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The Class War Has Begun
And the very classlessness of our society makes the conflict more volatile, not less.
During the death throes of Herbert Hoover’s presidency in June 1932, desperate bands of men traveled to Washington and set up camp within view of the Capitol. The first contingent journeyed all the way from Portland, Oregon, but others soon converged from all over—alone, in groups, with families—until their main Hooverville on the Anacostia River’s fetid mudflats swelled to a population as high as 20,000. The men, World War I veterans who could not find jobs, became known as the Bonus Army—for the modest government bonus they were owed for their service. Under a law passed in 1924, they had been awarded roughly $1,000 each, to be collected in 1945 or at death, whichever came first. But they didn’t want to wait any longer for their pre–New Deal entitlement—especially given that Congress had bailed out big business with the creation of a Reconstruction Finance Corporation earlier in its session. Father Charles Coughlin, the populist “Radio Priest” who became a phenomenon for railing against “greedy bankers and financiers,” framed Washington’s double standard this way: “If the government can pay $2 billion to the bankers and the railroads, why cannot it pay the $2 billion to the soldiers?"
The Bonus Army veterans stage a mass vigil on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol in 1932. (Photo: MPI/Getty Images)
The echoes of our own Great Recession do not end there. Both parties were alarmed by this motley assemblage and its political rallies; the Secret Service infiltrated its ranks to root out radicals. But a good Communist was hard to find. The men were mostly middle-class, patriotic Americans. They kept their improvised hovels clean and maintained small gardens. Even so, good behavior by the Bonus Army did not prevent the U.S. Army’s hotheaded chief of staff, General Douglas MacArthur, from summoning an overwhelming force to evict it from Pennsylvania Avenue late that July. After assaulting the veterans and thousands of onlookers with tear gas, MacArthur’s troops crossed the bridge and burned down the encampment. The general had acted against Hoover’s wishes, but the president expressed satisfaction afterward that the government had dispatched “a mob”—albeit at the cost of killing two of the demonstrators. The public had another take. When graphic newsreels of the riotous mêlée fanned out to the nation’s movie theaters, audiences booed MacArthur and his troops, not the men down on their luck. Even the mining heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean, the owner of the Hope diamond and wife of the proprietor of the Washington Post, professed solidarity with the “mob” that had occupied the nation’s capital.
The Great Depression was then nearly three years old, with FDR still in the wings and some of the worst deprivation and unrest yet to come. Three years after our own crash, we do not have the benefit of historical omniscience to know where 2011 is on the time line of America’s deepest bout of economic distress since that era. (The White House, you may recall, rolled out “recovery summer” sixteen months ago.) We don’t know if our current president will end up being viewed more like Hoover or FDR. We don’t know whether Occupy Wall Street and its proliferating satellites will spiral into larger and more violent confrontations, disperse in cold weather, prove a footnote to our narrative, or be the seeds of something big.
What’s as intriguing as Occupy Wall Street itself is that once again our Establishment, left, right, and center, did not see the wave coming or understand what it meant as it broke. Maybe it’s just human nature and the power of denial, or maybe it’s a stubborn strain of all-American optimism, but at each aftershock since the fall of Lehman Brothers, those at the top have preferred not to see what they didn’t want to see. And so for the first three weeks, the protests were alternately ignored, patronized, dismissed, and insulted by politicians and the mainstream news media as a neo-Woodstock for wannabe collegiate rebels without a cause—and not just in Fox-land. CNN’s new prime-time hopeful, Erin Burnett, ridiculed the protesters as bongo-playing know-nothings; a dispatch in The New Republic called them “an unfocused rabble of ragtag discontents.” Those who did express sympathy for Occupy Wall Street tended to pat it on the head before going on to fault it for being leaderless, disorganized, and inchoate in its agenda.
Despite such dismissals, the movement, abetted by made-for-YouTube confrontations with police, started to connect with the mass public much as the Bonus Army did with a newsreel audience. The week after a Wall Street Journal editorial claimed that “no one seems to care very much” about the “collection of ne’er-do-wells” congregating in Zuccotti Park, the paper released its own poll, in collaboration with NBC News, finding that 37 percent of Americans supported the protesters, 25 percent had no opinion, and just 18 percent opposed them. The approval numbers for Occupy Wall Street published in Time and Reuters were even higher—hitting 54 percent in Time. Apparently some of those dopey kids, staggering under student loans and bereft of job prospects, have lots of parents and friends of all ages who understand exactly what they’re talking about.
Coverage increased and politicians ran for cover. Mayor Bloomberg, who had initially (and preposterously) portrayed the occupiers as a threat to the financial industry’s lower-income service workers, gingerly observed that some unspecified “people” are “very frustrated.” Though the Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, waffled when asked if he had any sympathy for Occupy Wall Street, Barack Obama publicly acknowledged the demonstrators’ “broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.”* (If Bloomberg and Obama are both using “frustration,” you can be certain it is a focus-group-tested trope chosen not to frighten the presumed sensibilities of independents.) Mitt Romney, who had first called the protests “dangerous,” executed another of his patented flip-flops to assert that he, too, identifies with America’s 99 percent, not the top one percent where he’s always dwelled. “Boy, I understand how these people feel,” he said. (Boy, do “these people” not believe him.) Even Eric Cantor, who’d described the protesters as “mobs,” started talking about—what else?—“frustration.”
These efforts to domesticate and contain the protests are unlikely to succeed. It is not frustration that’s roiling America but anger, the anger of a full-fledged class war. Try as polite company keeps trying to ignore it, that war has been building in this country and abroad for much of this decade and has been waged in earnest in America since the fall of 2008. But the crisp agenda demanded of Occupy Wall Street will not be forthcoming. The inchoateness of our particular class war is central to its meaning. America is not Tahrir Square or the riot-scarred precincts of North London, where everyone knows at birth who is in which class and why. We pride ourselves on being a “classless” democracy. We abhor ideology. When Americans left and right, young and old, express anger at an overclass, they don’t necessarily agree about who’s on which side of that class divide. The often confusing fluidity of class definitions, especially in an America as polarized as ours is now, may make our homegrown class war more volatile, not less.
The tea-party right finds the hippie-scented movement in lower Manhattan repellent, but it and Occupy Wall Street are two sides of the same coin. “Take Back America,” the initial tea-party battle cry, would work for those in Zuccotti Park as well. The disagreement is about which America needs to be taken back, and from whom.
Provoked by Obama’s ascent, the right was ahead of the class-war curve, with Sarah Palin sounding the charge when she stuck up for “the real America” against the elites during the 2008 campaign. The real America, as she defined it, was in small towns—“those who are running our factories and teaching our kids and growing our food.” In other words: It is the middle class (or at least its white precincts) that fell behind while the rich got richer. The Über-class she and her angry followers would take to the guillotine, however, is not defined by its super-wealth. It is first and foremost exemplified by potentates in the federal government, especially the Ivy League cohort of Obama—closely followed by the usual right-wing populist bogeymen, the pointy-headed experts in fancy universities and the mainstream-media royalty with their “gotcha” questions.
Palin may now have abdicated her position on the barricades, not least because she succumbed to the financial blandishments of the unreal America, but the zeal of her constituency has not faded a bit. The right’s angry class warriors constitute the vast majority of the GOP—that roughly three-quarters of the party that seems determined to resist Romney no matter what. A Harvard-educated former Massachusetts governor, especially one who embraced the social engineering of health-care reform, inspires class anger from his own party to the same degree that his private-sector record as a leveraged-buyout tycoon provokes class anger from Democrats.
But while Romney is a class enemy liberals and conservatives can unite against, perhaps nothing has revealed how much the class warriors of the right and left of our time have in common than the national outpouring after Steve Jobs’s death. Indeed, the near-universal over-the-top emotional response—more commensurate with a saintly religious or civic leader, not a sometimes bullying captain of industry—brought Americans of all stripes together as few events have in recent memory.
Some on the right were baffled that the ostensible Marxists demonstrating in lower Manhattan would observe a moment of silence and assemble makeshift shrines for a top one-percenter like Jobs, whose expensive products were engineered for near-instant obsolescence and produced by Chinese laborers in factories with substandard health-and-safety records. For heaven’s sake, the guy didn’t even join Warren Buffett and Bill Gates in their Giving Pledge. “There is perhaps no greater image of irony,” wrote the conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, “than that of anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, anti-materialist extremists of the Occupy Wall Street movement paying tribute to Steve Jobs."
Yet those demonstrators who celebrated Jobs were not necessarily hypocrites at all—and no more anti-capitalist than the Bonus Army of 1932. If you love your Mac and iPod, you can still despise CDOs and credit-default swaps. Jobs’s genius—in the words of Regis McKenna, a Silicon Valley marketing executive who worked with him early on—was his ability “to strip away the excess layers of business, design, and innovation until only the simple, elegant reality remained.” The supposed genius of modern Wall Street is the exact reverse, piling on excess layers of business and innovation on ever thinner and more exotic creations until simple reality is distorted and obscured. Those in Palin’s “real America” may not be agitated about the economic 99-vs.-one percent inequality brought about by the rise of the financial sector in the past three decades, but, like class warriors of the left, they know that “financial instruments” wreaked havoc on their 401(k)s, homes, and jobs. The bottom line remains that Wall Street’s opaque inventions led directly to TARP, the taxpayers’ bank bailout that achieved the seemingly impossible feat of unifying the left and right in rage against government—much as Jobs’s death achieved the equally surprising coup of unifying left and right in mourning a corporate god.
That bipartisan grief was arguably as much for the passing of a capitalist culture as for the man himself. Finance long ago supplanted visionary entrepreneurial careers like Jobs’s as the most desired calling among America’s top-tier university students, just as hedge-fund tycoons like John Paulson and Steve Cohen passed Jobs on the Forbes 400 list. Americans sense that something incalculable has been lost in this transformation that cannot be measured in dollars and cents.
There’s no handier way to track just how much American capitalism has changed since Apple’s divine, mid-seventies birth in a garage than by following the corporate afterlife of the American icon most frequently invoked as Jobs’s antecedent in his obituaries, Thomas Alva Edison. Like Jobs, Edison wasn’t just a brilliant fount of technological breakthroughs but a businessman as well (albeit a less savvy one). He was the official founder of General Electric—known as Edison General Electric at its inception in 1890, before Edison was strong-armed into an early merger. G.E. was created to maximize the profits of his many inventions and businesses, Apple style. And like Apple, the company flourished as an exemplar of American capitalism at its most creative and productive, even in a downtime. During the Great Depression, it produced an astonishing array of Jobs-worthy innovations—the first commercial fluorescent lamp, the first waste “Disposall,” the first night baseball game, and the first television network. This was the job-creating, profit-making, America-empowering corporate behemoth, spewing out refrigerators and jet engines, that would ultimately recruit Ronald Reagan as its television pitchman in the fifties.
But the G.E. born out of Edison’s genius and synergistic with Reagan’s brand of postwar jingoism is far from the G.E. of our time. Its once minor financial-services subsidiary, G.E. Capital, metastasized over the past 30 years in sync with the growth of the new Wall Street. In 1990, G.E. Capital accounted for just a quarter of G.E.’s overall profits, but by 2007, on the eve of the crash, it had gobbled up 55 percent of the bottom line. Its sophisticated gambling strategies, like those of the big banks it emulated, amounted to an ingenious get-rich-quick scheme for high-rollers until the bottom fell out, taking shareholders and employees, not to mention the country, down with it. G.E. Capital’s dependence on short-term credit was so grave that it forced G.E. to cut back its dividend for the first time since the thirties and to turn to Buffett for a $3 billion emergency cash infusion in the dark days of October 2008.
The cheerleader for ratcheting up that risk at G.E. was the CEO, Jeffrey Immelt. These days he heads the president’s ineffectual Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, despite his own corporation’s record of job-shedding in America and the revelation that G.E. paid no American taxes in 2010 (on more than $14 billion in profits, including $5.1 billion in the U.S.). Immelt is a Republican, but that didn’t prevent Palin this fall from calling G.E. “the poster child of corporate welfare and crony capitalism.” (Bill O’Reilly and Newt Gingrich joined this class-warfare chorus.) On this point, once again, there is no air between the right and Occupy Wall Street. And as both camps condemn Immelt, so they are also united in the conviction that the godfather of Obama’s economic team, Robert Rubin, is likewise a poster child for corporate welfare and crony capitalism. Rubin, whose useful cronies included his former protégés Geithner and Lawrence Summers, encouraged reckless greed and risk at Citigroup during the bubble much as Immelt did at G.E. Capital, ultimately requiring the taxpayers’ rescue of TARP.
Politicians in either party, of course, never use the term “class warfare” to describe what’s going on in America, unless it’s Republican leaders accusing Obama of waging it every time he even mildly asserts timeless liberal bromides about taxing the rich. Nor do most politicians want to talk about the depth of the crisis in present-day capitalism, since to acknowledge its scale would only dramatize how little they intend to do about it.
The whole system is screwed up, and it’s not all Wall Street’s fault—or remotely in the financial sector’s power alone to solve. As middle-class Americans have lost their jobs or watched their wages stagnate or decline while corporations pile up record profits, they’ve also seen CEOs far removed from Wall Street (at Hewlett-Packard and Yahoo most recently) walk away with rich settlements even after they’ve laid off workers en masse, mismanaged their companies, or wrecked them. But at least politicians pay lip service to the woes of the middle class. That America’s poverty rate has risen to its highest level since 1993 goes all but unmentioned by leaders in both parties. The poor, after all, don’t make campaign contributions and are unlikely to vote. And they have even less clout than usual now that Republican legislators and governors, fanning bogus fears of “voter fraud,” have mandated new, Jim Crow–style restrictions to scare away poor, elderly, and minority voters in fourteen states. In the Beltway bubble, even the local poor are out of sight and out of mind; with a 6.1 percent unemployment rate and a median income of $84,523 (versus $50,046 nationally), Washington is now the wealthiest metro area in the country and, according to Gallup, departs from all 50 states in believing by a majority that the economy is getting better.
Back in 1931, even Hoover worried that “timid people, black with despair” had “lost faith in the American system” and might be susceptible to the kind of revolutions that had become a spreading peril abroad. When Roosevelt took office, he had the confidence that his leadership could overcome that level of despair and head off radicals on the left or right. In 2011, the despair is again black, and faith in the system is shaky, but it would be hard to describe the atmosphere at Zuccotti Park or a tea-party rally as prerevolutionary. The anger of the class war across the spectrum seems fatalistic more than incendiary. No wonder. Everyone just assumes the fix is in for the highest bidder, no matter what. Take—please!—the latest bipartisan Beltway panacea: the congressional supercommittee charged by the president and GOP leaders to hammer out the deficit-reduction compromise they couldn’t do on their own. The Washington Post recently discovered that nearly 100 of the registered lobbyists no doubt charged with besieging the committee to protect the interests of the financial, defense, and health-care industries are former employees of its dozen members. Indeed, six of those members (three from each party) currently have former lobbyists on their staffs.
Elections are supposed to resolve conflicts in a great democracy, but our next one will not.
Just in time for election season, Obama has recovered his populist rhetoric (if not populism itself) and will say the right things about Wall Street, about that “frustration” out there, about the modest reforms of Dodd-Frank, and about millionaires who don’t pay their fair share of taxes. It’s not clear if anyone believes it, including him. Having been a bystander to history when the tea party harvested populist rage during the summer of 2009, he may have a tough time co-opting Occupy Wall Street now to plug the so-called enthusiasm gap in his base. There’s a serious danger that the anger could co-opt him instead. To pander to the swing state of North Carolina, the Democrats in their wisdom chose to hold their convention in a city best known as the headquarters of Bank of America, whose recent financial innovations include illegal robo-foreclosures and the $5 monthly fee on debit cards. Occupy Charlotte could be a far more telegenic show than the one happening inside the hall.
Despite all the chatter to the contrary, Obama is so far outdrawing all the GOP candidates combined in Wall Street contributions. His best hope is that that fact is blurred by either Romney, the plutocrat from central casting, or Rick Perry, a creature of lobbyists and pay-for-play government in Texas. Herman Cain’s as yet little-known corporate history would also prove problematic to Republicans: He’s not only an unabashed Alan Greenspan fan who was chairman of the Kansas City Fed but also served on the board of Aquila, an energy company that ended up paying a $10.5 million settlement for Enron-esque shenanigans. (Cain’s campaign manager hails from Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers’ political front.) Whatever else is to be said about Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Tim Pawlenty, and Ron Paul, they actually spent most of their pre-political careers in the aggrieved middle class. But they are all history in the presidential race, and perhaps were destined to be, given how big money plays its hand. You don’t have to like their views to find their earnest but misplaced faith in the free-market efficiency of the political system a bit poignant.
Elections are supposed to resolve conflicts in a great democracy, but our next one will not. The elites will face off against the elites to a standoff, and the issues animating the class war in both parties won’t even be on the table. The structural crises in our economy, our government, and our culture defy any of the glib solutions proposed by current Democrats or Republicans; the quixotic third-party movements being hatched by well-heeled do-gooders are vanity productions. The two powerful forces that extricated America from the Great Depression—the courageous leadership and reformist zeal of Roosevelt, the mobilization for World War II—are not on offer this time. Our class war will rage on without winners indefinitely, with all sides stewing in their own juices, until—when? No one knows. The reckoning with capitalism’s failures over the past three decades, both in America and the globe beyond, may well be on hold until the top one percent becomes persuaded that its own economic fate is tied to the other 99 percent’s. Which is to say things may have to get worse before they get better.
Over the short term, meanwhile, the Democratic Establishment is no doubt wishing that Occupy Wall Street will melt away with the winter snows, much as its Republican counterpart hopes that the leaderless tea party will wither if Romney nails down the nomination. But even in the unlikely event that these wishes come true, it is not likely to be the end of the story. Though the Bonus Army was driven out of Washington in the similarly fraught election year of 1932, the newsreels they left behind turned out to be previews of coming attractions for the long decade still to come.
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109 Comments so far
Show AllJust a note - 45,000 people may die in the US every year from lack of access to health care, but at least twice that many die from RECEIVING health care. Health care is really a minor factor in overall health.
He exploited people, but his overall contribution was positive? Wow. Sounds like the Monty Python description of the Piranha Brothers--"cruel, but fair." Steve Jobs was a putative Zen master of geekdom, but it was mostly schtick for the suckers out there who would line up outside Best Buy for every product launch. He clearly read up on P.T. Barnum.
One of the positive side-effects of Occupy Wall Street has been the neutering of the 'class war' epithet that was an effective rhetorical weapon by elites' media lackeys and lap dogs. To see said shills now flumoxed and scared when that prior effective trump card is played and now useless is satisfying in a schadenfreude sort of way.
The present regime in China, brought into being by the communist traitor and renegade Deng Xiaoping, has gone way beyond socialist revisionism. The American "triumphanlist" Francis Fukuyama, who proclaimed the end of cultural evolution paled in comparison. These Chinese"recidivists" believe Chinese civilisation actually stopped evolving 2,000 years ago. They are eager to graft and grow the ancient dynastic China to modern capitalis. Under such circumstances the much oppressed and marginalised followers of Mao Zedong all but rejoice at the rise of OWS in America. They see this as the rebirth of their own Cultural Revolution in America.
Back in the 1950's Mao discerned the rise of recidivism within the Chinese Communist Party. His concerns turned into alarm by the rise of revisionism under President Kruschev in USSR. In 1957 he launched the 'Anti-rightist Campaign', a rectification movement to stamp the tide of recidivism within the Party and to dislocate the entrenched "aristocratic", bureaucratic, power-corrupted echelon. He failed. Instead, these recidivist elements, led by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, used the opportunity to terrorise all critics of the Communist Government and Party and entrenched their rule even further.
Mao Zedong then decided to push the revolution much further ,prematurely I must say, into political and economic communization, what we came to remember as the Great Leap Forward, to stamp the tide of recidivism and arrest the trend towards socialist revisionism. As his last Herculean attempt to save the revolution he launched the great Cultural Revolution and introduced the first direct mass democracy we had ever seen. He not only inspired a whole generation of Chinese youth but his call reverberated around the world, influencing people from the French students who carried out the Paris revolt of 1968 to John Lenon and the Hippy Movement of America.
The reaction from the Chinese recidivists were prompt and lethal. The Empire fought back and violence was unleashed, turning the country into turmoil. Civil war was imminent. Mao was forced to call off the Cultural Revolution prematurely. The rest was history as we know it (Or didn't know it). Lin Biao who was tasked with leading the Cultural Revolution was murdered; Mao Zedong was marginalised; Deng Xiaoping orchestrated the rapprochement with USA; further break with the USSR and the attack on Vietnam; the death/murder of Mao Zedong; the coup de'tat against Mao's "sucessor" Hua Guofeng; the arrest of the Gang of Four and the murder of Mrs. Mao/Jiang Qing; the launch of Deng's capitalist revolution; the 1989 June Fourth Tiananmen demonstration for democracy.......
The Chinese regime had co-operated fully with Washington and Wall Street in rescuing capitalism from collapsing in 2008. But in the days to come this Chinese regime may choose to go their own way as they faces increasing challenge to their rule at home. Tension may arise in Sino-USA relationship and global political and economic environment may worsen sooner than we think. I can see the authority, facing a more hostile environment abroad, coming down hard on the OWS so be prepared.
Very interesting, thank you very much for the post!
Is there a particular reason you are spamming the forum with this bit of Maoist propaganda? I counted 3 articles just today where you have posted the EXACT SAME thing.
Yes, the same comment was posted to Zizek's article, as well as to the uploaded video of his interview with Al Azeera. This was because Zizek was a critic of Socialism and I like readers of his article to also know what actually happened to so called socialism in China. In his interview with Al Azeera he concluded that the real tragedy of the 20th Century was socialism which had started off with such hope, and he mentioned authoritarian capitalism as typified by the system of Singapore and China. And I put it here because I want readers to know that if OWS is more than just a flash in the pan it is going to face the same violence as was faced by the Maoist in the Cultural Revolution.
And what is your problem with the said essay? Are you a Chinese from People's Republic of China? Are you a Singaporean Chinese? LoL
>>nakli: "... I want readers to know that ...OWS is ... going to face the same violence as was faced by the Maoist in the Cultural Revolution."<<
Whaaaa....t? "Same violence as was FACED BY the Maoist"? What about the violence, chaos and destruction (as if by hordes of marauding conquerors) unleashed by the Maoist thugs all around the country and in Tibet?
Whatever revolution that the OWS may lead to, so far, it does NOT appear like these people are thinking of the kind of so-called "Cultural Revolution" and most certainly NOT the means employed by the Maoists in the 1960s.
>if OWS is more than just a flash in the pan it is going to face the same violence as was faced by the Maoist in the Cultural Revolution.<
Yes, Nakli, most people, brainwashed by the Western corporate media and China's Dengist government, just don't use their brains. Who were the folks that Mao had relied on to take matters into their hands (as there was no other way to shake the power holders in the Chinese Communist Party)? They were mostly young idealists - students, peasants and workers - defenseless individuals who were inexperienced in political struggle. "Bombard the Headquarters!" Mao called. What Headquarters? That of the Chinese Communist Party, of course! Many in the Party had been using their positions to ride roughshod over the people, especially workers and peasants, and the only way to have a people-oriented government was for a mass movement like the Cultural Revolution to root them out. But since peasants and workers and especially young students had only their mouths to shout, and since writing big character posters was the only means of getting their messages through, who then were the people who committed violence? Wasn't it more likely that most violence would come from the establishment - those entrenched in the Party as well as the Army? This indeed, was how truth was turned on its head: the armed Dengist aggressors, some wearing Red Guard armbands, had indeed been the ones who committed the violence, though overall such incidents were much less than the Western media would've it. Deng himself said: "Although the ``cultural revolution'' has been described as a full-scale civil war, there was no fierce fighting, no actual civil war."
But assuredly there were some violence, especially in the Beijing area where children of Communist Party officials (the Liandong) attacked some teachers in the name of the Red Guards (and blamed it all on their adversary, Mao). This kind of violence against OWS is possible somewhere along the line, as Nakli warns us.
I don't understand the continuing attempts to re-legitimize and whitewash this bloody pogrom called the "Cultural Revolution" by presenting a particular version of the events when its relevance is not even clear, other than through some totally contrived and ridiculous linkage with the OWS.
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From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
>>Struggle sessions and purges:
Millions of people in China were violently persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. Those identified as spies, "running dogs", "revisionists", or coming from a suspect class (including those related to former landlords or rich peasants) were subject to beating, imprisonment, rape, torture, sustained and systematic harassment and abuse, seizure of property, denial of medical attention, and erasure of social identity. At least hundreds of thousands of people were murdered, starved, or worked to death. Millions more were forcibly displaced. Young people from the cities were forcibly moved to the countryside, where they were forced to abandon all forms of standard education in place of the propaganda teachings of the Communist Party of China.
Estimates of the death toll, including both civilians and Red Guards, from various sources are about 500,000 between 1966 and 1969. Some people were not able to stand the torture and, losing hope for the future, committed suicide. One of the most famous cases of attempted suicide due to political persecution involved Deng Xiaoping's son, Deng Pufang, who jumped (or was thrown) from a four-story building after being "interrogated" by Red Guards. Instead of dying, he became a paraplegic. In the trial of the so-called Gang of Four, a Chinese court stated that 729,511 people had been persecuted, of which 34,800 were said to have died.
Some of the most extreme violence took place in the southern province of Guangxi, where a Chinese journalist found a "disturbing picture of official compliance in the systematic killing and cannibalization of individuals in the name of political revolution and 'class struggle'." Senior party historians acknowledge, "In a few places, it even happened that 'counterrevolutionaries' were beaten to death and in the most beastly fashion had their flesh and liver consumed [by their killers]." Not even the children of "enemies of the people" were spared, as more than a few were tortured and bludgeoned to death and dismembered. Some of their organs - hearts, livers, and genitals, were eaten during "human flesh banquets". According to Mao: The Unknown Story, an estimated 100,000 people "lost their lives" in Guangxi during this period.
The true figure of those who were persecuted or died during the Cultural Revolution may never be known, since many deaths went unreported or were actively covered up by the police or local authorities. The state of Chinese demographics at the time was very poor, and the PRC has been hesitant to allow formal research into the period.
In their book Mao's Last Revolution (2006), the Sinologists Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals assert that in rural China alone some 36 million people were persecuted, of whom between 750,000 and 1.5 million were killed, with roughly the same number permanently injured. In Mao: The Unknown Story, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday claim that as many as 3 million people died in the violence of the Cultural Revolution. Sociologist Daniel Chirot claims that around 100 million people suffered and at least one million people, and perhaps as many as 20 million, died in the Cultural Revolution.
Ethnic minorities
The Cultural Revolution wreaked much havoc on minority cultures in China. In Tibet, over 6,000 monasteries were destroyed, often with the complicity of local ethnic Tibetan Red Guards. In Inner Mongolia, some 790,000 people were persecuted. Of these, 22,900 were beaten to death and 120,000 were maimed, during a ruthless witchhunt to find members of the alleged separatist New Inner Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party. In Xinjiang, copies of the Qu'ran and other books of the Uyghur people were apparently burned. Muslim imams were reportedly paraded around with paint splashed on their bodies. In the ethnic Korean areas of northeast China, language schools were destroyed. In Yunnan Province, the palace of the Dai people's king was torched, and an infamous massacre of Hui Muslim people at the hands of the People's Liberation Army in Yunnan, known as the "Shadian incident", reportedly claimed over 1,600 lives in 1975.
Concessions given to minorities were abolished as part of the Red Guards' attack on the “Four Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. Communes were established in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (Tibet had previously been exempt from China's period of land reform) and reimposed in other minority areas. Despite official persecution, some local leaders and minority ethnic practices survived in remote regions.
The overall failure of the Red Guards' and radical assimilationists' goals was largely due to two factors. It was felt that pushing minority groups too hard would compromise China's border defences. This was especially important as minorities make up a large percentage of the population that live along China's borders. In the late 1960s China experienced a period of strained relations with a number of its neighbours, notably with the Soviet Union and India. Many of the Cultural Revolution's goals in minority areas were simply too unreasonable to be implemented. The return to pluralism, and therefore the end of the worst of the affects of the Cultural Revolution to ethnic minorities in China, coincides closely with Lin Biao's removal from power.<<
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Now, I know that particular statements or numbers in Wikipedia can be questioned. But I CHALLENGE, I DARE anyone to argue that everything in the excerpt above, or even most of it, is wrong! This propaganda nonsense has got to stop or needs to be challenged!
And I CAUTION and URGE others to learn more about this period in history and see if this is the kind of "Revolution" that the world needs today. There are many books and articles online. I would recommend the book "Mao's Last Revolution" by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, that talks specifically about this so-called Cultural Revolution.
>bloody pogrom called the "Cultural Revolution" by presenting a particular version of the events when its relevance is not even clear, other than through some totally contrived and ridiculous linkage with the OWS.<
Wow.. look at the typical brain-dead statement that denied any linkage between the Cultural Revolution and the OWS and then offered the massive lies from two of the most infamous and exposed propagandists regarding Mao and the said Cultural Revolution. I'd mentioned the self-confessed CIA collaborator McFarquhar in my earlier posting - that story is well-known to many who're interested in Chinese history. As for June Chang, her wild lies were totally discredited on a number of Chinese dissidents' websites, to the extent that she dared not visit Taiwan for fear of a lawsuit from someone she alleged was a spy for the Communists. The Deng Pufang story had also been exposed as a blatant lie and there were witnesses who saw him climbing down a drainpipe (he was detained by the Red Guards) and hurt his legs. So was the charge that Wang Kuang Mei was anti-Mao: it was she who organized a party to commemorate Mao's birthday with the latter's son and other relatives. Readers who're interested in the real story of the Cultural Revolution should read "The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution" by Mobo Gao, Pluto Press London • Ann Arbor, MI, 2008.
Another useful book would be Dongping Han's "The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village" (Monthly Review Press (December 1, 2008).
Because of new voices - those who actually experienced the Cultural Revolution - that emerged during the past few years, the present government itself has changed its stance by admitting that the CR "also" has its merits. But more important is what Deng Hsiaoping himself - a victim of the movement - said to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, former Prime Minister of Canada on July 11, 1990: "Although the ``cultural revolution'' has been described as a full-scale civil war, there was no fierce fighting, no actual civil war."
Are the Western propagandists going to call their man - one who was chosen by Time as "Man of the Year" - a liar?
One can of course listen to Western propagandists, of the, among other lies, "Weapons of Mass Destruction" fame, and accept their usual garbage. That's the individual's prerogative.
No doubt the gap between haves and have nots includes more havenots but also it is institutionalized. An example would be the trade agreements (by Paul Bremmer) with Iraq. The uniformity of agriculture means that anyone outside that uniformity can not trade goods. The problem is this is only the beginning of this and it will really end self-determination as we know it, if it is successfull. All the while Americans have been cheering this on. (no, not all just most)
Managed health care is also a good example but along with advances there is also a creepy downside too. (and I am not referring to the exclusion that you mention) but inequality is institutionalized here as well.
Technology, you can still make that determination but someday it will just be history. Like Chestnuts, I roasted some today. I had to buy them because they no longer grow here in America. Some people probably don't know or care about Chestnuts or that they use to grow wild here, but people are not the only ones that eat the them.
This is in response to Rosemarie, sorry it took a long time as I was peeling nuts.
Yup; the demise of the American chestnut was tragic. The current-day demise of the Eastern Hemlock is equally as tragic, even if their value to humans was mostly aesthetic.
Quite true, some people cannot see the forest for the trees...I couldn't resist.
Most people, even, or particularly "country boys" cannot name a single tree, or bird, in the forest. So thy don't even see the trees.
Worst of all are lumberjacks, they think tree farms are forests.
lol...this is a refreshing turn of conversation lol...if a tree falls in the forest does anyone hear it?? :D
Ok, that was funny..:)
One of the most institutionalized forms of 'class' is so often accepted, that it is never questioned. That is the class elitism that results from determining a person's place in society by his educational status. It should be an illegal form of discrimination to refuse employment based on college degrees - or even high school degrees. A person's suitability to any 'job' should be his work history and his talent. Many of the most brilliant people I have known faced this discrimination. Some people learn a lot in college. Some use the time for keg parties or 'dress-to-get-laid parties (as at one of the most expensive, prestigious colleges in the USA). Having a college degree doesn't prove anything except that the person had/borrowed the money to get there. Now OWS and others are challenging the student loan debt. That's good, but I still don't hear much about why education costs so much. How about taking a look at administrative salaries - especially the salaries of college presidents. The same issue exists in health care. While many talk about cutting benefits and bringing cost down, no one is questioning the salaries of hospital CEOs.
If it is to succeed, OWS will address the issue of 'class' in the USA.
This is an interesting point, I think we are all better prepared with higher education but the assumption that it is the only way or even the best way is where things get stuck. The best example I can think of is Michael Brown that headed FEMA during the Katrina hurricane.
What is even worse is the degree mills used by administrators to get jobs they are horribly unqualified to do. (and yes they represent health care administrators too)
On another note, you have to admire those young people in Liberty Plaza for using their education in such a extraordinary way. All of them, education or not are using what they know to create something. I've always thought that education is really about knowing when to break the rules.
Rich sez: "We don’t know if our current president will end up being viewed more like Hoover or FDR."
***
Um, actually, yes. Yes, we do know, Frank.
Goebbels sez
Indeed, "we" do know...all too well.
But, in case Frank Rich is still so besotted with Obama that he retains any lingering doubts -- Hopey Changey love really dies hard for some people -- he should do more background work, to wit:
By Kevin Baker -- Harper's -- July 2009
"Barack Hoover Obama: The best and the brightest blow it again"
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/07/0082562
It's a great piece and even more timely today than when first published. To say that Baker nails his subject would be an understatement -- he skewers him.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
That General Douglas MacArthur? At least the Americans he abandoned to the Battan death march had a higher survival rate than the Americans abandoned with the smashing of the Glass-Steagal Act. The filthy rich assault on the American middle class started with Ronald Reagan and bloomed when the corporation's Bush/Cheney seized power in 2000. Corporate class war continues under Obama.
It's Bataan...
"Rubin, whose useful cronies included his former protégés Geithner and Lawrence Summers, encouraged reckless greed and risk at Citigroup during the bubble much as Immelt did at G.E. Capital, ultimately requiring the taxpayers’ rescue of TARP."
I would like to give Robert Rubin a break. He has written some noteworthy articles in support of the OWS, and I do not think he should be pilloried for being in the same room with these Wall Street Thugs.
Rubin is a two faced creep.
with a nod to i ♥ BigBrother for the reminder, I prefer Marx's term "class struggle".
I hope OWS is the beginning of real change in this country and the world. Want to see 'The Street' tremble? Move your money from BofA, Citi, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo on Nov 5th. Keep it moved.
"The elites will face off against the elites to a standoff, and the issues animating the class war in both parties won’t even be on the table" But he public watches the electoral spectacle with disgust, with no illusion that this can pass as Democracy, that whoever rules does it with a mandate from ordinary people. The country continues to drift rightward. Distrust of government is greater than doubt about the corporations which prop it up. The show works for now but eventually the public will catch on to the farce and then a real but ugly war will begin. As Frank Rich has intimated the worst is yet to come.
"The elites will face off against the elites to a standoff, and the issues animating the class war in both parties won’t even be on the table" But he public watches the electoral spectacle with disgust, with no illusion that this can pass as Democracy, that whoever rules does it with a mandate from ordinary people. The country continues to drift rightward. Distrust of government is greater than doubt about the corporations which prop it up. The show works for now but eventually the public will catch on to the farce and then a real but ugly war will begin. As Frank Rich has intimated the worst is yet to come.
I agree with an early comment - this is not a class conflict.
I think, and hope, it is a movement against injustice - an injustice so malignant it threatens the future of mankind and the physical environment upon which he depends - as do countless other dependent species.
That might sound like a mouthful - but I think it is closer to the truth than class warfare, or the 99 percent.
And I think we had better get it right this time.
Manysummits
====
I think most of the people in the 1% (complicit elite) are getting set up by an even smaller minority (criminal elite). It has something to do with the corporation and how the process of globalization of the corporate state have gotten out ahead of themselves and degenerated into this epic greed fest.
The movers and shakers have long been trying to globalize their system of wealth and power, but have screwed up recently by tricking-out the economic principles upon which it might have had a chance to succeed. The signs of that are highly imbalanced wealth figures, and people in the streets. Now, those are the kind of figures they would be shooting for at the completion phase of a world-dominating globalization. But to have those kinds of imbalances during an intermediate phase (expansion and empire by military/hegemonic means), when any excess financial energy should be being fed back into the roots and middle of the system, risks the whole venture.
The corporation, if cleaned up and held accountable to society and environment, might serve as a vehicle for progress. Personhood, money as speech, and C.United are classic, serious over-reaches. "Class war" is a red herring. Use of the word "war", another, perhaps more serious, frame. It is, more accurately, a struggle between those who would use force, fear, lies, and corruption for personal/gang gain, versus more of those who have/are waking up to the fact that they are no longer comfortable with such methods, and are no longer willing/able to participate at previous levels of expectation, (2% active, 35-60% passive).
Force is an expensive way to move such an endeavor forward. Fear, lies and corruption pay off only because the rules are tricked-out. Force, both military and authoritarian, has been mis- and over-used, probably because of momentum from WWII, and the relative ease with which force concentrates wealth and power in the short term. Ultimately, force weakens the system and creates counter-productive blow-back which further drains its energy.
Sooo...what to do? I don't think there is much anyone needs to do to bring down this tricked-out, basically unjust psuedo-capitalist system, because it is self-destructing. The problematic elite who have risen to the top of this for-profit corporate system do not have what it takes to create a real world system that is good for everybody. (Some of the elite do, and would prosper under any system.)
For most of us...just get out from under it. Vote with feet and money to support alternatives...move accounts, hang out the laundry in the sun, ride a bike, eat healthy, treat each other fairly, with respect and in Peace. With our numbers we will have a better chance (for instance, to cope with climate change) than that which might trickle down under the current set-up.
Calm down, Lashe. LOL. What you see when you are not logged in is most likely from the site's "cache" which gets updated at certain intervals. If you wait long enough, eventually, what you see when you are not logged in will be the same as when logged in. But when an article is still "fresh", and people are actively posting on it, there will be a difference between "logged in" and "anonymous visitor" versions.
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong.
To see the latest, you have to 'refresh'. Otherwise. your computer will show you, what was there previously. It is not CD's fault. Right?
With peanut butter soon to go up 24 to 30 percent and everything else but wages increasing, and it's not just the weather that is a factor. Fuel prices are the biggest determinant. And who really knows what drives fuel prices? They go up if we use more, they go up if we use less. They go up before a war, they go up after a war. They rise faster than they ever decrease. I am thinking class warfare has just begun.
I am thinking peanut butter is not a staple in most of the 01% homes but it is in most of the 99% homes. It's a cheap alternative protein to meat for most of us. While we're scraping to pay our heating bills this winter, we won't even be able to rely on peanut butter to see us through.
who 'owns' the 5 biggest oil companies? the 4 biggest banks? and who are they? (and who 'owns' them??)
for all the national dialogue, the transnational context of the root subjects and issues is dispensed with right off the bat toute suite. nobody but nobody ever goes there. understandably too; what *can* one -as yet -say, offer, or propose? precious little at present i believe.
i also believe that will change. (although not necessarily usefully.)
certainly the global response, from the Arab Spring right on through to OWS, are just that, but while there's the limiting 'WS' framework in OWS, protesting [American] financiers is just about as offtarget (IMHO) as protesting their mouthpieces, American politicians. likely protesting international financiers is as well just as limiting, for it seems to me the real currency of ultimate power isn't necessarily money itself after all but power itself. much harder to trace at that.
globalisation as a topic may finally come to more fully focus on the international financial knot, by following the money (so to speak), but i fear it won't get past that to ever following the power behind it. without that, the cancer is never really actually addressed. -and hellyeah, i don't know that it can even be done, or how. one might as well set out to corralling the DMT elves...
it ain't money that power is after.
it's more power.
This article is an hilarious dollop of US self-centredism and US exceptionalism.
"Class...war has been building in this country and abroad for much of this decade and has been waged in earnest in America since the fall of 2008." Er I think you might find it's been around for several thousand years since the slave revolts of Ancient Rome (think Spartacus) and there's been a long tradition of it ever since. The occupy movements are rather feeble in comparison to such events even just in my own country's long history of the struggle against class oppression which is by no means one of the more brutal histories regarding the matter.
Well, I'm really pleased that the US has discovered socialism at last, after decades of attacking, surpressing and eroding (by policy) it's values wherever in the world they appeared, and it's nice of you to finally join us, but can you please keep your enormous, solipsistic ego's out of the equation as it's not really conduicive to global solidarity. Many people outside the US, particuarly in USSR where they lost 28 million, are still a little miffed about how the US appeared in WW2 at the last minute then went on to take all the lion's share of the credit for saving the world. Wouldn't want that again!
way too long, and way too wrong...
from the article:
~ If you love your Mac and iPod, you can still despise CDOs and credit-default swaps. ~
no...
if you love your Mac and iPod, you are part of the problem, not the solution...
You're right, dubet, in more ways than one, actually.
Rich makes some good points about class-war, but misses some also.
The 'party' of Wall Street is really not limited to a party (nor two business 'parties'), but includes the combined powers of the entire political sphere, corporate/financial economic sphere, the media sphere of control, and the ultimately violence unleashed (if necessary).
All of these spheres of power are integrated, as they were by the British Empire in 1776, and on an even more global basis today.
This clearly defines an opposition force, a repressive force which is more than merely The Party of Wall Street ceaselessly waging class war.
While a fundamental tract of Marxist thought is that capitalism is the highest (last) form of 'class war', it must be remembered that the lowest (earliest) form of 'class war' is the hierarchy of the Empire class over all others --- and historically, Empire has never shied from using 'violence' as the primary means of prevailing in this longest running and still running battle of class-war, which empire is still winning.
While Empire is entirely more free than modern capitalism to use the monopoly weapon of violence to overtly prevail is this eternal class-war --- along with using the other more refined weapons of media power, economic power, and political power --- the only weapon available to the "nemesis" of Empire is the weapon of truth; the truth weapon to identify to all men that the empire is an empire against all people.
This simple weapon of disclosure, exposure, and confrontation with 'empire' is the only weapon that will trump all the weapons of violence, political power, legal power, media power, economic power, etc. which all favor the empire.
The true 'nemesis' of Empire is simply to expose it as empire, and in doing so to dis-empower all of empire's monopolies of power.
To effectively do so the Occupy movement must overtly Occupy the Empire, expose the Empire, confront Empire, and ultimately excise the Empire --- and effectively leverage its one superior 'weapon of truth' by referring to this disguised global Empire as merely "The Party of Wall Street", without mention of Empire, simply will not be able to overcome the multiple powerful weapons of empire itself.
Best of luck and love to Occupy in Occupying the Empire,
Alan MacDonald
Liberty, democracy, justice, and the "Multitude"
over
violent/Vichy
empire
I sometimes think that amacd is obsessed with the concept of empire, but if you don't believe him here, think "Bradley Manning" now rotting in jail, and Julian Assange likely on his way to join him. Our government, "Empire" rests on lies, and like vampires, cannot afford the sunlight of truth. dh
Donkey Hote (not the Democrat donkey),
Thanks for your kind words and support of the fact that, as Pogo should have said, "We have met the enemy and he is Empire".
Best,
Alan
Occupy Empire
Though Rich worries about the type of powerful weapon for class-war that the repressive (and potentially violent) forces of the 1% have to attack the Occupy movement and the seemingly less heavily weaponed 99% have, if Occupy were to answer such inane questions with the reply, "our agenda is to confront the disguised 'Vichy' corporate/financial/militarist empire that has captured and is occupying our country --- and to confront the Empire by actually Occupying the Empire", then Rich could be absofrigginlutely sure that the media, all the political shills, and everyone else who is trying to torpedo Occupy would immediately shut-up about asking what their 'goals', 'demands', and 'agenda' are --- because the opposition to Occupy would be dis-empowered, exposed, and scared shitless, because this well armed opposition IS THE EMPIRE..
While the reactionary and counter-revolutionary opposition to Occupy can use many tactics and strategies to attack and try to destroy Occupy --- most particularly the Empire's tactic of VIOLENCE ---- the greatest and non-violent weapon that Occupy can use to attack these counter-revolutionaries is simply to strike them between the eyes by identifying them for what they are: EMPIRE.
The weapon of truth and peaceful confrontation in identifying the Empire as precisely an EMPIRE, is mightier than any violence.
Best luck and love to Occupy,
Alan MacDonald
Liberty, justice, democracy, & the "Multitude"
over
violent/Vichy
empire
duplicate removed
Inserted same reply - on the Cultural Revolution - at the proper place. This one is redundant and hence deleted.
Americans are groomed to believe that EVERYBODY can become rich, famous and live an American dream. When children grow up and hit all kinds of ceilings, unless they are Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who indeed grew up in more or less regular American neighborhoods, they adjust to reality that perhaps they will not become a President or become rick and famous. They get satisfy just to live a modified version of American dream of their parents, just hoping a bit better.
The reality of the last 50 years (ever since Eisenhower left the office warning about industrial/military/congressional complex) is that the tax rate on the richest who paid 90% into federal tax if they made over ONE millions, went down to 34^ even for multimillionaires, so that they have a control of tremendous amounts of money to buy out politicians and others that support this system of catch-as-catch capitalism that went out of vogue with FDR when rules of the market evened out the field for creative pursuits.
Free market DEMANDS that people have an equal chance of success, which clearly is not the case here where the financial parasites, who do not create wealth but are just skimming the piles of money representing real world, call the shots and do as they please. We have instituted a socialism for the rich and socialism for the poor, a socialism and "free speech" for corporations and catch-as-catch-can swim or drown capitalism for working stiff.
Eventually, such social injustice where parasites win and producers lose leads to social unrest, which we have seen all over America. However, don't forget that many if not most of those 99% do not bother in participatory democracy even by voting. Staying in tents is not so bad if you are homeless and jobless, and if those people had jobs and homes they would not be protesting their situation. ;-)!
Of course, it was our fabled Eisenhower who led MacArthur's troops against the vets.
"And a Separation Psychology produces a Separation Sociology. That is, a way of socializing with each other from a place of separation rather than unity or oneness; a way of interacting that declares our personal interests to be separate—or at least to come first. And a Separation Sociology produces a Separation Pathology. That is, pathological behaviors of self-destruction—evidenced individually and collectively throughout the world.
"The question thus becomes, how long can we survive imagining that we are separate units, living as a collective but not as One? How much longer can we survive imagining that we are single beings, rather than A Single Being?
"If there were one change in humanity’s approach to life that would benefit us most right now—that would be more vital, more pivotal, more essential, powerful, and would be more transformative than any other—it would be a change in our belief in separation from God. And then, in our separation from each other. We are talking here about a massive movement into the living of a New Cultural Story that begins with a vivid description of our essential Oneness.
"Imagine what such a message would produce in the lives of our children.
What is sad is that we are afraid to teach Oneness as a life principle. We are actually scared of the idea. Why? Because we imagine that Oneness means Sameness, that identicality disappears individuality, and that when we lose our individuality we lose our very Self....
"Yet individuality does not require separation, and differences do not have to produce divisions, any more than our fingers have to be separated from our hand for them to be different from each other, and very individual."
Neale Donald Walsch
Humanity’s ‘overhaul’ now underway
Posted by Neale Donald Walsch
"We are discovering that the reason the world’s troubles persist in spite of how rapidly we have evolved as a species—presenting the same challenges they presented one hundred, five hundred, and one thousand years ago—is that we have been trying to solve our problems at every level except the level at which the problems exists.
"The result: Our problems have not gone away. We are still, as a species, faced with suffering on a massive scale. The largest number of the world’s people are still faced with poverty and destitution, malnutrition and starvation, disease and preventable death, a paucity of resources and the inability to meet basic needs, a lack of opportunity and, often, of even a basic education, the absence of fairness and even the thought of equality, the presence of despair, if not utter desperation—and the anger and violence that proceeds from all of this.
"We have imagined our problems must be political problems...must be economic problems...must be military problems...
"Now, nearing the middle of the first quarter of the 21t Century, we can no longer escape a persistent question. A question that any reasonable person must ask if we are to consider ourselves and declare ourselves to be an evolved species:
"How is it possible for 6.9 billion people to all want the same thing and to be unable to get it?
("Overhaul" con't)
"Is it possible that there is something we do not fully understand, the understanding of which would change everything?
"The answer for any thinking person must certainly be yes. There must be some data out. There must be some information we do not have—or to which we have not paid attention. Yet what could it be? What is it that we do not understand? What is the missing data?
"Ah, that is the answer that has eluded humanity for centuries. Nay, for millennia.
"But now, as we approach the time of our emergence, perhaps we are seeing, at last, the answer. We appear to recognize finally that at its core our problem is not a political problem, it is not an economic problem, and it is certainly not a military problem. Some of us—a growing number of us are—are now clearly perceiving that the problem facing humanity today is a spiritual problem…and it can only be solved by spiritual means.
"We have come to this conclusion neither swiftly nor randomly. Quite to the contrary, we have, as I have just pointed out, systematically employed every political maneuver, applied every economic pressure, imposed every military measure we could devise to create for our species what we say we all want.
"None of these approaches, I point out again for emphasis, has worked. None of them.
"One last time, please, so that it is burned in…?
"Not—a—single—solution—has—worked.
"This proclivity of ours to use them over and over and over again, expecting to get a different result, is the classic definition of insanity. Might it now be time to try a different solution? Might it now be time to employ a different approach?
"Yes. Of course. Any intelligent species would conclude so. Surely we can see in ourselves a fly banging against the windowpane. Surely we can find within ourselves the awareness that there must be another way out of where we are..."