, abusive relationships. Such relationships become one’s “normal,” and anything different from that tends to be shunned, whether good or bad, because one isn’t used to such a contrast in human dynamics. Not being used to it means not being comfortable with it, so it is shunned, even if it’s good.

So the abusive way of dealing with unwanted behaviour, far from correcting it, will instead usually reinforce it, because it feels “normal” to be in such a negative social interaction. Instead of learning to depart from the undesirable way of behaving, one believes that it is an indelible part of one’s nature, thus perpetuating it.

I’ll give some examples from my family-of-origin. My eldest brother, R., was performing badly at school when he was a teen, probably far more because of difficult, emotionally confusing issues he was dealing with rather than a lack of intelligence. Our father’s Neanderthal way of dealing with R.’s poor academic performance was to shame him with notions that he was “too stupid” to do better. Shock and surprise!…instead of pulling up his socks and studying harder, R. ended up dropping out of school and leaving home; he was made to believe he could do no better. Our father took a bad situation and simply made it worse.

Several years later, when R. was at the end of his tether and could do more as a worker without even a high school diploma, he was finally motivated to come back home, go back to school, and study hard…all of which he did, and he succeeded–not because of Dad’s shaming, of course, but from sheer desperation to turn his life around.

R.’s successful bouncing back (he got into computers, and he’s surely the most successful family member now, having proven his smarts, now that he’d gotten past those adolescent emotional problems) came with some nasty side effects, though, much of which got taken out on me, who’d had a somewhat better relationship with Dad (from somewhat better grades at school). R. had come back home with a great big chip on his shoulder, imagining we all saw him as “the idiot of the family” because of those old bad grades (Really, R.? Ever get called “retarded” by Mom? You haven’t even got a clue!)

So R. had a motive (envy of Dad’s somewhat better evaluation of me), totally unjustified, for joining my other two elder siblings in bullying me. R. was too out of touch with his feelings to realize it was Dad he was mad at, not me, and he was too much of a coward to confront Dad with that anger, preferring to take it all out on me (then a shy teenager going through emotional problems of my own), which was so much easier for him to do.

As for me, there were many things I did that the family, of course, didn’t like me doing, but instead of finding constructive ways of making me stop doing those things, they shamed me for all of it, causing me to do those things all the more.

Apart from having been bullied regularly by my elder brother, F., when I was a little kid, I had to move with my family from the Toronto area to Hamilton in 1977, making me leave my best friend, Neil McIntyre: I was emotionally devastated from not being able to be with him anymore, and the pain stayed with me for years. Research has been done to show that such adverse childhood experiences as bullying and relocation can be traumatizing enough to cause a child to do such things as self-isolate and socially withdraw–it’s a trauma response.

By the late 1970s, my family was growing more and more concerned with my habit then of playing all alone, what was actually maladaptive daydreaming. Granted, they should have been concerned that I didn’t want to go out, find friends, and play with them; but their methods to get me to stop the maladaptive daydreaming were all poorly thought out, and they only served to make me do more of it. Rather than trying to understand why I self-isolated and showing compassion, they shamed me for my maladaptive daydreaming; me elder sister, J., coined a pejorative expression, “tooka-tooka,” to describe it and make me feel foolish for doing it. Such toxic tactics only increased my self-loathing, and made me do more of the maladaptive daydreaming.

My mother exacerbated my problems exponentially with her autism lie, which served only to make me feel as though I could never fit in with social groups. I’m convinced her reasons for pinning that label on me were outright malignant, a wish to make my life harder and undermine my ability to develop self-confidence. Other motives that I suspect she had were to act as if she were some kind of expert in psychiatry (she, while having training as a nurse, had no psychiatric training whatsoever), and fancying oneself to have abilities and knowledge one lacks is a narcissistic trait; another motive I suspect in her was to project her narcissism onto me, since her characterization of autism was by the original use of the word, meaning an excessive involvement in oneself (Sounds rather like narcissism, doesn’t it?), a retreat into one’s own private, inner world, as opposed to how autism is understood to be now–characterized by difficulties in social interaction and in communication, and restrictive, repetitive behaviours.

Needless to say, all of these things the family was doing to me were making my dysfunctional behaviour go from bad to worse, for, far from doing anything to help me, as they imagined was their intention, their true intention was to try to control me and make me into something they wanted me to be. This leads me to the next topic of what makes a family lack basic decency.

VIII: Forcing Conformity

A healthy family will want each member to grow and become who he or she really is and aspires to be, nurturing and encouraging one to be, in the parlance of our time, ‘the best version of oneself.’ In a toxic family, though, this is not so.

Instead, one is expected to become, if you will, the best version of what the toxic family wants one to be. One of the key components of emotional abuse is having power and control over the victim, and so forcing conformity is part of the abusive nature of the toxic family.

Now, of course, it’s perfectly reasonable that a family will want to deter any member from doing genuinely bad things, such as getting involved in crime, doing drugs, or performing badly at school. But the kind of enforced conformity that I’m talking about is of a far less reasonable sort. Healthy families don’t set precise agendas for their members, making them extensions of one’s ego (we see examples of this in the film, The Graduate).

As far as examples from my family are concerned, I already mentioned how my mother’s agenda was to trick me and manipulate me into believing I have a mental condition that I don’t have, so that–as I suspect–she could, via projective identification, split off and expel the narcissism in herself and impose it on me, a kind of exorcising of her personal demons (a plan of hers that never worked, for she stayed narcissistic to the end). I also mentioned how my father tried to push R. to become a superstar student, and in his frustration at teen R.’s having failed to do that, Dad shamed him for it. Now I’ll discuss some other examples.

Just as my mother wanted to project the worst or herself onto me, so did she manipulate J. into embodying what Mom saw as an idealized version of herself. The golden child of the family, J. was pressured into being the perfect daughter, the perfect sister, the perfect aunt, and the perfect mother–the perfect ‘family woman.’ Totally enmeshed in the family dysfunction, J. was required to give her whole life and identity to the service of the family. On any occasion that she tried to go off and do her own thing, all for herself, there would be hell to pay.

Now, this doesn’t mean, of course, that she never did anything for herself–it’s just that she’d have to prioritize the family over herself. One time, though my memory of it is vague, it’s enough to illustrate my point. We as a family (I was a teen) were in the car doing something we had to do together (I forget what specifically), but J. wasn’t with us. We arrived at the restaurant, where we saw her walking about, doing her own thing. Mom and Dad viciously bawled her out, reducing her to tears.

On another occasion, Mom and Dad had come home unexpectedly early one night, and they found J.’s boyfriend undressed and in her bed (again, I was a teen at the time, and in the basement, hearing the whole ensuing fight, so she, five years older than I, was a young adult). Mom freaked, screaming, “I’m ashamed of you!” at her repeatedly, again, reducing J. to tears…and all for doing something that, by the mid-1980s, was standard for a consenting young adult couple. J. had failed to be our mother’s ideal.

Since Mom forced conformity on J., tricking her into believing that such ‘guidance in the paths of righteousness’ was Mom’s way of loving her (this was J.’s trauma), my sister in turn tried to make me conform to the kind of person she thought I should be, imagining she was loving me and guiding me with her ‘wisdom,’ rather than just using me as an extension of her ego, as Mom had done to her.

J. carried this ‘guidance’ to some rather ridiculous lengths. In her ‘humble’ opinion, I can’t do anything right. I don’t dress the ‘right’ way, I don’t have the proper, ‘enlightened’ political beliefs, and I certainly don’t listen to the ‘right’ music.

Oh, the absurd attempts she made to deter me from listening to the music I liked! She’d berate me for it, dismissing its often experimental nature as “weird” and “strange” (note: we always label the things we simply don’t understand as “weird” and “strange”–her words were really more of a comment on her musical ignorance than they were on my idiosyncratic taste in listening). I was a teen at the time, though, and teens identify with their music: so in calling it “weird,” J. was calling me “weird,” another form of emotional abuse.

Needless to say, none of her attempts to shame me and discourage me from listening to progressive rock, jazz fusion, 20th century classical music, and other forms of experimental or boundary-pushing music ever worked. If anything, I got even more interested in that kind of music. So if listening to that kind of music was bad, then her tactics were just another case of the family pushing me from bad to worse. In any case, her “weird” labelling of my music, and by extension, of me, was just another way that that family gave me a complex.

Though my brother, F., was the worst bully of my three siblings, he imagines he tried to do me a good turn by teaching me how to play baseball. Actually, he forced me to play a game I wasn’t interested in playing; it may amaze him, but not every little kid is interested in playing sports, and that’s okay. And again, if he didn’t like my childhood habit of maladaptive daydreaming instead of going out and finding friends, then he should have made the link between his bullying of me and the harmful psychological effects it had on me as a kid…and if he was too young himself to make that link, then it was the job of our parents to help him understand that–which, of course, they never did.

On at least one occasion during that ‘teaching of baseball,’ he not only bad-mouthed me (about 8 or 9) to a girl neighbour of a similar age, which only increased my feelings of alienation and loneliness, discouraging me all the more from seeking friends, but he at the time also threatened to hit me, if not actually did (I don’t quite remember what exactly happened: traumas often cause memory loss). In any case, I went home in tears that day, and instead of getting any comfort from my parents, my mother loudly barked at me from another room, saying, “Take your bath!” I remember lying in the bathtub in a daze, stunned at the lack of love I was getting…and my mother’s last words to me before dying in 2016 were to tell me that, during those very childhood years of mine, she’d given me “the most love.”

It can be argued that Mom simply didn’t know what had happened, yet her attitude made it plain to me that she simply wasn’t interested in even listening when I tried to tell her. You see, we’re not talking about a few mere flaws in an otherwise basically good family here; we’re talking about a lack of basic decency. Family is not supposed to treat you this way, and the refusal to listen to the victim’s cries for help leads me to my next topic.

IX: Not Listening

If your family loves you, they listen to you. Period. It’s the same as in any other relationship.

Toxic families don’t listen. They preach. They pretend that their long-winded speeches are edifying for you. They aren’t so at all–they’re just annoying, an insult added to the injury of all their emotional abuse.

None of this preaching is for your own good, no matter how much the toxic family claim it is. It’s really about glorifying their egos.

This mentality was Mom’s an J.’s, all over. Just as my mother imagined she was a natural born psychiatrist, with no need for training or education in the field, so did my elder sister fancy herself a life coach of some kind for me.

J. imagines she has this huge treasure-trove of life wisdom to impart to me…actually, as I said above, she’s only five years older than I am: how much more could she possibly know about life than I do? On the other side of the coin, she imagines that I know nothing substantial about life, or about much of anything else, for that matter. This arrogant presumption of hers dovetails with what our mother had said about ‘my autism’ and being ‘mentally defective’ in general.

In fact, if J. and I were ever to switch roles, with me sharing any of my own thoughts on how to live one’s life, she would get outright snotty with me, as if I had the gall to break rank with her and be ‘insubordinate.’ I recall a couple of occasions when I was a young man, when I’d made comments, not at all serious, and she thought I was pretending to know more about life than the great philosopher did.

On one of those occasions, she’d expressed a rather snobbish annoyance at someone speaking ungrammatical English. I joked, “Sometimes in life, we all meet people who don’t talk good [sic].” She redirected her snootiness at me and said, in all sarcasm, “Oh, really? Tell me about life.” Her sense of ‘superior wisdom’ was so great…and her listening so poor, she didn’t even realize I’d merely attempted a joke–a silly one, but a joke all the same, not a serious lecture on life. So, what I’d unwittingly done was offend her narcissism, and I got needlessly hurt once again.

As I said, instead of just being quiet and listening to me, which is what I so desperately needed during those years I lived with the family, J. preached to me. She always thinks she needs to teach me something, that her words of advice will ‘guide me on the straight path.’ No, J., that’s not what I need; people can learn the lessons of life the normal way–by trial and error, through experience. Her words don’t add much to that.

Allowing people to talk, however, is very therapeutic. Allow them to get their pain off their chest, what’s called “the talking cure.” When an analysand free associates, the therapist just listens and takes notes, linking the themes that appear again and again in the patient’s endless talking; after enough themes are connected to show a consistent direction in the patient’s thinking, then the therapist may speak, giving an interpretation of the analysand‘s thought processes, which–it is hoped–will be an insightful one, helping the patient understand him- or herself better, thus leading to improvement in the patient’s mental health.

J., no more a therapist than our mother was, fails to understand the importance of listening. Instead, if I start to explain what’s troubling me, she breaks in and gives me a speech that, supposedly, makes visible the ‘larger philosophical perspective’ that I don’t see. Actually, what she typically says has little relevance, if any, to the subject at hand.

I’ll give a few examples. Once, when I was about 18 or 19 years old, I tried to tell her about a time shortly before, when Mom had yelled and screamed at me like a maniac for the unforgivable crime of having interrupted her. All J. had to do was listen. Instead, she interrupted me, saying, “Yeah, and I applaud Mom for it!” Then she went on about some nonsense about teenagers arrogantly thinking they know everything, which had nothing to do with Mom’s then-craziness or my attempt to remain calm as she’d spoken so hurtfully to me. That J. thought she knew everything about what had happened was lost on her, of course; I’m guessing she’d heard Mom tell her about our argument, misrepresenting what had happened and painting herself as the innocent victim, and me as the bad guy.

Another time, shortly before Mom died, I tried talking to J. on the phone about how Mom had lied to me so terribly (<<parts 5 and 6) that I didn’t want to communicate with her and put up with her manipulation anymore. Again, instead of listening to me, J. lectured me about how mothers ‘don’t have an instruction booklet on how to deal with every single family problem.’ Again, apart from J.’s typical condescension, her ‘perspective’ had nothing to do with what I was complaining about! Constant lying isn’t just a minor character flaw: it’s a serious personality problem, causing one to feel no longer able to trust the liar. It’s shows a lack of basic decency–not something to be endured. Actually, J. was enabling Mom’s emotional abuse by lecturing me the way she did, and this leads me to my next topic.

X: Enabling the Abuse

Many might read what I’ve written about here and think that I’m wallowing in the remote past like a ghost. Oh, those things you complain about happened so long ago, Mawr, decades ago! Get over it! Let it go!

First of all, those things happened in my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood–my formative years, when my personality was only developing, and so the experiences would have a profound effect on the rest of my life, the same as anyone else’s experiences of childhood trauma. Such issues, thus, should never be trivialized or dismissed.

Second, the emotional abuse I suffered from that family was not limited to those early experiences. Once a toxic family, always a toxic family. After I left Canada to live in East Asia, the family could still communicate their nastiness by email or long distance phone calls…and they did.

Not content to have implanted the autism lie in my head when I was a child, my mother modified her lie by saying I have Asperger’s Syndrome: no need to have me tested by a psychiatrist during one of my visits home…my mother, the rank amateur psychiatrist, just ‘knew.’ I argued with her about this new label during the 2000s, and she wouldn’t let it go. It didn’t matter to her that she lacked the authority to give me, or anybody, psychiatric labels of any kind. Her presumptuous arrogance was just that brazen.

Of course, enabling of her emotional abuse came from her #1 flying monkey, J., the golden child, who in an email from the mid-2000s told me to “let this go” (i.e., stop arguing with Mom about the Asperger Syndrome label, and stop wallowing in the past). I was also instructed by J. not to reply, for I obviously have no right to tell my side of the story. Mom’s ‘version’ of the truth, in which she is blameless and I’m the bad guy, would suffice for J.

Another thing that had upset me at the time was how, when J.’s husband was terminally ill from cancer, my wife and I had offered to make a visit to Canada to see him one last time. My mother, in her usual condescending tone, said I shouldn’t come out of a fear that my ‘tactless and insensitive’ nature would cause me to put my foot in my mouth and say something to upset J. and her husband. Oh, those Aspies sure are tactless, aren’t they? Never mind how tactless and insensitive my Mom was being. My wife was every bit as offended as I was.

Indeed, I was furious, arguing all the more vehemently with Mom about it, thus leading to J.’s “let this go” comment. And around this time, I was beginning to have truly anti-Mom thoughts. I go into detail about all of this issue here, so if you’re curious about it, Dear Reader, you can go there, as a full explanation is beyond the scope of this article.

J.’s wish that I “let this go” must therefore be seen in the context of these more recent outrages of Mom’s, as was J.’s comment in 2016 about Mom’s ‘not having an instruction booklet to deal with every family problem,’ as discussed above. J.’s enabling of the family’s emotional abuse wasn’t just something from my childhood–it’s recent, too. J. claimed in a tweet to me a couple of years ago that, in spite of my having gone NO CONTACT with the family, she still ‘loves’ me: if so, her having read some of my blog posts on the family’s emotional abuse and having felt saddened by what I’d suffered, why has she–as I can safely assume–not pleaded my cause to R. and F. (if she had, and succeeded, surely they would have tried to contact me on Twitter and sought to make amends, wouldn’t they have)? The enabling of the family abuse, then, continues to this day–her ‘loving’ me was just an attempt to hoover me back into the family dysfunction.

XI: Conclusion

So, to summarize, families with a basic sense of decency will not allow the following problems to go on unchecked: gaslighting you into thinking you’re less capable than you really are; bullying you; teaching you to embrace bigotry and a petite bourgeois mentality (which can lead to fascistic attitudes and bigotry, given the right material conditions); explosive anger; making problems even worse instead of solving them; forcing you to conform to their way of doing things; not listening to you; and enabling their abuse of you.

These issues are not the result of minor, forgivable character flaws in otherwise basically good people. These issues come from people with serious personality problems. If you’re in a family with people subjecting you to this kind of abuse, don’t let them gaslight you into thinking that they’re ‘okay,’ but just a little flawed, and that you are ‘not okay’ for not tolerating their b.s.

They are the ones who are not okay. You are right to call out their abuse and demand better treatment. If, after your demands are made, they still won’t change, get help and get out. You deserve better than to be treated that awful way. Don’t let them guilt-trip you for setting boundaries and prioritizing your mental health over them.

By getting away from them and their toxic influence, you’ll truly get a chance to heal. Do what you need to do to be well.

Billionaires Should Not Exist!

I: Introduction

A couple of weeks before I started writing this post, I came upon a short video posted on Twitter (I refuse to call that social media website by its moronic renaming!) on which Elon Musk was complaining about having to pay too much in taxes. Good God: who would imagine the richest man in the world, a centi-billionaire, upset about that? The super-rich would never go on campaigns to lower their taxes, would they?

Well, of course, such complaining is only to be expected of him and his ilk. But matters get worse when we encounter ordinary people defending these plutocrats, which I promptly found myself having to deal with after replying to the video by saying that people like Musk pay far too little in taxes, which of course they usually do–that’s how they became centi-billionaires in the first place.

Musk’s defender was someone who calls him- (or her-) self “chronically based” (“chronically bird-brained” is more like it). The person in question replied to my comment by saying that Musk pays “absurdly” high taxes, “in the billions.” I took a quick look at the defender’s Twitter page, which included, under the name, what probably shouldn’t be all that surprising–a Bible quote: “With man this is impossible, but with God, all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26). Right-wingers are often fond of their feel-good Christian quotes.

I responded to all of this by pointing out the oft-noticed link between Bible-thumpers and billionaire-simping right-wingers, adding that this person ought to read this quote from Matthew–25:31-46, which shows a concern for the poor, something right-wingers routinely ignore.

Well, I suppose this person got a little upset by my reply. First, he or she wanted to know if I’m any better when it comes to caring about the poor (by not defending the super-rich, I’m already better without a need to do anything else!). Then, after citing a few more debatable statistics about the tax rates of the rich vs average-income Americans, which I consider neither here nor there, he or she claimed that higher taxes would just drive the super-rich out of the country, leaving the US government to default, since average-income Americans wouldn’t be able to carry the burden of such high taxes.

Let me deal with these objections one by one. There was no point in my saying any of the following in a reply on Twitter, since I’ve no need to prove myself to this nitwit (who probably wouldn’t listen to me, anyway), and my claims of charity couldn’t be verified independently, anyway. But suffice it to say, for years, I donated money monthly to World Vision to a boy in Nicaragua named José Eliel Angulo; and as a leftist, I constantly advocate for the poor. This right-winger said nothing of helping the poor; just billionaire-simping. I’ve already done leaps and bounds more, even with my modest charity as a chronically-underemployed worker (ever since covid), than he or she.

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels.com

II: Musk’s Wealth and Taxes

Next, we should look at the claim that Musk pays an “absurdly” high amount in taxes, “in the billions.” Let’s start with some context: Musk‘s net worth, as of this writing in May 2026, is $788 billion, according to Forbes; his net worth was $800 billion in February 2026. In 2021, his net worth, again, according to Forbes, was $300 billion. His total in net worth billions rose by a billion yearly, if not almost monthly, from 2024 to 2026. Since November 2025, he’s been expecting a Tesla pay package of $1 trillion, if approved, over a period of ten years, if he meets specific goals.

Note that net worth is, of course, after taxes. In 2021, he had to pay about $11 billion in taxes (while Tesla paid none), yet his net worth had been $300 billion. Given his gargantuan wealth at the time already, I think he could handle a tax on 28.27% (311/11) of his wealth–it doesn’t seem all that “absurdly” high to me. It was also just one year. He paid no federal income taxes in 2018, by the way. From 2014-2018, he paid $455 million in taxes on $1.52 billion of income.

As much of his wealth is in stock rather than salary, his tax liabilities often arise only when he sells shares, allowing him to defer taxes. In 2026, he said he’d have to pay a combined federal and state income tax rate of around 45% when selling stock. Well, don’t sell the stock, then, Elon, if you hate taxes so much.

Incidentally, Tesla paid 0% in federal income taxes, in 2025, on $5.7 billion of US income. Indeed, in spite of high profits, Tesla has utilized tax breaks, resulting in a low effective tax rate in recent years.

Furthermore, ever since Trump‘s second term, the super-rich have seen huge increases in their wealth, up roughly $1.5 trillion in 2025, about 22%, from $6.7 trillion to $8.2 trillion. Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Mark Zuckerberg made up about a quarter of the total gains. Much of these gains were, of course, because of Trump’s tax cuts to the rich. A study last year showed that, in spite of the super-rich paying an overall larger share of taxes than ordinary Americans, the former pay a lower tax rate than the latter. The super-rich are not paying their fair share.

Ultimately, though, who pays how much in taxes is neither here nor there when you consider how everyone ends up after the taxes are paid. Oligarchs like Musk, Bezos, et al are still obscenely wealthy, while millions of working-class Americans are struggling to make ends meet. We all know where far too much of that tax revenue goes–to the military, to Israel, to the US/NATO proxy war against Russia (using Ukraine as a stick with which to hit Putin), and the like, in disproportion to how much should go there…if any of it. Far too little of that money is going out to help the poor.

And the rich won’t leave the US if taxed more…they own the country! They simply won’t pay. We cannot legislate them out of their wealth. That’s why I advocate forcible expropriation (via socialist revolution), and not taxation, anyway.

A huge part of the reason that so many of the super-rich (the tech-bros in particular, like Musk et al) are supporting Trump in his second term is surely because of those delicious tax cuts his administration has given them. When Musk is in a video talking about how ‘awfully high’ taxes are in the US, what he’s really trying to say is that he simply wants to get them even lower than they currently are.

Musk currently has ambitions of being the world’s first trillionaire, as Tesla’s pay package, mentioned above, may make him. We have a word to describe such ambitions: GREED.

This leads me to take a proper look now at the psychology of the super-rich.

III: Billionaires Are Different from the Rest of Us

Yes, the title of this section is ridiculously obvious in its truth, but I need to state it in reaction to something that chronically bird-brained said in one of his or her comments. Apparently, the rich are the same as the rest of us and ought to be treated the same as us.

lol wut?

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that acquiring huge amounts of wealth changes you psychologically, and in a profound way. You become more selfish, acquisitive, narcissistic, entitled, and you lose much in empathy for others. It’s easy to see why people like Musk want even lower taxes than they currently have to pay.

Several years ago, I wrote an article on how those benefitting from capitalism tend to exhibit narcissistic personality traits. Many of the super-rich are so devoid of empathy and basic decency that they can be reasonably called sociopathic.

Consider how Jeff Bezos’s company, Amazon, has pressured their workers to deliver products so quickly that, lacking time to go to the bathroom, they have to piss in bottles as they’re driving to deliver! Then there’s Musk himself, who in response to 2019’s fascist takeover of the Bolivian government (with its accompanying violence to those Bolivians opposed to the new right-wing government) and the left-wing protests against it, he said, “We will coup whoever we want. Deal with it!”

Finally, there’s that billionaire psychopath Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, whose AI is currently used to help the IDF kill Palestinians and Lebanese, and which will also be used in data centres for mass surveillance of everybody. He’s spoken bluntly of the ‘superiority’ of Western civilization and the need to defend it, necessitating scaring our ‘enemies’ so we can “on occasion kill them.” Such notions are in Palantir’s 22-point manifesto. And Palantir co-founder/Trump supporter Peter Thiel speaks out against democracy.

We all have dark, selfish thoughts deep down: Freud‘s id, and Jung’s Shadow. What distinguishes us from the super-rich is that they can afford to fulfill their darkest desires. That’s why billionaires shouldn’t exist. This is just common sense.

Those guilty of the disgusting and highly disturbing Epstein crimes weren’t and aren’t necessarily billionaires, but they’re certainly rich enough to have partaken. They, who raped and sexually exploited underage girls, among other atrocities, clearly regard common people as mere toys to be played around with, mere meat, not as human beings.

This sort of wickedness is why people like me are opposed to the whole idea of being born into a lower class, a middle class, or an upper class. One tends to stay where one is: those at the bottom generally cannot escape poverty, those in the middle are driven to work like slaves out of a fear of falling to the bottom, and those at the top, never learning what it’s like to struggle to live, go through life entitled, thinking they should be able to have anything they want and never be held accountable for any wrongdoing.

Such an entitled attitude is easily seen in people like Trump, who’ll “grab ’em by the pussy,” and never release the Epstein files, in which his name is mentioned tens of thousands of times. Billionaires are people who can buy a home, a private plane, cars, etc. quite fast and easily, as compared with how the rest of us would struggle, scrimp, and save to afford any one of those things. One billion is a thousand millions: people need to use their imaginations and think about what one can do with that much money. If a million dollars were seconds, they would add up to a little over 11.5 days. If a billion dollars were seconds, they would add up to about 31.7 years; and if a trillion dollars (Musk’s current ambition) were seconds, they would add up to about 31,710 years. I hope these calculations help the skeptics understand why we call such amounts of money obscene levels of wealth.

No, billionaires are not the same as the rest of us. We aren’t even in the same league as they are.

Some may try to defend billionaires by referring to their acts of ‘philanthropy.’ Their ‘charitable’ acts, however, require closer scrutiny. Only a small amount of that money actually goes to helping the poor; when donations are given to schools, for example, they usually go to elite ones. A lot of the motive behind the giving is for tax breaks and an improved public image. Most importantly, this ‘charity’ only serves to justify keeping the class system as it is instead of properly addressing the real root causes of poverty–those of capitalism.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation may have done a lot to reduce the problem of polio, but that was far from the biggest problem of the local people, to give one example. That foundation is also not all that noble in its agenda: among other things, Gates’s ‘giving’ allowed his net worth to go up every year since 2009 to $72 billion as of 2014. It’s currently at $102-108 billion. Some charity.

If expropriated, billionaires’ wealth could help end world hunger, build schools and hospitals in the Third World–ones that are fully equipped and with well-trained staff–it could provide affordable if not free housing for everyone, and could be used to clean up the planet. All their combined wealth is around $16 to $20 trillion: don’t tell me it couldn’t at least make huge strides at achieving, if not completely achieve, the above goals.

Instead of even trying to achieve those oh, so worthy goals, however, what kinds of things do the super-rich do with their wealth, besides hoarding it in offshore bank accounts to avoid taxes (i.e., the Panama and Paradise Papers), to pushing for even more tax breaks, lobbying for Israel, etc.? Well, in the case of Musk, Bezos, and Richard Branson of the Virgin Group, they go into private space exploration! What do we need that for, when we have NASA?

What good are fantasies about colonizing space when we won’t even solve the ecological problems of this planet? Even if we achieve the technological miracle of science fiction’s terraforming, isn’t it true that we’ll just mess up the environment out there on those planets, too, sooner or later?

The motives of these three private space explorers is obvious: it isn’t out of altruism: it’s just a glorification of their already bloated egos. No, billionaires are not the same as the rest of us. They are, in fact, monstrosities.

IV: Billionaires Buy Power and Kill Democracy

The idiotic dogma of the market fundamentalists is that with minimal-to-no government intervention in the economy, the “free market” as a ‘natural,’ ‘organic,’ and ‘self-regulating’ way of doing things will set everything right. Lower taxes, deregulate business practices, and businessmen’s “rational egoism” will motivate them to produce the best quality goods to satisfy customer demand, resulting in a healthy economy with lots of jobs for everyone. Wealth will “trickle down” to the poor, and everyone will be happy.

The last fifty-or-so years have shown that the truth is anything but the nonsense described above. When taxes are lowered and the economy is deregulated to maximize profits, far from resulting in the right-wing libertarian’s “free market” utopia, millionaires become billionaires and their private property balloons, requiring the super-rich to protect it all the more through the very state that they claim they want to minimize. Hence all the rich’s lobbying of American politicians through super PACs, resulting in legislation to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. Hence the proliferation of militarized police. And hence, when markets dry up here and need to be developed abroad, the need to export capital to other countries, fueling imperialism and war.

As I explained here years ago, the “free market” doesn’t result in “small government”; it results in huge government (i.e., the bloated military-industrial complex). As Tupac once said, “They got money for wars, but can’t feed the poor.” When right-wing libertarians talk about “small government,” what they really mean is cutting social programs; spending absurdly high amounts on the military, though, as if there were no tomorrow, is perfectly acceptable to them. Their notions of being “frugal” and not wasteful with government money is pure hypocrisy. It’s not “small government”; it’s capitalist government.

This is why the US has a multi-trillion-dollar deficit because of such things as military spending that’s through the roof, resulting in a “need” to raise the debt ceiling, yet there are all these cuts in education and the like. Landlords have raised rents, resulting in a rise in homelessness to an epidemic level, exacerbated recently by the inflation caused by Trump’s tariffs and his needless war of aggression on Iran (spiking oil and gas prices).

Tariffs, of course, are taxes on imported goods. While Trump has lowered taxes on the super-rich, hence the backing of his reelection campaign by Musk et al, the poor are being burdened with the taxes of these tariffs, and the poor in the US are already having difficulty making ends meet as it is. All of these injustices are the result of allowing the super-rich to have too much political influence, making them get richer and richer, while the rest of us get poorer and poorer.

Real democracy means giving power to the common people, not this sham we see of voting for whoever the oligarchs allow us to vote for every four or so years, and yet the pro-rich, anti-poor policies continue unchecked. In these ways, we can see how, in buying political power, the billionaires are killing democracy.

Any candidate offering a real alternative to the system gets marginalized. Scant media attention is ever given to the Green Party, for example, and even the modest social-democrat reforms proposed by Bernie Sanders, AOC, etc., are stopped before they can even be seriously considered. Sanders can be counted on to bow down and endorse yet another corporate whore of the Democratic Party during the lead-up to any election because he is just a sheep-dog for the left. He and AOC, in spite of the lip service they pay to criticizing Israel, are Zionists: any American politician who wants to have a successful career must be firmly Zionist, as Israel has always been crucial in helping protect the interests of Western imperialism.

This is all why, outside of revolution and expropriating all of the billionaires, the poor will never have a hope of improving their lot. The super-rich will never pay their fair share in taxes, and they’ll continue to lobby for even lower taxes. They do this because they own the country. They are killing, if they haven’t yet already fully killed, democracy.

The fact that Trump recently visited China accompanied by oligarchs like Musk and Jensen Huang of Nvidia is telling. Trump is one of these oligarchs, and he serves the oligarchs, who truly rule the US. They are caving into China because they know that China, home to many of the coveted rare earth minerals and other natural resources essential to propping up American industries like AI, etc., has the upper hand.

The link between billionaires and AI leads me to my next point.

Photo by Oktay Ku00f6seou011flu on Pexels.com

V: Billionaires Want to Surveil Us

Along with the idea that today’s US government is a big, capitalist one is the fact that this state is getting increasingly fascistic and totalitarian. As I discussed in this article, what is feared of communism is here in capitalism: attacks on freedom and democracy–touched on in the previous section, but I go into more detail in this other article; cults of personality (i.e., Trump), police brutality, concentration camps, and mass murder (again, see my article for details); and finally, surveillance, which is what I want to get into here now.

As the working class gets more and more frustrated and desperate, they will start lashing out and thinking about revolution. The super-rich, naturally, are getting nervous about that, as we can see from such things as Luigi‘s shooting of the health insurance billionaire, the burning down of warehouses, and Sam Altman’s house being hit with a Molotov cocktail.

The tech bros among the billionaires have been setting up AI data centres in places all over the US, which apart from using up needed water and energy are also being used to collect data and info on everyone. So anyone who, as the AI finds out from all of this personal information, is in any way involved in organizing resistance to the capitalist, imperialist system, who is agitating and educating (as I try to do here), and/or is planning anything of a revolutionary nature has thus made him- or herself a target. Big Business is watching you.

Note that at least one of these oligarchs, Larry Fink, billionaire CEO of BlackRock, has vocally expressed his concern about “domestic terrorism” in the event of a possible civilian use of drones to strike these data centers, an act of resistance against the growing totalitarian capitalist state. Note also that Fink was one of the oligarchs who went with Trump, Musk, Huang, et al to China. And note further that BlackRock, along with Vanguard and State Street, is one of those giant, multinational investment companies that own and control just about every business on the planet.

These billionaires are becoming truly scary people. Taxing them more doesn’t even begin to address the need to rein them in. Why do you think Musk brazenly did a Nazi salute on TV at the time of Trump’s inauguration? Was he just being foolish or ‘socially awkward’? Doing such a thing thirty years ago would have been political suicide. Now, at worst, Musk has received something of a public shaming (like most of the Epstein criminals), but there haven’t been any real harsh consequences to his life and career. He did the salute because he knew that with the ascent of Trump, fascism has arrived fully formed in the US, and Musk figures there’s nothing any of us at the bottom can do about it.

This helplessness of ours brings me to my next point.

VI: Genocide as Suppression of Resistance

The “terrorism” of Hamas and Hezbollah should be understood as resistance against the ongoing Israeli settler-colonialism, occupation, and oppression of the Palestinians. The UN has acknowledged that armed resistance against an occupying force is legitimate self-defense. To the extent that the events of October 7th, 2023 were the acts of Hamas, as opposed to the Hannibal Directive, we can see those events as part of that resistance; for as those of us who have read the history know, this conflict didn’t start on Oct. 7.

While the Zionists have made life for the Palestinians an unending hell ever since the foundation of Israel in 1948, the ethnic cleansing of those in Gaza and the West Bank has been particularly shocking to watch on live-streamed video and photos since Oct. 7. Bodies buried under the rubble of destroyed buildings all over Gaza, children having lost limbs and their bodies torn apart, traumatized survivors everywhere, people dying of starvation, a lack of housing and medical care…all because the IDF looks on the victims with a Hitler hate.

Now of course, the international reaction from ordinary people like me to all of these horrors has been one of sheer outrage, but apart from protesting and attempts to bring food and medical relief to the victims, we cannot stop the Israelis, the great majority of whom support Netanyahu and his thugs in their non-stop murder, which has now extended itself to southern Lebanon. The people in power who really could have stopped Israel–such as, first, Biden and Harris, and now, the Trump administration–have done nothing. They have all been perfectly content to allow the killing to continue. Again, as with Sanders and AOC, they may pay lip service to how awful the violence is, but they’ll do nothing of consequence to stop the violence.

Note that this support of Israel is not limited to the United States government. The former prime minister of my country, Justin Trudeau, proudly called himself a Zionist while this killing was going on; like so many others, he was more concerned with “antisemitism” (never mind that many Jews are anti-Zionists, and many non-Jews are Zionists). Similarly, you can find video of German police beating the shit out of pro-Palestine protestors, who include women.

The Middle East is geostrategically very important to the US and the rest of the Western Empire, as I went into here...all that oil! It’s extremely vital to the imperialists to have an ally–Israel–to kick ass in the region, as then-senator Biden said in a speech back in 1986 (not with my choice of words, of course, but the same idea).

Therefore, not even protests against Israeli brutality against the Palestinians–and now against Lebanese–is acceptable to the Western powers-that-be…to say nothing of a military intervention from those powers to stop the Zionist slaughter. And so the accusation of “antisemitism” is such a convenient excuse for those powerful people to use to stifle the protests (and so it’s important that we protestors not fall into the trap of generalizing about “the Jews” when we protest the evils of Zionism…such generalizing only gives those powerful people more ammunition against us).

When we consider how Israel–apart from a public shaming–is continuing their persecution of the Palestinians with impunity, we must also consider another, even scarier idea: the ongoing genocide of Gaza, the West Bank, and now southern Lebanon is clearly a template for how all resistance–anywhere in the world–will be dealt with.

Consider the current situation in Cuba. The island has already suffered an economic embargo since 1960 for committing the unforgivable sin of kicking out the capitalists on New Year’s Day, 1959, and embracing Marxism-Leninism. Now, the Trump administration has been cutting off Cuba’s access to vital materials for its people’s survival–no fuel or oil, widespread blackouts, difficulty in securing the financing and logistics to import basic food, medicine, and agricultural inputs. There are even Cuban fears of a US military invasion. If the American government is allowed to have its way in these acts of aggression, this will mean yet another genocide.

So what’s happening in Palestine, southern Lebanon, and Cuba is adding up to a dangerous set of precedents. Genocide will be the punishment for resistance against capitalism, imperialism, and settler-colonialism. Imperialism has always been violent, cruel, and bloodthirsty, but not on such a brazen level. And who do these imperialists ultimately serve? The capitalist class, at the top of whom are the billionaires…which leads me to my next point.

VII: The Rich Fuel Imperialism

In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin explained how the interlacing of bank and industrial capital, creating a financial oligarchy, has financial capital generate profits from the exploitation colonialism inherent in imperialism. Note that these imperialist wars and coups d’état are not just “government stuff.” The bourgeois government merely manages the affairs of the capitalist class. In other words, it’s really the rich who fuel imperialism.

Consider again Musk’s tweet in response to protests over Áñez‘s far-right takeover in Bolivia in 2019: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” He said the quiet part out loud here: it was his coveting of Bolivian lithium (and that of other oligarchs–including those among Western carmakers and investors [including U.S. firms], and various private technology corporations) that motivated at least some of them to aid in the right-wing coup and removal of Evo Morales from power.

Then there’s the real motive behind the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and his wife: not that nonsense about arresting him on bogus charges of drug trafficking, but to steal Venezuelan oil, which is what Trump has been doing (making his claim that it was Venezuela that was stealing from the US pure projection). The US government and the capitalists it serves have been coveting that oil for years, since Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world.

On top of all of this, the Big Three asset managers–BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street (note the extent of their influence on corporate America)–have substantial investments in the defence sector, including Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon Technologies, and Northrop Grumman. We don’t know exact numbers here, but estimates suggest the Big Three’s combined holdings could be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. These defence contractors are profiting from wars like the one in Iran.

While oligarchs like Musk, Bezos, Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet don’t hold significant direct public stock portfolios in legacy defence contractors like Lockheed-Martin or RTX, Musk’s Starlink, for example, has been used to help Ukraine in the US/NATO proxy war on Russia; Starlink has also been used to help Israel. Amazon, under Bezos, secured a massive contract (Project Nimbus) to provide cloud services for the Israeli government and military. Gates’s Microsoft has a notable cybersecurity and technology footprint in Israel. Buffett, a strong supporter of the Israeli economy, is heavily invested in Israeli businesses like Iscar. The fact that the super-wealthy have, in one way or another, been involved in imperialism and Zionism is all the more reason to be opposed to the very existence of billionaires.

VIII: Conclusion

All of the above reasons should demonstrate that there is no sound reason to regard billionaires as anything like the rest of us, or that we should treat them as we would anyone else…except that they should be reduced in wealth to that of the average citizen, at least. Billionaires need to be much more than merely taxed heavily: they should be expropriated–they should not exist as such. Reduce them to the status of multi-millionaires at the very most…and that is already being very generous to them. (I would, incidentally, extend this reduction to Chinese billionaires, too. Fair is fair.)

Another thing worthy of mention–though I won’t go into detail about it here, since I already did so in section III of this article–is the undue influence of the super-rich on the media. You can go to the link for the details.

Of course, forcible expropriation of the super-rich is easier said than done. In fact, with AI surveillance data centres keeping tabs on all of us, militarized police and ICE ready to beat the shit out of us, as well as those scary robot dogs, etc., the achievement of the needed expropriation seems bordering on impossible. Still, we can’t just sit on our hands and wail in despair. Things will continue to get worse if we let them. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

Elsewhere, there is hope in the decline of the American empire and de-dollarization. As Rosa Luxemburg once said, “Before a revolution happens, it is perceived as impossible; after it happens, it is seen as having been inevitable.” Let’s find comfort in those thoughts.

Trump is No Aberration…He’s the Culmination

I: Introduction

One thing we can all agree on is that the world today is at its most screwed up in a very, very long time. What we don’t necessarily agree on is who in particular is at fault, who in particular has to be removed from power, and what is the best way to remedy these problems.

At the heart of these problems is one man, whom I affectionately call Orange-face (I call him by this moniker in case any liberals in the comments mistake me for an apologist of his). The Trump phenomenon is a classic case of controlled opposition: either you worship him in a cult of personality, or you abominate him to the point of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

What you’re not supposed to do is to regard him as yet another example of the capitalist class using a demagogue to further their interests. They want us to focus on individual personalities as a distraction from the very group of people who are really behind all of the injustices of the world, people of whom Trump is just one example.

The ruling class is thrilled to have us either demonize Trump as the supposedly sole cause of our problems, or to worship him as the sole solution to these problems. The bourgeoisie would be terrified if we fingered them as the true cause of our problems, for then we might be motivated to overthrow them, not just vote in a “lesser evil” and gain satisfaction from how the new president is, at least, ‘not Trump’ (though the new policies will remain largely the same).

Apart from those in the MAGA crowd who have finally seen the light and realized that Trump isn’t doing anything to improve the lives of Americans, there are still a number of red-cap-wearing morons out there who turn a blind eye from such things as the Gaza genocide (which he’s enabling no less than the Biden administration did), the regime-change operations and other forms of imperialism (so much for the “peace-loving president”), and the Epstein scandal, not to mention the “corporatism” of his political love affair with all those tech-bros.

What the MAGA crowd and the TDS liberals have in common is their misguided belief that Trump, for good or ill, represents a huge shift in American, and therefore global, politics. The MAGA crowd continue to delude themselves that Trump is ‘draining the swamp’ and taking on the ‘deep state.’ Liberals wail, gnash their teeth, and rend their garments thinking that his second administration is an abominable deviation from how America ‘ought to be.’

To be sure, things have gotten recognizably worse since 2025, but the worsening of the world has had far less to do with his personality than it has had to do with the general worsening of things ever since the dawn of neoliberalism and the dissolution of the USSR. Let’s now go into all of the conditions that have led to Trump, and therefore learn how he is no aberration from the system, but rather, he’s its culmination.

II: Fascism

It would be a naïve mistake to think that people like Hitler or Trump are these unique monstrosities who suddenly popped out of nowhere. They didn’t pass through a membrane from another dimension. Their rises to power were a result of particular material conditions to serve the needs of the ruling class at those particular times.

Fascism in general is used by the capitalist class as a response to crises in capitalism, when the system is breaking down, and there’s a danger of the working class rising up in revolution. There were Mussolini’s blackshirts physically assaulting Italian leftists in the 1920s. There were the Nazis putting German leftists in the first of their concentration camps. And now, there’s the designation of Antifa as a ‘domestic terrorist organization’ (when it really isn’t any kind of formal organization, but just an umbrella term to describe antifascism in general…and how exactly is that a bad thing?), and there’s the intention to use ICE to target leftists.

What is more important to understand, though, for the purposes of this argument, is that fascism and ideas associated with it are far from anything new in the US. What I’m saying here is hardly eye-opening to any leftist, of course, but those of my readers in the political centre and to the right may need a bit of a history lesson.

Far from being ‘a shining example of freedom and democracy for the world,’ the US was built on black slavery, the genocide of the Native Americans, and it’s therefore a shining example of white supremacist settler-colonialism. Racism against blacks was only the tip of the iceberg.

Hitler’s fantasies of achieving lebensraum for the ‘Aryan race’–the conquering and settling of Eastern Europe and the enslaving or killing of Slavs–was inspired by American Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine. Slavs were understood to be the Nazis’ equivalent to the Native Americans, an ‘inferior’ race meant to be subjugated. Naziism didn’t inspire people like Trump: people like Trump inspired the Nazis.

After WWII, the American government, NATO, and West Germany gave jobs to ex-Nazis to help fight the Cold War–Operation Paperclip. The Ukrainian underground (which included the Nazi-sympathizing OUN) was also given help by the West to fight communism–Operation Aerodynamic. Operation Gladio was set up in Europe in the 1970s, using fascists there to fight communism, too.

In 2014, the US and NATO aided in a coup d’état to remove Ukraine’s democratically-elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, to set up a US-friendly government that includes Nazi sympathizers. The purpose of this was to stop Yanukovych’s pro-Russia, anti-IMF stance, so the US and NATO would have more control over Ukraine, as was demonstrated in Victoria “fuck the EU” Nuland’s telephone call with Geoffrey Pyatt, then-ambassador to Ukraine. Provoking Russia into war with Ukraine, then blaming Russia for the war, was all part of the plan.

Trump may pay lip service to wanting to stop the Russian/Ukrainian war (probably more to win votes in the 2024 election than out of a sincere desire to have peace), but his ‘peacemaking’ stance doesn’t explain his willingness to sell Javelins to Ukraine back in 2017. He couldn’t stop that war even if he wanted to, anyway: too many billions have been invested in it from the Biden administration.

In short, the support of fascism is as American as apple pie–it didn’t start with Trump.

III: Greenland, Venezuela, and Cuba

Trump’s recent threats to take Greenland are seen as a highly eccentric move by him, to put it mildly. But as Dennis Riches demonstrated in a blog post, the American desire to take Greenland (typically by purchase) is nothing new. Attempts to purchase Greenland go back to Seward in 1867, when Alaska was purchased. Other attempts before Trump to acquire it were in 1910, 1945-1946, and 1955. Trump’s more aggressive attempts to acquire Greenland are thus the culmination of them, not a deviation from a previous American contentment with leaving the island alone.

As is the motive for so much of US imperialism, that of obtaining Greenland is a combination of economic and geo-strategic ones: the island possesses potential reserves of hydrocarbons and rare minerals crucial for high-tech industries; economic valuations are estimated to range from $200 million to as high as $1.7 trillion; and Greenland’s location is crucial for military and ballistic missile trajectories between the US and such major powers as Russia and China (hence, Trump’s rationalizations about American ‘national security’ vis-à-vis Greenland).

As with the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and the threats to overthrow the Venezuelan government, the threats on Greenland reflect an arrogant American attitude that the US somehow ‘owns’ both American continents and every piece of land that’s a part of them. It’s nothing new: the US regards South America as its ‘backyard’; Manifest Destiny would have all of North America (including Greenland) to be part of the US eventually; and the Monroe Doctrine would refuse any foreign intervention in the Western Hemisphere, certainly not out of any sensitivity to the sovereignty of the countries within that area, but because–let’s face it–the US government imagines that it owns all of this land (as an extension of the Monroe Doctrine, the Roosevelt Corollary makes my interpretation more explicit).

The motive to control Venezuela is obvious, and even openly admitted by Trump: to steal their oil, of which Venezuela has the largest reserves in the world. Only an idiot thinks confronting Venezuela is about drugs. Many attempts have been made over the years to wrest power away from those protecting the Bolivarian Revolution. A coup tried to unseat Hugo Chavez during the George W Bush administration. Starvation sanctions have been imposed on Venezuela for years. Again, Trump’s attacks on the country are the culmination of years, decades, of toxic US foreign policy. It isn’t just about Trump being an asshole.

As for Cuba, Trump’s threats are only the latest in decades of attacks on the island, from the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, to the economic embargo that’s lasted over six decades, to the hundreds of attempts on Fidel Castro’s life. Trump is the culmination of it all.

IV: Epstein

Only a fool thinks Trump is anything other than guilty as sin when it comes to the Epstein files. Was it ever a secret that he’s an old lecher? The man openly lusts after his own daughter! We’re supposed to believe that he, with his money and connections with the billionaire class, did not rape underage girls on Epstein island?

The MAGA crowd, still delusional that ‘God sent Trump to take on the deep state,’ will do mental gymnastics and believe him that the Epstein scandal is a conspiracy to bring him down. They’ll also try to deflect criticism from him by pointing out how men like Bill Clinton are also guilty of involvement in the goings-on with those girls, goings-on that sound like something out of a Marquis de Sade novel, or Salò, or that scene in the mansion in Eyes Wide Shut. I’m perfectly content to see Clinton shamed and punished, too, for I’m not partisan.

The point is that, apart from the disgusting sexual abuse these men are guilty of, the Epstein files expose something that should be obvious to everyone: people with obscene amounts of wealth feel free to commit the most obscene acts of violence, sexual or otherwise, against the poor and vulnerable, because they can simply buy their way out of being accountable for it.

We shouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent (that some are claiming he was a Russian agent is the most desperate Hasbara!). It makes so much perfect sense as to be a no-brainer that there would be a link between a Mossad agent and members of the ruling class raping underage girls, on the one hand, and on the other, the enabling of the Gaza genocide. These people have nothing but contempt for human life.

Another thing to keep in mind: the Epstein people got caught. How many other people among the super-rich have committed the same kinds of crimes elsewhere, and at other times in history, and gotten completely away with it? Very few of the current gang of criminals have been punished: Ghislaine Maxwell is incarcerated, and is Epstein even dead…murdered, or the unlikely official explanation? He’d have the money and connections to make himself disappear, even if those photos that surfaced are faked, as some claim they are–a little plastic surgery, and he could live anonymously somewhere in Israel, with bodyguards to protect him.

It seems unlikely that the rest of the guilty will ever be punished, beyond a public shaming. In any case, we’re dealing with the crimes of the rich that hardly started with Trump, and–outside of a socialist revolution–will likely continue to be perpetrated long after he’s gone.

Photo by Faruk Yu0131ldu0131z on Pexels.com

V: Israel

It’s fitting to follow up the above Epstein section with this one on Israel since, as I mentioned above, he was an Israeli agent. It’s also fitting because the Zionist regime is also guilty of committing some of the most heinous crimes against humanity, against women and children in particular, and crimes that, in all likelihood, will never be punished outside of a revolutionary overthrow of the entire global system. These crimes have in common with those of Epstein’s criminals a contemptuous disregard for the rights of the vulnerable and the poor.

A lot of people say that Israel has used the Epstein files to blackmail Western politicians into doing the bidding of the Zionists. Such coercion hardly seems necessary, given how thoroughly willing most in the upper echelons of Western politics are to support Israel. Epstein and Maxwell, as well as Trump, Clinton, Prince Andrew, and others have already been outed: where’s the power of blackmail? Epstein and Maxwell were arrested. Nobody else to date is being punished.

The notion of Israeli blackmail is surely rooted in the antisemitic canard that Israel rules the world, which in turn is rooted in the idea that the Jews rule the world–Nazi nonsense. The correct way to understand Israel’s relationship with the world, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, is that Israel is a vital ally to the Western empire. That tiny sliver of land is in a crucial area of the world geo-strategically, where there’s so much oil and thus such a great need to control the area. The Western empire needs an ally there to kick ass among unruly neighbours who don’t want that Western control and exploitation going on.

Because capitalism, as we know through Lenin, is intimately connected with imperialism (i.e., the export of capital into other countries and stealing their resources to get rich off of them), it’s easy to see how the super-rich would have always enthusiastically supported Israel as a protector of Western interests. Just as the concentration of wealth among the 1% is nothing new or started under Trump, neither is the abuse of the vulnerable, on Epstein island or in occupied Palestine. Trump’s abuses are the mere culmination of it all.

Israel’s founding in 1948 was land theft, plain and simple. The Zionists never had, and still don’t have, any right to that land. Israel as a country should not exist; Palestine belongs to the Palestinians. It’s perfectly acceptable, on the other hand, to have Jewish communities in Palestine, even large ones, enjoying full equal civil rights there with the Muslims and Christians…but not superior civil rights. Such Jews would be Palestinian Jews, not Israeli ones–therein lies all the difference. As for the excess of Jewish settlers, however, they have the right to pack up their bags and leave, as Norman Finkelstein once said.

The Soviet Union, regrettably, in a momentary lapse of reason and rationalized as realpolitik, aided in the establishment of Israel, hoping to gain geopolitical leverage in the region and–with a ‘socialist’ Jewish state–gain a crucial ally. The Zionists’ choice to side with the US and capitalist West took away the USSR’s illusions about the new country, and the Soviets quickly repented and maintained all solidarity with the Arabs from then on.

US support for Israel ever since, from both the GOP and the DNC, has of course been unwavering. Even “progressives” like Bernie Sanders and AOC, for all of their paid lip service to opposing Netanyahu, support Israel’s “right to exist” and insist on condemning Hamas, whose necessary armed resistance against Israel has been shown to be more than justified over the past few years of carnage in Gaza.

Biden and Harris willingly green-lit the genocide in Gaza, right from October 2023 until the end of their administration, and if Harris wins in 2028, there’s no reason to believe she’ll change her stance. All talk of her having ‘worked tirelessly’ to end the killing of Palestinians was and is just that…all talk. Trump’s moving of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on May 14th, 2018 (the 70th anniversary of the nakba), and his current wish to turn the mass graveyard of Gaza into a set of resorts for wealthy vacationers, as outrageous as these are, are merely the culmination of a decades-long project of ethnic cleansing.

No blackmail is needed to make Trump, or any of the other plutocrats, support Israel, for such support is already in their class interests. They want to maintain a global order that ensures more for themselves and less for everyone else. Support of Israeli settler-colonialism–just like that of the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc., as against the rights of the indigenous peoples of all of these ‘countries’–is integral to maintaining such a world order. Socialism is anathema to such a system, and that’s why billionaire Israeli agent Epstein was the very antithesis of socialism. The only way Israel needs to blackmail the West is through its most probable nuclear weapons program and the Samson Option, that is, if any attempt is made to overthrow the Israeli regime.

VI: ICE

ICE, having received training from the IDF (and having a similar contempt for human life), can be seen as a manifestation of the imperial boomerang. Now, I don’t mean “boomerang” in a strictly geographic sense, since fascist terrorizing of people of colour in the United States is nothing new. Hear the words of black Americans when they describe their victimization from police brutality to know what I mean. The violence has, however, boomeranged on white people, and while we shouldn’t use this violence to prioritize whitey and minimize the horror that should be felt at state violence against POC, we can use this new violence to point out the extremes to which the state is going now.

When an otherwise white supremacist culture is actually starting to inflict violence on people of their own skin colour, people they normally take it easy on, things have come to a pretty pass, to put it mildly. We’re horrified to contemplate the Nazi murder of Jews, the Roma, Slavs, etc., but not quite so much when King Leopold II of Belgium was responsible for the butchering of one to fifteen million Congolese. Similarly, the condemnation of the 1985 MOVE bombing isn’t quite as vehement as it should be.

My point is that we shouldn’t regard the ICE atrocities as either anything new or anything occasional in history. That many are shocked at what ICE is doing now is merely an indicator of how little they seem to be aware of such violence against non-whites for many decades…centuries. That ICE is attacking whites and American citizens now is an indication of the boomerang I’m talking about.

And while the ICE attacks have gotten particularly vicious under Trump, we shouldn’t regard the problem as just a ‘Trump thing.’ Anyone who has been following the history of ICE knows that the Democratic Party has done much over the past two decades to strengthen the law enforcement agency.

ICE was created in 2002, under the Bush administration, as part of the Homeland Security Act in response to the 9/11 attacks. There was already severe criticism for ICE’s aggressive, militarized attacks, including high-profile workplace raids, the separation of families, and civil rights violations.

ICE was awful under the administration of Obama, the “Deporter-in-Chief,” too. They deported a record 2.4 million undocumented immigrants, 40% of those deported in 2015 having no criminal conviction, and a majority of those convicted guilty of only minor charges. See here for an investigation of complaints of abuse and harsh treatment in the detentions and deportations during Obama’s first term, aired in 2011, and how it all continued in his second term.

The Democrats have helped in the increase of funds to ICE. The inhumane conditions of ICE detention centres continued under the Biden administration. The beefing-up of the agency during the second Trump administration should not be seen as an aberration from a ‘normal’ form of deportation, but as the culmination of targeting POC, finally rebounding and hitting whites, too.

VIII: Iran

The current push for regime change in Iran (while there are some Iranians with legitimate grievances against their government, the bulk of the recent protesting and violence in the country has been sparked by US and Israeli influence, not least of all by the sanctions imposed there causing economic misery) is, of course, not an aberration from usual American foreign policy. The Trump administration is just carrying on a continuation of a decades-long policy.

It can be traced back to when Mohammad Mosaddegh tried to nationalize Iranian oil in the early 1950s, wishing to use the revenue to improve the lives of his people rather than allow the West to exploit it and profit off of it. Of course, such ‘socialism’ could not be tolerated, and the MI6 and CIA helped bring about a coup d’état in 1953 to get rid of Mossadegh and install the Shah, a Western puppet who’d ensure that the exploitation continued.

The Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, would no longer be tolerated by the Iranian people by the late 1970s, and he was overthrown in 1979 to establish the Islamic Republic of Iran, then led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. During the Iran/Iraq War in the 1980s, the US gave aid to Saddam Hussein, even with him using chemical weapons on Iranian forces, fearing that an Iranian victory would threaten regional stability and oil supplies (Of course, there was some US aid to Iran, too–i.e., the Iran Contra Affair; but it was mostly about aiding Iraq.).

Israel has always felt threatened by a strong Iran, so naturally the US will snap to attention and aid the Zionists. A reflection of that US/Israeli solidarity, among so many of them, can be seen from back when Dubya spoke of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “Axis of Evil,” propagandistically exploiting quasi-Nazi language as a projection of American fascism on the three “rogue” countries just after 9/11.

The sanctions imposed on Iran, ever since 1979, have devastated the country, causing banks and firms to withdraw humanitarian trade; this has left Iranians with rare and severe diseases unable to obtain the medicine and treatments they need. The desperation felt there, combined with how the Mossad has been stirring things up, more than explains the explosion of violence in Iran. The Western hypocrites couldn’t care less about human rights issues: they just want a US/Israel-friendly regime installed there. It should come as no surprise that the former Shah’s son is to be Iran’s next head of state.

Overthrowing the Islamic Republic of Iran won’t exactly thwart the BRI, but it will certainly disrupt it, as Iran is a key component of it, and the West would like to hinder it. In any case, between attempts to overthrow the governments of Iran and Cuba, and to take Greenland, the American empire is clearly overextending itself, and history has taught that empires that do so are not long for this world.

VIII: Democrats Helping to Pave the Way

I’ve already pointed out how the Democrats are at least partially responsible for such problems as the support of Ukrainian Nazis, links with Epstein (i.e,, the Clintons), support for Israel and the Gaza genocide, the increase of funds to ICE, and the sanctions on Iran. There’s much more, as I’ll soon go into, and have gone into in previous blog posts.

The point I’m trying to make here is that it is beyond naïve for liberals to think that a mere voting in of Democrats will solve the Trump problem. In fact, it’s outright political dishonesty. Liberals being “at brunch” if Hillary or Harris had been elected means they would have turned a blind eye to Epstein, Gaza, ICE, and Iran. They certainly would have been cheering on Ukrainians fighting to the last man against their bogeyman, Putin, meaning they’d be content to see all Ukrainians die in the process (what “To the last Ukrainian!” really means), while smugly blaming Russia for a proxy war the US and NATO provoked.

To get rid of Trumpism, one has to get rid of the conditions that gave rise to Trump, and the Democratic Party’s concessions to the rise of the right have been key to creating those conditions. Liberal claims that bipartisanship makes for “better legislation” (yes, I know a shit-lib who actually said that online, and I’d say it’s a safe assumption that there are many shit-libs out there who’d say, and have said, the same thing) is their outright confession that they are a crucial part of the problem.

If one goes into the history of it, it isn’t difficult to see how right-wing libertarianism leads to fascism. First, they cut taxes on the rich and deregulate the economy, so businesses can make higher profits. This sort of thing happened under Reagan and Thatcher. It also turned millionaires to billionaires, who could then buy both political parties via Super PACs and make them steer politics in even more pro-business directions. This is all why notions of the “free market” and “small government” were bullshit right from the beginning.

Capitalism uses the government no less than any other political ideology to further its interests. The capitalist class needs the state’s monopoly on force to protect private property. That’s why we Marxists call “liberal democracy” the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and consider the dictatorship of the proletariat (i.e., a working-class state, for the people) to be true democracy. When there’s any threat to the ruling class (i.e., when the common people have had enough of our oppression, as has been keenly felt in recent years), the rich use fascism to beat back the working class: that’s what we’re seeing now under Trump. The mask has come off: keeping up the illusion of freedom is no longer profitable or sustainable.

The Democratic Party has been every bit as much a part of this rightward movement as has been the GOP. Clinton gutted welfare, helped re-elect Yeltsin, signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and bombed Yugoslavia. Obama expanded the Patriot Act, increased surveillance, and punished whistleblowers. Biden didn’t lift a finger to stop Israel’s killing of Palestinians. It’s easy to see how all of this led to Trump, if you have eyes to see.

IX: Conclusion

Liberals are living in a fool’s paradise if they think voting in a Democrat in 2028 will fix the Trump problem. We’ve seen the DNC/GOP one-two punch too many times over the years to believe that any meaningful reversal of the current fascism will happen. The Republicans in power push things disturbingly rightward, the Democrats hypocritically wring their hands about it, and when they are in power, they leave matters largely the same.

On the issue of releasing the unredacted Epstein Files in their entirety, Pam Bondi said the whole system would collapse if they were thus released (Snopes denies she ever said it, but I think one ought to pull a Snopes on Snopes, since so many of us suspect Snopes works for the powers-that-be). Anyway, if true, then in Bondi’s response we can see a hint in why the Democrats won’t reverse the move to the right, but only pay lip service to doing so. Democrats are part of that system, not a cure to it. So many people would go down with Trump et al, not just the Clintons, that the whole legal system would be overwhelmed. I would not be at all surprised if many other high-ranking Democrats would be exposed in the Epstein files, too.

But if that’s the case, so be it, I say. Tear the whole system apart. Burn it to the ground, and replace it with federations of socialist communities that will take care of the needs of the people and restore the land to the aboriginals. The damnation of the empire will be the salvation of the poor and disenfranchised. I won’t state explicitly how the tearing-apart of the system should be done, but I’ll just say this: I’m having visions of tricoteuses.

Parenti’s Lectern

Parenti’s lectern was
a launchpad
from which
he’d shoot
communist
missiles at
an empire
that’s trying
to quiet him.
May we keep
his wit and love
for the low alive.

‘The Great Lecture Hall and the Small Seminar Room: Michael Parenti Vs. Western Marxism,’ from Weaponized Information

RIP Michael Parenti.

The Great Lecture Hall and the Small Seminar Room: Michael Parenti Vs. Western Marxism

What Is Feared of Communism Is Here in Capitalism

I: Introduction

Several weeks before I started writing this post, I shared a meme on Facebook, one whose pro-Soviet content I don’t remember (and which isn’t all that relevant, anyway), but which also got me a troll reaction from some liberal who said, “No Gulags.” This comment is what has inspired the current article.

I’ve already written a number of defenses of communism in such articles as these, as well as a number of criticisms of capitalism, from both my former anarchist and my current ‘tankie’ perspectives, as can be found here. In this article, though, I feel I need to address something different.

There’s always this fear among many in the West, including many on the left: what if we ‘tankies’ are in denial about how the dictatorship of the proletariat will inevitably become totalitarian and oppressive? My answer in this article is that capitalism has already become so. We’d might as well try socialism. What else have we to lose, but our chains?

II: The Forms of Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism, tyranny, an oppressive state–whatever you want to call it–takes on many forms. I’ll list off pretty much the main forms here. First, and most obviously, totalitarianism discards these:

–a free press
–freedom of speech, and
–democracy

Then, with its intrusive government, we start to go into totalitarianism’s harsher forms:

–cults of personality
–surveillance, and
–police brutality

Finally, we come to the most horrifying forms:

–concentration camps, and
–mass murder, or genocides

Communism, of course, has been accused of perpetrating all of the above. Fascism, even more obviously (or, at least it should be more obvious), has been genuinely guilty of all of these. The horseshit horseshoe theory would have you believe that the extreme left and extreme right are similar in having supposedly led to the same outcomes, leaving liberal democracy as the only viable alternative.

A far more accurate representation of the relationship between the left, centre, and right, however, would be the fishhook theory, in which we can see liberal centrism backsliding into fascism. Recall Stalin’s words on the subject: “Social-democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.” Note in this connection that social democracy is as left-leaning as liberals get; the rest of liberalism moves only further rightward.

A casual observation of Western politics, especially from the dissolution of the USSR to the present day, should demonstrate the truth of Stalin’s words. First, liberals demonized communism in lockstep with conservatives. Then, declaring an “end of history” with communism’s demise and the “free market” as the only viable system, liberals helped to chip away at social welfare, since there was no longer any fear of socialist revolution. Finally, as leftist agitation revives, they’ve used fascism to thwart it.

And here we are.

One must take seriously the notion of a fear of communism, through its association with the atrocities listed above, to understand the great lengths to which right-wingers will go to defend capitalism. Note that these right-wingers are usually of the petite bourgeoisie, the useful idiots of the ruling class, whose real reason for fearing communism is the loss of their wealth; so they fear monger in the media they own to tell the middle and lower classes about communist ‘atrocities.’

As a result, the conservative and liberal masses will tolerate any horrors that go on in our society today so as to prevent a resurgence of socialism. If the poor are so bad off, it’s because they’re lazy, talentless, incompetent ‘losers,’ or they waste money that they should be saving. Never mind that class mobility is a myth. People generally stay in the class they were born in.

When one tries to tell these bootlickers of the rich that the root of the problem of the poor is systemic, the inevitable result of capitalism, they claim that our political problems stem from ‘corporatism,’ because apparently, ‘real capitalism’ and the government are mutually-exclusive antitheses of each other. Never mind that capitalists have always used the state to protect their private property interests: that’s what the cops are for.

Even today’s boot-lickers of the rich cannot deny that the political system, especially that of the past twenty-five years or so, has been nothing less than an unmitigated disaster, one that continues to get worse and worse. What they cannot bring themselves to admit is that this disaster has been the result of the neoliberal experiment, which is a subordination of everything, the government in particular, to the Almighty Market. Hence the need to describe our growing totalitarianism as ‘socialist,’ even when it should be obvious to anyone with half a brain that the current system is anything but socialist.

Politicians on both sides of the political fence accuse each other of being ‘communist.’ Trump and his administration spew constant verbal flatulence about the dangers of ‘radical Marxist extremists,’ when if anything, even among today’s progressives, Western Marxism is practically moribund. Liberals are similar, with Kamala Harris bizarrely calling Trump a ‘communist.’ At first, this comment just seems to be yet another air-headed one from her; yet on closer inspection, we can see how its purpose was really to associate today’s totalitarianism with communism rather than with its true source–fascism.

Her Democratic Party has also joined Republicans in issuing a blanket condemnation of socialism just before Trump’s meeting with ‘socialist’ Zohran Mamdani. This bipartisan fear of socialist ‘totalitarianism’ is bogus given their recent embrace of fascist totalitarianism, as I’ll attempt to prove below. Their real fear, as I mentioned above, is the plan to have workers take control of the means of production, and therefore to take the excess wealth of the billionaire class and redistribute it among the masses. Such a taking of wealth is a taking of power from the ruling class.

But let’s now look at all of the ways that capitalism has turned totalitarian.

III: No More Free Press

This loss didn’t come about in one fell swoop (i.e., with Trump). It started decades ago, and gradually got worse before we came to where we are today. While the mainstream Western media has always been bourgeois in ideology, we can see the beginnings of this particular problem with the abolition of the fairness doctrine in 1987. Introduced in 1949, the fairness doctrine was a policy requiring the media to present controversial issues of importance from differing points of view. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the demise of the Eastern Bloc would come not too many years since the abolition of this policy, it’s easy to see how the already anti-communist stance of the media during the Cold War would become even more insistently pro-capitalist after that.

Next came the Telecommunications Act that Clinton signed into law in 1996, which allowed mergers and acquisitions in the American media, leading to today’s control of about 90% of the US media by only six corporations. This change thus means that most of Americans’ access to information is decided by the ruling class, and therefore reflecting their agenda and interests. There’s an international networking of media to tell essentially the same stories from largely the same political points of view, so this problem is not limited to the US.

The situation got worse in 2013, when Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post. Just so there’s no misunderstanding that the centibillionaire supposedly has no interest in the political content in his newspaper, in 2025 he announced that the WaPo would essentially promote right-wing views only, euphemistically worded as defending “personal liberties and free markets.” Well, we all know what conservatives mean when they say that.

Additionally, Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, idiotically renaming it “X.” The social media website has also become a haven for right-wing views, which should not be surprising, given its owner’s Nazi salute during Trump’s inauguration and other manifestations of Musk’s far-right leanings.

Indeed, Mint Press News (MPN) published an article in late November of 2025 about how seven oligarchs, including of course Bezos and Musk, are now controlling key elements of the mainstream media. Remember in this connection Mark Zuckerberg’s ownership of Facebook. Larry Ellison is to purchase CNN as of the writing of my article, and CNN has already been partisan to the Democratic Party/liberal wing of the ruling class.

When you have oligarchs like these controlling the average person’s access to information, who needs a state-owned media to brainwash them into compliance (and, incidentally, the presence of ex-FBI agents, ex-CIA officials, ex-generals, and former security state operatives in the news–all of whom work for imperialist capitalism, in case there was any misunderstanding–is enough to make one wonder if American media is anything other than state-owned)? The attendance of elites like Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk at Trump’s inauguration should have been sufficiently and disturbingly portentous of things soon to come.

Now, there are still left-wing voices like mine and those in alternative media, like MPN or ChatNews Net, to give the people a dissenting voice, but firstly, our voices get nowhere near the circulation of the establishment ones, and we also get trolled a lot by reactionary types, either the useful idiots of that establishment, or paid trolls whose job is to discourage us from being those necessary ones shouting in the wilderness.

The point is that a stifled free press marks the beginning of totalitarianism, because no free press means no freedom of speech, which brings me to my next topic.

IV: No More Freedom of Speech

The one crowning example of a lack of freedom of speech in recent years has been the suppression of pro-Palestinian protestors on the campsites of American universities. This suppression is of crucial importance, for it is about preventing the one basic thing anyone in a truly democratic society should be given the freedom to do: protest injustice.

Injustice has always been a part of human experience, and overcoming it has sadly never been easy. We should, however, at least be able to talk openly about injustice and make demands that it stop. This is especially true if the injustice is as extreme as an ongoing genocide. If the powers-that-be can suppress the protesting of ethnic cleansing, it will become all the easier to suppress the protests of smaller injustices, which leads to…

V: No More Democracy

Let’s start by defining what democracy actually is. At the risk of sounding pedantic and condescending, I’ll use an etymology you should already know: the word comes from Greek words meaning “people rule.” Now, what does the rule of the people actually entail? Mindless voting for a particular political party, with little thought as to what the real issues are (i.e., “Vote blue, no matter who”)? Or does it mean ensuring that the policies enacted serve the will and interests of regular, working-class people?

I’ll put my money on the latter definition.

Let’s compare, for example, Libya under the rule of Muammar Gaddafi, as contrasted with the years of revolving-door voting for different leaders, say, every four to eight years or so in the US, the UK, Canada, etc. Neoliberalism has, over the past forty to fifty years, eroded economic democracy by crushing unions; it has cut welfare funding and regulations to allow the rich to gain more profit at the expense of the people and the environment; and it has generally immiserated the poor, leading to an epidemic of homelessness. How is any of this power for the people? How is it democratic?

Contrast that with the ‘despotic’ rule of Gaddafi. His Jamahiriya, or Third International Theory, was a kind of Islamic socialism that provided for the basic needs of Libyans throughout the years of his rule of the country. The benefits that his government provided included guaranteed universal housing, education, and health care, as well as free electricity and the free starting of farming businesses, bursaries given to mothers with newborn babies, cheap gas, and the raising of Libyan literacy from 25% to 87%.

How is ‘Western democracy’ better than that?

The notion that Gaddafi was a ‘brutal dictator’ would be based on the idea of his suppressing of anyone opposed to his system of government; but who would have opposed such a system? Anyone opposed to the kind of thing his government was providing, of course–that is, opposed to giving the benefits described above to his people (such opposition would have included Islamic fundamentalists, who were often imprisoned during his rule). I don’t know about you, Dear Reader, but I don’t have much sympathy for those opposed to giving the Libyan people the aforementioned benefits.

My point is that Gaddafi may have been a dictator, but whatever actual objective flaws he may have had, he was by any reasonable standard a benevolent dictator. Why is his having stayed in power for over forty years a problem if he had provided those benefits to his people; whereas having an assembly line–as it were–of presidents or prime ministers who change every half- or full decade or so, but largely serve the rich instead of the ordinary people, is considered more democratic?

Another important point must be considered: are the candidates available to be voted for truly representative of the wishes and interests of ordinary people in Western elections, or are they people chosen–directly or indirectly–by the ruling class, while more truly representative candidates are deliberately marginalized, and therefore unavailable?

As anyone who has read enough of my articles should already know, I am no supporter of Bernie Sanders, but note how not only does he not have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever being elected (let alone of being allowed to tax the rich to gain the revenue needed to pay for the FDR-New-Deal kind of social programs that are so popular among working-class Americans), but he is correctly understood to be a sheepdog for the left. The establishment uses people like him and AOC to sell hope to the masses, then at the last minute, he bows down and tells his crestfallen supporters to vote instead for the newest corporate whore of the Democratic Party. This is by design.

Similarly, because of their left-wing political positions, the Green Party of the United States stands no chance of even being in a position to challenge the corrupt and morally bankrupt two-party system of the US, let alone to win elections and implement their policies.

Anyone with any sense knows that the Democrats and the Republicans are, at best, mere variations on each other, and at worst, two wings of the same party, the Capitalist Party, with virtually identical, imperialist policies. While generally less extreme than in the US, the bourgeois political parties of any country under capitalism are of essentially the same nature.

This sad state of affairs is actually worse than having a one-party state (and contrary to bourgeois propaganda, there was and is far more democracy in the Soviet and Chinese systems than is assumed in the West), because in multi-party bourgeois politics, there is the illusion of choice that fools the public into thinking they needn’t change the system. The ruling class will never allow any party to challenge the capitalist system; they’ll never allow anyone to legislate them out of their wealth. Recall Goethe’s words.

Voting does not work. I haven’t even gotten into the corruption of the US electoral college or gerrymandering. Revolution is the solution.

VI: Intrusive Government

Thanks to anti-Soviet propaganda like George Orwell’s Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-four, as well as Leon Trotsky‘s description of the USSR as “totalitarian” and his description of their labour camps as “concentration camps,” we in the West have come to associate big, intrusive government with socialism and communism, when associating them with right-wing and fascist governments is far more apt, as I’ll try to demonstrate.

The association of intrusive government with communism is so consummate in the minds of so many in the West that whenever one sees examples of such intrusiveness in the US, it’s assumed that the country has become ‘communist.’ This is especially true when the Democrats are in power, since they are assumed by the politically illiterate to be ‘left-wing.’

Recall in this connection the conservative reaction to Obama becoming president, and how they idiotically said “there’s a communist living in the White House,” and he would enact socialist policies, when in reality he did nothing of the sort. He extended George W Bush’s Patriot Act, ordered more drone strikes than Dubya, was the Deporter-In-Chief, helped oust the actually socialist Gaddafi, and helped the capitalist class do particularly well during the economic crisis of the late 2000s and early 2010s, including bailing out the banks. He was in fact groomed by the ruling class to do things like these. The colour of his skin is completely irrelevant.

The problem of NSA surveillance was exposed by Edward Snowden back in 2013, during Obama’s very capitalist administration. AI is only going to make this surveillance worse, as I’ll demonstrate in its section below.

Obama’s continuation of Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as his administration’s involvement in the regime change operations in Libya and Syria, are clear, blatant examples of capitalist imperialism in those countries, not of socialism. When people speak of ‘human rights violations’ in Cuba, I have two words to say to them: Guantanamo Bay, something Obama allowed to continue from Bush’s administration, and which continues to this day, though with fewer people imprisoned.

The point is that the US government, like any capitalist, imperialist government, is so intrusive that it insinuates itself into the affairs of other countries, places it doesn’t belong, either through military invasions or coups d’état. Right-wingers think of intrusive government as being an essentially socialist affair (welfare, single-payer healthcare, etc.), while ignoring the military, NSA, and CIA as branches of the government, which are totally bloated.

The libertarian notion of ‘small government’ is a con game, anyway. It’s not about whether government is ‘big’ or ‘small’; it’s about who the government serves–the people, or the wealthy elite. Similarly, the validity or invalidity of taxation depends on two things, as I see it–who is being taxed the most, and how the tax revenue is being spent. If the rich pay the most taxes, and the revenue is spent on social programs for the poor, taxation is valid; if the middle and lower classes are being taxed up the kazoo, while the rich pay little if any taxes, and if the tax money is being spent mostly on the imperial war machine and to bail out the banks, taxation is invalid.

So, intrusive government can be totally capitalist; socialism has no monopoly on the problem.

Since I’ve been criticizing the Obama administration a lot, and since liberals are always fawning over him and finding no fault in him at all, this brings me to my next point.

VII: Cults of Personality

Anti-communists love to quack about how we tankies supposedly revere men like Stalin and Mao as if they were gods. We do no such thing. It must also be understood that Stalin and Mao rejected the idea of being raised up on such pedestals, contrary to bourgeois propaganda. We Marxist-Leninists are also thoroughly willing to acknowledge their faults as leaders.

Their achievements in helping to modernize Russia and China are enough to explain that their people simply loved them rather than ‘worshipped’ them. Indeed, decades after it was ‘necessary’ to love Stalin, huge numbers of Russians still love him, and it shouldn’t be difficult to see why: over a mere two and a half decades or so, he transformed the USSR from being a backward, agrarian state into an industrialized, nuclear-armed superpower, while also having defeated the Nazis.

Mao’s attempts to modernize China went on a rockier road, admittedly (with the deaths from the Great Leap Forward wildly exaggerated), but the foundation he built was essential to the glorious success of China today. Again, the Western painting of Stalin and Mao as cruel tyrants has far more to do with bourgeois, Cold War propaganda than it does with reality.

Still, all of that is secondary to the point I want to make, which is that the political right has its cults of personality no less, if not much more, than the left has. Hitler and Mussolini had cults of personality, and contrary to the delusions of many right-wing libertarians, fascism is a capitalist ideology, not a socialist one. The whole purpose of fascism is to crush leftist uprisings (which, by the way, should explain the recent rise in fascist totalitarianism); Hitler’s big business donors ensured that he’d never take seriously the S in NSDAP.

But even more to my point is how we can see a cult of personality in recent, capitalist presidents like Obama and Trump, in each of whom one could write up an epic catalogue of awful things both have done. Still, their worshippers refuse to find fault in them, or they at least minimize their faults.

How many times have we seen nauseating praise of Obama as having led the US for eight years without any scandals, and how he was all grace, style, and class? Let’s just conveniently ignore his drone killings, his prosecuting of (and, based on political and social status, double-standards on) whistle-blowers, his expansion of all of the evils of his predecessor’s administration, and everything else I mentioned above? Eight years of grace, style, and class war…there, I fixed it.

Then, there’s Trump’s even more obvious cult of personality. Many among the religious right have imagined that God sent Orange-face to take on the “deep state” and to “drain the swamp” of corruption. If that isn’t a cult of personality, I don’t know what is.

Not only will the MAGA crowd believe such nonsense about Trump, they’ll also do all kinds of mental gymnastics to do away with their cognitive dissonance upon facing the truth. They claim, for example, that as with King David (who committed adultery with Bathsheba and had her cuckolded husband, Uriah the Hittite, killed so he could marry her), God chose a sinner in Trump to do His will. This is so even in light of how it’s pretty much settled that Trump is guilty of having joined in on the sexual exploitation and abuse of underage girls with Epstein et al.

And the ‘president of peace’? Apart from his failure to end the Russia/Ukraine war (which I figured he wouldn’t have been able to do even if he’d sincerely wanted to), his banging of the war drums against Venezuela–not to stop a drug cartel, but to steal their oil, a motive freely admitted to–proves that he’s no less of a warmonger than any other US president. The MAGA crowd still won’t admit that they were conned…that their Lord and Saviour is as much a sheepdog for the right as Bernie Sanders is a sheepdog for the left.

VIII: Surveillance

Now, if there’s any one thing that we associate with totalitarianism, it’s surveillance. We can thank Orwell for that: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, telescreens that, as you watch them, people on the other side are watching you, the Thought Police, etc. Furthermore, also thanks to the snitch, totalitarian surveillance is also associated with socialism. So, if people today feel themselves to be surveilled, they all too often tend to think theirs is a socialist government.

Well, we’re far beyond what Snowden discovered over a decade ago as of this writing, and as I’ve endeavoured to demonstrate to you, Dear Reader, ours is a capitalist world. Only a small handful of countries today are of the Marxist-Leninist ideology (and some leftists dispute whether a few of those even are truly socialist). People are going to have to confront the reality that it’s our capitalist government that is oppressing us.

To start with a relatively minor example, you must have noticed by now that whenever you show an interest in this or that product online, you tend to see ads for similar products, or ones associated in one way or another with that product. Obviously, capitalists are surveilling you, and trying to get you to part with your money to buy their product and line their pockets. BIG BUSINESS IS WATCHING YOU.

There are surveillance cameras on streets, ready to catch proof of drivers violating traffic laws (including relatively trivial ones) as an excuse to pass out fines and take more money out of your pockets. There seems to be less of an interest in driver safety than there is in controlling people.

Of course, surveillance has recently been enhanced through the use of AI in the forms of smart homes, smart TVs, smart cars, and smart cities. Orwell’s telescreens had nothing on this. Keep in mind also how this AI is linked with some of the richest men in the world: Jensen Huang, cofounder of Nvidia, as well as Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg. There has been growing concern that tech bros like these are further eroding democracy (News flash: they’re all capitalists!)

This surveillance can, of course, be used to help the ruling class track any and all revolutionary activity, on- or offline. Remember how a number of those tech bros are buddying up with Trump. Palantir is another big tech company using AI in aid of government surveillance, helping to enable such things as Trump’s deportations.

Two of Palantir’s founders, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, have publicly shown themselves to be particularly problematic in their attitudes to human rights, democracy, and warmongering. Thiel has been described as both an Ayn Rand libertarian and a ‘skeptic’ about democracy–something many might find contradictory, but not me, for the reasons I’ve given above and in other posts. As for Karp, one need only watch him ranting in YouTube videos to get a clear sense of how unhinged (and/or addled by narcotics, most likely) he is, fanatically defending imperialist war, Zionism, Western chauvinism, and ICE.

Seriously, do we want loose cannons like these in charge of AI and surveillance? Now ICE, among other things, brings me to my next topic.

IX: Police Brutality and ICE

Now, let’s start going into the truly nasty and violent aspects of our growing totalitarian world, in case what I mentioned above wasn’t enough to convince you, Dear Reader. I know I’ve been focusing a lot on the US, the belly of the beast to which ICE is specific, but manifestations of the militarization of police can be found in many countries around the world–not just in the US, but also in Brazil, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, and the UK, as well as in Africa. I should hardly need to go into great detail about the harm police militarization does to democracy, to public trust, to marginalized communities in particular, and to civilians perceived as enemies. The Thought Police, NKVD, and Stasi had nothing on these cops.

A lot of white people in the US and elsewhere in the West show little, if any, sensitivity to how these cops brutalize blacks, Latin Americans, and LGBTQ+ people. If such white and conservative people had ever had the experience of being disproportionately targeted by militarized police, though, they’d not only realize what a totalitarian world we’ve been living in, they might also realize that those marginalized groups…are…actually…people, too, no less so than the straight white crowd.

We always hear stories of how the secret police of socialist states would round up dissidents in the middle of the night, using torture and intimidation to crush political dissent. What we don’t hear is how these dissidents were, or were at least perceived to be, the kind of capitalist sympathizers who, if left to do whatever they wanted, would have all the sooner and surer brought back capitalism, leading in turn to the capitalist totalitarian nightmare we’re in now…which includes having the same kind of cops doing the same kind of thing to the anticapitalist dissidents of today.

We’ve already seen the extent to which ICE will terrorize people in the Latin American community on the pretext that they’re illegals, kidnapping them, separating children from their parents in cages, then deporting them. Venezuelans have been sent to CECOT in El Salvador; others have been sent to “Alligator Alcatraz,” places that are actually concentration camps (more on that below), where they’ve suffered all kinds of abuses. These cops often nab them at night, too.

We’ve known for ages about police brutality and the killing of blacks, often with impunity. Note that none of this started under Trump, whom liberals like to blame for everything while ignoring the sins of their favoured presidents: the Obama and Biden administrations presided over a lot of this kind of brutality, as well as the ICE deportations. Fascism has been building and growing in the West for a long time.

Things have taken a recent turn for the worse under the second Trump administration, with Pam Bondi announcing that law enforcement officials are to investigate Antifa and other supposed domestic terrorist groups. This will be nothing less than a crackdown on leftist groups perceived as a threat to the American capitalist government. Note that ‘Antifa’ just means antifascist, which should be deemed a perfectly reasonable stance to have, especially in our increasingly fascist world. So criminalizing an ‘organization’ not clearly defined as such should tell you what kind of a government the US really has. Now, let’s talk about those…

X: Concentration Camps and Prisons

Before I get into the current situation, it might be fitting to point out that, contrary to anti-Soviet propaganda that came from such groups as the CIA during the Cold War, the CIA themselves knew that being in the Gulag labour camps was nowhere near as bad as we’ve been led to believe. Among the many facts given in the link above, the Soviet archives reveal that 20 to 40 percent of Gulag inmates were released every year, and the vast majority of inmates were charged with nonpolitical offences: murder, assault, theft, and any of the other usual crimes punishable in any society.

The Nazi concentration camps, on the other hand, were genuine death camps, in which up to 11 million inmates were victims of murder for being Jews, Roma, gay men, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the mentally ill and mentally or physically disabled, political and religious opposition to the regime, etc. And fascists were and are allied with capitalism, not socialism…in case you forgot.

As for today’s capitalist concentration camps, I’ve already mentioned those in El Salvador and in Florida, where many have been held without charge or due process, and where many are being subject to beatings, psychological and sexual abuse, inhumane living conditions, denial of medical care, incommunicado detention, overcrowding, inadequate food rations, etc.

Let’s now do a comparison of the characteristic detainees: in CECOT and Alligator Alcatraz, the great majority of inmates are Latin Americans; in the Nazi concentration camps, the inmates were mostly “Untermenschen“–Jews, Roma, gay men, the mentally ill and disabled, and political prisoners; in the Gulag, they were mostly criminals. Seriously, which political stance is far, far guiltier of using labour camps as places for abuse and injustice–the far left, or the far right?

Next, we can look at the for-profit prison system, which uses inmates to do labour for corporations and typically pays them wages far below the minimum wage, making the work hardly distinguishable from slavery. Prisons for profit are perhaps most notorious in the US, but they also exist in countries around the world, including the UK, Australia, New Zealand, France, South Africa, South Korea, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Jamaica, Peru, etc., to varying extents.

Note how capitalistic such prisons are (i.e., the motive is maximizing profits for the corporations). The near-slave status of the prisoner-labourers is easily comparable to that of the slaves in the Nazi concentration camps, who generally worked for nothing. In the US, the 13th amendment permits prison slavery. In contrast, in the Gulag, inmates were paid or given food, given more or less of it depending on how productive their work was.

Of course, the very worst concentration camp in the world–and it can legitimately, if metaphorically, be called one, for its victims (innocent men, women, and children) are trapped in the place and murdered and brutalized every day–is the open-air concentration camp that is Gaza. The totalitarian mass murder going on there and elsewhere is my next topic.

XI: Mass Murder

Before I go into the capitalist mass murder of today (and of so many years and decades before that), we need to take a brief look at the nonsense that bourgeois propaganda has said about the deaths blamed on communism, or more accurately, how many deaths there supposedly were due to communism, as opposed to how many deaths there actually were.

The spurious sources of the ‘100 million killed by communists’ idea are such books as The Black Book of Communism, the lies of Robert Conquest, and the like. Please click on the links if you want more detail on that, since I don’t wish to waste time and space going into that. Suffice it to say that the 100 million figure is wildly exaggerated and deliberately contrived for maximum propagandistic effect. Bourgeois paranoia about the spread of communism during the Cold War necessitated, from the ruling class’s point of view, exaggerated numbers meant to shock, not to inform. You know the old cliché: in war, the first casualty is the truth.

In any case, even if one accepts the absurdly high number of 100 million deaths as accurate, this otherwise bloated figure is dwarfed by the millions of people who have died, and who continue to die annually, under capitalism. We’ve been able to feed the entire world for a long time, but we don’t because there’s no profit in doing so. The combined wealth of oligarchs like Musk, Ellison, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Buffett, Thiel, Karp, and others could feed the world, build hospitals and schools, provide affordable (if not free) housing, and the like. The deaths resulting from starvation, disease, homelessness, and war are largely preventable: only the ruling class’s greed and psychopathy prevent it.

The endless imperialist wars cause constant, needless deaths. The Iraq War alone resulted in at least a million deaths. Contrary to what right-wing libertarians think, war is not just ‘government stuff.’ War is a business. Weapons manufacturers like Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, and others are laughing all the way to the bank with all the glorious profits they’re making off of human suffering and death. The stealing of natural resources, like the oil in Iraq and Syria and the oil to be stolen from Venezuela, is a crucial aspect of capitalist imperialism and the obvious motive for these wars.

The recent genocides in Yemen, Palestine, and Sudan are the most egregious recent examples of capitalist mass murder, though. Again, weapons from many countries around the world have been sold to the killers in these genocides: the Saudi-led coalition killing Yemenis, the IDF killing Gazans and those in the West Bank, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) killing the Sudanese.

Special attention ought to be given to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, though. The real reason for the support of so many countries around the world, especially the Anglo-American NATO-allied empire, for Israel–apart from the obvious business interests (i.e., the buying and selling of weapons)–is how crucial the Jewish state is as an ally in maintaining imperial control of the region. There’s a lot of oil there, and so a lot of money is to be made. Israel is needed to kick ass in the region to secure those capitalist imperialist interests.

The official number killed in Gaza since October 7th, 2023, as of this writing, and excluding the thousands estimated to be buried under the rubble, is over 70,000 people. The ‘ceasefire’ is of course complete bullshit, since the IDF has still been killing Gazans without interruption, and of course we can see no end to the killing any time soon, for the whole point of the killing is not to stop Hamas, but total extermination.

What should be particularly chilling about all of this is that not only are the people with the power and authority to do so not lifting a finger to stop the killing, but also that these genocides can be seen as a template for possibly wiping out any other group of people who try to stand up to imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism in general. With AI surveillance, any of us in the resistance can be fingered and hit with a drone strike, if not a balls-out genocide like in Yemen, Palestine, and Sudan. The psychopaths in power simply have no respect for human life.

XII: Utopian Thinking

Critics of communism like to claim that we leftists all dream of a perfect world with no pain, and that we’ll force our vision on everybody with a globe-spanning government. It is especially amusing to get this charge of utopianism from the supposedly anti-government right-wing libertarians, who imagine that the “free market” is naturally self-regulating and efficient (easily seen as total bullshit when we consider wasted food and starving people, as well as empty houses and homelessness, to give just two examples), and that the “invisible hand” will magically make everything right.

This “free market” ideology has been increasingly the dominant one in our world since the Reagan/Thatcher years, of course. It would be far more correctly called neoliberalism, since this new liberalizing of the market (translation: let the capitalist class be “free” to be as selfish, greedy, and hoarding as they like) really involves a subordinating of the government (and everything and everyone else) to the whims of the market, not an eliminating of the government.

Just as right-wingers imagine there’s no such thing as governments eradicating poverty (even though many governments have at least made impressive progress in doing so), so do we on the left (as well as anyone with a modicum of common sense) know there’s no such thing as allowing “rational” selfishness to run rampant and magically provide for everyone’s needs, while also not needing a government to protect capitalists’ private property.

For people so supposedly anti-government, many right-wing libertarians sure like getting into it. Look at the ‘libertarian’ Koch brothers, who pumped so much of their wealth into the Republican Party. Look at libertarians Ron Paul and Rand Paul, who work in the government. And look at Argentina’s current president, Javier Milei, a self-proclaimed “anarcho”-capitalist, who is set to receive $40 billion from the Trump administration in exchange for forcing Argentinians to vote for Milei, whose policies ruined the country’s economy. I thought it was bad to let the government intervene in the economy, and to force its will on the people.

Apparently not.

XIII: Cold War Fears of Nuclear War

Now, as if all of the above wasn’t bad enough, the one peace dividend we were supposed to enjoy from the end of the Cold War–no more fears of the two great superpowers, the US and the USSR, going into a hot war and killing everybody all over the world through nuclear annihilation–is no longer to be had. The US/NATO provocation of war with Russia over Ukraine, as well as the looming war with China over Taiwan, has killed even that one peace dividend.

That nut-job I mentioned above, Alex Karp, envisions a three-way war between the West on one side, and Russia, China, and Iran on the other. With the connections between the tech bros (and their AI in the US military) and Trump’s right-wing government, such fears of the world’s annihilation are well-founded.

XIV: Conclusion

So, even if socialist revolution leads to the totalitarian nightmare that the right-wingers are so scared of…so what? What’s the difference between that kind of totalitarianism and the right-wing kind we’re currently living in?

I’ll tell you what the real difference is…and yes, the capitalists are terrified of it. Ordinary people will gain access to free healthcare, housing, and education up to university, full employment, food security, a social safety net, etc…all of their basic needs met, and recipients will include people in the Third World. Getting all those things, however, will also mean that the ruling class will lose all their excess wealth–that’s the real reason they’re so scared of socialist revolution.

Let’s scare them.

Analysis of ‘MASH’

I: Introduction

MASH: A Novel about Three Army Doctors was written by Richard Hooker (with the help of WC Heinz) and published in 1968. It was adapted into the 1970 feature film by Robert Altman (with a screenplay by Ring Lardner, Jr.), which starred Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, and Tom Skerritt, with Robert Duvall, Sally Kellerman, René Auberjonois, Roger Bowen, Fred Williamson, and Gary Burghoff.

From these came the long-running hit TV series (1972-1983) whose original cast included Alan Alda, Wayne Rogers, McLean Stevenson, Larry Linville, Loretta Swit, William Christopher (except for the pilot episode, which had George Morgan as Father Mulcahy), Timothy Brown, and Burghoff. Both the film and TV series use the story’s setting, a US Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in the Korean War, as an allegory for the Vietnam War.

Neither Hooker nor Altman liked the TV series, feeling it took the story in the opposite direction of its original purpose. In contrast to the liberal, anti-war stance of the series, with its tendency to advocate progressive causes (e.g., opposition to discrimination against blacks, tolerance of gays, equality of the sexes), Hooker was politically conservative. In fact, the novel uses a number of racial slurs (particularly against Asians, as opposed to Alda’s Hawkeye calling out US troops for referring to Koreans as “gooks”; only bigotry against blacks is judged by Hawkeye as wrong), and its protagonists tend to refer to women as “broads.” In the film, the MASH unit’s dentist wants to commit suicide because a moment of erectile dysfunction has made him worry he’s become a “fairy.”

Here‘s a link to a PDF of the novel, a link to an audiobook of it, and a link to quotes from the film.

II: Political Background

As for the contrast between the liberal TV series and the conservative/apolitical novel and film, though, I’d place these contrasting stances at the centre-left and right of a continuum. For as noble as it may be to talk about ending war, as is often wished for on the TV show (as opposed to the novel’s doctors’ indifference to the issue, and instead just wanting to finish their time in the army and return home), the real left-wing stance, the one that is truly to be contrasted with the general stance of the entire MASH franchise, is that the US Army should never have meddled in Korea in the first place, as was the case with Vietnam, too, the aforementioned allegory of the story.

Conventional wisdom would have us believe that, during the Cold War, the capitalist ‘free world’ had to contain and stop the spread of communism, therefore both North Korea and North Vietnam had to be stopped by American military intervention. Actually, as had been revealed years later, the Gulf of Tonkin incident that was used to justify greater American involvement in Vietnam was a lie. Similarly, the conventional narrative that a North Korean invasion of South Korea, which would involve Soviet and Maoist Chinese involvement, started the war was also based on dishonest accounts from hawks like MacArthur, as is related in IF Stone‘s Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950-1951. These wars were just exercises in, and excuses for, US imperialism.

It is further assumed that South Korea is the free, liberal democracy, and that North Korea is the brutal, totalitarian dictatorship. Actually, South Korea has been occupied by the US ever since just after the end of WWII, hardly giving the people a breather after the Japanese occupation of the land, with its exploitation of Korean ‘comfort women.’ US troops soon would also use Korean women as prostitutes to satisfy the men’s lust.

As for the ‘totalitarian DPRK,’ while it’s surely difficult living there because of Western economic sanctions placed on the country, living in a place that provides (or at least strives to provide…sanctions notwithstanding) free or affordable housing, healthcare, education, and other basic needs is far better than living in a country of cutthroat capitalism, the kind that causes the poverty dramatized in films like Parasite. People in the West might also want to reconsider how ‘free’ they are in a world drowning in neoliberal capitalism.

So when we contrast the TV series of MASH, on the one side, against the novel and film, what we’re really dealing with is a culture war of liberal vs conservative, not left vs right. Everyone knows that conservatives are on the right, of course. Liberals, though, are properly understood to be swaying whichever way the political wind happens to be blowing at the time. During the decade that the TV series was on the air, that political wind blew in a relatively leftward direction. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear should be able to understand which direction liberals have been blowing under leaders like Clinton, Obama, Biden, Tony Blair, Justin Trudeau, etc.

Seen in a broader political context, conservatism vs liberalism is just moderate-to-extreme right-wing infighting. This context will help us understand the MASH franchise as a whole.

III: Foreword, Chapters One and Two

After a brief foreword–in which Hooker explains how the paradoxical combination of stress from overwork and nothing-to-do boredom, from living and working in a MASH unit during the Korean War, made some of the staff into insubordinate, scruffy, badly-behaved alcoholics (i.e., the Swampmen)–the book goes into a description of Corporal “Radar” O’Reilly (Burghoff), and where he is from–Ottumwa, Iowa. He’s called “Radar” because he has ESP: he can “receive messages and monitor conversations far beyond the usual range of human hearing.”

Radar, sitting at a poker game in the Painless Polish Poker and Dental Clinic of the 4077th MASH, can hear the commanding officer of the unit, Lt. Col. Henry Blake (Bowen; Stevenson), shouting into his phone in his office that he needs two surgeons. In the film, Radar demonstrates his ESP by saying Blake’s words just as Blake is saying them, standing outside, by a chopper with wounded.

The two doctors that the 4077th will get are Captains Benjamin Franklin Pierce, or “Hawkeye” (Sutherland; Alda), and Augustus Bedford Forrest, or “Duke” (Skerritt). Hawkeye got his nickname from his father, who read The Last of the Mohicans; he’s from Crabapple Cove, Maine. Duke is from Georgia; the character never appears in the TV series, though in a season 3 episode, when asked what happened to “that surgeon you had from Georgia”, the answer given is, “He got sent stateside!”

From the physical description given Hawkeye in the novel, Sutherland looked a lot more like him than Alda. He and Duke steal a jeep and drink a bottle of alcohol on their way from Transient Officers’ Quarters at the 325th Evacuation Hospital in Yong-Dong-Po to the 4077th. Both men are married and with kids; but that won’t stop them from fooling around.

They come into Ouijongbu, where they drive past The Famous Club Service Whorehouse, which has contributed much to the venereal disease problem faced by the US Army Medical Corps. An American flag is seeing flying from its central edifice. Such signs as these, in combination with the irreverent attitude of Hawkeye, Duke, and the other Swampmen to be introduced later, illustrate the imperialist encroachments on Korea.

Hawkeye’s plan on arriving at the 4077th is for him and Duke to work so hard as surgeons that they outclass the other talent there. They’ll thus be able to get away with their insubordination and other acts of naughtiness.

Arriving at the 4077th, Hawkeye and Duke go into the mess hall and meet Blake, who already thinks they’re “a pair of weirdos.” He tells them they’ll be living with Major Hobson in his tent; Blake would have Radar told of the order, but Radar’s already there to take them, thanks to his ESP.

The film takes Hobson and merges him with Frank Burns (Duvall; Linville), who is a captain in the novel, but because of this merging, becomes a major in the film and TV series. Hobson’s/Burns’s praying for everybody is comical and annoying to the non-religious Hawkeye and Duke, who insist that Blake get him out of their tent; the two also insist that Blake get a chest surgeon. This will result in the arrival of Captain “Trapper” John McIntyre (Gould; Rogers).

IV: Chapter Three

McIntyre is from Winchester High Medical School, in Boston. His face is hiding inside a parka hood when he meets everybody, and at first he seems aloof, laconic, and introverted. Hawkeye finds him familiar, though.

It’s when Hawkeye offers McIntyre a martini that he finally comes out of his shell, happily accepting the martini but insisting on olives for his, Hawkeye’s, and Duke’s drinks. He has a bottle of olives in his parka pocket, so all three can have one.

Hawkeye is still trying to remember where he’s seen McIntyre before. One day, the latter picks up a football that’s just landed at his feet. He throws a perfect pass to Hawkeye, who’s now racking his brain trying to remember who McIntyre is. Finally, he realizes that McIntyre is “Trapper” John, an old football player from the Boston/Maine area.

He got his nickname after being caught fooling around with a woman in the ladies’ room at the Boston and Maine train. She said to the conductor, who found her with McIntyre, “He trapped me!”

It’s interesting how, when Hawkeye finally remembers, he says, “Jesus to Jesus and eight hands around, Duke!” Trapper is replacing a major who prays to Jesus. Trapper, in Chapter Seven, will dress up as Jesus in a scheme to raise money to help a Korean houseboy, Ho-Jon (played by Kim Atwood in the film, and by Patrick Adiarte on the TV show), go to the US to study in a university there. There’s a lot of Christian imagery in the novel and film, though it’s usually presented in an irreverent way. Chaplin Father Mulcahy (Auberjonois; Christopher) is well-liked, but derogatorily nicknamed “Dago Red” for his mixed Irish-Italian descent and his red hair.

V: Chapter Four

In this chapter, we learn that the tent that Hawkeye, Duke, and Trapper are sleeping in will be called The Swamp, hence the three are known as the Swampmen. A sign, in big capital letters saying THE SWAMP, is painted in red on the door of the tent.

It’s called The Swamp in part because the tent resembles “the kind of haunt one might come across in a bog”…in other words, the place is a mess. It’s also the centre of social activity in the 4077th, where the three doctors do their boozing.

When one combines the Dionysian messiness of The Swamp with the sloppiness of the three doctors–that is, their often being unshaved and without the short haircuts one would expect of not just army men, but men of pre-Beatles Western society–we see in their sloppy appearance, as well as in the (often mean) pranks they pull on others and their general contempt for authority, a personification of the kind of mess the US army left Korea in by the end of the war.

A certain group of people are mostly marginalized in the novel, film, and TV series–the Koreans, played mostly by Japanese-American and Chinese-American actors. (The situation with Ho-Jon, to be dealt with below, is one of the few exceptions to the rule of marginalization.) As I said above, racial slurs against Asians are used a number of times in the novel, including by our presumably sympathetic Swampmen. As I’ve also mentioned, Ho-Jon is one of many Korean houseboys, there to do menial chores for the American army hospital staff–in other words, their servants. Finally, I’ve mentioned the reality of Korean prostitution for American GIs, something acknowledged in the novel, but never judged.

This marginalization and racism should form the backdrop of what is the biggest issue of the Korean War, but one rarely given scrutiny in the West: how the US military bombed and destroyed pretty much everything in North Korea. 20% of the total population was killed. The US made a messy swamp, if you will, of North Korea. This reality might help Westerners to understand why the DPRK now has nuclear weapons–not to attack other nations, but to defend themselves. The collective trauma the surviving North Koreans suffered from those bombings meant they were determined never to let it happen again.

Audiences are charmed and amused by the Swampmen’s wisecracking, pranks, and general defiance of US military authority. While I am in principle sympathetic to such defiance, one must take into consideration the fact that one shouldn’t just defy authority for its own sake; one should instead look into the evils caused by that authority and direct one’s defiance against it with an aim to stop those evils.

The Swampmen in the novel and film aren’t interested in directing their defiance with such aims. They just want their fun and games (golf, football, drinking, poker, chasing women, etc.) to be uninterrupted by the officious military. Unlike the more progressively-minded Hawkeye and Trapper of the TV show, the novel’s and film’s Swampmen are just self-absorbed hedonists. As such, they fit in well, ironically, with the US empire’s depredations in East Asia.

One example of a victim of the Swampmen’s depredations is a Protestant chaplain named Shaking Sammy. In Chapter Four, we learn that this chaplain has a bad habit of writing overly optimistic letters to the families of wounded soldiers without inquiring into whether or not these soldiers’ wounds could have resulted in lethalities. Shaking Sammy will tell the soldiers’ families that all is well, and the soldiers will be home soon, for example…yet the soldiers in question could be dead, thus cruelly getting the families’ hopes up, only to be crushed when the truth is known to them.

He’s been warned repeatedly not to send such misguidedly optimistic messages, yet he still does it. Furious with Shaking Sammy, Duke and Hawkeye have him see them use their .45s to shoot all four tires of his jeep. Justice has been done, it seems.

Soon after dealing with a particularly difficult patient who, it seems at first, isn’t going to live, yet with the help of Father Mulcahy’s “remarkably effective Cross Action,” the doctors are able to save the wounded soldier after all. Hawkeye and Duke, very drunk, decide to show their gratitude to Mulcahy for his prayers.

They do so in the form of what Hawkeye calls “a human sacrifice”, and for their sacrificial victim, they choose Shaking Sammy, imagining in their total inebriation that Mulcahy will appreciate this ‘gift.’ Tying Sammy to a cross and surrounding him with a pile of hay and assorted inflammable junk on the ground, Hawkeye, Duke, and Trapper are lying on mattresses by him. Duke has a Molotov cocktail in his hand, and it looks as if Sammy’s about to be immolated.

Indeed, the contents of a gasoline can are poured on the debris surrounding Sammy as well as on him. Mulcahy watches the scene in horror, hoping to stop the Swampmen. Duke lights the Molotov cocktail and throws it at Sammy, who screams. It turns out, though, that it wasn’t gasoline that’s been poured on him and his “funeral pyre.” The Molotov just sizzles and goes out.

So no, they didn’t kill Sammy, but they gave him one hell of a scare. This is an example of how mean and excessive the Swampmen’s pranks can be. Another example, from the film, is the famous dropping of the shower tent, exposing the nakedness of the beautiful but disliked head nurse before the entire camp, publicly humiliating her.

The Swampmen know they can get away with this kind of scurrilous behaviour because of their skill as surgeons, and because of how needed they are when the wounded come into the 4077th, as will be the case soon after the prank pulled on Shaking Sammy. Three companies of Canadians will be coming in, flooding the 4077th with casualties, as Hawkeye is aware. The surgeons can’t operate while under arrest.

Tying Sammy to a cross and making him into a “human sacrifice,” a chaplain made into a kind of lamb of God to take away the sin of the world, is an example of the novel’s use of Christian imagery to ridicule religion. As I said above, the Swampmen stick their tongues out at authority, including the authority of the Church, not to right any wrongs inflicted by the powers-that-be, but simply to be enfants terribles for the sheer fun of it. However ill-conceived the optimism may be of Sammy’s letters, he has been cruelly and unusually punished for them.

VI: Chapter Five

Captain Walter Koskiusko Waldowski (played by John Schuck) is the dentist of the 4077th. He’s known as “The Painless Pole” because of his amazing skill at doing dentistry without it hurting his patients. His dental clinic is also where poker games are played, so he is the most popular man in the outfit. Apart from poker and dentistry, his greatest hobby is women.

He’s well-endowed, too…so much so that whenever he takes a shower, other men stop by to see his equipment with awe and admiration. I suspect he’s bipolar, though, since according to the novel, he suffers monthly bouts of depression, each one lasting anywhere from twenty-four hours to about three days. On one particular occasion, he tells the Swampmen he wants to commit suicide because of one moment of impotence.

Hence the song, “Suicide Is Painless,” as the MASH theme music, heard in instrumental form on the TV show, and for the film, with a lyric by Mike Altman, the then 14-year-old son of Robert Altman (music by Johnny Mandel). The song is sung twice in the film, first by “The Mash” (John and Tom Bahler, Ron Hicklin, and Ian Freebairn-Smith) during the opening credits, then by Ken Prymus (playing Private Seidman) during the scene of Painless’s suicide attempt.

Duke and Hawkeye suggest that Painless use a “black capsule” to kill himself with. The Swampmen et al have no intention, of course, of letting Painless kill himself; their plan instead is to cure him of his suicide ideation by, ironically, indulging him in it. This plan, along with their helping Ho-Jon to go to an American university, is one of the few genuinely charitable acts of the Swampmen in the novel or film, which in turn makes them even remotely likable.

They plan to put amytal, a barbiturate derivative with sedative-hypnotic properties, into Painless’s “black capsule.” They figure he’ll take it after getting him drunk, then when he wakes up, he’ll be OK.

On the night of the supposed suicide, everyone will have a party for Painless in his dental clinic/poker hangout. The party is called “The Last Supper”; in the film, there’s even a shot of all the men seated at a pair of long tables as a parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting.

Painless is more or less at the centre, where Christ is in the painting. So this scene is another example of MASH using Christian imagery and concepts irreverently. Christ, after His Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, accepted His impending death on the Cross; Painless is about to die (or so he thinks). Christ was raised from the dead; Painless will rise from…well…a death-like state, anyway.

The irony here is that Painless’s salvation will come by a suicide attempt, the ultimate loss of faith, whereas we are saved by Christ through faith. In wanting to save one’s life, one will lose it; but in losing one’s life for Christ, one saves it (Luke 9:24). His yoke is easy, and His burden is light (Matthew 11:30). Suicide is painless. ‘Tis a consummation/Devoutly to be wished (Hamlet, Act III, Scene i). Fittingly, Mike Altman’s lyric quotes “to be or not to be.”

Suicide is painless because, of course, life is painful. Part of the ostensible purpose of religion is to provide solace for that pain. One ‘loses’ one’s life, for the sake of Christ, or to attain nirvana, to achieve painlessness…hence the Painless Pole is a kind of Christ figure, if comically so.

Koreans were historically Buddhist and/or Confucian, and such thinking is still quite influential there today, but it has waned somewhat in the modern world, with today’s influence of secular thinking and Christianity. We’ll learn that Ho-Jon is Christian, and with his trip to the US to study there, he’ll be further inculcated with such Western ideas.

The point is that Western imperialism’s encroachment on Korea has its cultural as well as military aspects, so the Christian imagery in MASH is apt, even if presented irreverently. The irreverence is just part of the theme of defiance of authority for its own sake: it never rights wrongs. As long as liberals can enjoy imperialist privileges in the countries the West occupies, they’ll give the finger to authority all they like, and it won’t make a real difference to the occupied.

Anyway, to get back to Painless, in the novel, while he’s sedated from the amytal in the black capsule, a blue ribbon has been tied to his cock (implying the return of his sexual prowess), he’s been hooked to a harness and dropped from a helicopter (Is this to imply that he’s supposed to believe that he died, harrowed heaven, then had a resurrection back on Earth?); all of this has apparently ended his depression and suicide ideation. As for the film, during his sedation, the gorgeous nurse, Lt. “Dish” Schneider (played by Jo Ann Pflug in the film and by Karen Philipp on the TV series), has been asked by Hawkeye to sleep with Painless and thus allay his fear that he’s becoming a “fairy.” She does so, and his depression is cured.

VII: Chapter Six

This chapter deals essentially with Frank Burns (Duvall; Linville), a captain before the film and TV series promoted him to major. Hawkeye hates him more than anyone else. Burns will never admit his faults as a surgeon, blaming any problems or deaths on someone else, or they’re held to be acts of God. He also has a $35,000 home and two cars back in the States; he has no formal training in surgery, having learned from his father.

On one occasion, a patient in Burns’s care dies after a rather simple hospital staff worker, Private Lorenzo Boone (played by Bud Cort) tries to use a non-functioning suction machine on the patient. Burns claims Boone killed the patient. Not being very bright, Boone assumes Burns’s opinion, as a doctor, is of infallible authority, and he is overwhelmed with guilt and weeps over the death.

Duke sees this exchange, and he hits Burns. In the film, it’s Trapper who sees it and hits him; in the novel, Trapper hits him on a later occasion.

Burns will develop a mutual admiration for and romantic interest in the new Chief Nurse, Major Margaret Houlihan (Kellerman; Swit). While in the book and the film, Burns will be kicked out of the 4077th and sent stateside after he physically attacks Hawkeye for taunting him about his (in the novel, only rumoured) sexual relationship with her, in the TV series, both Burns and Houlihan will stay at the MASH and personify the hated army authoritarianism that the Swampmen rebel against. But again, it’s a self-absorbed, American antagonism between the two sides that has little, if anything, to do with leaving the Koreans alone.

VIII: Chapter Seven

This is the chapter in which the Swampmen raise money to help their Korean houseboy, Ho-Jon, go to the US to study in university there. As I said above, this is one of their few charitable acts in the novel. Even with this one, though, there are some qualifying factors to consider.

As I’ve tried to argue from the beginning, the Americans shouldn’t have been in Korea in the first place. A few scruffy American doctors sticking their tongues out at military authoritarians does nothing to compensate for the damage caused to the Koreans by occupying, bombing, prostituting, and forcing capitalism on them.

If the Koreans had wanted to pursue socialism after the end of the Japanese occupation, then that was their prerogative. Imposing starvation sanctions on the DPRK, and then claiming disingenuously that their problems are all because ‘socialism doesn’t work,’ has been a tried-and-true tactic that Western imperialism had used on a number of occasions, including Cuba and Venezuela. If ‘socialism doesn’t work,’ then just let the countries attempting to build it fail on their own, and after a few months, they should be running back crying to the capitalist West for salvation. Instead, consider what Cuba, burdened with an economic embargo from the 1960s, has been able to achieve.

Ho-Jon would be properly described as an Asian Uncle Tom. He thinks his Swampmen masters are “the three greatest people in the world.” Sure, the three doctors are good to him: they allow him to spend time with them in The Swamp when he isn’t shining their shoes, doing their laundry, etc.; they help him with his English. All of this can be seen as simple rewards for the boy’s loyalty to them. Accordingly, they like him as much as he likes them.

Ho-Jon still has to fight in the war, though, despite the attempts of Blake and the Swampmen to intercede with the Korean government…he’s seventeen at the time, and he gets wounded, with a mortar fragment in his chest. He thus returns to the 4077th to be operated on by Hawkeye and Trapper.

After the surgery and Ho-Jon is getting better, the Swampmen are debating which college would be the best one for him to study in. After briefly considering Dartmouth and Georgia (the latter being a place where the KKK won’t take kindly to an Asian being there), the Swampmen agree on Androscoggin College. Hawkeye writes to the dean, who replies, saying Ho-Jon will need a thousand dollars a year. To raise the money, which will probably add up to five or six thousand, including travel and expenses other than the aforementioned tuition, the Swampmen decide to have Trapper, as hairy as he is, dress up like Jesus, and sell photos of ‘Him.’

Mulcahy doesn’t like the idea of religion for money, but the Swampmen know “there are a lot of screwballs in the army” who will buy the photos for laughs and souvenirs, and there doesn’t seem to be any other way to raise money for Ho-Jon. Once again, MASH uses Christianity irreverently, and we see in it more of Western culture imposed on Korea.

By “more of Western culture impose on Korea,” I mean that Trapper’s clowning around in a Jesus outfit in South Korea and making money from the photos is a symbolic presentation of Christian missionary work and capitalism nosing their way around Asia to spread their influence among the locals. Ho-Jon is already a Christian–that is, he’s been indoctrinated with Western values and ethics–and he’s about to be educated in an American university. The Swampmen are content to work to raise money to send their friend there and be further indoctrinated. Consider in this connection how much money the American government has given to South Korea to keep the country under its spell.

IX: Chapters Eight and Nine

A soldier whose father is a US Congressman has been wounded, and the Congressman wants Trapper to fly to Japan with an assistant doctor, Hawkeye, and do emergency surgery on the boy. The doctors’ major motivation in going to Japan, though, is to play golf there. They even bring their golf clubs with them.

When they get there, Hawkeye reconnects with an old friend, “Me Lay” Marston, who is an anesthesiologist and helps a Japanese doctor run a pediatric hospital that doubles as a whorehouse. In fact, the place unabashedly calls itself “Dr. Yamamoto’s Finest Kind Pediatric Hospital and Whorehouse,” or FKPH&W, for short. This openness shouldn’t be all that surprising, for of course, the US military has been known for frequenting such places in East Asia, as I’ve mentioned above.

When the doctors are going to the operating area, an army nurse tries to stop them. During the operation, a colonel shows his disapproval of their barging in to the place. Neither of these people deter the doctors, obviously. Examples of their usual defiance of military authority can be seen in the film. Again, though, this defiance of authority is just about two men who want to get the surgery out of the way as soon as possible so they can play as much golf as they can get in. They don’t want to wait around for the right people to arrive so they can be authorized to operate. They’re not even dressed as doctors: they’re all scruffy and have their golf clubs with them. Military authority isn’t an oppression to be overthrown–it’s just an inconvenience.

Later, while Trapper and Hawkeye are playing golf, some women caddies there get the impression that Trapper is Jesus when Hawkeye says the Lord’s name in vain after Trapper has hit a good shot. Hawkeye still has some old Jesus photos of Trapper on him, so he gives them to the “bimboes…[who] are on a real Christian kick.”

Though it looks as if Trapper and Hawkeye are planning to get laid, and they even hope to hang out in FKPH&W, speaking of which place, Me Lay wants the two doctors to take care of a half-white, half-Japanese baby, the result of an American john and a careless prostitute there. The doctors deal with the baby’s medical problems and talk Me Lay into adopting the orphan.

That officious colonel, who doesn’t approve of the Swampmen’s dealings with the baby, is blackmailed with photos of himself in bed with a prostitute, so the doctors won’t get in trouble. After all of these adventures, though, the doctors must rush back to the 4077th to deal with a huge, seemingly endless deluge of wounded, which is what Chapter Nine is all about.

X: Chapter Ten

This chapter starts with a description of Captain “Ugly John” Black (played by Carl Gottlieb in the film, and by John Orchard in the TV series), the 4077th’s anesthesiologist, how important he is to the hospital, and how his work is never done. He’s called Ugly John in the novel as an ironic joke: he’s actually “the handsomest man in the outfit.” He also hates everyone in the Commonwealth Division: Brits, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, etc.

Later on in the chapter, a new doctor arrives who is christened by Trapper with the nickname of “Jeeter.” He shares some martinis with the Swampmen, and as he’s getting tipsier and tipsier with each drink, Jeeter reveals how horny he is for the women there. He gets advice from Hawkeye on how he can get his hands on a nurse; while Hawkeye offers a few suggestions, he’s not sure which one is the best, so Trapper suggests that Jeeter announce his availability to all the nurses in the mess hall.

By now so drunk that he’s staggering, Jeeter goes to the mess hall with the help of the Swampmen, and standing at the doorway, he announces his availability in the crudest and most aggressive terms possible, shocking everyone there. Trapper can’t resist inspiring him to say he’ll start by screwing “Hot Lips” Houlihan.

Now, “Hot Lips” has been Major Houlihan’s official nickname, much to her chagrin, ever since her sexual relationship with Frank Burns. Trapper is the one who has christened her with the nickname, though in the film, it’s inspired by her telling Burns to “kiss [her] hot lips,” not knowing that a microphone has been surreptitiously placed by her in her tent where she and Burns have been making love.

Another surgeon, Roger the Dodger, arrives at the 4077th, and he’s inspired to shout out “Hot Lips Houlihan,” which will provoke her all the more.

In the novel, she races into Col. Blake’s tent, fresh from the showers and wildly irate. There’s no reference to a prank involving the shower tent dropping and exposing her nakedness to the whole 4077th, as in the movie, but it’s easy to see how the filmmakers took the idea of the prank as implied in the novel.

When she goes into Blake’s tent, the ends of her hair are still wet, and the strap of her shower cap is hanging from an end of her towel. She obviously ran out of the shower tent before she was finished in there, because the Swampmen, “those beasts, those THINGS,” have upset her so severely. She threatens she’ll resign her commission if Blake won’t do anything about them.

Blake couldn’t care less if she does. He never properly disciplines any of the Swampmen. As she says, the 4077th “isn’t a hospital…It’s an insane asylum,” and Blake is to blame for not using his authority to stop men like McIntyre from calling her “Hot Lips.”

This incident, especially as it’s represented in the film, underlines another unsavoury aspect of the original MASH that makes nonsense of the more progressive aspects of the TV series: its sexist attitude towards women. Houlihan may be a major, but she’s given no respect. In the TV series, especially the later seasons, much is made of her as a spokeswoman for sexual equality in the army.

Not so in the novel or film, where women are called “broads,” chased by the men for sex, objectified and exposed as described above, had orders barked at them by the Swampmen to do such things as cook for them, etc. All of this fits in line with the imperialist project of trying to control the entire Korean Peninsula, as well as Japan, where in both US-controlled places, there is prostitution provided for the GIs. A huge part of world domination is in controlling its women, as of the 2020s, just under 50% of the global population.

I never found the film’s shower scene with Houlihan amusing. It always came across to me as a mean, humiliating, demeaning prank devised by the immature Swampmen, all just to find out whether or not she’s a natural blonde. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: as charmless as army authoritarianism may be, cheap pranks like these are not the way to deal with it; they’re often not even funny.

Houlihan will try to get Blake in trouble by informing General Hammond (played by G. Wood) of how out of control the staff of the 4077th are. Ultimately, nothing will be done about it. Indeed, the general goes so far as to say, “Screw her.”

XI: Chapter Eleven

Blake has been sent to Japan for temporary duty at the Tokyo Army Hospital. He’s been replaced by Col. Horace DeLong for the three weeks that Blake is gone. DeLong, another regular army guy, will be quite dismayed with the erratic behaviour of the scruffy Swampmen, though he will come to respect Hawkeye for his skills as a surgeon.

Bored during a spell of no wounded, and suffering in the heat, the Swampmen get some amusement by pretending they’ve gone insane. They speak of mermaids as if they were real, and they tell DeLong that when they catch a mermaid, they’ll “screw the ass off her.” They figure that if they can convince DeLong that they’re nuts, they’ll be sent to some psychiatrists in Seoul for a while, then get sent back to the 4077th in time for when more wounded come.

To add to the craziness about mermaids, Hawkeye says he’ll agree to DeLong’s plan–to have the Swampmen go to the 325th Evac for psychiatric observation–if he can get “a shot at the epileptic whore,” an idea inspired by a psychiatrist Hawkeye once knew who had a female epileptic patient; she’d go crazy every time her husband tried to have sex with her. Hawkeye hopes to find such a prostitute in Seoul during the Swampmen’s rest and ‘therapy.’

They go to the 325th Evac, meet a psychiatrist named Maj. Haskell, and do their crazy routine with him. They act as though Hawkeye is the worst case. When Haskell meets Hawkeye, the latter makes a number of incoherent remarks to seem crazy.

The Swampmen also find a place where they can get at the “epileptic whore”–Mrs. Lee’s, whose brothel’s girls are “velly clean.” They visit the place, but don’t end up trying the prostitute with “hysterical convulsion[s].”

XII: Chapter Twelve

Hawkeye gets the idea to have the 4077th set up a football team. He considers certain men in the unit, including one named Vollmer, to be a centre, then Jeeter as a second string halfback, among others, all of whom have had football playing experience, according to Hawkeye. Their new team can play against that of the 325th Evac, a team coached by General Hammond.

Since Hammond’s team is really good, Hawkeye knows someone who can be a ringer to ensure that the 4077th can beat the 325th Evac: Captain Oliver Wendell Jones–“Spearchucker,” (Williams; Timothy Brown in the TV series) an excellent football player who’s become a neurosurgeon. When Duke hears the man’s name, he (correctly) assumes that Jones is black, flaring up Duke’s racial prejudice.

Hawkeye gives Duke a slight chiding for calling Jones a “nigra,” and when Duke meets Jones and taunts him a bit, Jones puts him properly in his place. This is the first time in Hooker’s novel that someone is called out for using racial slurs or otherwise demonstrating racial bigotry. Since the novel was published in 1968, it is safe to assume that, because of the Civil Rights movement, conservative Hooker knew he couldn’t get away with racism against blacks the way he could racism against Asians at the time. Still, calling Jones “Spearchucker,” a nickname he accepts because he “used to throw the javelin,” is plenty racist as it is.

The Swampmen go to Blake to make a twin request that is really one: they need a neurosurgeon, Jones specifically, and they need him also for the 4077th’s new football team. Blake remembers that Hammond coaches the 325th Evac team, and that Hammond’s sense of how to coach a football team is years out of date; Blake also knows that with Jones playing for the 4077th, they can beat Hammond’s team and make a lot of money. After all, people bet on these football games, and so a profit can be made on them.

When Blake agrees to set up the new 4077th football team, insisting that he be their coach, Hawkeye is pleased and tells the other Swampmen, “Henry believes in free enterprise, too.” Note here the combination of capitalism with the liberal concession of having a black man on the football team. Of course, the far more progressive stance of the TV series includes far greater respect for blacks…the dealing with “Spearchucker” early on notwithstanding.

The character had been written out of the TV series by the end of season one because it had been understood that there were no black surgeons in MASH units during the Korean War, and so the sitcom’s creator was concerned, apparently, with maintaining historical accuracy (about something most people probably wouldn’t have known, anyway; and actually, there had been several black surgeons at the time). Hmm: a TV series–one that ran for just over a decade about a war that had lasted for only a little over three years, that was meant as an allegory about the Vietnam War, and which had men in the early 1950s with shaggy 1970s hair instead of short, army haircuts–fired a black actor because of concern about historical accuracy? Speaking of racism…

Then again, continuing to call a black man “Spearchucker” over and over again would have been problematic in itself for a TV show that was to be more politically progressive, anyway. In all of this, we can see how the contrast between the show, the film, and the novel is not a conservative/liberal dichotomy, but rather a continuum between the two supposedly opposing political stances.

XIII: Chapter Thirteen

When the players of the new 4077th football team are practicing, they’re awful, but not hopeless. When the game happens, it turns out that Hammond has a few pro footballers of his own for his team, so the 4077th will have to find ways around such obstacles…including cheating. One of the pros, for example, is surreptitiously given a sedative during a pileup in order to incapacitate him.

One way to think about this football game is to allegorize it as a war, except that instead of it being a war between the capitalist West and the ‘dirty commie’ North Koreans and Chinese, it’s a war between the scruffy anti-authoritarians and the military authority, as personified by Hammond’s team. Such an interpretation seems fitting, since throughout the novel and the film, we get very little of the actual Korean War, apart from all the wounded needing surgery.

This war-allegory ties in with what I’ve been saying on and off throughout this analysis: there’s very little concern with the actual war and the damage that was done to the Koreans at the hands of US imperialism. All the MASH staff care about is themselves. They deal with the horrors of war not by demanding a stop to it or by making fun of anti-communist hysteria (as happens from time to time in the TV series), but instead by indulging in pleasure: boozing, sex, golf, and now, football. They oppose the military not because of its imperialism, but because it gets in the way of their fun.

The football players are profiteering from bets on the game, just as there are profiteers in war. The team opposing that of the 4077th are called, significantly, “the enemy” in the novel. The game is a war, a comically self-absorbed one between Americans and Americans, with the Koreans so marginalized this time that they’re not even present.

One of the major reasons for divergences from the film and the novel (and even Lardner’s script, for that matter) is Altman’s encouragement of his actors to improvise, to allow more creative freedom for them and to have more spontaneous interactions between them, adding more realism. One result of this indulgence in MASH is, during the football game, Schuck as Painless saying, “Alright, bud, your fucking head is coming right off,” making this the first time in a mainstream Hollywood movie that that word was ever said…and allowed.

Another example of the 4077th team cheating is when Radar uses his ESP to listen in on the upcoming plays Hammond’s team is planning. They also use a trick involving Vollmer hiding the football and walking it over to the enemy’s side while everyone else is kept busy and distracted. As a result, the 4077th wins the game 28-24, and they make a huge profit.

This blatant disregard for the rules, as well as the contempt shown for authority, can be seen to represent the real political stance, if there even is one, of the Swampmen–they’re anarchists. Yet their penchant for making profits makes them a most dubious kind of anarchist…’anarcho’-capitalists! I told you this novel/film was far from left-wing or progressive.

XIV: Chapters Fourteen and Fifteen, and Conclusion

The days of the deployment of Hawkeye and Duke in South Korea are numbered, so between now and when they get sent home, Blake is having them teach two new doctors how to do “meatball surgery,” which is a set of surgical short-cuts, since saving the lives of the wounded is the priority, and not daintiness, which can be left to the doctors in, say, Tokyo.

In the final chapter, Hawkeye and Duke finally leave the 4077th and go back to the States. They do a lot of drinking on the way, and they engage in a lot of their usual naughtiness, including at one point shirking certain medical duties by pretending to be chaplains. Finally at home, they rejoin their wives and kids in Maine and Georgia.

In the TV series, though, of course, Hawkeye (as well as Frank Burns) have not gone home, and Hawkeye (played by the ever-so-charismatic Alan Alda) is a bachelor. The show truly was an allegory of the Vietnam War, the last years of which overlapped with the film and the first few seasons of the series. As a result, the TV show, with its eleven seasons, ended up turning a three-year-war into an eleven-year quagmire, if you will, in ironic imitation, it seems, of Nam.

The more progressive liberal stance of the TV show, as I said above, should be seen as on a continuum with the more conservative vision of Hooker and Altman, since the one progressive stance of consequence–that the US army should never have been in Korea in the first place–is never even considered, not in the novel, the film, or the TV show.

Violence?

There have been times when–showing support to Luigi Mangione and his shooting of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, net worth of about $43 million, whose company got rich off of denying health insurance claims to those who desperately need the money–I have been scolded online for promoting “vigilante violence.”

A couple of things should be taken into consideration before scolding me in this way. First of all, Marxists like me see Luigi, who actually has right-leaning political views, as a symbol of the kind of revolutionary uprising that is so urgently needed in a world of growing wealth inequality, endless wars, genocides, environmental destruction, and fascist authoritarianism.

In posting memes on Facebook about how Luigi had done nothing wrong and should be freed, and that we need more Luigis right now, I was not advocating vigilantes randomly shooting anyone in a wild rage, or pulling a Charles Bronson on street thugs. I’m talking about using Luigi’s example to galvanize the people to take back our world from the greedy oligarchs.

Standing up to those oligarchs does not mean following phonies like Bernie Sanders or AOC, who are just Zionist sheepdogs that lure progressives into voting Democrat. I’m talking about building a mass workers’ movement to fight for the rights of the poor, to educate, agitate, and organize, and to rise up and take over our governments by force–to smash the capitalist/imperialist system and build socialism.

The second, and far more important, issue here is this: how are we to confront violence? Which forms of violence are to be condoned, and which are to be condemned? For I can assure you, Dear Reader, that many forms of violence in the world are being condoned, not just by the rich and powerful, but also by their useful idiots among the masses (i.e., the MAGA crowd on the right, and the liberal supporters of Biden et al). Such thoughtless support of a most violent political and economic status quo is why the uprising I’m advocating is so necessary.

Whenever people criticize me for showing solidarity with Luigi, people who are “pretty sure” that supporting “vigilante violence” is “not cool,” I find these people, affectionately known as “normies” or “shitlibs,” curiously silent about pretty much all other forms of violence that exist on a much greater scale and appear far more often than just some angry young man with a backpack and a pistol with “delay, deny, depose” etched on the cartridge cases used during the shooting. These smug people don’t seem at all to care about the reality of structural violence.

Social structures and institutions that harm us by preventing us from having our basic needs or rights met are forms of structural violence. Family violence, oppression from sexism or racism (e.g. hate crimes), police and state violence, and war are all forms of structural violence.

Health insurance companies–which profit off of the suffering of the ill who are denied the money they need to pay their expensive medical bills (and those without such health insurance have died by the tens of thousands each year)–are committing structural violence. When people’s lives are in any way being threatened, including this way, it’s natural to want to fight back. When people like me are advocating the emergence of more Luigis, we’re simply hoping for more of that fighting back against systemic oppression. It isn’t bloodlust–it’s self-defence.

The fascist Trump government’s nabbing of ‘illegal’ immigrants, ‘terrorists,’ ‘gang members,’ and ‘antisemites,’ to incarcerate them in CECOT, which is–let’s face it–a concentration camp: this is another case of structural violence. How are we going to free people like Kilmar Albrego Garcia without the use of physical force? Vote blue, no matter who? Use black magic?

Now, let’s move on to some more extreme forms of structural violence–those involving war and ethnic cleansing. It shouldn’t be necessary to point out by now that the global response to the Gaza genocide has been–to say the least–woefully inadequate, and to say the most, outright complicity.

Such complicity, it needs to be said, but again, shouldn’t, is not the sole responsibility of the Trump administration. The ongoing current phase of the Gaza nightmare was first enabled by the Biden administration, and American politicians of all political stripes have, to varying degrees, supported Israel’s bloody actions. The only Democratic exception, to my knowledge, is Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian American, significantly.

Rationalizing of the continuing extermination of the Palestinians is based on the ‘need’ to wipe out Hamas, which of course has been branded a terrorist organization. The whole reason Hamas exists, though, is as resistance to Israel’s brutal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. If you don’t like Hamas, end the occupation. It’s as simple as that…though the Zionists will never comply, of course.

The UN acknowledged, decades ago, that armed resistance against an occupying power is legitimate. This includes Hamas ‘terrorism.’ Recall in this connection that Nelson Mandela, in his armed resistance to the South African apartheid system (which engaged in plenty of armed violence of their own), used to be labelled a terrorist by right-wingers like Reagan and Thatcher. Since Israel, properly understood, is a racist, apartheid, settler-colonial ethnostate, the labelling of Hamas’s armed resistance as ‘terrorism’ should be regarded as equally cringe.

As is often said, Zionism’s violence against the Palestinians didn’t start just after October 7th, 2023. It started officially in 1948 with the establishment of the Jewish state, resulting in the killing and displacement of about 750,000 Palestinians. Since then, Israel’s very existence has made the Palestinians’ lives a living hell…insofar as they’ve even continued living.

Gazans are caged in what’s been called an open-air concentration camp. Their access to electricity and water has been severely restricted, and IDF incursions into their impoverished neighborhoods terrorize them. UN resolutions frequently condemn Israel’s actions, but the resolutions are blocked by the US. Again, what are the Palestinians supposed to do about any of this? Wag their fingers at the IDF and say, “naughty, naughty”?

As far as Western politicians’ reactions to this oppression is concerned, even the ‘left-leaning’ liberals are sure to repeat that hackneyed line, “Israel has a right to exist.” Such voices include those of Sanders and AOC, in spite of the lip service they pay to Palestinians’ rights. And no, as a settler-colonial state bent on the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, Israel does not have the right to exist. Palestinians are the ones with the right to exist! To say that the Zionist state has a right to exist is equivalent to saying that Nazi Germany has that right.

The notion of a “two-state solution” sounds on the surface like a reasonable compromise between giving Israelis and Palestinians what they want. Look deeper into the issue, though, and you’ll realize that the “two-state” solution is really a mask for the continued enabling of Zionism.

Israel, just like the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc., is a settler-colonial state forcibly imposed on the indigenous peoples who were there first and who were–and are–the people who have the right to the land. Settler-colonialism is a cancer that grows and kills more and more of the indigenous population. We can see that in, for example, the genocide and decimation of the Native American population, and we can see it in Israeli settlers’ stealing of more and more of Palestinian land, and in the IDF ethnic cleansing going on since October 7th.

You don’t cure a cancer by just allowing it to exist in one small part of someone’s body, for it is the nature of a cancer to grow. You have to remove the cancer completely: that means, to use my metaphor, that Israel must not exist. Similarly, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc., in their current forms, must not exist, either. The land must be given back to the indigenous people, while negotiations should be made between, on the one side, the aboriginals, and on the other side, the whites and all others who have come to live in each of these countries, negotiations to coexist peacefully and enjoy full equal civil rights, preferably, as I envision it, in federations of socialist communities.

Similarly, in the case of Israel, I see no problem with Jewish communities living in Palestine. A large Jewish community should be allowed to live in a fully-restored state of Palestine, enjoying full equal civil rights with the Muslims and Christians living there…equal, not superior, civil rights. These would be Palestinian Jews, not Israeli ones–that’s the difference. The problem with Zionism is its hegemony and imperialism, not its Jewishness…which leads me to bring up another important issue.

A lot of people, in their zeal over condemning the horrors going on in Gaza, are confused about the true source of the evil of Zionism. Many like to repeat old antisemitic slanders about the Jews ‘controlling world politics’ and ‘ruling the world from Israel.’ THIS IS NONSENSE. It’s also Nazi b.s., and it gives political ammunition to Zionists like those in the Trump administration, who in their efforts to maintain the status quo are silencing pro-Palestinian opposition to Israel. It’s part of the problem, not part of the solution, and it’s got to stop.

Israel does not control the US and Western empire: it’s the other way around. European and American Christian Zionists wanted the creation of the Jewish state to ensure they’d have a foothold in the Middle East, an extremely important geo-political/strategic region. Remember all that oil in the area! While, to be sure, some Jews are Zionists, so are many non-Jews, and many Jews are outspokenly anti-Zionist–here are some famous examples.

Biden, an example of a particularly contemptible Christian Zionist, has said the quiet part out loud about the true relationship between the US and Israel. Israel is there to protect American interests in the region; without Israel, the US would have to invent one, or else send the navy into the area. No, there is no magical Jewish mojo controlling the Earth: the ‘chosen ones’ are not the people of the Devil. Let’s drop the superstition, grow up, and follow the money if we’re to discover the root of all evil.

Now, as for the violence of the Hamas attack on October 7th, a few things need to be understood. First of all, the severity of the attack was wildly exaggerated for propagandistic purposes in the Israeli media. Sensationalistic stories about rapes, violence against children and babies, etc., have turned out to be outright lies. The same is true of Hamas’s treatment of Israeli hostages, which was far more humane than has ever been the case of the Israeli treatment of Palestinian hostages…and recall that in that open-air concentration camp that is Gaza, every single resident can be legitimately called a hostage.

Furthermore, the Israelis themselves have admitted that many of the Israelis killed on October 7th were killed by Israeli forces themselves–they call it the “Hannibal Directive.” But ultimately, the current genocide isn’t about defeating Hamas: Hamas is just an excuse for the genocide.

Protests and demands for a ‘ceasefire’ are nowhere near good enough: we saw how meaningless that ceasefire was when Trump came to power. And it isn’t a war between the IDF and Hamas: a war implies two sides hitting each other; the average Palestinian isn’t armed, whereas the IDF is armed to the teeth with the most advanced weaponry, and they’re slaughtering the Gazans indiscriminately. The IDF isn’t fighting terrorism–they are the terrorists.

Zionism as a whole must be defeated with the use of military force. I don’t like war, but there is no choice here. The Houthis in Yemen are doing the heroic work of trying to thwart Israel, and of course the Trump administration is bombing Yemen in an attempt to thwart them.

Allied to American fascism is so-called social democracy, which as Stalin once said, is “objectively the moderate wing of fascism.” Zionism, as we’ve seen, is a form of fascism, and liberals like Sanders and AOC, being the careerists that they are, cynically pander to Zionism, in spite of their paying lip service to supporting the Palestinian cause, criticizing Netanyahu, or saying they’d stop the sending of weapons to Israel. Left-leaning liberals like Sanders and AOC, who won’t even acknowledge the genocide, are the social democrats of today’s increasingly right-wing world. They’d rather affirm Israel’s “right to exist” and to “fight terrorism” than save Palestinian lives.

When we are all up against not only such extreme forms of oppression as the Americans’ healthcare-for-profit system, political parties that don’t represent the needs of working-class people, fascistic deportations, Trump’s tax cuts for the rich and taxes for the poor in the form of tariffs, etc, but also liberals who give false hope of “fighting the oligarchy” and then smash those hopes by sheep-dogging the people into voting for the next corporate whore in the Democratic Party, it should not be too difficult to understand why some, out of desperation, might resort to violence.

So much of a game is made out of liberal politics in identifying this or that particular politician, or this or that political party, as the source of everyone’s ills, instead of identifying the actual cause, which is the entire system. Sanders would rather blame the plight of the Palestinians on Netanyahu than on Zionism as a whole. Similarly, the Democrats would rather blame current American woes on Trump and Musk than identify capitalism and imperialism as the problem.

They do this blaming of specific people, who are mere symptoms of the sickness, rather than correctly diagnosing the whole sickness, because these liberals benefit from the class privileges that the system gives them. For this reason, liberals will never help the working class.

This is why fighting the system, and not ‘voting harder,’ is the only viable solution. Yes, literally fighting it. I don’t mean running around in the streets and acting like a maniac with a gun. Luigi is just a symbol for what I’m talking about. People in the West, not just in the US, need to build a huge working class movement that is in no way compromised by the mainstream political parties. They need to get fully organized, and when a revolutionary situation arises, they need to seize power of the state by force.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I don’t like violence, in my heart (I guess it’s the residual liberal in me), but it isn’t a matter of liking violence–we simply have no other choice. The ruling class will never allow us to legislate them out of their wealth, and no peaceful protests are going to stop the Zionist killing machine. The Red Army forcibly stopped the Nazis: a similar show of force is the only thing that will free Palestine.

The liberation of Palestine is intimately linked with the liberation of all of humanity, especially those in the Third World and the global proletariat, because these issues are all linked up with imperialism, which is the highest stage of capitalism. They’re all different facets of the same struggle, because the enemy is preoccupied with the accumulation of capital in all the corners of the Earth. There’s oil in them-there Palestinian hills.

Able-bodied young people are going to have to do this fight: go to the gym, lift weights, get weapons training, learn guerrilla tactics, etc. (Recall how much of this battle-preparedness the fascists already have!) The rest of us can be involved in organizing, planning, theory, agitation, spreading the word, etc.

The odd American or two may get snarky with me and say, because I’m advocating this kind of struggle from the comfort of my living room on the other side of the world, that I should go over to his country and fight with him. Well, apart from the fact that I’m neither able-bodied nor young (I have muscular atrophy in my legs), I’m also neither American nor a voter (I haven’t even voted in a Canadian election since around the early 1990s!), so I’m in no way responsible for the mess voters (not just in the US, but also in any bourgeois democracy) have made by contributing to and validating such a bogus, corrupt system. I therefore have every right to complain about the creation of a mess I had nothing to do with: I consider George Carlin to be my authority on this matter.

Different people have different talents and aptitudes, and all of us are helping in our own way, as long as we’re not voting for any of the corrupt, Zionist, mainstream parties that make promises they’ll never keep.

Remember that revolution is not a dinner party, and political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Ultimately, though, violence…as self-defence against the ruling class…is not just violence for its own sake. After smashing the bourgeois/imperialist system, the goal is to build socialism. This means improving the quality of life for everyone: providing and guaranteeing universal healthcare and education, ensuring our basic needs are all met, and liberating us from oppression.

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