US military propaganda loses its grip on your mind the second you consider the last time you were threatened by a terrorist vs. the last time you were threatened by a health insurance corporation.
One of these threats (the health insurance corporation) is a daily reality in American lives, killing tens of thousands of us a year. Yet the government spends nothing going to war with BlueCross executives, and trillions maintaining endless warfare against “terrorism.”
The answer to people who pay attention to this stuff is obvious: military leaders and corporations created anti-US terrorism through their century of war crimes and now use it as a moral smokescreen to keep people from examining the violence we levy against innocent people.
There are other examples. The threat of eviction. The threat of termination. The threat of having no social security benefits. The threat of Monsanto’s pesticides in your kid’s food. Rather than eliminate these threats via radical government action, the state ignores them.
The daily threats on Americans’ minds and livelihoods, waged by capital in order to extract maximum value from them before death, are profound, and amount to a sort of miasma of terror that floats over people’s heads every day. Al Qaeda is nothing compared.
I recently read Mark Fisher’s seminal “Capitalist Realism.” In it he describes Zizek/Lacan’s idea of the “Big Other,” the faceless majority the state needs you to think exists and supports its heinous acts. It is the lie that makes people think radical improvement is impossible.
The Big Other is not real. The state’s PR organs (chief among them a corporate press) work daily to reproduce the state’s view as though it’s the view of the public. The pain you feel from capital’s squeeze on your life is widely shared, even if others don’t have the terminology.
The challenge of the American left over the next decade, in my opinion, will be in repoliticizing the constant pain and fear people have learned to see as a natural byproduct of life itself — to (in Fisher’s words) “transform the taken for granted into the up-for-grabs.”
What that means is talk to those we know who are hurt by corporate-capital but believe they’re hurt by something else (Democrats, MAGA, Putin, terrorists, commies, or some other master narrative). COVID is an opportunity for this like we haven’t seen since ‘08, and a better one.
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