From Juan Cole over at Informed Comment:
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Nicole Winfield and Lisa Marie Pane at the Associated Press write at the unbelief with which Europeans are staring at the United States, as we head for 300,000 dead from the coronavirus and our economy shranks 33% on an annualized basis last quarter, and we just appear to be all right with that.
Not only are we perfectly willing to toss grandma in an early grave on Trump’s say-so, but we are supine as he openly engineers the destruction of social security and medicare, and of the post office, on behalf of himself and the billionaire class he represents. That is after we sat by while he completely gutted all environmental regulations that got in the way of corporations making money off poisoning us. I don’t think the neutering of the EPA has even been reported on daytime cable news, though the prime time magazine shows on MSNBC have at least brought it up.
Americans imagine themselves rugged individualists. A cartoonist did a satire on us showing brawny guys, shirts off, with the logo “Rugged individualism works best when we obey.”
In fact, Americans are masochistic sheeple who let the rich and powerful walk all over them and thank them for the privilege.
...
By feeding us decades of propaganda against unions and “socialism,” the American rich have broken the legs of the people, and left them to twitch helplessly as more and more indignities are heaped on them. They’ve divided us by race (Trump is not alone in this tactic, only the least subtle), they’ve convinced us to give the super-rich power because they will make us rich too. (How is that working out for you?).
And Canada is half-way there. Or more than half-way. I don't have any intention in conveying that US-Americans are genetically inferior or contaminated. They can't be. They're a nation of immigrants/settlers the same way that we Canadians are. They aren't more "stupid" than other people. I say all the time that they're normal human beings like everyone else. But their culture has been shaped, deliberately, by their dominant classes, through propaganda, "public relations," religious brainwashing, etc., ... to embrace toxic values of authoritarianism, deluded individualism, anti-socialism, selfishness, religious stupidity, etc., ... and that we Canadians by our proximity and pre-existing cultural similarities, have been infected by it.
One example: Look at any international comparison of police killings of civilians. The USA is the highest on the list of wealthy, industrialized countries. But Canada is second (albeit a distant second).
The factors that have saved our labour unions, preserved a nominally social-democratic political party, and which necessitated a more activist state, have saved us from the embracing entirely the toxic stew of nation-destroying insanity that is US capitalism.
6 comments:
It is definitely worth reading Cole's entire article, which also makes a comparison and contrast with France. I wasn't in France during this last social movement, but I was there during the 1995 general strike. Unfortunately here in Québec we have seen a decline in that kind of social movements (after the 1972 general strike, there was much labour action here), with the notable exception of the 2012 Student (and not only!) movement.
lagatta,
We need institutions that have power and that are willing to use it.
Also, France doesn't seem to be so wedded to the pathological-level of non-violence as North Americans have been conditioned to accept.
A friend who was active in the Resistance in Normandy died recently; he was 99. One of the last. Non-violence became indifference in those days; and the French collaborators were worse than the rank-and-file German troops (not than the SS and the Gestapo). Collaborators who reported partisans and/or Jews could take over a flat or a business...
There was a lot of right-wing screeching here about the "violence" of the 2012 student movement here. Actually, though it went on for many months, there was far less violence or serious vandalism than at your run-of-the-mill hockey riot. Most of the so-called vandalism was graffiti, and quite a few were very beautiful, including some retro ones that channelled Mai 68 in France.
By the way, the Lebanese authorities were forewarned about the danger posed by the massive fertiliser deposit at the port... Aieee.
lagatta,
I just have to say (and I think it relevant for this discussion) that I'm entirely in agreement with the sentiments expressed here:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/08/11/tear-gas-ted-has-a-tantrum-in-portland/
"A little recapitulation of recent and less recent history seems very much in order here, for context. Much has been said in alternative and corporate media in recent months about the racist history of policing in the United States, about the history of slave patrols, and about white mobs who committed massive and terrible massacres, killing hundreds of Black people and burning down thousands of buildings in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and so many other similar horrors. Much has been said about many other such atrocities committed by racist white mobs, as well as the even more tremendous atrocity of institutional racism, in all the many forms this has taken since and before the Civil War. It would be impossible to overstate how important it is that these things are being talked about, particularly if all this talk might actually lead to fundamental changes.
...
The police beat people with truncheons in Portland for speaking on the sidewalk. They savagely assaulted people for marching on the streets. They did their best, on a city level and ultimately, with the formation of the national police force known as the FBI in the early twentieth century, on a national level, to destroy the radical labor movement. This was their first and primary enemy. They lynched union organizers, hanging them under bridges. They fired into crowds of protesters, killing many, in repeated cases across the country. The paramilitary, anti-union and virulently racist American Legion burned down union halls in Portland and across this country.
And did everyone among the working class in Portland and other cities in the US take all this lying down? No, some did not. They fought back. The Industrial Workers of the World organized campaigns of resistance. Not just organizing workplaces, publishing newspapers and carrying out free speech campaigns, but they organized riot squads. These brave fighters for this proudly, self-consciously intersectional union movement physically attacked boat loads of scab workers on the Willamette, and drove them out of the city. They physically attacked the railroad bulls who had been constantly beating and intimidating organizers who traveled by hopping freight trains, in order to get the bulls to back off.
A lot has changed over the intervening century since those times, of course. The country now is more unequal than it has been since that period, but the labor movement is anemic, and doesn’t have any riot squads anymore. After destroying the radical labor movement with a concerted campaign of terror, arson, mass arrests and deportations a hundred years ago, the FBI moved on to destroy other radical social movements, and they’re still at it today. They love it when members of current social movements or remnants of past social movements, in some cases, argue with each other, and the argument over violence vs. nonviolence, and which forms of oppression social movements should focus on most, and how to have a truly ecumenical social movement, how to make real change – all this is very important, and none of it is new."
Yes, it is absolutely relevant, whether to the pogrom in Tulsa or the judicial murder of the Haymarket militants. We remember Albert and Lucy Parsons (he was hanged after the phony trial; she lived to about 91 and was a radical all her life).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Parsons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Parsons
lagatta,
Thanks for the link. Interesting read about a vital, lost time, and an inspiring figure.
I wonder if her personal papers are still stored somewhere by the Chicago police force?
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