"Why do you love Putin and hate democracy?"

On the war guilt question making the rounds

Yeah, whose side am I really on, right?

So let’s assume you have this huge, dominant crime syndicate in a major city, in possession not only of most of the drug trade, prostitution and protection rackets, but also with the majority of the police force and even the newspapers and radio stations in their pocket.

Then this minor set of quarrelsome clans on the city’s outskirts refuse to let go of the five or six meth labs in the sticks which is their major source of income, as well as to open their city territory for the dominant syndicate to market their products and spread their prostitution business. How dare they?

So in response, the major syndicate then usurps the meth labs, giving the managers "an offer they can't refuse", and surrounds the little dog's city territory with indwelling goon squads who randomly fires into the residential areas on the minor clans' side. Let’s call this their take on gentrification.

And then this smaller player reciprocates by a rapid dispatch of hitmen to both neutralize the goon squads and their sporadic bombardment as well as to recapture their vital meth labs in the countryside.

The major crime syndicate then immediately mobilizes their control of the communications media and the city police force. We read in the paper and hear from the local radio stations of the horrific atrocities perpetrated against the very foundations of our beautiful and prosperous city, and of the incomprehensible evil of these backward clans.

So which side am I on?

Well, if someone in this situation then points out that perhaps the dominant crime syndicate really is the proximate cause of these most recent developments, and that maybe, just maybe, the optimal form of government is not the predominant violent kleptocracy overshadowing the entire social structure and permeating both parties in the conflict… Then he’s clearly on the side of the terrorists.

Such insinuations namely not only conflicts with the prevailing propaganda narratives. To approach our real-world situation, they immediately clash with the culture’s fundamental myths (democracy, liberty, progress) which have been usurped by the dominant syndicate’s propaganda and marketing of themselves as “the good guys”.

And here’s really the gist of it. Notwithstanding our political persuation or self-identity, the vast majority of us really adheres to the basic precepts of the Western social and ideological imaginary. We think that the “West”, or rather global, capitalist industrial society, while terribly flawed, is somehow yet good, “democratic” and “progressive” at its core.

We who call ourselves anarchists or socialists may pay lip service to rejecting the “evils of the system”, but actually don’t get that something as awful as the Holocaust was really just an extreme manifestation of a normal attitude, a way of life, a complex of institutional organization that still constitutes the essence of our social order, which

… shows itself in the treatment of minorities in industrial democracies; in education, education to a humanitarian point of view included, which most of the time consists in turning wonderful young people into colourless and self-righteous copies of their teachers; it becomes manifest in the nuclear threat, the constant increase in the number and power of deadly weapons and the readiness of some so-called patriots to start a war compared with which the holocaust will shrink into insignificance.

It shows itself in the killing of nature and of 'primitive' cultures with never a thought spent on those thus deprived of meaning for their lives; in the colossal conceit of our intellectuals, their belief that they know precisely what humanity needs and their relentless efforts to recreate people in their own, sorry image; in the infantile megalomania of some of our physicians who blackmail their patients with fear, mutilate them and then persecute them with large bills; in the lack of feeling of many so-called searchers for truth who systematically torture animals, study their discomfort and receive prizes for their cruelty (P. Feyerabend, Farewell to Reason, Verso 1987).

And in these inflamed and combative circumstances, you naturally start policing the unsettling and potentially dangerous dissidents around you.

And when the situation worsens, you pick up a rifle to go fight this deadly menace in the name of all of civilization.

In service of the racket.

It was just before dawn
One miserable morning in black 'forty four
When the forward commander
Was told to sit tight

When he asked that his men be withdrawn
And the Generals gave thanks
As the other ranks held back
The enemy tanks for a while

And the Anzio bridgehead
Was held for the price
Of a few hundred ordinary lives

And kind old King George
Sent mother a note
When he heard that father was gone

It was, I recall
In the form of a scroll
With gold leaf adorned
And I found it one day
In a drawer of old photographs, hidden away

And my eyes still grow damp to remember
His Majesty signed
With his own rubber stamp
It was dark all around
There was frost in the ground
When the tigers broke free
And no one survived
From the Royal Fusiliers Company Z

They were all left behind
Most of them dead
The rest of them dying
And that's how the High Command
Took my daddy from me