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2009: The beginnings of a revolutionary era (Is Glenn Beck the common man?)
By Roman Shusterman
www.nopolicestatecoalition.blogspot.com
In my assessment it is likely that this year for the first time since the great depression we will begin to see massive unrest related to the economy. In revolutionary times, or times of economic hardships, especially in advanced western societies, there are very few political organizations or groups who are prepared to deal with leadership roles. The masses rightly have great concerns and demands but no real way of gaining economic victories or addressing their concerns, as their leaders generally shut their eyes to the suffering of their own people. Instead the leaders of countries will stress that there is a recovery coming and that there is no need to panic as the situation will improve soon...etc. At the same time the government prepares an ideological political constituency for the well-to-do (common people) who
begin to look into the situation out of curiosity and in order to look for who to blame. From the perspective of someone who is well off in hard economic times, labor unrest and other violent outbursts are seen as something distinct and not connected to the economy and somehow the blame for the unrest is placed exclusively on the individuals perpetrating the unrest or violent acts. If however, people would bother to ask any political scientist, they would be informed that the violent acts and the unrest are a result of a lack of a peaceful political outlet for the masses of newly jobless people and youth who lack political organizing abilities and may act out on any impulses they feel.
To a common person observing from the outside who has no stake in the depressed economic situation, many of the impulses and outbursts exhibited by average jobless people seem criminal and barbaric; and the "common man" instinctually out of self-preservation decides that the police and government should deal with such outbursts by any means necessary including the use of necessary force in order to return "stability" for the "common" citizen. Political pundits and talking heads on cable networks such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh seek to calm the nerves of worried "common" well-off people. They do this by adding a dose of revised history to their political diets in order for them to be able to place blame anywhere but where it truly belongs.
Firstly, the presumption of today's well-to-do "common man" is that anyone who is not willing to accept the government's plan of "don't worry just suffer for a while, the downturn will be over soon", is not the common man but the enemy of the common man. Currently, our country is at the stage where the average person is beginning to place blame where it rightly belongs, at the bankers and the wealthy who invested in a false economy with no safeguards or promises for the future of the masses. The problem is that the mainstream media defines the vocabulary used to set the political debate for the country. Due to media manipulation it is the wealthy that end up being the common people who are rebelling against the "government reformers" like Obama and the history of the reform movement. So far, the majority of
people have witnessed the denunciation of Obama and his every move. The reason is because Obama uses the language of a reformer, to the common man a reformer is someone who is critical of them, someone who threatens to reform them. Glenn Beck puts blame on Teddy Roosevelt, someone normally recognized as a great president, but today, someone who is seen as being part of the problem, part of the problem of reform that is. This is one of the main signs of a revolutionary era, when reformers are called socialists and demonized simply for posing a verbal challenge for the well-to-do. In revolutionary eras anyone who says anything to appease the masses by promising reform or by criticizing the wealthy is automatically causing the wealthy great heartache. The wealthy like to pretend that they are part of the masses and usually they like to to live in extravagance without notice. But, in hard economy times people start to pay more
attention to extravagance because they cannot help wonder why someone should be able to own 100 houses and allow most of them to be empty while millions have to sleep on the streets and die from starvation. During normal times people overlook this extravagance but when the average people themselves lose their jobs they start to wonder about the government and why the government can't be used to rectify this economic situation.
Any attempt the government makes to rectify the economic situation is automatically attacked by the wealthy and privileged who pervert all philosophy and ideology for their purposes. For example, Obama has already been called a fascist and has been compared to Hitler by the political pundits mentioned above. But in order to get away with fooling their audience, they have to revise history. Glenn Beck compared the US economic situation to the German Weimer Republic and it's inflationary economy and depression. Beck then talked about how the situation helped Hitler rise and how the socialist movement grew. Aside from the detail that the socialist movement in Germany was a vast political movement with many factions many of which did not recognize Hitler as their leader, Beck, makes a ridiculous distinction between
Obama and Hitler by calling Obama a liberal fascist ( as opposed to Hitler who was a conservative fascist?). This careful revision of history allows Beck to simply bypass all philosophy and ideology and instead to provide a feel-good perspective to his audience, some of who may have second thoughts about supporting someone like Beck but who end up feeling good with the analysis he provides since it gives them a false sense of knowing history. Ideological programs like Beck's serve as a historical educational outlet for the upper class, however, the obvious questions that arise from Beck's perversions of history are never asked due to the media's bias toward conservative thinking. One way the bias is apparent is when shows are allowed to equate Hitler with other socialists such as Stalin and Mao without explaining the differences in economic policy, groups, and economic classes that those leaders represented. Worse yet, is when the media
equates anyone calling themselves a socialist today with any historical figures who are responsible for criminal acts. This type of equating demonizes average activists and citizens in the eyes of the apolitical "common man" who then perceives these people as his enemy on a personal level. One of the ways genocide is promoted is by the conscious manipulation of history and by the equating of innocent people who may have radical ideas, with historical figures who were involved in criminal acts against their people. This way whoever the ruling party or class is, falsely feel that by silencing or murdering a group of innocent people who hold certain radical ideas they are preventing a larger catastrophe in the future. In fact, Hitler's justification to the German ruling class and people was that he had to get rid of the communists, gays, Gypsies, Liberals, Socialists, and Jews because they represented radical ideas that could pose a
greater threat to humanity in the future. The logic is then that it is a sacrifice worth making since a great tragedy will be averted. Then Genocide is made to be seen as acceptable or even preferable. The violence that is produced by the economic crisis only serves to work in the favor of conservative thinkers as they point to it and urge their constituents to make the "hard" decision and suck up their humanity or stand aside and allow the conservatives to carry out the real work of genocide. The lessons of history teach us that in hard economic times an organization must only use pacifist means of resistance if it is to succeed in making its case to the "common man" and winning over most of the people from all classes to the cause of economic humanitarianism. I as an activist with the No Police State Coalition will only promote pacifist methods of resistance.
What Beck neglects to mention is that he himself fits more into the role of Hitler then Obama. In fact, Hitler, just as Glenn Beck was in the opposition movement on behalf of the "common man" the same people represented by the Glenn Beck program. Hitler was known to all the major political organizations of the time and was a renowned figure in the conservative movement of Germany which is one of the reasons why Germany and Europe ban certain extreme conservative groups from existing today. Communist groups on the other hand are allowed and not seen as threatening.
So the trick of the political pundits in revolutionary times is to claim the revolution for themselves, while the people are rising up to demand a better future, there will be so-called leaders who will claim to represent the people but who will paint a very murky picture as to who is responsible for the economic crisis. They will never accept any blame for themselves but they will go back a few hundred years to look for imaginary culprits and then attempt to link contemporary thinkers to those leaders and place blame on them, hence that will be their scapegoat while they attempt to sucker in the masses to accept a new holocaust with concentration camps and all the rest of it. Information is power and 98% of the people in the US will not have access to the proper information that would allow them to combat
the threat of Nazi fascism that is posed by leaders like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck as well as many others who are a little more careful in their approach. Dabbling in the waters of historical revisionism can be a dangerous thing especially when exposed. The revival of fascism under the guise of the revolution of the "common man" is unlikely but still a possible threat if we are silent, but fortunately we will not be silent and will expose these fascists during our speak out every Thursday and Sunday at Union Square. |
