redFlags

A hundred-year argument in 5 minutes

My buddy LeftSpot found this gem from Reds on YouTube. It highlights an argument between two old friends, Jack Reed and Emma Goldman during the hard times of War Communism in the early Soviet Union.

"It's just the beginning, EG. It's not happening the way we thought it would. It's not happening the way we wanted it to. But it's happening..."

"I do not recognize myself anymore"

Found poem.

"Actually, everything is quite clear if one thinks it over and reaches the conclusion that indirect democracy is a hoax.  Ostensibly, the elected Assembly is the one which reflects public opinion most faithfully.  But there is only one sort of public opinion, and it is serial. 

"The imbecility of the mass media, the government pronouncements, the biased or incomplete reporting in the newspapers -- all this comes to seek us out in our serial solitude and load us down with wooden ideas, formed out of what we think others will think.  Deep within us there are undoubtedly demands and protests, but because they are not echoed by others, they wither away and leave us with a 'bruised spirit' and a feeling of frustration.  So when we are called to vote, I, the Other, have my head stuffed with petrified ideas which the press or television has piled up there.  They are serial ideas which are expressed through my vote, but they are not my ideas. 

"The institutions of bourgeois democracy have split me apart:  there is me and there are all the Others they tell me I am (a Frenchman, a soldier, a worker, a taxpayer, a citizen, and so on).  This splitting-up forces us to live with what psychiatrists call a perpetual identity crisis.  Who am I, in the end?  An Other identical with all the others, inhabited by these impotent thoughts which come into being everywhere and are not actually thought anywhere?  Or am I myself?  And who is voting?  I do not recognize myself any more."

• —Jean-Paul Sartre's Elections, A Trap for Fools

Howard Zinn: Put away those [American] flags

By Howard Zinn
for The Progressive

On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

Is not nationalism — that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder — one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

These ways of thinking — cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on — have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.