Mainstream “Centrists” Pose The Greatest Ideological Threat To Us All
Ashton Kutcher, a stupid person who got famous playing the role of a stupid person, tweeted the following the other day:
“Where has the middle gone? Middle class? Politicians who don’t need to be far left or far right? Media the just tells the facts w/o spin? The middle is most! The middle can innovate. The middle can negotiate. Hardworkers with inclusive values = the middle.”
A year ago Kutcher also tweeted a photo of himself sipping from a coffee mug bearing the insignia of the lying, torturing, propagandizing, drug trafficking, coup-staging, warmongering Central Intelligence Agency, with the caption, “Just sending out a morning shout to the men and woman of the intelligence community that keep us safe and protect our country.”
If Kutcher had tweeted a “far left” or “far right” perspective, like that America should be an all-white ethnostate or that racist demonstrators should be physically assaulted in the streets, it would have made international headlines. But tweeting in favor of the CIA, who kill many orders of magnitude more people than America’s fringe white supremacist groups, went almost completely unnoticed.
This will sound normal and obvious to you. But it shouldn’t.
If people could wake up one morning and suddenly see what the ruling power establishment is doing to them every single day, there’d suddenly be vastly more outrage directed at the so-called “centrists”, and a lot less focus on politically impotent fringe organization like white nationalists and Antifa. This is not to say that all fringe ideologies are harmless, just that none of them pose anywhere near the immediate existential threat that is posed by the current order.
There’s an old joke: A duck swims past two fish and calls down, “Hey fellas! How’s the water?” The fish look at each other for a minute and then one of them asks, “What the hell is water?”
People don’t see the dangers of mainstream “centrism” for the same reason fish don’t see water. In reality, the only reason such an ideology gets labeled “centrism” at all is because it has been normalized and made mainstream by generations of plutocratic media propaganda. The ideological group which supports the status quo omnicidal, ecocidal oppression machine by giving you a choice between two warmongering oligarchic parties in fake elections that never make any difference is nowhere near a politically moderate position by any stretch of the imagination.
People like Ashton Kutcher imagine that the so-called “center” is called that because it sits smack dab in the middle of the ideological spectrum between communism and fascism, right in that moderate sweet spot that respects capitalism and private ownership without flying off the deep end into Nazi-like tyranny. In reality, the status quo exists entirely outside any left-right paradigm. It’s neither “left” nor “right” to give total control of the western world to an alliance of plutocrats and opaque government agencies who seek to expand their power and wealth by destroying our ecosystem, waging endless wars, and gradually shoring up more and more control of their citizenry via internet censorship, surveillance and police militarization. It’s just crazy.
I’m picking on Ashton not because he occupies some special place in all this, but because he doesn’t. He’s just an illustration of how blind people have become to the real threat that’s right in front of them, and how normalized insanity has become.
People who identify as “left” see the ruling power establishment as right-wing, people who identify as “right” see the ruling power establishment as left-wing, and people who identify as “center” see themselves as moderates whose normal, healthy way of life is under threat by the “far right” and “far left”. But really all that’s happening is a few assholes fucking over everyone else, which is no more “left” or “right” than a terrorist attack. The left versus right argument doesn’t even make sense until this far more pressing issue has been resolved. A Bernie supporter and a Trump supporter are arguing about left versus right while trapped in a room with a tiger who’s eating them both alive.
A movement towards true health will look like everyone waking up to the reality that we’re all being driven toward extinction via climate collapse or nuclear war by a ruling class who used propaganda to trick us into thinking that its suicidal trajectory was the moderate path. Obviously when we create our new model we won’t all agree with each other about the best direction to take it, but we’ve got to overhaul the old one first.
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