The triumph of Freedom

Yesterday's referendum in Ireland was a triumph of freedom!

Sounds lovely, doesn't it? Well, this is actually the case! In the splendid world of Capitalism, freedom means that you are free to choose as long as you make the right choice. If you don't make the right choice, you can very quickly stop being free. That's a solid fact. I wonder how many Greeks did actually know the name of Lucas Papademos before he became prime minister...

Got the point? All right then, here comes the blissful part: The people of Ireland are not so foolhardy as the stupid Mediterranean bunch of lazy slackers down there at the Balkans! Here we've got some really wise and judicious people who - after being "isolationist" and "anti-european" in the past (Shame on them!!!) - have finally made up their minds and decided to choose the right! Here we've got one more nation we don't have to completely destroy in order to save them! Of course they will be destroyed anyway, but they will suffer with pride and happiness knowing that their freedom was preserved. Isn't that just wonderful?

Oh, come on!

This whole story reminds me of Liberia in 1997. Back then, this tiny African nation was just emerging from civil war with a scale of violence hardly imaginable to occidental minds. The biggest perpetrator of this violence was a powerful warlord called Charles Taylor. After killing a substantial part of Liberia's population, this man has decided to run in the new presidential elections. His idea may seem a little bizarre, especially considering his campaign slogan: "He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him!" Guess what happened after this profoundly ingenious presidential campain! Did he lose? Nope. Charles Taylor won with a landslide victory of 75%. Why? Because Charles Taylor had a lot of soldiers armed to the teeth and eager to restart the war in the fraction of a second. The people voted for him in order to prevent the renewal of his killing spree. Like Leonardo di Caprio so proverbially said in the scenes of Blood Diamond, this is Africa...

Well, he was not completely right. If only we replace the armed soldiers with banks, multi-nationals and rating agencies, if only we substitute the bloodshed of civil war with the social devastation of lay-offs, foreclosures and financial meltdown, we get the new proverbial statement of our time: This is Europe!

The people of Ireland knew all too well that this "stability mechanism" is going to suck out hundreds of billions from European budgets only to throw them into the bottomless pit of bank bailouts. They knew that it's going to sanction the shit out of any nation trying to escape the downward spiral of austerity. They knew that the patient is being killed by the doctors as we speak. But still they voted for it. Why? Because they also knew that the global 1% can do as they please with this small and weak nation completely dependent on the world economy. They were afraid of being punished without mercy by faceless, heartless and mindless bureaucrats of the EU, the IMF, the rating agencies or whatever institution representing the unelected power of the global ruling class. They were bombarded from every direction by the media saying that their country will be like Greece if they don't obey their will. The blackmail is not hidden among the lines anymore.

I don't think there's any kind of misinformation here. This is pure blackmail. The people believe that there is great power in the hands of the ruling class, and this is not a lie. It's a matter of faith. It is completely true as long as the working class keeps obeying, believing that there is no alternative.

The lack of alternatives is not a lie either. Of course it's not true, but the ruling class sincerely believes in it as well. There's no secret underground lair full of super evil conspirators desperately trying to fool us. The people who fool us are also fooling themselves. Evil people always imagine themselves to be good, either by believing to serve a good cause, or by saying they are just doing their jobs. (The most famous guy "just doing his job" was Adolf Eichmann...) You can rarely convince an evil person in power that he is actually evil.

On the other hand, hating these people is not a bad thing. Actually, it's a good thing. Hating rich people is the sign of a healthy society. Of course hate is not a good thing in itself, it can indeed poison the soul, so there is a point in all the hippie shit about hate, but still it's a natural human feeling. People have very good reasons to be angry not only with the system, but also with the people who reap the profit from its operation. Everyone is participating in the production and distribution of value either directly or indirectly. Even criminals do. Policemen would be out of jobs without them. But there is a surplus expropriated by a small and shrinking minority of people. The working class has all the right to hate rich people for this expropriating behaviour. If you don't know what to do, hating the rich is the best thing you can do.

Contrary to popular belief, fascism is NOT growing on hate. Assuming this is a very big mistake - one of the worst mistakes ever made by the left wing. Fascism is feeding and growing on a completely different human emotion: resignation. Ceasing to believe that justice and fairness is possible and focusing on law and order instead, regardless of the price to pay. This is what fascism is feeding on.

The success of the far right lies in the task of convincing us that there's no way to get rid of oppression and injustice. If we believe that there's no way to get rid of the system, we will stop hating the ruling class. We will stop participating in class struggle. The end of class conflict in a class society is a certain omen for very bad things to come: crimes against humanity on a massive scale. This is the Stockholm syndrome at its largest! After finally accepting the notion that our captors are here to stay, we slowly start loving them. This is what happens in the minds of people during a prolonged economic crisis with no end in sight. But the people still need objects to release their hatred because the things which frustrates them are still there.

The situation is complicated by the fact that fascism was completely defeated back in the second world war. (Many thanks to the glorious Red Army for that!) Now the ruling class wants to avoid overt political fascism with genocide and total war. The far right is just one part of the ruling class and they are still the minority. Instead of giving us scapegoats to annihilate, they try to make us believe that our hatred is somehow unnatural and we have to do something about it. Taking pills, watching soap operas, spirituality, whatever. The problem is that as the system goes deeper into its inherent crisis, there will be more and more medication required to prevent the people from feeling hate. There will either be a point where the dosage of medication would make us unable to do any productive work (except for drooling and staring at the wall), or there might just as well come a new super drug turning us into thinking machines without emotions and needs, like in the otherwise shitty movie called Equilibrium.