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Is Venezuela in an orbit of international class struggle?

Franz J. T. Lee | 19.05.2009 16:19 | Analysis | Terror War

Apart from some valiant exceptions, the historical question is: why did the European workers so readily follow Hitler and Mussolini? Could this happen again?

Carelessly discarding the natural and social inter-relations, the inherent contradictions, that is, the vital existence of things, and therewith only focusing on the superficial, isolated appearance forms of flowing events, of real persons, of social classes, of historical epochs, hence indulging only in systemic, capitalist practices and formal logical ideology, could very easily end up in material destruction and intellectual ossification, in political manipulation, indoctrination, body, mind and thought control. All this serves as a fertile breeding place for all genres of ignorance and confusion; it not only destroys working class solidarity and resistance, at best it favors ruling class interests, profits and power. For example, many serious investigations have revealed that over 80% of the mighty international mass media, controlled by giant corporations, use this very Orwellian ideology mechanism to divulge brazen lies about the current workers' upheavals, the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and the class struggles in Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, Nepal and elsewhere.

The Murdoch empire and its associated agencies very often use the Orwellian 'scape-goat' ideological technique of turning facts, events and realities upside down: Freedom is Slavery, War is Peace, Fascism is Democracy, Barbarism is Socialism, Class Struggle is Terrorism, Chavez is a dictator. The same barbarian butchers of yesterday, who threw phosphorus bombs on Irak, today are recruiting worldwide all assortments of 'peace agents' ... "Oh, ye Pharisees, ye generation of vipers!" (Jesus Christ)

The socially inculcated authoritarian personality (Adorno), the (especially in the South) still existing feudal religious white master-black slave mentality and the across many centuries induced inferiority complexes seriously impede the revolutionary cultivation of global working class consciousness, with respective logics, reason, praxis and theory. Whole social groups fall into the ideological pot-holes of the maelstrom of 'transition', 'post-capitalism' and even 'post-modern pro-capitalism'. Many of us fall easily prey to all sorts of political myths, blatant lies and mortal hoaxes, ranging from the 'Reichtagsbrand' in Nazi Germany, to the Bay of Tonkin events in Vietnam, to Pearl Harbor, to the mysterious 'Bell Island' electromagnetic incident, the US-Russian Chernobyl nuclear fiasco, to the 'Bin Laden' horror lullaby, to the '9/11' fairy tale from Arabian nights, to Saddam Hussein's 'Arms of Mass Destruction', to 'Chavez's support of international terrorism', to the global 'swine flu' pestilence. To believe in all this we have to be faithful, be staunch, incorrigible consumers of authoritarian and totalitarian ideology and 'absolute truths', to worship Mammon and hate all communists.

Six years ago, on December 26, 2002, after the failed political coup and the oil sabotage staged by the "opposition" in Venezuela, financially aided by the United States government, in an article, "International mass media conspiracy against Venezuela", published in English by the then recently founded Aporrea.Org, we alerted about the global "Eclipse of Reason":

"Since decades, even centuries, as downtrodden peoples and revolutionaries of Africa, Asia, South America, Oceania, the Caribbean, and elsewhere, we are used to the distortions, lies, half-truths, character assassination, racism, discrimination, plots; to the body, mind and thought control mechanisms, to the inculcation of a master-slave mentality, of inferiority complexes, to our wonderful "education" and "socialization", to the "freedom of thought", to the "freedom of expression", to the magnificent "freedom of the press", to the "family" of Venevision, Globovision; of the fantastic "news" of "El Nacional", "El Universal", of the "Voice of Russia", the "Voice of America", UPI, Reuters, ARD, ZDF, CNN, BBC, dpa, New York Times, FAZ, Der Spiegel, BILD, etc., etc. Now, we may also add the 'Toronto Star'!"
(See:  http://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/a1622.html )

In the fabrication of political "news", empty jargon or tricky propaganda, the Nazis (Hitler, Goebbels and Goering), the fascists (Mussolini, Franco) and the Stalinists were experts in falsifying history, the attributes of historical processes and the facts of social reality. Really the ruling ideas became the ideas of the rulers, became ideology. Today most sophisticated technological tricks, gadgets and inventions are used to bamboozle the masses; these mind and thought control devices would make Goebbels green with envy ... even HAARP now serves the global propaganda machinery.

A favorite of cunning propaganda, especially used by GLOBOVISION and other mass media in Venezuela, is the unscientific usage of adjectives or characteristics to disqualify the opponents. Somebody may affirm that "Hitler was a dictator" and everybody may agree. However, if the same person, living in Venezuela, currently would state that "Chavez is a dictator", or that 'Venezuela is a police state', then for the sake of national security urgently he should consult a psychotherapist, for example, Wilhelm Reich or Frantz Omar Fanon. Such irresponsible, ideological statements verify that many of us have already become victims of merciless manipulation, that many of us do not have not have the foggiest idea about global capitalism, imperialism, globalization, socialism and fascism, about what dictatorship is all about.

In spite of the bitter fascist lessons of the 20th century ... of Apartheid, McCarthyism, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Verwoerd, Franco, Batista, Idi Amin, Mobutu, Videla, Pinochet and Papa Doc, ... why do the poor working masses still follow fascist leaders, vote for their own butchers? Why is it so hard to form a class conscious proletarian vanguard, a socialist party here in Venezuela or elsewhere?

In the wake of a Great Depression (1929) and in a devastating, fascist, imperialist world war (1939 - 1945), nobody informed the public about a 'Manhattan Project', the construction of atomic bombs and of 'flying saucers'; and yet ... especially in Germany, ... many social democrats, socialists and reformists accompanied tens of millions of workers who joyfully participated as cannon fodder in an imperialist butchery and lost their lives in two world wars for nothing in return. The general public remained ignorant, the common people knew very little about the strange 'devil's pacts' -- the 'Molotov – Ribbentrop Treaty' also called the 'Stalin - Hitler Pact' (1939), which in the end nobody really pretended to honor.

What do we know today about the future plans of the super powers? How big will be the human sacrifice, the 'collateral damage' this time? The current Recession and Depression of Globalization is a Moloch that has an insatiable, ravenous hunger for arms, for war, for human blood.

Well, already the victims of the Middle East already make up the first million within a decade.

Apart from some valiant exceptions, the historical question is: why did the European workers so readily follow Hitler and Mussolini? Could this happen again?

These same questions the Freudomarxists like Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse seriously have posed years ago. How was it possible that the European working classes so easily succumbed to fascist propaganda and went to war, in defense of the bourgeois fatherland? Why did the Marxists fail to transform revolutionary theory into socialist material force? Did counter-revolutionary reformism, Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein, devour the class struggle and dialectics?

Hundreds of authors have given their opinions and answers to these questions, which range from the errors committed by the socialist leadership, to theoretical mistakes, to the questioning of the scientific validity of Marxism itself.

In 1966, as part of my philosophic studies, I attended a class about "Negative Dialectics" of Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno at the Frankfurt University, and we debated his famous statement: 'To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric'. I wonder what he would have said in the context of current barbarism on a global scale.

But it was Wilhelm Reich who got down right to the essence of the problem, identifying fascism as the fundamental, deeply rooted emotional attitude of each and every exploited and suppressed human being of our modern, industrialized civilization. Parting from his truly praxical experiences as a psychoanalyst, medical doctor and natural scientist, Reich had observed that the structure of the human character in industrialized civilization, which in itself is the product of the socialization process, reproduces inevitably the social structure of society in the form of ideology.

What follows is especially important for the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and class struggle on a global scale.

Reich realized, that the ideology of any given social formation (or mode of production) not only has the function in a distorted manner to reflect it's economic structure in the minds of its members but to equally root this economic structure in their psyche. Thus, Reich identified IDEOLOGY as an obstacle for radical change of society because it factually constituted a material force that prevented the oppressed from acting in favor of revolution.

In analogy to Marx' famous statement, that theory converts itself into a material force (Gewalt) the moment it captures the imagination of the masses, Reich went on to ask: How does ideology convert itself into a material force, as soon as it captures the masses, and what is the concrete effect of this? He gave the answer in form of his splendid analysis of "Mass Psychology of Fascism": The systematic suppression of human, erotic life-generating and life-preservating energy (which he called Orgon) by industrialized civilization and in fact, throughout thousands of years of so-called human civilization, is responsible for the crippling of the human character. Only a radical revolution in all spheres of human life and civilization as such could enable what Reich calls the natural, self-regulating, creative character and what others like Frantz Omar Fanon and Ché Guevara have simply called: the New Man.

Franz J. T. Lee
- e-mail: franzjutta@cantv.net
- Homepage: http://www.franzlee.org.ve

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  1. Magic rocks, and idealogues — sceptic