One specialty of a dominant power is its ability to hijack the achievements and merits of others, from material progress to social progress. Thus, capitalism, neoliberalism, and the new radical ideology of business (whereby even the small and long-suffering businessmen and entrepreneurs believe they are members of the same union as Elon Musk, the Walton family and Donald Trump), has convinced the world that we owe all the economic, technological, scientific advances and even the bread we eat to its benefactor order. This insanity, easily refutable but fossilized in popular superstition, is as absurd as the idea that capitalism and democracy go together, when history shows that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, it has meant the opposite. Big businesses and corporations have promoted multiple wars and dictatorships in multiple poor countries, with the exception of the country where the power and the interest of order and good example came from. One of these problems (only one but of vital importance), was noticed and denounced on the television network by the same President and General Dwight Eisenhower in 1961, at the time of saying goodbye to the presidency: the obscene alliance in his country between the military power and the corporations. Long before, president Rutherford Hayes had done the same in 1886: “This is not the government of the people, by the people, and for the people; it is a government of corporations, by corporations and for corporations”.

Democracy is another example of perfect kidnapping, just as the official religions were, whereby even Jesus ends up being the protector of capitalism, the spokesman for the unbridled ambition of billionaires, and blesses wars, and dictatorships of all kinds. When democracies were unavoidable in multiple countries, they were colonized through the big press, and the new mass media such as radio and cinema.

In the United States, at the end of the 19th century, the white slavers, defeated in the Civil War, rebelled against the new rights of the blacks. They created the oldest terrorist group in existence, the KKK, and the uprisings, lynchings and even direct attempts at coups d’état, banana republic style, became popular. Some were successful. On November 9, 1898, a mob seized the court of Wilmington, the largest city in North Carolina, and declared “Independence of the White Race” based on the “superiority of the white man” and the constitution of the country, since“It had not been written to include ignorant people of African origin.” The blacks, the majority of this city, have managed to participate in the last elections, electing some representatives. The next day, two thousand armed whites stormed the streets, destroyed and burned businesses and the only newspaper in the city run by black people. Unsurprisingly, word got out that some blacks had opened fire on the white hooligans, for which the order went out to “kill any bloody black who shows up.” To bring order, the governor ordered the soldiers who had returned from Cuba (where they had kidnapped the revolution of other black people) to take the city. As a result, a few hundred blacks were executed and thousands had to leave their homes. The government and its black representatives, elected at the ballot box, were replaced by a dictatorship that will never be called a dictatorship, but the government of responsible and peaceful citizens who restored “law and order” and the will of God. Sounds recent?

Even feminists, fighters for the female vote like Rebecca Latimer Felton, were to recommend lynching the blacks who won the 1898 elections in North Carolina, since the more they are educated and the more they participate in politics, the greater threat they pose to the virginity of the defenseless white women. Lynching was (is) an institution established by the superior race that, not without irony, fears the physical and sexual superiority of the inferior races. Felton, a champion of modernizing education, kept insisting that the more money that goes into educating blacks, the more crimes they commit. For years, she argued that giving blacks the right to vote would lead to the rape of white women. Although from generations immemorial rapes were generally committed by white men against young black women, the pornographic fantasy of power never abated and Felton recommended a thousand lynchings a week to reduce the sexual appetites of these dark and ignorant men that she considered gorillas. In 1922, for 24 hours, the racist feminist became the first United States senator from Georgia. The second woman was Kelly Loeffler, also from Georgia, who, in January 2021, lost to an African American candidate Raphael Warnock. That same day, thousands of white fanatics stormed Congress in Washington, where the electoral college proved her defeat.

In the 20th century, as a way to avoid the catastrophe of the white race announced by Charles Pearson, the word race was replaced by communism. This semantic castling was so effective that it was to outlive generations of misfit critics, antipatriots, and all manner of radical left-wing extremists. In Latin America, the more radical extreme left was also an inevitable collateral effect of imperial power. Neither Cuba nor Venezuela nor any other pro-independence experience would have been what they were and what they are without the persistent and profound intervention of Washington and the megacorporations from the north. The extreme right, from the military dictatorships to the sheltered democracies, also justified the reaction against the reaction. Theodore Roosevelt had put it in writing in 1897: “the democracy of this century needs no more justification for its existence than the simple fact that it has been organized so that the white race will have the best lands in the New World.” Rich whites, to be more precise.

Now in the United States, the events present and to come will move the political spectrum a bit to the left, which, due to the generational change, was already going in that direction before the conservative reaction led by Trump. Trump will not win the support of the Pentagon because of a functional difference between the US and Latin American armies. They have always been complementary: that of the United States is in charge of the international level and those of the Third World of domestic matters, not fighting any war with other armies but repressing popular demands within their countries.

In the United States, popular and progressive movements were central to its most profound social changes, from the abolition of slavery, the struggle for labor rights, the women’s vote, to the civil rights struggle of the 1960s and 1970s (as we recalled above, these movements were also frequently hijacked by the reaction of the wounded power). The extreme right, on the other hand, is the permanent reaction in favor of the masters, of those above, almost always led by the same slaves and foremen from below. Now, in the United States, as in Europe and Latin America, the extreme right is a collateral manifestation of social and political power that, with the frustration of its powerless members, creates a social instability that becomes a threat to the very interests of the power they serve. Suddenly, Wall Street and the dominant corporations cry out for the “restoration of order.” Unpredictability is the second biggest enemy of investors.

13-01-2021

(Translated by Matthew M. Wilinski)