Daily Times

Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organisations. It is the rhythm of total destruction — Adorno

In the US, the coldblooded massacre, a gory crime against humanity, carried out by a deranged sadist has led to both fury and frenzy. It was this media frenzy that helped the knee-jerk reaction to be blown out of proportion. What determined the hideousness of the act wasn’t merely its grisly nature but also the stigma attached to the faith of the executioner. He wasn’t Breivik, a trigger happy neo-Nazi, who deemed it necessary to wipe out communists and Muslims from Norway. Neither was he a Kissinger or Rumsfeld (appreciated by Nixon as “a ruthless little bastard”) — the former ordered the annihilation of everything that crawled to everything that flew in Indo-China, while the latter blew Iraq to bits.

But these are hackneyed images of an eclipsed past. Why to exhume the interred horrors from the piles of history especially when convenient scapegoats like Omar Mateen are available — a pervert who in his fit of anger mercilessly butchered 50 people, committed no less a hideous crime than the annihilation of nearly one-third of the entire population of Libya, Syria or Iraq. Yet if the goriness of his crime was innately linked with his religion, which media make us believe, could he really be blamed for this massacre when the savages of Riyadh are the blue-eyed henchmen of the hegemonic empire? Welcome to the era of naked hypocrisy based on neo-Nazism.

Was Mateen a psychopath, afflicted with an impulsive kind of necrophilia, having a deep fixation/affinity with guns and cadavers? It’s quite possible if one is prepared, may be temporarily, to give up one’s reductionist approach about the innate belligerent nature of his religious beliefs. But then, isn’t “insanity a perfect rational adjustment to an insane world?” Psychosis “cannot be understood without understanding the despair… Madness need not be all break-down. It may also be a break-through,” Laing wrote. Break-through from what? From one’s stifling imprisonment, from the repressive power of the system and society, as both shape the individual and his surroundings, according to their image and interests.

In the US, the gun culture — if barbarity can ever become a culture — has always been rationalised and promoted as an individual’s right, his safety valve. Safety from whom? From the state or the imaginary “bad guys,” an abstraction created and nurtured by the state to coerce the people to follow the diktat of the established, albeit false, reality. Modern man is sane or insane enough not to think of combating the state, not at least with the existing mindset. The other alternative is to stay on guard against the possibility of any offence carried out by someone, possibly a “bad guy.” The American social construct makes everyone a suspect and a victim — prone to be a potential assassin or vulnerable to assassination. The distrust/phobia only proves how unfathomably paranoid this deeply alienated society is.

Those who create jobs precisely know the material they require to fill them with. Those who produce the commodities prepare the mindset of the buyers as well. The industry of ammunition is no exception, which has paved the way for many tragedies. Yet no one finds the courage to stand against the capitalist-backed NRA. Even the almighty US president seems to have no cojones to challenge the lethal law of owning weapons. In their struggle for existence, the American people have submitted themselves to the lethal process of “production of means of destruction, to the perfection of the waste” (Marcuse). The commodity form has become their second nature. Using these wares and wastes at the expense of their own destruction seem to have become their “biological” need.

What was once considered a “waste” by Marcuse is the leading industry at present. In the “interest of the nation” is the logo that helps every US president to hail and further the expansionism, hence the warfare-industry. The more wealth gets privatised, the more poverty and death become socialised. Does this fall in the category of “terrorism,” not by the (ir)rationality of capitalism. Hitler, according to the one-dimensional history, alone was the symbol of terrorism who singlehandedly led Europe to the World War. The rest were all naïve and innocent, busy playing their flutes, perhaps akin to Nero! The same logic, or lack thereof, applies to those who argue that present-day Islam is a continuation of Nazism. Not in the distant past when the US interests were found compatible with Islam, the “believers” found the “Reds” inimical to world peace. In reality, the latter were resisting to retain the biggest piece of the pie for the people who were nearly stolen from them.

In recent years, the definition of terrorism has drastically changed. Whatever happened to the victims in Abu Ghraib, in Santiago (Chile) or in Guantanamo Bay was neither terror nor violence, it was an exercise to ensure security. In the name of this holy cow, the police, the CIA, the FBI are given all powers to do what is deemed necessary to subjugate the non-conformists. The Pentagon and NATO, “guardians of the capital,” are justified in utilising any measure they may or may not help them achieve their ends. It is not tyranny but methods to assert hegemony, though some have madness about them. The “enemy combatants” are a different species who can be subjected to any form of torture but not to any law.

Yet a few nagging queries keep haunting the humanity. How about the murders in broad daylight of Victor Jara, all of whose fingers were smashed, and later he was shot 40 times? Rodolfo Walsh was tortured, killed and dumped into a river. Orlando Letelier, Allende, Guevara, Lumumba, Tania and Rogelia Cruz — the last two mentioned were raped and tortured. Tania’s breasts were severed, and her mutilated body carried innumerable marks of scalds. And some millions of their ilk? Can one explain more than 600 attempts on Castro’s life, the annihilation of Tupamaros in Uruguay, the overthrowing of Sandinista by assisting mercenaries such as Contras, the series of My Lai massacres, the cold-blooded murder of the PKK in Indonesia where “bodies clogged the river” while blood of the “Red” gave the water a tinge of rose. If this fails to meet the definition of terror, a suitable substitution is none other than fascism. These assassinations were not only carried out against individuals or groups but against “distinct ideas” and truths.

In Indonesia, according to Time, Marxists were “massacred by the thousands.” Incidentally, the assassins were all Omar Mateens – “Islamic radicals” — armed with knives. The lists of their victims were provided by the CIA, which made doubly sure that the mission was accomplished. “Islam” unfurled and waved the flag of corporate America over Indonesia. Similarly, in Latin America, the dustbin stuffed with human hair, fingers and torsos were not acts of terrorism either; these were mere strategies to reassert the domination of corporations through coercion.

In 1933, Ford, General Motors, J P Morgan, Standard Oil, and the rest of Wall Street resuscitated the Nazi-backed German economy. Henry Ford led the anti-Sematic movement from the front and received the Iron Cross, the highest Nazi award. It was the Ford Foundation that imposed the Berkeley Mafia upon the Indonesians, “which punished the millions through planned misery.” In [1970s] Argentina, yet again Ford, General Motors and other multinationals “gained a reputation of unparalleled sadism.” Their “cars became the symbolic expression of terror. A death mobile”… “Workers testified to the presence of a battalion of 100 soldiers at the [Ford] factory … it looked like as we were at war with Ford.” Certainly it wasn’t terrorism but a mere lesson in New World Order.

This established “vocabulary” does not recognise violence, or whatever it perpetrates against the common folks. It is no more applicable to the actions of CIA, NATO, Pentagon and the “poodles,” who rule their countries to enhance the interests of corporate capitalism, or what Mussolini described and both Trump and Clinton endorse and advance as “corporatism.” Fascism pure and simple. Today the word “violence” is attributed to the forces that take up the cudgels to counter these designs no matter how democratic they are. Not the meaning alone but the very expression of violence has to be defined and validated by the lexicon of corporatism. The freedom fighters are the ones who don’t seek freedom from exploitation but demand fetters of free market. Even the al-Qaeda can be both (as per the current narrative): in Afghanistan a violent organisation while a freedom fighter, a surrogate, in Syria, where under the banner of the al-Nusra it is assisting the US to topple Asad.

(To be concluded)

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