"Far more insidious and less open to conscious challenge are the notions that so fit into the dominant political culture's field of established images that they appear not as biased manipulations but as 'the nature of things.'"

--Parenti, Inventing Reality

That's a pretty concise description of things, I'd say.

  • GenderIsOpSec [she/her]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Many on the U.S. Left have exhibited a Soviet bashing and Red baiting that matches anything on the Right in its enmity and crudity. Listen to Noam Chomsky holding forth about "left intellectuals" who try to "rise to power on the backs of mass popular movements" and "then beat the people into submission.... You start off as basically a Leninist who is going to be part of the Red bureaucracy You see later that power doesn't lie that way, and you very quickly become an ideologist of the right. . . . We're seeing it right now in the [former] Soviet Union. The same guys who were communist thugs two years back, are now running banks and [are] enthusiastic free marketeers and praising Americans" {Z Magazine, 10/95). Chomsky's imagery is heavily indebted to the same U.S. corporate political culture he so frequently criticizes on other issues. In his mind, the revolution was betrayed by a coterie of "communist thugs" who merely hunger for power rather than wanting the power to end hunger.

    Blackshirts & Reds