A Triumph of the Will

(with acknowledgement of Riefenstahl’s propaganda set-piece)

During a ten days stay in Berlin one gets a good perspective on the world outside the United States as well as a fairly objective view of this country, unsullied for once by its absurdly propagandistic news media. Europe seems to be tired and stuck in the same groove as always with many unresolved social and political problems and the populace in Berlin appears to be dejected and listless, despite all the highly advanced visible technical and material advances. Little is to be hoped for however in new ideas or political changes in Europe at present because in its capitalistic mode it abandoned all to what can be measured and quantified, i.e. a pervasive materialism without any human factor.

As for North America, it is not seen as an empire, a view tenaciously adhered to within this country, unless one would name one-sided despoliation of the globe an empire of sorts. What is clear is that the American elite is out for economic domination, for control of natural resources or at least a monopoly of how these will be distributed over the world. There is very little interest in territorial conquest beyond what was already acquired in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is bourgeois commercial dominance by an intrisically not very militaristic society.

The idea that foreign wars are fought to keep the national population here in check and pre-occupied is nonsense, which is obvious from the continuation of the Iraq attack despite the defined resistance of the public. The compliance of the American public is sufficiently guaranteed by the war on terror which is a de facto war waged on the populace itself. Nor is the regime really interested in conquest (which makes any effective protesting the attacks so difficult) but it wants to apply a quick deployment of forces in an effort to secure bases for future economic exploitation. Power in itself has no feet unless it is based on what are called sound economic interests of the vested control classes.

That the elite would ever be threatened is also an idealistic fiction because they own the input as well as the output of emotional and mental production as Marx has clearly pointed out, though he would not have been able to envision this extent of indoctrination. The McLuhanesque spread of communications (better living through technology….) has sufficiently anaesthetized modern humans to the content of what is being fed to them (and unfortunately that goes physically as well).

The distribution of power within the political machine would (as almost anywhere in the world, in the past as now) be hollow if it did not form part of the elite network of economic interests. A good example was the German fascist leader whose power was assured by such as I.G. Farben, Krupp and Hjalmar Schacht, the director of the German Reichs Bank, in cahoots with financiers in Britain and America. Not only did they finance his Putsch, but kept him cemented in power and the resulting human and material destructions were for them only inconvenient though useful concomitants.

Thus it is with successive North American administrations culminating now in a leader of definitely lesser talents than the former German one, but with an equal (to the elites appealing) fervor for serving all the financial exigencies of his masters. Surely he collates in his mind their interests with the interests of the state, the clear fact being that economic domination does not recognize borders and invades wherever a power vacuum has been created. So in pure ignorance the unelected chief executive manfully soldiers on to serve his power elite’s dictates, a true retardaire triumph of the will….

Wim Voetpad can be reached at wimvoetpad@aol.com.