Wednesday, August 14, 2019

T his was the first installment in the latest effort by the U.S., using its propaganda apparatus (PA), to integrate the descendants of its slaves into a loyal citizenry. The strategy in place since the end of Reconstruction was mob and police violence characterized by Clan lynchings and Bull Connor cattle prods and police dogs, respectively. After a century of failure of that strategy, the new tactic is an ingratiating benevolence characterized by Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action. With the PA's remarkable ability to define reality, the American Reality has been turned into a Disneyland Exceptionalism. Where this artistry works really well is in the minds of media executives, but where it works really unwell is in the minds of America's former slaves. And it is in the recognition of that failure that the Times has, in desperation, breached the wall between Reality and Exceptionalism by acknowledging that American Capitalism, in its practice of human slavery, was, however safely in a remote past, nevertheless characterized by brutality.

Tuesday, August 20, 2019

W hat the Times will never do, as long as it is an instrument of a capitalist dictatorship, is to break the artificial limits of a propaganda campaign and to open the door wide to America's capitalist reality. There are many places to start, but the worst crime of American Capitalism, and, correspondingly, the one the most completely suppressed, is the obliteration, under the psychological cover of wartime necessity, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By insisting on its sovereign right to own and use the means to obliterate cities, American capitalism unleashed an arms race that now puts the very survival of civilization at risk. Enslaving human beings as an institution for extracting wealth from the soil of an under-populated continent is bad enough, but to threaten the existence of human civilization for the purpose of extracting wealth from the world is the ultimate crime of a criminal ruling class and its media facilitators.