In every battle the eyes are the first to be conquered…

-Tacitus, Germania

[Hitler’s] aims, from the campaign’s inception in 1940, were not those of conventional geopolitics. He did not want just to annex useful territory and crate a new balance of power, but to wipe out a culture and an ideology, if necessary a race. His vision for the newly conquered territories, as expounded over meals at his various wartime headquarters, was of a thousand-mile-wide Reich stretching from Berlin to Archangel on the White Sea and Astrakhan on the Caspian. ‘The whole area,’ he harangued his architect Albert Speer, ‘must cease to be Asiatic steppe, it must be Europeanized! The Reich peasants will live on handsome, spacious farms; the German authorities in marvelous buildings, the governors in palaces. Around each town there will be a belt of delightful villages, 30-40km deep, connected by the best roads. What exists beyond that will be another world, in which we mean to let the Russians live as they like.’

-Anna Reid, Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944

We should have no other goal and no other result than the realization of socialism - (“The Socialization of Society,” published in 1918).[1]

Socialism! Again!

Stalin! The gulags! Communism! Totalitarianism! The Soviet Bloc! Democracy - nil! Freedom - nil!

This is the United States of America!

In the United States of America, where demons lurk here and abroad, some citizens meet to plot the next distribution of little American flags (Made in China) while others conspire to overthrow once and for all the right-wing with the winner of the Best-Candidate-for-Wall-Street-Bankers-Contest.

In the United States of America, where a running tab of demons abound, the charitable bail fund for Zimmerman the Defender competes on Yahoo with the Obama-is-better-than-Bush league of visionaries.

We should have no other goal and no other result than the realization of socialism - but for the demons!

The fearful and the terrorized envisioned demons at every turn: demons in the wilderness, demons in family members, friends, neighbors, demons in mothers, daughters, women in general, demons in the indigenous population, demons in the southern fields, in the antebellum kitchen, and demons, still, nonetheless, in the enslaved quarters late at night.

Horror is the vision of democracy, the historical realization of socialism.

Those Europeans (“Demons”) who experience less government imposed austerity and who have in place social safety nets we can only dream of here in the land of the fearful and terrorized, are, as Marxist Economist Richard Wolff notes, “less in the streets, less active.”

Is it that the populations of workers, the poor, the 99% of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Iceland, Ireland, France, for example, see fewer demons or are they able to see the demonic socialization of society?

Americans know more than those Europeans, lazy as the idle are, intent on their governments paying the bill for social services. Americans look to Europe and condemn such a generous system for the working class, but within the U.S. borders, our idle class who subsist on the generosity of government tax cuts and bail outs and our tax dollars, are worshipped and receive the “exceptional” (American) treatment.

Dismantling the system in the U.S. would bring us the “un-American,” “socialized” citizenry of Europe with citizens, as we see on Fox News and MSNBC, in the street causing mayhem and interrupting the exchange of money for corporate-produced goods.

Americans are frightened of violence in the streets! Demons dressed in black terrify Americans more than the earth-shattering crimes committed in broad daylight, in posh Wall Street offices.

The Left bickers over whether to bar or include the Black Bloc. The right waves flags frantically. The mayhem delights the corporate 

• Corporate profits: $1.97 trillion for the year
  

• Corporate taxes paid in the same year: $181 billion (federal), in other words, 9%. For state taxes, corporate elite paid 40%. In total, the corporate tax burden was just 11% for
  

• In contrast, the poorest Americans paid 17.4% in federal, state, and local taxes in the same year. (Paul Buchheit, “Some Outrageous Facts about Inequality,” Counterpunch, July 2, 2012).

Outrageous - but trying talking to the average American citizen about real change: Obama! No, Romney!

The capitalist rulers dare the “patriotic” to know the true face of the demonic!

Some Americans are just fine in instructing one another in the fine art of narrating horror stories about the lazy (demons) invading the landscape of the hard working and deserving. Their narrative of the demonic invasion, featuring those living “on the government,” innocently omits the government’s bankrupting of social safety nets to feed the behemoth that incriminates and conquers the democratization of humanity.

Americans see what they see, what they have been socialized to see.

Here in the U.S., “socialism,” designed and controlled by the capitalist class, is structured to maintain a hierarchal division between the leadership of the elite and everyone else! In order for the rulers to uphold this structure, citizens U.S. must consume their daily intake of fear and dread of terror. In turn, to be recognized as a “patriot” by other citizens is to recount the images of horror produced on cable news networks. Americans are coerced into battling demons among themselves - because citizens here know, to challenge the capitalist system is to court annihilation, social and financial disaster!

Remind American citizens about the “communist” system, its leadership, its lack of freedom, and they no longer see themselves in relation to the corporate rulers. They see Stalin and the Siberian gulags for the uncooperative. Make them sneer at the French and its socialist government and citizen barricades and American citizens miss the ruling elites’ consolidation of the financial and material resources for themselves.

American laws punish transgressors. No, not the elite ruling class who swindle, and then like J.P. Morgan, swear it is sorry it accepted the bail out and cannot remember taking it anyway. No, America’s transgressors are who believe the Constitution is still in effect, who challenge ID cards, (“pass” cards), or who challenge government’s infringement on our communications with each other while the corporations devise computerized chips for our clothing and even chips to install in our bodies. There is money to be made in a smart surveillance apparatus that puts the Soviet Union orEast Germany to shame.

And the U.S. has a U.S./Western Corporate Bloc of “Allies,” NATO, and just plain friendly governments willing to conduct proxy wars and conflicts by exploiting the fear and dread of terror of their citizens.

And the U.S. has gulags now called supermax prisons, with deep dungeons. The U.S. has more prisons than any of its allies.

Detention lists and kill lists - those are American lists - not Stalin’s!

Their narrative of the demonic invasion, featuring those living “on the government,” innocently omits the government’s bankrupting of social safety nets.
 

No longer look to the East for the Iron Curtain. Here in the U.S. the Iron Heel’s crushingly oppressive and repressive foothold on the necks of everyone but the 1% exploits to death the “free” as well as the “imprisoned,” the devout liberal as well as fanatic right-winger, the socialist as well as the communist, the Greek man as well as the South African woman.

We have “socialism” here in the U.S.;” it is just not for everyone! This IS American!

The strange and sadistic relationship American citizens have with capitalism is demonic! It is a relationship that facilitates the totalitarian tendency in the implementation of that American narrative of Manifest Destiny! It is a relationship that compels one party to “love” another (capitalism) more than life itself!

The capitalist rulers dare the “patriotic” to know the true face of the

It is not enough, writes Rosa Luxemburg in “Socialization of Society,” from The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, for the working class to grab power. It must “use this power” to bring about a “fundamental transformation of the entire economic relations.

The “patriots” emulation of the class of leisure and materialism must cease! The towering ladder to the top must topple! The steady intake of the Manifest Destiny narrative with its cinematic “cultural” or “morals” narrative, non-stop entertainment news cycles, its insidious ads flashing luxury homes or clothing or jewelry for the wealthy and aspiring, Prozac for everyone else, and its serial printing of government cover ups of cover ups must be unplugged!

Americans subjugation to fear and the threat of terror from without must be understood for what it is - the conquering of hearts and minds within - while our capitalist rulers, sit at meals, mapping out a vision of conquered territories, covered with lavish and magnificent buildings - for themselves, the 1%. (The “peasants” here will be excluded!).

Americans are socialized to be blinded by the demons and the grandeur: Wave the grand ole’ flag and witness the grandeur of the United States of America - and, in the process, seal the fate of humanity and this planet.

Are they able to see the demonic socialization of society?

“In a socialist economy,” writes Luxemburg, one that is truly for the people, “the private employer will disappear.[and] no longer is production aimed at the enrichment of one individual” (“The Socialization of Society”). No more Walton family, Koch brothers funding capitalist slaves in suits with the title of governor, senator, or president. No more GE bringing good things to life, such as talking heads, to promote its wars and nuclear weapons.

The entire war and munitions industries must be abolished since a socialist society does not need murder weapons and, instead the valuable materials and human labor used in them must be employed for useful products. (“Socialization”)

A nation of workers will no longer be slaves for individuals: “Everyone works for everybody, for the public good and benefit.” In this, we are not just producing a just system of relationships with each other and Mother Earth, but we are producing a new narrative, one that promotes real growth and a more democratic way of life. “In a socialist society, where everyone works together for their own well-being, the health of the workforce and its enthusiasm for work must be given the greatest consideration at work.”

In a socialist society, freedom is the absence of the overseer and its boss! Freedom is “free and equal human beings.”

Freedom is workers working “by themselves…working on their own initiative, not wasting public wealth, and delivering the most reliable and meticulous work.”

In a word: the worker in a socialist economy must show that he [or she] can work hard and properly, keep discipline and give his [or her] best without the whip of hunger and without the capitalist and his slave-driver behind him [or her]. This calls for inner self-discipline, intellectual maturity, moral ardor, a sense of dignity and responsibility, a complete inner rebirth of the proletarian.

In the course of struggle against the capitalist system, the worker learns, to use Luxemburg’s words, to achieve the “necessary idealism and acquires the intellectual maturity” to ward off the demons and dissolve the façade of grandeur.

The job of the young generation is everywhere! The job of the young generation, Luxemburg writes, is “to demonstrate that it is equal to the task of being the bearer of humanity’s future.”

“‘We will do it!’”

And then believe in what the eyes see within!

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