Capitalists, Technocrats and Fanatics: The Ascent of a New Power Bloc
The
far-right is no longer at the margins of western political discourse.
It is center-stage. It is no longer dependent on contributions by local
militants; it receives financing from the biggest global corporations.
It is no longer dismissed by the mass media. It receives feature
coverage, highlighting its ‘dynamic and transformative’ leadership.
Today
capitalists everywhere confront great uncertainty, as markets crash and
endemic corruption at the highest levels erode competitive markets.
Throughout the world, large majorities of the labor force question,
challenge and resist the massive transfers of public wealth to an ever
reduced oligarchy. Electoral politics no longer define the context for
political opposition.
Capitalism,
neither in theory nor practice, advances through reason and
prosperity. It relies on executive fiats, media manipulation and
arbitrary police state intrusions. It increasingly relies on death
squads dubbed “Special Forces” and a ‘reserve army’ of para-military
fanatics.
The
new power bloc is the merger of big business, the wealthy professional
classes, upwardly mobile, elite trained technocrats and cadres of
ethno-religious fanatics who mobilize the masses.
Capitalism
and imperialism advances by uprooting millions, destroying local
communities and economies, undermining local trade and production,
exploiting labor and repressing social solidarity. Everywhere it erodes
community and class solidarity.
Ethno-Religious Fanatics and Elite Technocrats
Today capitalism depends on two seemingly disparate forces. The
irrational appeal of ethno-religious supremacists and narrowly trained
elite technocrats to advance the rule of capital. Ethno-religious
fanatics seek to promote bonds between the corporate-warlord elite and
the masses, by appealing to their ‘common’ religious ethnic identities.
The technocrats serve the elite by developing the information systems,
formulating the images and messages deceiving and manipulating the
masses and designing their economic programs.
The political
leaders meet with the corporate elite and warlords to set the
political-economic agenda, deciding when to rely on the technocrats and
when to moderate or unleash the ethno-religious fanatics.
Imperialism
operates via the marriage of science and ethno-religious fanaticism-
and both are harnessed to capitalist domination and exploitation.
India: Billionaires, Hindu Fascists and IT “Savants”
The
election of Narendra Modi, leader of the BJP and long-time member of
the Hindu fascist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) para-military
organization was based on three essential components:
(1) Multi-billion rupee funding from corporate India at home and abroad.
(2) Thousands of upwardly mobile IT technocrats mounting a massive propaganda campaign.
(3) Hundreds of thousands of RSS activists spreading the “Hindutva” racist doctrine among millions of villagers.
The Modi regime promises his
capitalist backers that he will “open India”– namely end the land
reserves of the tribes, convert farmland to industrial parks, deregulate
labor and environmental controls.
To the Brahmin elite he promises to end compensatory quotas for lower
castes, the untouchables, the minorities and Muslims. For the Hindu
fascists he promises more temples. For foreign capitalists he promises
entry into all formerly protected economic sectors. For the US, Modi
promises closer working relations against China, Russia and Iran … . .
The BJP’s ethno-religious Hindu fanaticism resonates with Israel’s
notion of a “pure”Jewish state. Modi and Netanyahu have longstanding
ties and promise close working relations based on similar ethno-racist
doctrines.
Turkey: The Transition to Islamic-Capitalist Authoritarianism
Turkey under the rule of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party has
moved decisively toward one-man rule: linking Islam to big capital and
police state repression. Erdogan’s ‘triple alliance’ is intent on
unleashing mega-capitalist projects, based on the privatization of
public spaces and the dispossession of popular neighborhoods. He opened
the door to unregulated privatization of mines, communications, banks –
leading to exponential growth of profits and the decline of employment
security and a rising toll of worker deaths. Erdogan has shed the mask
of ‘moderate Islam’ and embraced the jihadist mercenaries invading Syria
and legislation expanding religious prerogatives in secular life.
Erdogan has launched massive purges of journalists, public officials,
civil servants, judges and military officers. He has replaced them with
‘party loyalists’; Erdogan fanatics!
Erdogan has recruited a small army of technocrats who design his mega
projects and provide the political infrastructure and programs for his
electoral campaigns. Technocrats provide a development agenda that
accommodates the foreign and domestic crony corporate elite.
The Anatolian Islamists, small and medium provincial
business elite, form the mass base – mobilizing voters, by appealing to
chauvinist and ethnocentric beliefs. Erdogan’s repressive, Islamist,
capitalist regime’s embrace of the “free market” has been sharply
challenged especially in light of the worst mining massacre in Turkish
history: the killing of over 300 miners due to corporate negligence and
regime complicity. Class polarization threatens the advance of Turkish
fascism.Israel and the “Jewish State”: Billionaires , Ethno-Religious Fanatics and Technocrats
Israel, according to its influential promoters in the US, is a ‘model democracy’. The public pronouncements and the actions of its leaders thoroughly refute that notion. The driving force of Israeli politics is the idea of dispossessing and expelling all Palestinians and converting Israel into a ‘pure’ Jewish state. For decades Israel, funded and colonized by the diaspora, have violently seized Palestinian lands, dispossessed millions and are in the process of Judaizing what remains of the remnant in the “Occupied Territories”.
The Israeli economy is dominated by billionaires. Its “society” is permeated by a highly militarized state. Its highly educated technocrats serve the military-industrial and ethno-religious elite. Big business shares power with both.
High tech Israeli’s apply their knowledge to furthering the high
growth, military industrial complex. Medical specialists participate in
testing the endurance of Palestinian prisoners undergoing torture
(“interrogation”). Highly trained psychologists engage in psych-warfare
to gain collaborators among vulnerable Palestinian families.
Economists and political scientists, with advanced degrees from
prestigious US and British universities (and ‘dual citizenship’)
formulate policies furthering the land grabs of neo-fascist settlers.
Israel’s best known novelist, Amos Oz condemned the neo-fascist settlers
who defecate on the embers of burnt-out mosques.
Billionaire real estate moguls bid up house prices and rents “forcing”
many “progressive” Israelies, who occasionally protest, to take the easy
road of moving into apartments built on land illegally and violently
seized from dispossessed Palestinians. ‘Progressives’ join neo-fascist
vigilantes in common colonial settlements. Prestigious urbanologists
further the goals of crude ethno-racist political leaders by designing
new housing in Occupied Lands. Prominent social scientists trade on
their US education to promote Mid-East wars designed by vulgar warlords.
Building the Euro American Empire : Riff-Raff of the World Unite!
Empire building is a dirty business. And while the political leaders
directing it, feign respectability and are adept at rolling out the
moral platitudes and high purposes, the ‘combatants’ they employ are a
most unsavory lot of armed thugs, journalistic verbal assassins and
highly respected international jurists who prey on victims and exonerate
imperial criminals.
In recent years Euro-American warlords have employed “the scum of the
slaughterhouse” to destroy political adversaries in Libya, Syria and the
Ukraine.
In Libya lacking any semblance of a respectable middle-class democratic
proxy, the Euro-American empire builders armed and financed murderous
tribal bands, notorious jihadist terrorists, contrabandist groups, arms
and drug smugglers. The Euro-Americans counted on a pocketful of
educated stooges holed up in London to subdue the thugs, privatize
Libya’s oil fields and convert the country into a recruiting ground and
launch pad for exporting armed mercenaries for other imperial missions.
The Libyan riff-raff were not satisfied with a paycheck and facile
dismissal: they murdered their US paymaster, chased the technocrats
back to Europe and set-up rival fiefdoms. Gadhafi was murdered, but so
went Libya as a modern viable state. The arranged marriage of
Euro-American empire builders, western educated technocrats and the
armed riff-raff was never consummated. In the end the entire imperial
venture ended up as a petty squabble in the American Congress over who
was responsible for the murder of the US Ambassador in Benghazi.
The Euro-American-Saudi proxy war against Syria follows
the Libyan script. Thousands of Islamic fundamentalists are financed,
armed, trained and transported from bases in Turkey, Jordan, Saudi
Arabia, Iraq and Libya to violently overthrow the Bashar Assad
government in Syria. The world’s most retrograde fundamentalists
travel to the Euro-American training bases in Jordan and Turkey and then
proceed to invade Syria, seizing towns, executing thousands of alleged
‘regime loyalists’ and planting car bombs in densely populated city
centers.The fundamentalist influx soon overwhelmed the London based liberals and their armed groups.
The jihadist terrorists fragmented into warring groups fighting over the Syrian oil fields. Hundreds were killed and thousands fled to Government controlled regions. Euro-US strategists, having lost their original liberal mercenaries, turned toward one or another fundamentalist groups. No longer in control of the ‘politics’ of the terrorists, Euro-US strategists sought to inflect the maximum destruction on Syrian society. Rejecting a negotiated settlement, the Euro-US strategists turned their backs on the internal political opposition challenging Assad via presidential elections.
In the Ukraine, the
Euro-Americans backed a junta of servile neo-liberal technocrats,
oligarchical kleptocrats and neo-Nazis, dubbed Svoboda and the Right
Sector. The latter were the “shock troops” to overthrow the elected
government, massacre the federalist democrats in Odessa and the eastern
Ukraine, and back the junta appointed oligarchs serving as “governors”.
The entire western mass media white-washed the savage
assaults carried out by the neo-Nazis in propping up the Kiev junta.
The powerful presence of the neo-fascists in key ministries, their
strategic role as front line fighters attacking eastern cities
controlled by pro-democracy militants, establishes them as central
actors in converting the Ukraine into a military outpost of NATO.Euro-America Empire Building and the Role of Riff-Raff
Everywhere the Euro-American imperialists choose to expand – they rely on the ‘scum of the earth’: tribal gangs in Libya, fundamentalist terrorists in Syria, neo-Nazis in the Ukraine.
Is it by choice or necessity? Clearly few consequential democrats would lend themselves to the predatory and destructive assaults on existing regimes which Euro-US strategists design. In the course of imperial wars, the local producers, workers, ordinary citizens would “self-destroy”, whatever the outcome. Hence the empire builders look toward ‘marginal groups’, those with no stake in society or economy. Those alienated from any primary or secondary groups. Footloose fundamentalists fit that bill – provided they are paid, armed and allowed to carry their own ideological baggage. Neo-Nazis hostile to democracy have no qualms about serving empire builders who share their ideological hostility to democrats, socialists, federalists and culturally ‘diverse’ societies and states. So they are targeted for recruitment by the empire builders.
The riff-raff
consider themselves ‘strategic allies’ of the Euro-American empire
builders. The latter, however, have no strategic allies – only
strategic interests. Their tactical alliances with the riff-raff endure
until they secure control over the state and eliminate their
adversaries. Then the imperialist seek to demote, co-opt, marginalize
or eliminate their ‘inconvenient’ riff-raff allies. The falling out
comes about when the fundamentalists and neo-Nazis seek to restrict
capital, especially foreign capital and impose restrictions on imperial
control over resources and territory. At first the empire builders seek
‘opportunists’ among the riff-raff, those willing to sacrifice their
‘ideals’ for money and office. Those who refuse are relegated to
secondary positions distant from strategic decision-making or to remote
outposts. Those who resist are assassinated or jailed. The disposal of
the riff-raff serves the empire on two counts. It provides the client
regime with a fig leaf of respectability and disarms western critics
targeting the extremist component of the junta.
The riff-raff,
however, with arms, fighting experience and financing, in the course of
struggle, gains confidence in its own power. They do not easily submit
to Euro-US strategies. They also have ‘strategic plans’ of their own,
in which they seek political power to further their ideological agenda
and enrich their followers.
The riff-raff, want to ‘transition’ from shock troops of empire into
rulers in their own right. Hence the assaults on the US embassy in
Libya, the assassination of Euro-American proxies in Syria, Right Sector
riots against the Kiev junta.
Conclusion
A new power bloc is emerging on a global scale. It is already flexing
its muscles. It has come to power in India, Turkey, Ukraine and
Israel. It brings together big business, technocrats and
ethno-religious fascists. They promote unrestrained capitalist
expansion in association with Euro-American imperialism.
Scientists, economists, and IT specialists design the programs and
plans to realize the profits of local and foreign capitalists. The
ethno-fascists mobilize the ‘masses’ to attack minorities and class
organizations threatening high rates of returns.
The Euro-Americans contribute to this ‘new power bloc’ by promoting
their own ‘troika’ made up of ‘neo-liberal clients’, fundamentalists and
neo-Nazis to overthrow nationalist adversaries. The advance of
imperialism and capitalism in the 21st century is based on
the harnessing of the most advanced technology and up-to-date media
outlets with the most retrograde political and social leaders and
ideologies.
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