...and back to Michael Parenti

Michael Parenti - the quintessential pinko commie subversive

As an antidote to all that bullcrap from the BBC I've been linking to recently, here's me re-linking to a couple of talks by Michael Parenti which I consider to be absolutely essential listening for any budding Conspiraloons out there...

• CONSPIRACY & CLASS POWER - Part 1 - Part 2

• The JFK Assassination and the Gangster Nature of the State - Part 1 - Part 2

• Contrary Notions

Parenti is essential listening because his ideas break out from the narrow confines of what currently constitutes 'permissable' political discourse

Parenti is a very robust and articulate spokesperson for those of us who believe that...

• there is such a thing as an elitist class
• there is such a thing as an elitist class interest
• that elitist interest is pursued with sometimes deliberate, sometimes covert, intent

It goes without saying that those of us who hold the above parapolitical beliefs are currently dismissed as lunatic, whackjob conspiracy theorists

...very often by newspapers and television stations that are owned or controlled by that non-existent elitist class which has no vested elitist class interest and which pursues its non-existent interests completely in the open with total respect for all human life.

Sad to say, I'm unaware of any heavyweight British academics of Parenti's quality. Come to think of it, there aren't many North American ones either. Peter Dale Scott comes to mind

None of the above constitues an unqualified endorsement of Parenti. He advocates some views and solutions I personally disagree with but his analysis of the socio-economic structure of our current system is bang on the money imho

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And whilst bigging up pinko commie subversives it's also worth mentioning a particular meme that's been doing the rounds on the conspirasphere since the current economic crisis entered a more overt stage...

That is the idea that, through the banking bailouts, the British and US governments are imposing Communism on their people via the back door

Hmmmmmmmmm, I'll just scratch my chin pensively for a second or two there

Maybe if the British and US governments were nationalising profitable businesses and putting them completely under state control then, yes, that could be a form of Communism

But what is actually happening is that the British and US governments are handing over stonking amounts of public cash, cash that will take generations to tax back off people, to the bankers in exchange for absolutely fuck all, and certainly no publicly-accountable control

That's as good an expression of Corporate Fascism*, not Communism, as you're ever likely to see

What's going on here is an awful lot of middle-class conservatives can see that they're getting buttfucked but cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that it's the very system they've endorsed all these years that is being harnessed to do the buttfucking

ergo, it must be communist in some way

yeah, right

hmmm, much cognitive dissonance

We didn't have genuinely free markets before the current crash got under way and they are not being replaced by communism. We lived under a oligarchical kleptocracy before the crash and we still live under a oligarchical kleptocracy after. The New World Order is the just the same as the Old One. It's just a tad more overt these days, that's all

I'd be the first person to acknowledge that populist concepts such as socialism, or environmentalism, or even religion get hijacked and subverted to suit elitist, totalitarian ends but that doesn't mean that ideals such as enviromental awareness, a desire for social justice or the natural human tendency for spirituality are intrinsically evil; even if some right evil bastards take control of them sometimes

There is, unfortunately, plenty of scope to get downhearted and depressed about the apparent power of the interests that would screw us all over and the flaws in the infilitrated movements which claim to oppose them but, fuck it, it's how we respond to the challenges in Life which define and shape who we are.

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* = of course, according to some right wing loons, Fascism doesn't actually exist and all Bad Things that have been attributed to Fascism in the past are, in truth, Socialist. Take this comment recently seen on The Antagonist's blog for example...

"Talking of 'fascism' (a term you throw around with the abandon of a child with a toy) do a little research, comrade, and you'll discover that both Mussolini and Hitler were socialists. Not to mention Stalin, Mao and all the other squalid little regimes around the world that have caused the world so much suffering. They've probably notched up a good 250 million murders at least between them. Talk about state oppression!"

Yup, neither Mussolini nor Hitler were fascists. An outstanding expose of Real™ History

here's another fucking commie to add to the list

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