Imperialism Is Now Murdering Stories
By Andre Vltchek
Nothing frightens fascism and its older brother imperialism more than real people and their honest stories.
It is because ordinary stories of ordinary people are so genuine and so accurately reflect authentic human fears, desires and dreams that the ideologues and propagandists of the Western regime, which is supported by unnatural hyper-pseudo-reality, feel, for their survival, that it is essential to annihilate those stories, to wipe them from the surface of earth, even to erase them from our memories.
Real human feelings get in the way; they still resist, block the path to the total commercialization of life and the full implementation of the perverse concepts introduced by the Empire. Such resistance is described and glorified in real stories, making them ‘extremely dangerous’ and potentially fatal to the regime.
Human nature is fundamentally optimistic and kind; it is mostly evenhanded and sharing. If it is not grossly manipulated, fooled, even conned; it generally puts the life of others well above cold profit. It is disposed to be compassionate, forgiving and accepting. It is not perfect, far from it, but as the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus declared at the end of his brilliant novel “The Plague”: “there is more to admire than to despise in humans”.
That is all very bad news for market fundamentalism and for the masters of the world. They need to ensure that the majority of the human race consists of greedy individuals, aggressive people, people who do not think or feel but consume, and, if they do think, about how to amass more, consume more; definitely not about how to build a decent and egalitarian society.
Each human life is made up of stories, of true and sincere stories. Some stories are ‘common’ and can occur, with certain variations, in any part of the world.
A boy meets a girl, and their love is ‘forbidden’, because they belong to a different class, ethnicity, or religion. They fight for their future together, against all oppressive customs and taboos, and they win or they fall. But after their epic struggle for happiness, their village, or their clan, will never be the same.
A son of rich man walks down the road in a miserable village, right near his mansion. He meets an old man or a woman. They sit for a while and talk.
Poor peasant conveys a message to a young feudal lord. Later this provokes questions, doubts and thoughts; he studies. One decade later he joins the revolution, to overthrow his own class. Almost all men and women of the revolution lived through that moment when they were told the truth on some dusty country road: Che, Lenin, Engels, Marx, Mao, Fidel, Chavez.
Some stories are extremely unique and powerful:
As documented in a great book written by Ron Ridenour “Backfire”, several Cuban men and women are approached by the CIA and asked to destroy their own country, to kill innocent people, to cause explosions on board civilian airliners in the middle of the flight, to assassinate Cuban leaders, to poison humans and crops with chemicals. They accept; they take money. Then they immediately join the Cuban intelligence and for years work as ‘double agents’, to protect, to save their beloved Cuba. There is not one moment of hesitation. Fatherland is not some commodity; it is not for sale! The Personal lives of some of them are ruined in the process. They keep no money for themselves. They give their entire CIA pay to their country, to buy medicine and other necessities. They feed North Americans with false information. Eventually the story is made public. They save Cuba.
Such are the great stories of decency, of courage, of progress.
Most ‘real’ stories are wise, and they contain unmistakable sparks of humanism. Many of them are also aiming at something that we are all secretly longing for from the bottom of our hearts: something very positive, warm, compassionate and tender. They are yearning for good conclusions, not for some toxic and pinkish Disney or Hollywood-style ‘happy ending’, but for solid, just, and decent finales.
That is exactly why real stories’ are becoming targets of hit men hired by the Empire.
In order to plunder unopposed, to control, and to manipulate, the Western Empire assumed that it has to give legitimacy to its own acts of terror. Those acts have to be elevated to the highest moral ground.
To do so, traditional logical and philosophical thinking has to be decomposed, then ‘new thinking’ introduced. A thoroughly new breed of stories must emerge, and even how stories are told must change.
Some would ask: ‘How could crime be packaged as altruism’?
It can, of course, in those societies that perceive ‘reality’ after getting stoned on huge daily doses of advertisement and propaganda, two sides of the same coin, two synonyms of lie and deception.
In order for the brutal Empire to pose and to be considered as the savior of the world, first the analytical thinking of people has to be damaged, their ability to think has to be sharply reduced. The stories they are told have to become ‘light’, ‘entertaining’, extremely far from the reality.
The human spirit has to be broken, human nature reshaped.
Then all that is real and decent and pure in people has to be dragged through a muddy and nontransparent bath of nihilism. Things that used to be sacred have to be spat on, optimism humiliated, and ordinary kindness and warmth killed.
Instead, substitutes have to be injected, if needed, by force.
It is because the acts of imperialism, like constant plunder and the commodification of life itself, are grotesquely unnatural occurrences; they are morbid and pathological. And the only way they can be accepted is if the reality is canceled, and then substituted by a ‘new’, gruesome and irrational pseudo-reality.
If in thousands of brainless Hollywood films, millions of people continuously vanish, victims of mutants, robots, terrorists, giant insects or microorganisms invading the earth, then the public becomes hardened, and ‘well prepared for the worst’. Compared to those horrors of pseudo-reality, the real agony of millions of men, women and children in places like Iraq, Libya or Afghanistan appear to be quite insignificant.
“Their children get cancer from depleted uranium coming from our bombs, or they get simply torn to pieces… well, guess what: our children are eaten by monstrous tarantulas or murdered by Arab terrorists…” Those words are not pronounced, of course. The monologue takes place in the subconscious realm.
If a false giant shark begins stuffing itself with the actors depicting defenseless swimmers on a picture-perfect resort beach, such fictitious terror shocks more viewers and at much greater extend than some real violence unleashed against the prisoners at the US torture and detention centers like those at Abu Graib or Guantanamo.
Using the same concept, the viewers tend to feel much greater shock when California keeps falling off the cliff to Pacific Ocean, in one of those disaster movies, than when they read about dozens of real and decent governments all over the world being overthrown by the Empire for simply being ‘too decent’, even when millions of real people perish in the process.
Psychologically, for many people there is no border between reality and pseudo-reality, anymore. Consumers of blockbuster movies and the mass media were made immune to the real terror the Empire is spreading all over the world, because they have already seen ‘much more frightening’ stuff beaming from the box.
Simultaneously, indoctrination gets encoded permanently in people’s brains; they cannot make the distinction, anymore, between some outright BBC propaganda against China or Cuba and the reality they encounter when they visit those two countries.
Some now judge the world and make political and other decisions strictly based on that hybrid of reality and pseudo-reality: “Chinese murdered brutally several thousands of people when they torpedoed some fictional ship, as we witnessed in the latest Hollywood blockbuster, therefore we have to finance their ‘opposition’ and send our battle ships to East China Sea, to deter the potential expansion plotted by Beijing.”
And if our film studios and pop writers keep demonizing Chinese people, South Americans, Russians, Arabs, Iranians, North Koreans and many others, the imaginary threat, in some very twisted but well calculated and effective way, suddenly begins to justify real and countless aggressions by the military forces of the Empire.
The Empire that consists of Western fascist regimes that call themselves ‘democratic’ and ‘free’, have already murdered several hundreds of millions of human beings on all continents. They dropped mountains of bombs and biological weapons on countless countries; they have experimented on people, and overthrew most of the governments that were determined to serve their own people. They murdered Presidents and trained gangsters, whom they elevated to the ranks of top military brass, as happened in Indonesia, Chile, Egypt, El Salvador and in many other places. These gangster-soldiers were then given training, on Western military bases, in the ‘art’ of interrogation, torture and punitive rape, as well as ‘disappearance’ of the opposition.
But the writers of ‘new stories’ and manufacturers of pseudo-reality do their absolute best to block this line of thinking. There is no discussion about the fact that the world is now fully enslaved by Western neo-colonialism, that it is controlled and oppressed to the greatest possible degree.
The past is already fully changed and re-written, with collaborators coming from the ranks of both academia and so called ‘liberal’ and ‘creative elites’. Grotesque lies are thousands of times repeated and therefore, as was suggested by the chief ideologist of Nazi Germany, they became truth. As Joseph Goebbels so correctly observed, many decades ago: “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.”
The lies are retold about China, the Soviet Union, Latin America, about Western colonialism, and neo-colonialism, the Cold War, Afghanistan, and so many other essential places and events. Almost all related stories, except those that were pre-selected, approved, and useful for the propaganda, had been successfully eradicated, muted, or at least ridiculed.
Inside the Empire itself, almost nobody is protesting, except when it comes to demands for higher wages and better benefits. The Western masses became the most complacent, uncritical group of people anywhere in the world. It is obvious from the art they are producing and consuming, from their political affiliations, from their aspirations.
An amazing paradox has developed, without being noticed or commented on: ‘the system, which has been professing both individual choice and extreme self-centeredness, actually managed to reduce a substantial part of the human race to an obedient, thoughtless, submissive, and frightened mass of uniformed beings convinced about their own superiority.
The individuality of people almost entirely vanished. Their identity is now closely linked and fully dependent on the manufactured identity of television stars, pop musicians and footballers.
It is logical and essential that the Empire tries to make sure that the real stories get discredited, destroyed, wiped out from the face of the earth; in order to prevent lapses, in order to make sure that human brains stop doubting and accept what they are being served.
Even the closest historic allies of real stories have been kidnapped, corrupted, and forced against them: books, films, music, and theatres, even fairytales.
But to the dismay of their tormentors, while in terrible pain, abandoned and endlessly sad, the stories do not seem to yield. It is because they are brave and proud, as human beings essentially are, and they know that so much depends on them – they are holding one of the last lines of defense against the capitalist genocide, against commercialization of life itself, against the attempt to exterminate human species as we know it.
As a storyteller I know all this, because they, the stories, are always talking to me. I also know that we will hold that imaginary defense line until the very end, together, come what way, with others who are still capable of thinking and hoping, and dreaming.
We will never cease telling the stories, real stories, because that is what human beings have been doing for centuries and millennia; telling stories, listening, learning, reading, moving forward, reluctantly, stumbling but moving nevertheless. We will be holding the line of defense against cultural fascism, because to succumb would simply be like betraying everything that makes life worth living.
For centuries and millennia people were dreaming about justice and kindness, they were fighting for better world where everyone has roof over the head, and food, free education and medical care, where there is no fear and no danger coming from beastly and greedy usurpers.
The ‘real’ stories were carrying such dreams, in their core.
Several years ago I sat in an old Café Brasilero in Montevideo, Uruguay, with one of the greatest Latin American writers, Eduardo Galeano, a man who wrote some of the most magical and powerful stories in the 20th century.
Before we parted, he said:
“I am a hunter of stories; I listen to the stories, then I give this back to the people after putting the stories through a creative process. My position is always that in order not to be mute, one shouldn’t be deaf. One has to be able to listen in order to speak. I am a passionate listener. I listen to reality. Reality is a magic lady, sometimes very mysterious. To me she is very passionate. She is real not only when she is awake, walking down the streets, but also at night when she is dreaming or when she is having nightmares. When I am writing, I am always paying tribute to her – to that lady called Reality. I am trying not to fail her.”
If the regime decides to starve us, real storytellers, we will, as in the marvelous story of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “No One Writes To the Colonel”, rather “eat shit”, than to betray that magic lady called Reality. The stories, the reality is not for sale, as the truth itself is not for sale.
countercurrents
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