Scary monsters

The ruling class of our empire needs to keep people in line and to do so they have enlisted past leaders that they use as horrible scary monsters the way ancient Christians used wolfs ghosts, hobgoblins and other spooks in horrid fairy tales to scare children from danger. After all, no child would go near an old Witch woman living in the woods after hearing fairy tales of them pushing children into ovens to cook an eat them.Today’s modern spooks include Pol Pot, (ប៉ុលពត), Joseph Stalin (Иосиф Сталин), Mao Zedong (毛泽东), Adolf Hitler and even VI Lenin (В. И. Ленин). Pol and Stalin did kill large numbers of people unnecessarily. Others, Mao and Lenin, have become the focus of modern historical revisionist who get published by and for those who want to exaggerate these people’s mistakes to make them look like mass murderers of history, along with Hitler. Hitler grew out of a movement supported by capitalist and he inspired such historical villain as Francisco Franco, of Spain or António de Oliveira Salazar of Portugal, fascist rulers who came from the same mold as Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Franco still has supporters and apologists of US conservative pundits. Hitler only became an evil monster after he turned the capitalist western countries.

ប៉ុលពត and 毛泽东

When Ronald Reagan was president, he and Televangilist Pat Robertson described the Sandinista Revolution as if it were the same as Pol Pot. Former President Richard Nixon treated the elected Marxist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, as if he were Stalin and he made every effort to remove him. Many in the press treated Augusto Pinochet, the bloody military dictator who replaced Allende, as a hero. It seems the term totalitarian has begun to mean a government of egalitarianism and it is that egalitarianism that the ruling elite can’t stand. It’s not the killings or repression. It’s the idea that rich and powerful people are the first to go in a socialist revolution. What they don’t want us to know is that the poor are usually the last to suffer.It was Herbert Marcuse who, in his book One Dimensional Man, Warned that “Society takes care of the need for liberation by satisfying the needs which make servitude palatable and perhaps even unnoticeable.”So our large middle class is bought off with TVs cars and other toys that make it seem as if we are living the good life. But our democracy is a farce. Powerful corporation buy political power for our election candidates, who pay lip service to issue the spend little time on, such as abortion, while providing nearly nothing but lip service for the people who vote for them. This creates the façade that we are using “democracy” to control our fates when the US bourgeoisie ruling class is providing us a patronizing façade, of nor more value than a pacifier.In the third world, there is much less façade. Poverty is deep and obvious. Opponents of the system are met with harsh repression. Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are prime examples. In Iraq our leaders bring them meaningless elections that do not improve their lives at all, they have lines and rationing for gasoline, yet they sit on the worlds largest oil reserves. Pakistan is a complete dictatorship. But are we all afraid of these scary monsters and super creeps. Much of the third world has long lost it’s illusions of the first worlds “scary monsters.” Stalin and Pol have their supporters and Maoism has inspired insurgencies that have made great strides in Nepal and India.As for America and the west, even here disillusioned youth question the idea that Mao or Che Guevara are such “scary monsters.” They have seen through the façade of US “democracy,” especially with the war in Iraq and the hypocrisy of our president and they are beginning to see the scary monsters for what they are:paper tigers made from historical people in the past.They know the ruling class is only using these people to scare everyone away from change, revolution and socialism. More and more I see signs that young people in the US, as well as those in the third world, are not afraid to change society.So let our elite leaders sleep at night with nightmares of Stalin, pol and Mao victories, while the rest of us sleep well with dreams of a better tomorrow.