Speaking Truth

George, I would submit to you that there is a.) no such thing as free speech, ever, anywhere. There is always a very free cost associated with speech, whether that is the wreckage of a career or the loss of life due to truth telling. And b.) we do not live in a democracy, nor was our constitution ever democratic. It has always been republican, most often oligarchically so, with intermittent periods leaning more towards the reaction party or more rarely, more towards the middle class.

The contemporary American Left believes itself to be systematically on the side of victims. Since the Jews are imagined as perpetual victims throughout history (most of everyone else's drubbings throughout history are seen as the product of numerous complex historical causes...but all anti-Jewish animus is deemed to be pure ahistorical evil) , the Palestinians are in the unenviable position of being the victims of victims and are therefore not easily assimilated into the Left's ideology. I believe that the late Edward Said made precisely this observation. Consequently, when the Palestinian suffering are invoked in leftist discourse, it is fraudulently blamed primarily on the WASP side of the American establishment. Ironically, Said himself seemed to have this same problem as his book Orientalism suggests that Israel is but the most recent manifestation of a general Western animus towards Islam. If a Palestinian-American academic has this blindness, the rest of the American Left can be expected to be afflicted with the same.

The Nazi-obsession of the Left also does not help since the Palestinians, like many other Arabs, are rather fond of the Roman salute and contemporary Arab nationalism (like 20th century nationalism everywhere else in Asia) drew much (selective) inspiration from the regimes of the 1930s.

On the larger issue of changing the American regime, I suspect that democracy itself, or rather the near-religious belief in it, is a key stumbling block. If the great mass of the American people has been too dumbed down to effectively and consistently defend their best interests, then plainly any effort to rejuvenate the American polity must exclude them until the commanding heights of American culture have been cleansed of so much of their idiocy. The oligarch-funded sophist will always beat the reformist logician in a public contest before a dumbed-down crowd. Major political changes have all been made by small groups who, for better or worse, dragged the rest of society along the direction that they sought to take it.

Such small groups might make these changes by taking over the dominant institutions, by storm or through infiltration. Yet such a course is probably unavailable because the present regime does not have a headquarters to storm and infiltration is not realistic.

The alternative is the path of the maquis, that is to exist outside of the regime as much as possible via a network of solidarity which would gradually embody the political reforms that one hopes to enact on the broader society. Such a network would have to be created in all legality, without positioning itself against the regime except to implicitly subvert it by its very existence. The point would not be to conquer power or to convert the masses, but to survive the difficult times to come so that those who wish to make these reforms on the broader society will not themselves be reduced to penniless proles fighting over cans of beans. Of course, such a network would, among its other functions, have to offer a reasonable amount of physical security to its members (not against the state so much as against increasing criminality as the police are more and more privatized) and I suspect here again that much of the Left would have a problem...

[What the Left needs is the good, old-fashioned red flag of revolution! g.]

Take a major American city and stop paying the salaries of civil servants (police, fire, garbage disposal), cut the just-in-time supply chains of the supermarkets, and disable the major electrical generators. Wait 2 weeks as chaos runs rampant. Is there an organization of cadres capable of stepping into the void to lead the populace to overcome the turmoil (setting up other electrical generators, negotiating with nearby agricultural areas for food, establishing a militia to suppress banditry)? Without it, positive change is not possible.

In other words, what are needed are...Soviets! As in councils of workers, bourgeois, returning soldiers. Such councils will not spring up spontaneously (though it would not hurt to look that way...), but would be that network of solidarity in action.

Furthermore, such an organization would have the advantage that it could be publicly justified, honestly, as rugged old-fashioned American self-reliance in action. Hence don't call them "Soviets"...

[Funny, a former senior CIA guy was saying exactly the same thing to me yesterday! g.]