Controlled Opposition
Neither party stands for the people. Rather, they parties play their part dutifully as the monolith behind the scenes continues to amass power.
Something struck me a while back as I found myself at a Vietnamese (Lunar) New Year festival. They played two national anthems: that of the United States and the anthem of the Republic of Vietnam. And it struck me: these are two entities that have been overrun by an enemy force, it’s just that only the latter fully realizes it.
That may elicit some eyerolls. “We don’t live a conquered country, come on, man. We are a free country!” You can hear the chorus echo.
That’s wrong.
We live in a country that has, since JFK, been captured by a monolith. Since then, it has not just ignored the interests of the American people as it solidifies its own power, it has also enabled a radical ideology to eat us from within.
Let’s go on a little history lesson.
Eisenhower Bids Farewell
When Dwight Eisenhower left office in 1961, he warned of the risks of a Military Industrial Complex:
…[W]e must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Innocent enough on the surface, but someone as disciplined as Eisenhower wouldn’t use the phrase “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist” without very good reason. As an accomplished General, Eisenhower knew this world better than almost everyone, and certainly better than his successor…
JFK Blown Away
What else do I have to say?
Billy Joel aside, JFK did heed Eisenhower’s warnings and took on the military industrial complex, particularly after the Cuban Missile Crisis. A lot has been written about Kennedy’s war on the Military Industrial Complex and it is well established that Kennedy wanted to disband the CIA.
Of course, JFK never really got the chance to do that after he was assassinated in Dallas shortly after his intentions about the CIA became known.
What a crazy coincidence right?
Let’s shoot straight: we don’t know the full extent of what happened behind the Kennedy assassination. At this point, we may never know for sure as every President since then has blocked and delayed the release of classified documents relating to the assassination. But the timing and the circumstantial evidence strongly implicate the CIA as a potential conspirator in the plot.
So Who is Really In Control?
Since JFK, it is notable that no President has dared to really challenge the Military Industrial Complex. Republicans and Democrats alike have acquiesced and started wars, continued wars, and never really end them.
And this brings us to a broader point: American Politics are now Kayfabe.
kayfabe (n) - is the portrayal of staged events within the industry as "real" or "true", specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not staged.
Kayfabe can most easily be thought of as W.W.E. wrestling. It looks real, but it’s not. And you can think of Republicans and Democrats as those wrestlers jumping in and performing to keep the masses engaged in their act and distracted from the real issues.
Whoever or whatever is making decisions about the future of this country isn’t a politician you see on a stage somewhere. They are actors and distractors.
Entrenched Powers Profit from the Status Quo
To understand who or what is really moving the pieces on the chess board, it is important to understand a basic fact: entrenched power and wealth profit greatly from keeping the status quo in place.
And if you think about the political behemoth, it is more and more optimized for maintaining a status quo. We all know it: elect Republicans or elect Democrats: not much is going to change. Both will spend more money than they have, both will start and continue wars, and both will pass laws and create loopholes that actually help monopolies and other consolidated powers even as they attack them rhetorically.
Power over Principles
I am not sure if America’s leaders were ever guided by principles. I want to say yes, but history is written by the victors and is largely geared toward presenting themselves as virtuous. But history aside, I can say with much more certainty that the leaders of the United States over the past sixty years have been focused primarily on accruing and stiffening power and control.
When your leaders lack principles, so too the entire body will soon follow. As our leaders have abandoned principles of merit, hard work, and free thought, the American people have forgotten them as well.
Without staunch principles, all that remains is the chase for power and status. This cultural vacuum is one that Postmodern Marxists have gladly stepped into to fill the void.
Postmodern Marxists Arrive
The other macro trend that is needed in order to understand where we are today is the proliferation of postmodern Marxists that also started in the 1960’s. Without going into too much detail, the philosophy arose and began to grab power in academia.
In sum, postmodern Marxists view the world through the lens of oppression, and target tearing down anything that causes that. Of particular note, it attacks the existence of Truth and objective merit. Instead, it claims that everyone’s views of the world are distinct and more-or-less equal.
Simplifying from there, these postmodernists arrived in academia and trained acolytes at many elite institutions and have permeated out into the culture from there, co-opting the Democratic party and wealthy urban liberals along the way. There is a longer story to be said here, but the end result should be clear to all: today’s Democratic Party is being pulled more and more toward radical postmodern Marxist thought. The avowed socialists like Bernie and AOC, the “defund the police” crowd, the pre-emptive selection of positions of power based on sex and race, and more are all the culmination of postmodern Marxist thought.
The Controlled Opposition
And now, finally, we get to the title of this piece. With the Democratic Party having been captured by the Postmodernists, Republicans now serve to persist the existing power structures and acquiesce to bot the Military Industrial Complex and the Postmodernists.
They are the definition of a controlled opposition.
Rather than stand for the principles and values that many Americans do still hold and view as definitional, Republicans serve two primary roles:
Act as a minor speed bump to slow down radical Democratic policies
Quite literally act (as in: be actors) to portray conflict and foment division among the people to distract from the continued pillaging of the American people
And when I talk about the pillaging of the American people, I am speaking principally of the spending that we’ve seen since George W. Bush of hundreds of billions or trillions more than we bring in. Much of that has been tied to the Military Industrial Complex and the rest of D.C. and positions of power in other industries and areas have found easy ties to the monolith in D.C. Together, government and corporations have conspired to defraud the American people. We are out of balance:
You’ll hear talking points of “oh, all this debt is fine, everyone else is doing it, it’ll work out.” And you know what? That’s exactly what someone who is getting defrauded while willfully consuming the propaganda of the fraudsters would say! It’s like your grandmother defending the nice Nigerian Prince who’s totally going to send her back a lot of money real soon.
There is a great logical maxim: anything that can’t go on forever won’t go on forever. Well guess what: spending a trillion dollars more than you bring in may work for a bit, but eventually it won’t. And when the music stops, it’s not going to be politicians or those connected holding the bag. They’ll be long gone, and it’ll be everyday Americans who are left footing the horrors that follow.
But if there is one thing to remember, it’s this: Republican politicians, minus a few notable examples, are complicit in this. They are no better or worse than the Democrats who play the same game with a Marxist flavor to their rhetoric.
A Conclusion
So that was all pretty dark (minus the Costanza meme). And it may have seemed a bit winding. But for anyone who stuck it through, I hope the thread makes sense. Historical context provides a lens, which is important when the present seems chaotic and uninterpretable.
All this to say: talk of the Military Industrial Complex, Postmodern Marxists, and Shadowy Cabals can sound conspiratorial. But to be clear, I don’t mean to suggest that there is/are specific plans and secret meetings where all this gets decided. Such a claim is as laughable as the oft-repeated joke that the Patriarchy meets regularly to decide how to oppress women. We used to, sure. Those Thursday nights were great, but we don’t do that anymore!
Rather, these systems that arise are emergent, and come directly from how humans interact when they are in groups with specific power dynamics. And that is why the monolith seems inevitable. In many ways, it is: people can come in and out, no one person is the problem. Rather, it is a systemic aspect of self-preservation: D.C. must act as a monolith as it is increasingly the only way that the monolith will survive. So the only answer would be systemic change that the monolith would fight tooth and nail to prevent.
Of course, one can’t help but tie in the Trump analogy (as a nice loopback to the beginning). Trump was elected because people thought he could be this change and destroy the monolith (or swamp, as he called it). Maybe he tried his best or maybe he didn’t. But we can all agree that the monolith fought him with almost everything it had. And at the end of the day, the monolith won. Naturally, they installed the living embodiment of the monolith.
But while the monolith may have won that battle, they are yet to win the war. But for the American people to have a chance, more need to wake up to what is happening.
Postscript:
If you have further doubts about the presence or the capabilities of the Military Industrial Complex, check out Seymour Hersh’s story that just broke:
For those not familiar, Seymour broke the Abu Ghraib prison story back in 2004, and here he has acquired intimate details of how the U.S. bombed the Nord Stream pipelines last fall. One paragraph of note highlights the testimony of CIA Director Richard Helms back in the 1970’s and corroborates our charges here quite well as Helms defends the actions he oversaw including various operations focused on American citizens:
In unpublished, closed-door testimony, Helms ruefully explained that “you almost have an Immaculate Conception when you do something” under secret orders from a President. “Whether it’s right that you should have it, or wrong that you shall have it, [the CIA] works under different rules and ground rules than any other part of the government.” He was essentially telling the Senators that he, as head of the CIA, understood that he had been working for the Crown, and not the Constitution.
In any case, reading Seymour Hersh’s piece is a great follow-up to this, check it out now!