BlackCommentator.com: The Peoples’ Revolution or the Capitalists’ Wars! - Represent Our Resistance - By Dr. Lenore J. Daniels, PhD

The dilemma is best symbolized in the Faustian legend: yield up your principles and you shall be rich. Cling to them, and you shall be less prosperous than you presently are. That’s the problem - choice.”

-Dalton Trumbo, Screenwriter, Hollywood Ten

He is held in a secret place at Guantanamo Bay. One month, he is waterboarded 183 times (New York Times, April, 20, 2009). Finally, he confesses: He assassinated John F. Kennedy and planned to assassination Pope John Pail II. The U.S. government published the confession.

The supremacy of the confession has its origins in Europe when charges and evidence were withheld from the “criminal” and the public. The rights of authority trumped the rights of citizens. “Knowledge was the absolute privilege of the prosecution,” philosopher Michel Foucault explains, and “truth was the right and the exclusive power of the sovereign and his judges” (Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison). The authority “reconstituted” in writing the “crime,” and the “criminal” was expected not only to sign this document but provide an oral confession that could be published for legitimizing the authority’s rule.

Punishment resulting in imprisonment, Foucault writes, is not intended to “eliminate offenses” but to “distinguish them, to distribute them, to use them…to assimilate the transgression of the laws in a general tactics of subjection.”

Penalty would then appear to be a way of handling illegalities, of laying down the limits of tolerance, of giving free rein to some, of putting pressure on others, of excluding a particular section, of making another useful, of neutralizing certain individuals and of profiting from others.

The confession was demanded of those “suspects” brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAAC). An alternative to capitalism, Communism, endangered the lives of U.S. citizens. Everyone must answer the question correctly: Are you or are you not a member of the Communist Party? Confess! A list bares your name!

Think indefinite detention and myriad lists and “suspects” who then supply more names. Think the National Defense Authorization Act signed by President Barrack Obama on December 31, 2011.

What happened to the necessity to confess?

Diminishing the necessity for the confession suggests the diminutive role of the discourse surrounding “the terrorist” or the “terrorist threat.” Who is “the terrorist”? What constitutes a “terrorist threat”? What irrational characteristics, behavior, expressions verbal or otherwise, what speeches and writings, what actions would warrant the intervention of the State’s military apparatus?

What can it mean that charges and evidence will be withheld from suspect and the public? And given this ambiguity, how does a citizen become a listed suspect?

Is justice, too, to be further marginalized, dysfunctional at best?

Why would a citizenry accept only a vague idea of this government’s operation and refuse to call it into question?

When has the narrative of the dominated, the 99%, ever been the dominate narrative?

Revolutions that capitulate to reforms confess to the power of the authority’s “absolute knowledge.” The people confess!

Power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the ‘privilege,’ acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions - an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated. (Foucault)

The people confess! We’ll supply you, the enforcer, with the names. You keep us safe. We confess. We believe in your authority and your authority is good for us - as good as privatized and corporate educational institutions and loan schemes, high-priced health care, lay-offs, factory closings, oil rig explosions, water pollution, F-14s, Black sites, high civilian body counts, as good as war!

The people forget themselves - and their forgetfulness is not unintentional.

Look at you, O’Brien demands of Winston in George Orwell’s 1984. You came to us!

‘Look at the condition you are in!’ he said. ‘Look at this filthy grime all over your body. Look at the dirt between your toes. Look at that disgusting running sore on your leg. Do you know that you stink like a goat? Probably you have ceased to notice it. Look at your emaciation. Do you see?...Open your mouth. Nine, ten, eleven teeth left. How may had you when you came to us? And the few you have left are dropping out of your head. Look here!’

Individuals need not confess because as a people, we have confessed to accept the authority of the State to profit from the exclusion and neutralization of choice - perhaps once and for all!

Perpetual fear for the right to conduct perpetual war!

For blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s bravery rested on a vision of democracy that could not possibly include the legitimacy of a State-conducted witch hunt; a vision of democracy that could not possibly punish his choice to remain sovereign over mind and body, he surmised. Only in a non-democratic State could he find himself imprisoned and only for a tyrannical enforcer could the State bow and throw the rights of the people to the wind.

He is the one who urges us to reform…He is, in fact, that same liberal producer…He applies the only lashing that’s economic reprisal…He is the enforcer…He dislikes the nasty business of blacklisting but, nonetheless, practicing it everyday of his life, he places upon his country and flag the blame for moral atrocities that otherwise would be charged to himself…Without his enforcement, the Committee could have no power at all. (Trumbo Hollywood Blacklisted but He Had the Last Word, film)

Without his [the capitalist] enforcement, the politicians of the one party, and the Courts of prosecutors, judges and lawyers, could have no power at all.

The threat that cannot be clarified is the peoples’ choice to transform the government’s ordering of power.

The peoples’ revolution or the capitalists’ wars?

I leave Dalton Trumbo with the last word:

That was it. He understood it now. He had told them his secret, and in denying him, they had told him theirs: He was the future. He was the perfect picture of the future. And they were afraid to let anyone see what the future was like. They were looking ahead. They were figuring the future, and somewhere in the future, they saw war.

To fight that war, they would need men. And if men saw the future, they wouldn’t fight.

So they were masking that future. They were keeping the future a soft, quiet, deadly secret. They knew that if all the people, all the little guys saw the future, they would begin to ask questions, and they would begin to find answers, and they would say to the guys who want them to fight, we won’t fight! They would say, you lying, thieving, son-of-a-bitches, we won’t fight! We won’t be dead! We will live! We won’t let you butcher us! We are the world! We are the future. We won’t fight no matter what you say, no matter what speeches you make, no matter what slogans you write.

Remember it well - we are the world! We are what make it go ’round. We make bread and cloth, and guns. We are the hub of the wheel and the spokes and the wheel itself. And without us, you would be hungry, naked worms.

We will not die! It will be you!

It will be you! You who urge us on to battle…you who incite us against each other…

Make no mistake, we will live. We will be alive, and we will walk and talk and eat and sing and laugh and feel and love and bear our children in tranquility, in security, in decency, in peace. (Excerpt from Johnny Got His Gun, film)

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.

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