“O judgment thou art fled to the brutish beast and men have lost their reason”. Antony addressed the Romans while standing beside Caesar’s cadaver. Brutus, however, denied him the consolation saying, “not that I loved Caesar, but I loved Rome more”. What Brutus did was a conscious act and not madness. Even madness has a method, and the bourgeoise media in the service of its class use it skilfully by spreading lies, indoctrinating the people, perplexing them with shock and awe, to project an alternate reality no matter how irrational it is. From denouncing Russia as imperialist power to their insistence upon the Israeli right of self-defence to the condemnation of Palestinians’ struggle for freedom as terrorism, the mantra of complete sanity goes on. Mark Twain sarcastically suggested the bourgeoisie “to get the facts first, and to distort them later”.
Obscenity is a term applied by the ruling class, not to its personal character or norms but to the actions of its opponents. Obscene is not a woman that shows her pubic hair, but a general who presents himself in public wearing his medals won in a war, lewd gestures are not obscene, distorting history is. This is the trait of western media; the era of Goebbels and Orwell is over, and the trait has been outsourced to its loyal Lilliputians in various countries.
Every class, Gramsci says, creates its intellectuals that not only consolidate their classes but steer them clear in difficult times. A weak Pakistani bourgeoisie is incapable of producing its organic intellectuals, albeit it has created devil’s advocates that leapfrog to cover the naked shame of its barbarity as charlatans or mountebanks, sometimes as pimps or poodles or both.
A weak Pakistani bourgeoisie is incapable of producing its organic intellectuals, albeit it has created devil’s advocates that leapfrog to cover the naked shame of its barbarity.
We often hear the drum beating about Stalin’s terror, Mao’s relentless torture, innumerable killings by the communists, and the massacres that surpass the total number of people living in those countries where the blood bath occurred, without an iota of reference. Blinded by hate the arbitrary figures languishing in their fictive minds are venomously spewed out. It only portrays the one-dimensional thinking of a person that refuses to see the pervasive barbarity of the west. From Iraq to Libya, from Vietnam to Chile, nothing figures out in his thought, because hate Oscar Wilde says, “is a form of atrophy”, “Hate”, Fanon adds has to be created, and “to be brought into being, in conflict with more or less recognized guilt complexes…he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behaviour: in a sense, he has to become hate”.
Hate and love are social passions and they do not fall from the void as manna, they are the products of social conditions. No one hates without purpose. Nazis’ hatred toward Jews was an organized and premeditated social passion. During capitalist anarchy, the ruling class sets one segment of its petty bourgeoisie against the other to avoid a revolutionary crisis. Capitalism has no free lunch and no free passions; it always aligns itself with the impotent segment of the petty bourgeoisie, prepared to gratify the fascistic impulse embedded in the recesses of its mind for crumbs. Its members become the launderers of its gory crimes.
From Churchill to Hitler, justice remains a favourite theme of bourgeois swindlers. Churchill, a racist instrumental in creating a human-made famine in Bengal, waited for Gandhi’s dead body and Hitler backed by Roosevelt needed Lebensraum for the just settlement of the German race, both took the world to the 2nd world war. Justice for Marx cannot transcend the economic structure of a society and the western justice system unmasked itself at Abu-Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and Belmarsh prison where the prisoner of conscience, Julian Assange is left to die.
Ideas changing the world is a favourite theme of the bourgeoisie, they can become a mechanical force but where do they come from? Humans figure out new ideas through the means of production and not vice versa. The medieval era despite producing its sages with radical ideas could not reduce its savages for it could not change its productive means. Neoliberalism did not crop from Zeus’s head as Athena did, the ruling ideas were the product of historical conditions with objective ground realities. The working class of 1970 became powerful and was desperate to reduce the working hour, increase wages, improve working conditions, and build a human society. Both Thatcher and Clinton began an assault on the workers. Thatcher wore the cloak of a Falkland warrior and unleashed a war on the workers at home annihilating the biggest trade union in Britain.
Marlow’s Faustus desiring to live an erotic and ecstatic life sold his soul to Lucifer. Capitalism the modern-day Lucifer has many Faustus at its service, it commodifies human labour-power, the alienated body immunized against thoughts becomes an automaton, and the mind following the pattern becomes a launderer. Recently Che Guevara, the heroic icon of the wretched of the earth has become the victim of satanic pride and dark despair of the creepy bourgeois launderers. By making the last few moments of his life controversial the valiant fighter is portrayed as a coward.
“We need history,” Nietzsche said, “but not the way a spoiled loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it”. To keep the record straight, one can refer to John Lee, the most authentic biographer of Che. The New York Time Book Review has endorsed the authenticity of Anderson over Che, stating, “Superb. . . Mr. Anderson does a masterly job in evoking Che’s complex character, in separating the man from the myth . . .”. “Excellent . . . admirably honest [and] staggeringly researched” Los Angeles Time adds, “. . . It is unlikely that after Anderson’s exhaustive contribution, much more will be learned about Guevara.”
“Ernesto Che Guevara,” Anderson writes, “was the twentieth century’s supreme revolutionary martyr. He became a myth in his own lifetime. He was a revolutionary fighter, a military strategist, a social philosopher, an economist, a medical doctor, and a friend and confidant of Fidel Castro. Che Guevara’s dream was an epic one – to unite Latin America and the rest of the developing world through armed revolution, and to end once and for all the poverty, injustice and petty nationalisms that had bled it for centuries. In the end, Che failed in his quest, but he is recognized as that one-in-a-million personality who just might have pulled it off”.
Arrested at Quebrada- del- Yuro with multiple wounds, surrounded by soldiers, “he shouted ….” Do not shoot! I am Che Guevara and worth more to you alive than dead”. It is hard to know what was going through his mind but certainly not death, he was on the battlefield and death and battlefield were synonyms. He might have looked for a trial, an opportunity to promote revolution, through his speeches the revolutionary icon could have blazed the simmering fire of revolution in the bosoms of millions of the people combating decadence. When “Sergeant Jaime Terán went to… execute Che, he found him propped up against the wall… Che asked him to wait…until he could stand up. Terán frightened, ran away and was ordered back by Colonel Selich and Colonel Zenteno. Still trembling Teran returned…and without looking at Che’s face, fired into his chest and side…. Che’s last words addressed to Teran were ‘I know you’ve come to kill me. Shoot, you are only going to kill a man.’ Terán shot Che in the arms, legs and then in Che’s thorax, filling his lungs with blood.” (Anderson 796). It was an extrajudicial murder and if carried out by a socialist state the bourgeois apologists would have been shrieking hoarse declaring it a crime against humanity, another striptease of their obscene freedom.”Not a few who sought to cast out their devil entered into the swine themselves” Nietzsche was succinct.
“Che” for Sartre “was the most complete human being of our age”. “What we want our children is to be Che Guevara” Fidel Castro added. The men of high station and pedestals were in unison in praising Che, do the ghosts of capitalism worth anyone’s consideration. They are already there where Trotsky wanted them to be, in the dustbin of history.
The writer is an Australian-based academic and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at [email protected].