中文
By Keith Lamb
The U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco residence was recently burglarized and her 82-year-old husband Paul was beaten with a hammer by a man named David DePape who was reportedly seeking out "Nancy." DePape has been charged with attempted homicide and assault.
On an individual and humane level, even if hackneyed, one can't help but offer condolences to the victim, Paul Pelosi while feeling revulsion for DePape's clearly deranged actions. Paul Pelosi, will now have to endure the same PTSD that countless working-class U.S. citizens endure, due to violence and insecurity. These conditions are felt even in wealthy San Francisco, where homelessness abounds and crimes such as assault and homicide have increased by9.2 percent and 16.7 percent, respectively, from 2020 to 2021.
This isn't about taking schadenfreude from this violent act where even those of privilege, living behind expensive walls, that divide them from the lived conditions of wider humanity, can taste the brutality that too often arises out of U.S. domestic and international conditions such as inequality, poverty, and the horrors of war. Rather, it's about recognizing that there are larger explanatory social forces that must be developed if solutions to violence are desired.
Already the corporate media have stuck with a psychological analysis of DePape. Here, DePape is a man with psychological problems, estranged from his family. Of course, on one hand, they're not wrong but with the analysis of the "victim" versus the "psychopath" established the reader is urged not to question more. Indeed, seeking a deeper societal level analysis would attack the very class interests and economic foundations that the corporate media and the Pelosi's represent.
Undoubtedly, such a sleight of hand is needed to maintain ideological discipline over the U.S. working class, which is being conditioned to delink basic nouns with objective reality. Indeed, with Epstein's death leading to the popularization of the verb "to suicide," one is led into utter confusion - which is exactly "their" intention.
Nonetheless, when the people are told that the U.S. military works for justice, when invasion and death are carried out for a word called "democracy," and when class warfare is sold as democracy and individual liberty, it will give rise to deranged people with deranged theories. True or not, these conspiratorial theories, in place of proven working class ideological tools, are desired by the "ruling class" for they sterilize class struggle and people's democracy.
Paul and Nancy Pelosi, as members of this ruling class, cut off from the common man, are the winners of a class war waged domestically and internationally. Paul has been involved in numerous cases of profiteering through political connections and Nancy supports the U.S. theft of China's Taiwan region. Their class interests are upheld through all manner of lunatic theories.
For example, the corporate press encourages us to listen to Nancy's "high-minded views" on so-called bringing democracy to China's Taiwan region while ignoring her real material interests and the profiteering by the U.S. military-industrial complex.
Every day, the U.S. working class is subjected to trash conspiratorial theories that hide a class war waging in plain sight. They are indoctrinated to believe that China "steals" their jobs and is carrying out genocide in China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, which justifies U.S. aggression against a China that has invaded nobody. Then China's development of the Global South and poverty alleviation is in the interests of "evil" while the U.S. invasions are in the interests of "good."
The U.S. worker is in a dire situation. They lack the basic ideological tools to challenge their subjugation by a well-organized ruling class. In place of good theory, they resort to superstition, rumor, as well as non-provable conspiracy theories to fill their intellectual void. For those who are able to recognize the double-speak where war is good, development is bad, and where genders don't exist, they are nevertheless unable to seek solutions because they can't accurately define the problem.
Indeed, the minutiae of individualistic "wokeism" which as an ideology of the ruling class, supported by Pelosi, is usually explained as being central to Marxism as opposed to Marxism's central mission as an ideology for collective mass emancipation.
In such an ideological swamp, is it any wonder that lunatics such as DePape arise that seek individual solutions to systemic problems? On the other hand, as stories are already arising about Paul and DePape, perhaps DePape is in the swamp.
Keith Lamb is a University of Oxford graduate with a Master of Science in Contemporary Chinese Studies. His primary research interests are China's international relations and "socialism with Chinese characteristics."
