Self-Proclaimed
"Progressives": You Are as Evil as the Empire You've
Enabled
By Charles Hugh Smith
Sorry, pal, you're evil. Self-righteous indignation
counts for nothing in the strict accounting of real
progressivism.
Dear Self-Proclaimed "Progressive": I
love you, man, but it has become necessary to
intervene in your self-destruction. Your
ideological blinders and apologies for the
Establishment's Neocon-Neoliberal Empire are not
just destroying your credibility, they're destroying
the nation and everywhere the Empire intervenes.
While you squandered your political
capital defending zero-cost causes like "safe spaces
on college campuses," the Empire was busy killing,
maiming and making refugees of women and children in
Syria. President Obama and
his Neocon crew (former Secretary Hillary Clinton
included) aren't fools; they rely on drones and
proxy armies to do their dirty work.
Neoliberalism is the Establishment's
core ideology, and by supporting Bill Clinton and
Barack Obama, you furthered, defended and
rationalized the Empire's neoliberal expansion and
exploitation. Neoliberalism's
Big Lie is transforming
everything into a market makes everyone richer.
The dirty little secret of
Neoliberalism is that the markets
it creates are rigged in favor of Elitist cronies. If
you can set aside your "progressive" blinders for a
moment (Bill and Barack could do no wrong for 16
long years of neoliberal exploitation), you might
learn that the Presidents and party you supported
ushered in the era of neoliberal pillage as public-private
partnerships, Philanthro-Capitalism, and rigged
markets that enriched the elitist Establishment
you defend at the expense of the bottom 95%
non-elites.
You defended "higher education,"
which was simply a code word for stripmining the
bottom 95% via student loans to pay outrageous
salaries for under-assistant deans of student
affairs and fund lavish
expansion projects.
You embraced the Corporate Media's
absurd "fake news" witch-hunt, when the biggest
purveyors of fake news/Imperial Propaganda are the
"liberal" media you unhesitatingly believe with all
your heart because it reinforces your sense of moral
superiority. Never mind
that the mainstream "liberal" media is owned by
corporations that are in bed with the Establishment
and the Empire.
You were silent when your
"progressive" president engaged in a global Murder,
Inc., and your former secretary of state bragged "we
came, we saw, he died."Your
sputtering excuses for Imperial over-reach,
extra-judicial murder and the destruction and
displacement of entire populations is a travesty of
a mockery of a sham of real Progressivism.
Wake up, Self-Proclaimed
"Progressives": you're apologists for an Evil
Empire.Your devotion to
the Democratic Establishment that has mastered the
art of bleating politically
correct speech acts while destroying entire nations renders
you the classic useful
idiots, on par with those who defended Stalinism
and the Soviet Gulag because "it was the right thing
to do."
While you devote your energy to "resisting" Trump in
completely empty gestures, you did nothing to resist
the imprisonment of tens of thousands of young men
of all ethnicities in America's War on Drugs Gulag.
While you championed your
fake-Progressive presidents and party, wealth and
wage inequality soared. Did
you not mind because you and your household
benefited from neoliberal skimming and scamming?
How many of your self-proclaimed "progressive" peers
are in the 5% who came
to do good and stayed to do well?
You have the luxury of supporting
ObamaCare because somebody else is paying the bills. It
may be a corporation, the state, a government
agency, a university, a foundation or the taxpayer,
but your support of neoliberal skims and scams
doesn't cost you anything.
You are a hypocrite because you only
engage in causes that don't cost you anything. Prove
to us that you've been questioned or arrested by the
F.B.I. for political action against the Empire, and
you will have earned credibility. If you don't have
any skin in real resistance, then your support of politically
correct speech actsis cost-free and therefore
meaningless.
I am sorry to be the one to tell you,
but your unquestioning support of a neoliberal-
neocon president, party and candidate makes you as
evil as the empire you support, via
your silence, rationalizations and absurdly empty
gestures in favor of cost-free political
correctness.
You have surrendered principled
action in favor of a self-righteous belief that
indignation makes you better then everyone else. Sorry,
pal, you're evil. Self-righteous indignation counts
for nothing in the strict accounting of real
progressivism.
Your claim to moral superiority based
on indignation makes you the moral equivalent of the
"conservative" married preacher who is sleeping with
the church secretary and skimming church funds. His
claim to moral superiority is based on indignation,
too.
By supporting a corrupt, self-serving elitist Empire
of privilege and power, you are an enemy, witting or
unwitting, of truth, justice, self-determination and
liberty.
If you want to become a real
Progressive, it has to cost you. You
will have to abandon the Establishment you belong
to, the party you support and the cheap veneer of
self-congratulatory fake-progressivism you project.
You will have to throw yourself on the gears of the
stripmining, protecting-the-privileged autocratic
war machine you have supported by your silence and
your rationalizations. To quote Mario Savio's famous
extemporaneous speech during Berkeley's Free Speech
Movement:
"There's a time when the operation of the machine
becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that
you can't take part! You can't even passively take
part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the
gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all
the apparatus -- and you've got to make it stop! And
you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to
the people who own it -- that unless you're free the
machine will be prevented from working at all!"
Memo to Self-Proclaimed "Progressives": "safe
places" on campus don't count.
The truth is, you are an
embarrassment to real progressives. You
should be ashamed of your empty claims to the high
moral ground. If you are incapable of feeling
ashamed for your self-congratulatory
self-righteousness, then you are truly lost.
Look, I know you want to "do the right thing." You
want to encourage and support truth, justice,
self-determination and liberty. To follow your
better instincts, you're going to have to admit that
you've been conned, and that you've been a loyal
passive puppet of an Evil Empire.
The "right thing to do" is to
recognize the Neocon-Neoliberal Empire as the enemy
of truth, justice, self-determination and liberty
and withdraw your consent. If
you still don't get it, maybe these essays will
help:
We need to pull together, not
self-divide into ever more fractious camps. The
oldest and most successful Imperial strategy is divide
and conquer. Don't fall for it.
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com
The views
expressed in this article are the author's own and do
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