Upside Down World

Revolution Anyone?

Smiley Genocide Joe, Jill Biden, and their fearsome imperial bite-dog “Commander”

Child in US-Israel-crucified Gaza

For what you call the Law is but a club of the rich over the lowest of men, sanctifying the conquest of the earth by a few and making their theft the way of things. But over and above these pitiful statutes of yours that enclose the common land and reduce us to poverty to make you fat stands the Law of Creation, which renders judgement on rich and poor alike, making them one. For freedom is the man who will thus turn the world upside down, therefore no wonder he has enemies.

- British Christian communist Gerrard Winstanley, 1649[1A]

US-Americans live in an upside-down political world where falsehood regularly masquerades as truth.  The reality inversion is most obviously and crassly apparent on the Republifascist side of the nation’s binary party spectrum where:

-        an overwhelming election loss is turned into a stolen election victory

-        an authoritarian and violent white nationalist movement to cancel what’s left of US bourgeois electoral democracy, parliamentarianism, tolerance, civility, and rule of law becomes a noble campaign to “save America” for “We the People.”

-        a bloody mass putschist assault on the US Capitol is portrayed as a festive working-class protest.

-        a demented and malignant sociopath who admires and channels Adolph Hitler is held up as a people’s democracy champion.

-        a cult of personality has been built around the biggest and foulest asshole of all recorded time, who also happens to be what Noam Chomsky accurately described in January of 2020 as “the most dangerous criminal in human history.”[1B]  

-        a serial sexual assaulter of women, a multiply accused rapist, and a blasphemous, record-setting prevaricator and swindler is made into a noble evangelical savior.

-        the capitalist and imperialist Democratic Party is routinely and ridiculously portrayed as “radical Left,” “Marxist,” and “communist.”

-        a putschist-fascist presidential candidate who promises to criminally investigate, prosecute, and incarcerate his political enemies accuses his enemies of politically weaponizing the criminal justice system against him.

-        a putschist-fascist presidential candidate claims to be suffering “persecution” at the hands of a supposed “radical left deep state” that has let him slide on one egregious offense after another, including trying to cancel the republic and install himself as a dictator.

-     a putschist-fascist presidential candidate names his relentlessly Orwellian[2], hate-spewing, reality-reversing, and anti-social media site “Truth Social.”

-        The candidate has the Orwellian chutzpah to claim that he is the victim of a “two tiere criminal justice system” aligned against him even as the epitomizes the old working-class maxim that “money talks, bullshit walks” by spending tens of millions of dollars to hire lawyers to effectively delay, cancel and nullify the numerous legal actions that have been belatedly taken against him.   

But the rightmost-/Reich-most  party of Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump has no monopoly on the inversion and perversion of reality. The Democrats’ aptly nicknamed and bumbling, arch-imperialist standard bearer “Genocide Joe” Biden has a long record of turning truth upside down and inside out,  something I’ve documented at length in numerous publications[3].  His alleged concern for the defeat of tyranny and the protection of humanity is coldly contradicted by his provocation and fueling of a miserable war that has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians while pushing the risk of terminal nuclear war to its highest level in more than five decades. 

Equally if not more grotesque is Biden’s embrace, funding, equipping, and politico-diplomatic protection of Judeo-fascist Israel’s six-month genocidal war on the people of Gaza – a backing of openly eliminationist and racist ethnic cleansing made all the more repulsive by his deceptive efforts to appear disturbed by Israel’s “excessive” slaughter of innocents. A stellar report on the website of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA captures the  Orwellian hypocrisy of these efforts:

“On March 25, Genocide Joe Biden finally agreed to allow the United Nations to pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Israel's horrific war against the Palestinian people (even though the U.S. still refused to vote for it).  This after months of vetoing or putting roadblocks in the way of a ceasefire resolution. Four days later, the Washington Post revealed that the same Biden sent another ‘arms package’ to Israel—this one including 1,800 new 2,000-pound-bombs!...As of March 30, Israel has killed more than 32,623 Palestinians across Gaza. Thousands more bodies are uncounted, buried in the rubble from U.S.-supplied bombs. The most horrific monster in the pipeline of death from the U.S. to the Israeli military are the 2,000-pound bombs…These weapons of mass destruction have turned much of Gaza into an uninhabitable moonscape with 40-foot-wide craters where apartment buildings, hospitals, and schools used to be. They have blown people up as they fled into areas Israel designated as safe for civilians. They have damaged or destroyed more than two-thirds of all structures in northern Gaza. They are a weapons of genocide…This is what these bombs have done already. Think about what it will mean to the people of Gaza that Biden just shipped 1,800 more of these to Israel!”

It gets worse. Joe “Willow Project” Biden campaign’s portrayal of the incumbent as a champion of climate sanity is belied by the incumbent’s approval of fossil fuel projects that erase the carbon emission reduction from his Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). As the Center for Biological Diversity reported last fall:

“The climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis….According to an international scientific consensus,…a rapid fossil fuel phaseout is necessary not only to prevent irreversible climate catastrophe, but to stem the interlinked public health, environmental justice and biodiversity extinction crises worsened by the fossil fuel industry…As a wealthy nation with a high capacity to manage a just transition to clean, renewable energy, as well as a dominant role in driving the climate crisis, the U.S. must rapidly phase out fossil fuel production and use. A Tyndall Centre report concluded that an equitable fossil fuel phaseout for the U.S. requires ending all oil and gas production by 2034 for a 50% chance of limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C and by 2031 for a 66% chance…But the United States [under Biden] is expanding fossil fuels…Despite the imperative to stop fossil fuel expansion, the U.S. is leading the world’s largest expansion of oil and gas production. The U.S. is now the biggest oil and gas producer in the world, and in 2023 U.S. oil production is projected to reach a historic high…The U.S. has also become a major fossil fuel exporter. Since the crude oil export ban was lifted in 2015, U.S. crude exports have increased by a whopping ~950%. The U.S. is now the number one exporter of petroleum products and the number one exporter of gas. As exports continue to grow, greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. fossil fuel exports are undermining the emissions reductions from the Inflation Reduction Act…While the Biden administration has periodically stopped fossil fuel projects, it has much more often greenlighted them. Approved projects include the Willow drilling project in the Alaskan Arctic, the Mountain Valley pipeline in Appalachia, massive oil and gas export terminals in Gulf Coast communities already overburdened by pollution, and record numbers of oil and gas drilling permits on public lands. Many of these projects have projected lifespans of 30 to 50 years that threaten to lock in carbon emissions and harm communities and wildlife in the long term.”

In the upside-down world of US-American media politics culture, climate ranks far below other citizen and voter concerns including “the economy,” terrorism, health care costs, education, Social Security solvency, crime, immigration, drugs, “the deficit,” “corruption,” and more – a great accomplishment of the petro-capitalist climate denial industry and capitalism’s longstanding separation of humanity from the natural world (of which homo sapiens is a key wild card part.)

How absurd. The climate crisis is arguably the biggest single issue of our or any time.  There’s no democracy, justice, love, play, poetry, civility, music, economic security, science, spirituality, health, on a dead planet. Who wants to turn a baked and poisoned world upside down?

For the most part and with some marginal exceptions, the Orwellian US corporate media is portraying the 2024 election cycle as just another “polarized” and “partisan” contest in “America’s turbulent democracy,” as if both of the nation’s only two viable political parties aren’t dedicated agents of mass-murderous eco-exterminist US capitalist-imperialist class rule – one a Weimar-like entity clinging weakly to what’s left of US bourgeois democracy (the dismal dollar Dems)  and rule of law and the other (the raging radical RepubliNazis) melding the richly illiberal threads of the American political tradition into a new Amerikaner fascism.

This makes the “mainstream” media deeply complicit in the fascisation of the country.  So does its ridiculous and regular references to the radically reactionary, post-republican Republicans as “conservative” and “populist,” its habitual descriptions of the corporate Democrats as “left,” and its giant and powerful liberal-run entertainment sector’s relentless promotion, normalization, and encouragement of mass violence and societal catastrophe[4].

The white nationalist cretin Clint Eastwood in the patriarchal, racist, and fascist Holywood movie Gran Torino.

At a certain point it needs to sink in that this upside down, inside-out, opposites world is too dangerous to tolerate any longer.  Why continue to muddle on like dazed mice trapped in a nonsensical No Exit maze of “tails they win, heads we lose,” where 2+2=5 and Love is Hate?  It would be one thing if this farcical “democracy” was another noir futurist movie or novel. But this is the real world, not some dystopian political science fiction we can turn off or put back up on our bookshelves. Sadly, this nauseating, corporate-crafted bg moneyt shit-show featuring Donald “Vermin” Trump (as Godzilla) versus Genocide Joe Biden (as Kong) is what preposterously passes for popular sovereignty atop the most dangerous imperialist power in world history – a lethally destructive nation that poses grave, globally unmatched threats to human survival. Tuning out from the nightmare in horror and personal retreat is a partly understandable response that might appear to be self-protective. But doing so is itself a political act of surrender to a madness that will engulf all our private “safe spaces.” What’s really required is turning on to calls for the overthrow of an underlying system – capitalism-imperialism – that shits up this poisonous political culture and expects us to applaud as it proceeds to cancel all prospects for a decent human future.  “Crazy” as doing that must sound to many people, there’s something far crazier given the overlapping, mutually reinforcing, and accelerating existential crises humanity now faces (ecocide, the drift to nuclear war, pandemicide, and fascism) under the deranged rule of capital: not doing that. Revolution, anyone?

Notes   

1A. I think one can appreciate this passage without embracing the author’s Christianity, which dominated the rhetoric of Winstanley's early-mid 17th Century time and place.

1B.  As Chomsky explained, “Are the crimes [of which Trump was accused in his first farcical  impeachment trial] discussed a basis for impeachment? Seems so to me. Has Trump committed vastly more serious crimes? That is hardly debatable. What might be debatable is whether he is indeed the most dangerous criminal in human history (which happens to be my personal view). Hitler had been perhaps the leading candidate for this honor. His goal was to rid the German-run world of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and other ‘deviants,’ along with tens of millions of Slav ‘Untermenschen.’ But Hitler was not dedicated with fervor to destroying the prospects of organized human life on Earth in the not-distant future (along with millions of other species)… Trump is. And those who think he doesn’t know what he’s doing haven’t been looking closely…Is that a wild and ludicrous exaggeration? Or the very simple and apparent truth? It’s not difficult to figure out the answer. We’ve discussed it often before. There is no need to review what is happening on Trump’s watch while he devotes every effort to accelerating the race to [climate] catastrophe, trailed by such lesser lights as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Australia’s Scott Morrison.”

2. By Orwellian, I mean truth-inverting.  I have no fondness for the anti-communist snitch George Orwell.  The brilliant Australian propaganda critic Alex Carey noted that Orwell missed the target by seeing the Soviet Union as the main source of truth-inverting propaganda in the world:  “The [anti-]communist craze has been created and sustained for so long that we are in danger of believing in it – believing for instance, that we should take George Orwell’s warning about 1984 seriously. Orwell warned that a crude and brutal totalitarianism would come from the left of politics and subvert the liberal democratic freedoms we are all supposed to enjoy. Such a prospect is no more than part of the [anti-]communist craze of the twentieth century, for while the freedoms of liberal democracy are certainly threatened, the danger has always come from the Respectable Right. It has come in the form of widespread social and political indoctrination, an indoctrination which promotes business interests as everyone’s interests and in the process fragments the community and closes off individual and critical thought.”

3. See Paul Street, Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and the Politics of Appeasement (CounterPunch Books, 2020), Chapter 5, titled “Joe Biden? Thanks, Obama.”

4. A clever New York Times commentary last fall was titled “Are the Movies Liberal?” As film critic A.O. Scott noted, “The people who make movies may skew progressive in their beliefs, commitments and voting patterns. The movies themselves tell another story.”