Belief to Revolution

Belief to Revolution

               There is an emptiness in the culture today.  The missing food in the stomach, the unfilled glass, the unfulfilled life of the working man.  There is no art, there are no paintings recognized as modern forms of greatness.  Every mural seen on a social media feed someone captured with a smart phone is forgotten and discarded within seconds, even if your cousin created it, even if it actually is great.  There is no good music anymore.  There is culture of some sort, but there might as well not be.  It’s empty and shallow and bland and bitter.
               The kids are on to something though, and everyone knows it.  The radio talk show broadcasters, the news anchors, the politicians, the college drop outs, the electrical engineers.  And they know this because the one thing the kids have that the older generations don’t is a real desire, a yearning to fix whatever this problem is.  The yearning for a better world hasn’t been beaten out of them.  The kids haven’t yet caved to the abuse the way the older generations of today caved, and what’s more, they’re actually putting up a fight.  There is a disgrace in what the older generations didn’t accomplish, but the greater disgrace is in the fact that they didn’t even fucking try.  They didn’t go out marching in the streets in the way this young generation does.

               The conservatives – they vocalize their terror of their feeling that the protests and marching and chanting and looting goes too far.  They fear that this yearning will actually transmute into discovery.  Self-discovery and then self-actualization and then revolution.  Their terror is real and it is delightful.

               The liberals, too, shake with an unspoken trembling fear.  They know the status quo holds them up as the middle managers, the bourgeoisie, the bureaucrats, the overpaid stooges and toadies who are compensated quite well for doing a job that has been long done throughout history by those just like them – the cowardly, sniveling, horrible priests, scribes and academics who have always sucked the teat of government and religious authority for a miserable middle class lifestyle and a miserable middle class paycheck.  They were bought off and they took a deal.  And the reality of their hypocrisy and their treason upon all which they claim to stand for is now out in the open for everyone to see, from the conservative, ignorant, racist dingbats to the hungry children who actually have the guts to point to Marx – whether he was right or wrong – as at least a legitimate sociological critic of the status quo.

               My dread, as an alcoholic loser with nothing to lose and no dog in the fight – no wife, no kids or pets or really any close friends (all my millennial counterparts disgust me; I can’t stand them) – is that this emptiness will not lead to self-discovery, self-actualization and revolution.  That the yearning will be co-opted and its momentum will be swung in a direction that leads straight for a cliff.  That the desire for a better world will fall straight off that cliff and onto the jagged rocks in an endless ocean of death, that same ocean in which all the rest of humanity and its past generations have drowned in their own ineptitude, cowardice, apathy and submission.

               Part of what’s missing is belief.  Not of the religious kind.  Although the rightful destruction of religion is what has led to the absence of an understanding of the importance of belief, the meaning of belief as a word and its value as a concept linguistically, in the abstract, and in its relation to ethics.

               Belief is not the same as knowledge.  The kids out in the street are chanting, “black lives matter,” and this is a concept they have knowledge of.  It’s not their belief.  It’s what has been taught to us by the moral leaders we used to have like King and by the generations who followed him.  Anti-racism is not a belief.  It is knowledge.

               A belief can be of less value or of more value than knowledge.  Back in King’s day, or in John Brown, the abolitionists’ day, anti-racism was a belief, from a sociological perspective.  It wasn’t the mainstream opinion.  It’s abhorrently annoying that I would have to explain that a mainstream opinion, a majority opinion, might not be universally accepted and that its equal and opposite challenging minority opinion would still represent a threat to society, but someone has to say it.  A belief of less value than knowledge might be something as trivial as believing it will be sunny tomorrow.  A belief of higher value than knowledge would be an anti-racist belief one hundred and fifty years ago compared to the knowledge that racism is evil today.  The word “belief” and the word “knowledge” have different contexts throughout time and are related to the society in which those concepts are used, spoken of and understood, as I assume I’ve made clear by now.  Yes, this is a linguistic issue.

               And this is why it’s painfully obvious that nobody believes in anything today.  It’s been accepted that belief is trivial, stupid, juvenile and often times used for evil, but this analysis is short-sighted and wrong.  Belief is all of these things, in its linguistic form as a value lower than knowledge, but it misses the other meaning “belief” has linguistically, and that is of something with more value than knowledge.  And that kind of belief, and an understanding of its necessity is sorely missing in such a devastating way.

               In all, there is feeling, there is thought, belief, knowledge, and truth.  These five words sometimes equal each other, but it is most important to note when these things differ.  It is most important to know how these words are distinguished from one another.  Knowledge isn’t the most important thing we can have.  A belief can be much more important.  Sometimes a feeling can be more critical.  Sometimes, a thought can be more profound.  The truth always holds a very high form of relevance.  Thus the importance of the word as it is used linguistically in our society, in what’s left of our culture, and in our court systems which claim to be a system representing an understanding of ethics and a proper arbiter of justice (“I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth…”)

               These kids have the feeling, they have thought, they have some low forms of belief and they have knowledge.  They also have the truth.  But a large part of what’s missing from our society is the highest form of belief.

               We know what happened to George Floyd shouldn’t have happened.  We know that racism is wrong.  We know that police brutality is wrong.  But where do we go from there?  The conservatives don’t want us to go any further, the liberals are scared of the consequences of venturing to go any further, and the kids know that going further is necessary.  But we are sorely lacking in belief, in a belief system, in a direction.  And because of that lack of direction which can only be achieved by a belief system which can only exist because of legitimate beliefs, we can’t expand upon our knowledge and achieve self-discovery, self-actualization, and collective revolution.
               Our society, our country, and our world is ready for a revolution, but that revolution depends upon the discovery and articulation of belief, which then may create a belief system, and then a direction.
               The revolution will follow out of this process.

CHAPTER 19 (EXCERPT)

CHAPTER 19 (EXCERPT)
            Immigration had become a winning issue for right-wingers and nationalists in Europe, so why not in America?  That was the worldwide trend in the First World, and Trump identified it, rode it, and used its momentum to dupe the American people.  Of course, nobody seemed to ask the question about where (particularly Islamic) immigration was coming from into Europe.  Not “where” as in a geographic standpoint, but “where” as in: “What is the origin of immigration from the Third World to the First World?”  People, immigrants, don’t just arrive in floods from the same geographic location randomly.  Like NAFTA’s effect upon Mexican immigration to the United States, there were real, quantifiable reasons for the amount of immigrants to Europe from the Middle East following 9/11, and they had nothing to do with Radical Islam putting a Jihad upon Western Civilization.  Here’s one: the war.

            If you start bombing people in a certain region, people are going to want to leave that region (all internal political turmoil that occurs after bombings and occupations aside).  Yes, in war-torn countries, warring factions battle for control of the region’s tax system.  Using drones to bomb civilian weddings, funerals, schools and hospitals because of intelligence - which may or may not be accurate - claiming knowledge of the existence of a terrorist in the general area is going to stir up a debate in any country, including one with nuclear weapons, like Pakistan, amongst the country’s ruling elite.  The infighting and general loss of infrastructure and wealth from such imperialistic aggression creates a region significantly more impoverished than it once was, which creates a lower ratio of resources to people, and therefore induces a wave of immigrants leaving the oppressed and divided nation, or region.

            I experienced the United Kingdom immigration “services,” back during the Obama years, following the invasions, bombings and occupation of Middle Eastern countries by the Western World.  After a fight with my long-distance girlfriend whom I had traveled to visit, I took a flight from Venice back to England, where I hoped to catch a flight back to the states or to try to work things out with her.  She obviously realized I hadn’t boarded the plane from Venice to Rome with her, and she would have a choice to finish the vacation without me, or to come back to England.  But the flight from Venice back to England experienced a great deal of turbulence after a long delay on the runway, due to a sudden need for “repairs” to the plane.  The turbulence got so bad, the crew thought we might crash, and consequently loaded us up with wine, compliments of the airline.  If someone offers me free booze, I’m drinking it.  I stumbled into customs, drunk.  They searched my bag (thanks Bush and Cameron), and found my left-wing and anti-war literature, A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn being an example.  More importantly, they found some poetry I had written on the topic of how I felt the UK treated Muslims and the overtly racist attitudes I saw directed by English citizens toward Islamic immigrants.  I didn’t appreciate or approve of the often negative references to Pakistani immigrants as “Packies.”  They detained me and transported me throughout the network of government-only roads which are attached to major airports.  I was placed in a barred vehicle with illegal English immigrants from Pakistan and Afghanistan, with the exception of one man who was from Ghana, practically the only Christian I met in the system.  The vast majority of the detainees were from Pakistan and Afghanistan (two countries belonging to one region the natives refer to as Pashtunistan, a major bombing site for American and Western military power) and were Muslim.  I interviewed several of the men who could speak English, and was informed of horrible, demeaning living conditions (cameras in the bathrooms being an example) which existed in some of the concentration-camp styled detention centers I was lucky enough to not be placed in, but only viewed from the outside, their high fences, security gates, sectioned off housing and barbed wire eerily bringing anecdotes of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia to mind.  When it comes to capturing people, rounding them up based on their ethnicity or place of birth alone, imprisoning them, and controlling their ability to freely move, I’m not sure World War II ever truly ended.  In terms of the concentration camp approach to dealing with foreigners, immigrants, and those who are kidnapped and incarcerated by the state without even committing a crime and treated like property of the state, or perhaps its trash, World War II in my mind started back when the British invented the first concentration camp.  The war’s concentration camp legacy still exists today in the design and use of immigration detention/deportation centers.

            I was deported back to America after several days, long enough for me to get the idea these sadistic motherfuckers wanted me to understand:  “If you love the Packies so much, we’re going to treat you like one.”  And this hateful, racist attitude was manifesting into rhetoric and policy in Europe, and it was coming to the United States.  Now it’s arrived, and liberals seem to be thrown for a loop over it.  I had been on the fence about immigration before I was detained, dragged through the immigration system, and deported.  Immigration policy as it currently exists is antithetical to what the concept of human rights is supposed to be all about.  The only moral position is a policy of open-borders.

            What the right-wingers and nationalists have never had to defend is the existence of the immigration system itself, and that probably has a lot to do with leftists continuing to use and keep that system while in power, in office.  The system is inhumane.  The nationalists likewise never had to explain what the origin of Muslim immigration was.  Mexican immigration was never explained to the American worker.  I listened to a lot of Rage Against the Machine growing up, aside from developing a background in Geo-politics, or International Relations.  According to Zach de la Rocha (who quit Rage after speaking at the United Nations and realizing his political, or rather humanitarian goals were not achievable through music), immigration from the Third World to the First World is a result mainly of Western exploitation of the Third World, one of those mechanisms for exploitation being imperialism.  You stick your nose where you don’t belong, you try to control and profit from the natural resources of the Third World, you bomb the shit out of nations whose leaders don’t comply with selling out their people, or at least their own political power, you’re going to get scores of thousands of immigrants coming to the shores of the First World.  If you give a people a choice of: move, or get bombed or die starving or live in poverty, a portion of the people will move.  Ron Paul explained to a crowd of Republicans in a Republican primary debate years ago that the CIA has referred to the so-called “phenomenon” of something they call “Blowback.”  This is the concept I’m highlighting here – Blowback.  But the average liberal didn’t listen to the obscure congressman from Texas.  Liberals around the world and Democrats in the United States generally do not have an understanding of this dynamic of Blowback, and are unaware of (or are willing to endorse while their side is in office) the exploitation and/or obliteration of the Third World.  Where I differ from, or rather expand upon Paul’s official position on the matter is I extend the logic from “Imperialism leads to terrorist attacks” to “Imperialism leads to not only acts of terror, but to immigration.”

            The concept of borders is unethical and bombing and sanctioning of foreign people is wrong.  If the left continues to support politicians like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton who are complicit in and endorse the existence of aggressive wars against foreigners and the existence of the immigration system itself, they cannot win elections consistently and create any meaningful, positive change in the world.  They will continue to lose elections and struggle to improve the nation because of the contradictions in their own belief system and actions.

            What liberals are missing is that they are playing into the nationalists’ hands.  They are supporting the idea of a wall being built between Mexico and the United States by endorsing the concept that the United States and Mexico should have a border and an immigration system at all, without seeing the contradiction in their belief systems.  The apparent “strength” of Trump and the anti-immigration crowd’s arguments are all based on the following argument: Nations exist objectively speaking, they are real-world entities and not abstractions (I would argue vague abstractions like God, used as a mechanism to create a religion, one now referred to by many anarchists as “Statism”).  If these nations have an obligation to protect their “own” people (as has been commonly assumed since the Magna Carta), and uphold their “own” people’s, or citizens’ rights, then it must be recognized that some nations are “better” than others, with the propaganda of America being a great, if not the greatest nation on earth in the back of the brainwashed minds of the average American Public School student.  If America is a “great” nation, of course foreigners would want to immigrate, to migrate to American soil, either for opportunities lacking in their own countries (which to the average, dumbed-down liberal has nothing to do with Western Imperialism), or perhaps due to some innate jealousy that drives them to travel across the world in some sort of Holy War, or Jihad.  According to the logic, these foreigners therefore threaten the “rights” (advantage) of the citizens of “great” countries like America, which creates a need for something like an immigration detention and deportation system.  It’s been Democrats refusing to embrace or accept the truth which prevents them from winning arguments with nationalists, right-wingers, Republicans, neo-Nazis and neo-fascists, that has led to this “need” for liberals to punch right-wingers in the streets, and the truth is this: the concept of a border itself is incompatible with humanitarianism.