Messages such as the "state of the union" addresses serve to engage the audience collectively and individually in holding, shaping, and forming a popular understanding about the world in which they live. The spin is designed to contribute toward the fundamental maintenance of a social order in the USA benefiting the super rich, power holders and profiteers--the big pimps and the real gangsters. The point of my article today is that the power elites have learned the lessons taught by the Italian revolutionary philosopher Antonio Gramsci far better than any other "historical group" on the right, middle or left sections of the political spectrum. The big pimp’s ho, (Bush’s whore) Condoleezza Rice, understands and communicates these concepts better than most peaceniks, progressives and social justice activists.

The concept of ideological hegemony is crucial to Gramsci’s theories and to understanding the critique in this article. By ‘ideological hegemony’ Gramsci described the process whereby a ruling class (such as those who own and operate media corporations, banks, and defense industries) contrive to retain political power by manipulating public opinion, creating what Gramsci referred to as the ‘popular consensus’. For example, GW Bush basically admitted in his speech last night how consent was manufactured for the war against Iraq where public lies led to war against a country that was no threat to the people of the USA. The result was consent by a makority of people in the USA for invasion, mass killings, and torture by US and coalition troops so they could steal the oil and other resources in the Middle East to which they are addicted. The public is convinced to accept the story line (also called a trope) of war and addiction as “common sense”. Gramsci said that this ideological hegemony is so totally established over mind and spirit that it is almost never perceived as such at all. It is spun to convinnce the mind of oil and war addiction as ‘normality’. In fact, many "Americans" today will agree to more torture and killing because the real pimps are addicted to oil and war and the people are subservient to this addiction.

Gramsci advised that in these hegemonic struggles for minds and hearts of the people clearly have a vital role. To counter propaganda programs that manufacture consent for oppression Gramsci proposed that we form groups and communities that he called historical blocs to provide counter-hegemonic strategies. For example, when people form newsgroups to share alternative news and views on the war against Iraq on the internet that circulate to thousands and even millions of people, that is an example of counter hegemony. The problem is that those in power have more access and control over the minds of people through corporate media. Simultaneously they disengaging the peoples hearts to accept the horrors of state wars to feed the oil, guns, and germs profit addictions of baby daddies who are pimpin all over da world.

Gramsci’s theory also identified how domination was accomplished in conjunction with what he called the ‘organic crisis’ in which the various points of contact between the dominant economic class intersects with other classes, specifically with the help of intellectuals in media and academic institutions that link the classes in a common identity, e.g., like speech writers and media spokes-models who get people to agree that because they are addicted to oil they must "support the troops" and the "war on terror".

Gramsci showed how scholars and writers were employed in Italy to legitimize the state’s power, in other words these intellectuals become agents of the state serving the elites in power with spins and propaganda. In the same manner that a historical bloc could serve power elite interests Gramsci posited that a historical bloc could counter an historical bloc. Revolution was conceived as the gradual formation of the collective will, an intellectual and moral framework that would unite a diverse range of groups and classes through an organic relation between leaders and the daily practices of subjects. This was a conception of revolution as issuing from the immanent will of the people wherein theory and practice constituted the very process of history itself. One can see concrete evidence of counter hegemony in the resistance blocs in Iraq and Palestine and Latin American blocs in Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia. In the Middle East a popular resistance identity is developing by using the organic crisis of the imperialist’s invasions and occupations. In Latin America an anti-imperialist popular identity is developing by using the organic crisis of embargoes and CIA wars by linking groups together with the help of organic intellectuals (street smart people, peasants and workers) who inform the professors and political theorists thus creating a community with a popular identity for liberation from imperialism and totalitarianism.

Gramsci’s organic intellectual was someone whose knowledge is derived through firsthand experience, and whose life-learning is complemented by self education and other alternative forms of learning, such as the learning that comes from war and oppression. The organic intellectual emerges from a social class (such as farmers or factory workers) to speak against the established order in a manner directly connected to the goals of a political movement and a community. However, a Gramsican organic intellectual must have a consciousness of a self which is opposed to those who would exploit and oppress him. The organic intellectual can differentiate, set a goal, can judge facts and events other than in themselves or for themselves but also in so far as they tend to drive history forward or backward. The organic intellectual sees how the rhetoric’s and actions of the power elites drive history towards feeding their addictions and back towards death and destruction.

Those of us who mean to free ourselves from this state of global oppression cannot be successful in our goals unless we know the history of the oppression of diverse groups of people, the successive efforts they have made to be what they are, to create the systems they have created. Gramsci held that each individual was the synthesis of an “ensemble of relations” and also a history of these relations . . . the constitution of the subject, then, is the result of a complex interplay of “individuals” and larger-scale social forces. The process to free ourselves includes understanding that the manner in which observations are made about the war, terrorism, and greed are dependent upon prior understandings of these subjects. People’s observations ‘refer back’ to past experiences based on class, creed and culture and are of central importance in the formation of historical blocs whose aims are self determination and social justice.

We must challenge ourselves so that we can locate that which in material relations (economics) gives rise to various spins, interpretations and points of view. In this mode we are called to assess relations in the context of who is liberating or terrorizing. Who is addicted to oil and war? Who has the motive and opportunity to most benefit from it these addictions if not the oilmen, defense contractors and their bankers?

As a resistance strategy we must be diligent in our undersatnding of the brainwashing of hegemonic discourse which promotes false realism and reification (normalizing and routinizing of what people concede as common sense) by exposing what is, at times unseen and unacknowledged, such as the facts of invasion and occupation. To know and understand our own and others reactions to media events such as daddy’s baby "state of the union" address is a revolutionary act to resist oppression and totalitarianism.

An historical understanding of last nights speech by Bush means to come to an understanding of the ways we, the people, are to be further debased into conditions of servitude which maintain subjugation, exploitation and misery for all those who do not serve King Greed. Knowledge and understanding of how hegemony obtains peoples consent to servitude provides the initial steps in the process of emancipation when we use the knowledge in counter hegemonic historical blocs in resistance against the real pimps and gangsters, the addicted ruling class men and women of oil, war, and their financiers.

To know is to die to illusion and delusion.

Liberation Central juneemoon.8m.net