Daily Times

The same holds true for ISIS, an outcome of US intervention in Middle East, if not an outright, well calculated product of imperialist forces. The US claims to fight against this ragtag, embattled organisation. Turkey, a lackey of the US, is supporting it. To destroy Syria (as if anything is left of it), the Saudis — who have devastated the hapless Yemenis — the Qataris and rulers of other Gulf States are both overtly and covertly behind this barbaric hotchpotch. Israel, a practitioner of modern apartheid and the most hostile enemy of humanity, is not standing far behind these corrupt and ruthless monarchies. Iran, another theocratic dictatorship, is nudged by the US into fray. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s — who in his indignation must be convulsing in his grave — Egypt is following the dictates of the Saudis.

Everyone is running for their piece of the pie, while two-three million human beings have lost their lives, and 65 million are forced to flee their homes. Due to this outrageous “peace” perpetrated by imperialism on humanity, people have lost their faith in future. “Men would never be superstitious if they could govern their circumstances by set of rules,” Baruch Sinoza, the Dutch philosopher, wrote. This invariably is the beginning of the revolt. If it lacks class-consciousness, it may find its way into an extreme existential crisis leading to religious/racial fundamentalism.

For international capitalism, ISIS, al-Qaeda and several other terrorist organisations are serving a twofold purpose. One, in the absence of an invisible enemy they are providing an opponent that exists beyond the spatio-temporal borders. Two, it mystifies the class struggle into religio-ethnic conflicts. The religion and race assume the shape of economic and political realities. German-American philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist, Herbert Marcuse says, “This development is rooted in the dynamic of late imperialism and its struggle for new methods of internal and external colonisation.” Today the debate revolves around non-issues such as savagery versus civilisation (especially in the context of Islam), atheism versus faith, and fundamentalism versus moderation. Even the countries dominated by Muslim population find themselves polarised between puritans and the enlightened ones. With mounting uncertainty the middle class, once a moderate voice, is deeply entrenched in extremism. The class conflict has been blurred though it keeps asserting itself with every economic upheaval.

There is sufficient evidence to prove that the description of terrorism/violence is deliberately left ambiguous, only to be fitted in the cloak tailored by the ruling class. Beside the real mayhem the authorities in Orlando have managed to unearth a completely different kind of a “violence” perpetrated by the members of an organisation named as Food Not-Bombs. They were distributing vegetarian dishes to the hungry and homeless when the police intervened to halt this “violent” act. Five volunteers were arrested, since they were not allowed to do this job at one place more than twice a year. “This is not the first time this scene has played out for members of Food Not-Bombs.” The mayor of Orlando even branded them “food terrorists.” People who refuse to conform invariably find means to deny and defy the power of corporate capitalism. The resistance shapes its own course.

The people of Eastern Europe once caged “behind the iron curtain” have been rescued from the plague of a prosperous “socialist violence.” According to Wikipedia, a much one-dimensional (capitalistic) source of information “ the East German economy was the Soviet Bloc’s largest economy and one of the most stable economies in the “Second World” until Communism in Eastern Europe started to collapse from 1990.” Today the economy of this region is in tatters. By plundering all its resources capitalism has now turned this “captured” area into a proverbial sick-man of Germany. GDR, as one-time reality, has been swept under the carpet. The man without memory is a vital asset for the hegemonic control of capitalism. The words such as USSR, GDR, Yugoslavia, socialism have been erased from the memory of this mechanised creature. For him history is not real, the established reality is.

For the rest of the East Europe, the situation was not much different. In Romania under Ceausescu “population continued to make progress. High production created conditions for raising living standards. [In] mid-1980s, the average net wages increased more than eightfold. …. Over 80 percent of the country’s population had moved to new apartments during this period.” Today, under the reign of free market, “free” people have one choice to survive: to flee from their own country. Approximately three million have migrated to the other European countries. Catrin Nye of BBC says, “There are up to 350,000 left behind children in Romania — children with parents living and working abroad. In around 40 percent of cases, both parents have to leave their children behind. These children are called ‘Euro-orphans’.”

Every society needs to be analysed in light of its functions and capabilities. These remain the only factors capable of identifying the demonstrable tendencies having the potential of breaking the spell of the existing state of affairs. Despite recession inherent in capitalism, which has enhanced the Islamophobia, both in the US and Europe the class-based movements are attaining a real momentum. The Brexit, the victory and betrayal of Syriza in Greece, the electoral success of the communists in Portugal, the emergence of Podemos Party in Spain, the mass strikes of the workers in both France and Belgium, and in the US the ever-growing Black-Lives-Matter movement, the most emancipated group that refutes the official version of terrorism and pins the blame of Orlando massacre on “homegrown terror” an outcome “of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and militarism.”

One certainly wonders about the nomination of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as the US presidential candidates. This is vivid indication of not only the striking sterility of political thought but the impotence of reason which has gone so cynical and vivid that now it barely requires any veil to masquerade its malice. This only proves that voting is no substitute for democracy that demands, as Howard Zinn states, “a direct action from the concerned citizens.” Yet there is no dearth of those who while condemning this grisly incident are fully aware where the responsibility of this mayhem lies. One commentator, while condemning the ruling class expressed his exasperation on social media by alluding to what he considered the root cause of terrorism, wrote, “You weren’t the gunman, but you’re the culture that built him. You’re the bullets in his gun.” An expression worthy of being treated as a metaphor. “Greatest beauty lies in greatest clarity,” Lessing was precise in his description.

“America”, says Studs Turkel, “suffers from a national Alzheimer’s disease; we forget history.” They forget the wounds and the scars they inflict upon others with nonchalant ease. It is time to revive the memory of another Orlando of another continent where 40 years ago on June 16, 175 innocent black students were massacred by an apartheid regime that history remembers as the Soweto massacre. Yet another forgotten one, a bestiality perpetrated by Zionist forces at Deir Yassin, which has nearly become a taboo topic. A holocaust in which 107 unarmed Palestinians, mostly women and children, were killed. It was the beginning of Jewish “Lebensraum.” The ever-growing appetite for expansionism that refuses to be satisfied even now. Will pangs of historians’ conscience care to recall the memory of this massacre? “History,” Malcolm X says, “is people’s memory, and without a memory man is demoted to the lower animal.”

It is time to reflect on the historical facts. It is time to change the political vocabulary, which despite being very descriptive maintains fake “objective neutrality.” The choice of words and sentences is a political act through which the facts are not merely explained/manipulated but created as well. The reality is processed, and the real is made to look rational. This is how capitalism gets endowed with its spurious rationality. If this unabated killing spree needs to be stopped, workers have to “clean the earth from the very material garbage produced by the spirit of capitalism, and from this spirit itself,” Marcuse wrote. Only then freedom will become a biological necessity.

(Concluded)

The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com