There is a general rule about the way society treats criminals: place responsibility for antisocial acts on the individual, thus absolving society from blame. The mismatch between society's attitude toward heroes and criminals rests in society's claim of credit on heroes and rejection of responsibility for criminals. A criminal is one who has betrayed societal values by violating a prescribed code of conduct, who is deranged but not legally insane, a deviant, an anomaly, a manifestation of social disease, a virus against the system, a unit malfunction and a personal malfeasance. Adolf Hitler was labeled a madman to protect German culture and fascism, notwithstanding the curious fact that Hitler rose to power in Germany in a discernible sociocultural context. Even organized warfare must be conducted within the limits of regulated behavior. War crimes and crimes against humanity are not tolerated. Yet market fundamentalism argues for wholesale deregulation to allow economic crimes against humanity. Charles Ponzi was deemed an unprincipled conman to insulate unregulated capitalism itself from being revealed as a systemic Ponzi scheme. "Capitalism's bad apples: It's the barrel that's rotten;" By Henry C K Liu. This article appeared in AToL on August 1, 2002. _http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/DH01Dj01.html_ (http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/DH01Dj01.html) Comment The politics of insanity: quickie notes. Twenty people were shot, and six of them died, in Tucson, Ariz., on Jan. 8, during the attempted assassination of the Democratic Congresswoman. The shooter, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, was captured on the spot and reported to be a psychiatrically disabled person with a recent history of fascination with right-wing rhetoric and abstract thinking posing such questions as: "if words have no meaning what is government?" The answer is simple: an executive committee for the ruling class. This in turn raises the question of the role of the state as an organization of violence. In politics the answer to a political question is by definition partisan, involving class outlook and ideology. Lougher's question is political. He is no "lone gunman expressing an aberration in American society," but an individual that choose a division of labor casting him as assassin of a political representative rather than unarmed Mexican immigrants, seeking economic relief in America. Lougher was very political with his ideas and ideology being shaped in a discernible sociocultural context. Whether Lougher is diagnosed as being "a psychiatrically disabled person," - whatever that means according to whom, has not prevented pundits and layperson from contextualizing his actions against a backdrop of economic and political crisis. And political and ideological outlook. Everyone speaks of Lougher in the context of Arizona, meaning Arizona expresses and represents something discernable in the national body politic rather than geographic location. Arizona is Senator John McCain and his presidential bid under the banner of "Country (White people) First," and focal point of the fascist anti-immigration movement. Every politically aware person in America understands this. What is not understood is the class sociology of a Lougher and the role he cast in political history. Arizona is in the forefront of the fascist anti-immigration movement. The anti-immigration movement is at the center stage of a political environment shaped by the impact of qualitatively new means of production; the transformation of the state; the militarization of the economy and society; the rapid and accelerating implementation of the legal means to suppress individual dissent and seize control of the government; and the changing character of the social struggle. Where in the past the religious right sought to organize and propagandize in a period when "globalization" had still not widely affected American society, the anti-immigration movement propagandizes an American people devastated by the effects of advanced "globalization," increasingly marginalized economically and politically, and bewildered by the world in which they now live. The medium of anti-immigration has become the means by which a section of the American people is being organized and mobilized as a social base to support the further transformation of the government and society necessary to facilitate the penetration of today's form of global capital in the world's societies, and to prepare for and contain its inevitable effects. Lougher was not immune to real time politics and ideological assault by fascists upon the national body politic. "If words have no meaning what is government?" strikes me as a "constitutionalist argument," harkening back to the passionate pleas of the Slave Oligarchy demanding their constitutionally protect rights of slavery. "If words have no meaning what is government?" Let's change this a bit. "If words (of the American Constitution) have no meaning what is the modern state?" Answer: fascist. The things that is frightening about the American fascist movement is its ability to advance under a "left" and "right" banner of defending the American Constitution, while opposing from the "right" what is called "the Second American Constitution" or the amendments adopted after and as the result of the Civil War. Lougher's "reading list" has been publicized and it contains many of the usual suspects: "Animal Farm," "My Life" by Adolph Hitler and the "Communist Manifesto." Obviously, Lougher did not understand what he read in the Communist Manifesto or had any serious dealing with a communist collective dedicated to the education, propaganda and creating class consciousness within the fighting section of the proletariat. If Lougher's words have no meaning what was his actions? Lougher is political.
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