Revolution

by Russell Brand

  Like a world built around excellence at a niche bagatelle, or a dumb parlor trick, or a board game; the masters of the universe are just experts at Hungry Hungry Hippos.

  Instead of vying to be heavyweight champion of a cannibalistic and stupid game, we must attune now to a clearer, shared objective. Like Daniel Pinchbeck earlier outlined, or as Buckminster Fuller succinctly described: “To make the world work for 100 percent of humanity, in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”

  27

  Es Mejor Morir de Pie …

  THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION LAID THE WAY FOR A NEW KIND OF imperialism, a new kind of colonization, an expansionist, militant ideology that is only now expiring. We have to decide if what replaces it will be better or worse.

  Noam Chomsky, Adam Curtis, and The Godfather films have all been trying to tell us—sometimes subtly through story, sometimes wittily through archive and arch voiceover, and sometimes through “being Noam Chomsky”—that “America” is not a land mass, a country, some stars ’n’ stripes, and a song. It is a violent mad gang enforcing the interests of its corporate clients onto a terrified globe. Look at the heroes of its folk tales: the cowboy; a lone justice-dispensing maverick, the gangster; a surly outlaw playing by his own rules, or the gangsta; a bejeweled misogynist making money by moving ice.

  All the good things about America either came from the counterculture or were there already when the white people arrived.

  What they’ve really mastered, like all good racketeers, is the business of scaring the shit out of people and then telling ’em that they’ll take care of them. They’ve also co-opted a bit too much ideology and technology from the Nazis for my liking.

  Sure, get their scientists to build you rockets, if the moon means that much to you, but check this bit of social technology from everyone’s favorite founder of the Gestapo, Hermann Göring: “The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

  The Americans and their allies, which means the British, of course, have been using this Nazi skullduggery on us for ages. I grew up worried sick about nuclear attack, forever peering out the window when a plane went over. It turns out the threat of nuclear attack comes primarily from the people that got me worrying about it in the first place; it’s the apocalyptic version of “who smelt it dealt it.”

  Chomsky—who must have one of the most satisfying names to say in the world, which is apposite for a linguist—explains how this technique has been used to validate U.S. terror, domestically and abroad, since 1823. This is when the Monroe Doctrine was established. Because you are childish, you think the Monroe Doctrine is a pledge to act all sexy and emphysemic, lifting up yer frock, going “poo-poo-pee-doo.” It ain’t. It was a diplomatic commitment from a century and a half ago when the Americans decided that they intended to “dominate the hemisphere,” which is an outlandish objective. It sounds like the sort of devilish intention that kept the British pedo establishment occupied: “I’d like to dominate your hemisphere,” they hollered into hospital wards and children’s homes.

  The United States have achieved this domination primarily by scaring us all witless and starting wars either explicitly or by proxy, primarily in countries where they were really confident they would win.

  I’m not saying I’m as clever as Chomsky—that would be mad, obnoxious, off-putting, and untrue—but, as is always the case with a prefix of this nature, here is something that makes it seem like what I’m trying to suggest is exactly that. When I was quite young, I realized that the primary motivation for secrecy within powerful structures was not the protection of the people they had power over but the preservation of their own power. I think I’ve even mentioned as much in a previous book (y wook). Those “Top Secret” files at the CIA or MI5 are not full of devious ways to trump the Russians and the Chinese; they’re full of information that is so incendiary that if we read it, we’d be so aghast that we’d go, “Fuck this lot; let’s have a Revolution.”

  In his essay on U.S. foreign policy, Chomsky says the same thing. So if anything, Chomsky is nicking my ideas, likely from my defining work on the subject of propaganda, “The Manufacture of Consenty-Went.” Chomsky’s essay explains that for years the United States used the threat of Russian attack as a palliative to hustle through any ideas that impaired the freedom of the domestic population, contravened international law, or increased the power and wealth of their corporate clientele. Chomsky observes that if the real motivation behind this conduct was the Soviet threat, then it would have ceased when the Soviet threat did in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down. It didn’t; in fact, their behavior became far more militant, particularly in Latin America and the Middle East.

  The fall of the Berlin Wall is perhaps the most significant political event in my lifetime, but, even though I was fourteen at the time, I remember not especially caring about it, other than when Knight Rider turned up and sang a song on the rubble. Surely it’s an indication of a nation with a bewildered and damaged sense of self is that the first thing they think of after years of enforced segregation end is to enlist David Hasselhoff.

  Perhaps I’ve missed something—he might be a vocalist healer. We should’ve got him along for 9/11 or Lockerbie.

  After the fall of the wall and lots of images of communists queuing up for McDonald’s, America was able to more freely pursue its agenda to “corporatize” the world by force. They waded into Panama, killed thousands of people, and installed a “client regime.” The media, which shares the same ideology as the U.S. government, always supports them. This could be as Julian Assange says, the cooperation of separate entities with a shared agenda or a more Bilderberg, illuminati, shadowy, evil, clandestine thing—I don’t know, it actually doesn’t matter; the results are the same. Government, transnational corporations, and the media cooperate to advance and maintain an agenda that is detrimental to the majority of us and to the planet.

  With the excuse of the Soviet threat gone, the United States (and, I am at pains to point out, I mean not the American people, who are lovely, kind, passionate folk. The same as when I talk of the UK’s sycophantic, clammy-palmed support, like a rapist’s impotent sidekick, holding his glove. I don’t mean the people; I mean the Establishment) had to dream up new reasons to act in the same way. Like when your girlfriend wants to have a row because she’s got PMS but instead of saying that creates some bizarre reason to thump you, like, I dunno, nose-picking.

  The United States said there was an “increased threat from Third-World nations who were developing technology” that could disrupt U.S. domestic serenity—really, they mean economic hegemony.

  The United States acts like an army that enforces the business interests of the corporations it is allied to. I didn’t know before I read this Chomsky piece that the American government subsidizes the development of weapons. They literally give massive companies grants to make missiles and whatnot, as well as creating ridiculously favorable tax conditions for them to prosper in. That’s state-funded industry—America does believe in communism but just communism for the rich.

  In spite of creating this corporate kindergarten environment for their pals, if anyone else tries doing it, especially Arabs or Latinos, America will fuck them up. In El Salvador—along with Israel and Egypt, one of the countries that gets a lot of U.S. military aid and, in a common corollary, has one of the worst human-rights records—the United States trained a military unit at their facilities to wipe out half a dozen Latin American intellectuals, mostly Jesuit priests who were opposing the El Salvadoran government.

  When Mikhail Gorbachev, who it turns out was a lovely fella who bent over backwards to prevent nuclear war and deserved to be remembered for more than that birthmark on his head, allowed a unified Germany to enter NATO, a h
ostile military alliance, on the condition that “NATO would not expand one inch to the east,” the United States agreed. Then they expanded right into East Germany, likely giggling as they went. This dunderheaded truculence persisted under every U.S. regime change. Just to reiterate the irrelevance of bi-party democracy: We all get excited by the Blairs, Obamas, and Clintons, with their well-rehearsed gestures and photo-op affability, but when push comes to shove we’re dealing with cunts. Clinton in his tenure expanded NATO right up to Russia’s borders. Chomsky says all this aggro we’re having today in the Crimea and Ukraine is because of these unreported acts of military expansionism by the West.

  The U.S. government acts to prevent any ideology that opposes corporate dominance emerging. That is why they are constantly meddling with the internal affairs of their neighbors to the south. Latin American people, like the indigenous people whose land they nicked and the Spanish people who nicked it, have some inherent and potent inward drift towards socialism. “Socialism” isn’t a dirty word; it just means sharing. Really, it’s just the bureaucratic arm of Christianity.

  Chomsky explains that any country that nurtures a national identity that conflicts with U.S. interests is regarded as hostile and, if possible, overthrown. The people of Iran have been under constant attack since their regime change in the early fifties, and in Guatemala anyone who opposes the interests of the United Fruit Company is likely to be jailed or killed. The United Fruit Company sound so friendly as well, like a posse of bananas and lemons all just trying to get along.

  In the fifties, President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles came perilously close to understanding the allure of socialism when they observed that communists had an unfair advantage as their ethos—sharing, equality, community, economic parity, and stability achieved through redistributing the resources of elites would always be more appealing to poor people than an ideology that exploits poor people and makes the rich unassailable.

  I like that they felt it an unfair advantage, like the disgruntlement felt by Philip Morris that their profits were declining because their customers were dying.

  The reason Cuba is the object of such unrelenting antagonism from the United States is that their very existence is a rallying cry to other nations that corporatism can be beaten. Ever since the Monroe Doctrine, the United States had intended to colonize Cuba. In 1898 they invaded it under the now-familiar guise of liberating it. Until the Revolution in 1959, the States ran it as a virtual colony—mostly with, as far as I can work out, casinos and Bacardi rum. Fidel Castro, a law student in the early fifties, started kicking off, along with his brother Raúl. After initially petitioning for change through diplomatic channels, they decided to form a militia from Havana’s disillusioned working class. Their first round of attacks on military targets were a shoddy affair and ended with Raul and Fidel banged up for fifteen years apiece and their small band of followers either nutted off or incarcerated.

  Fidel, whilst being sentenced, delivered a four-hour speech in which he came across as double cool, telling the judge he’d do his time standing on his head and “la historia me absolverá”—“When people look back at this, they’ll think I’m great.”

  Campaigners managed to get the brothers released after a few years of jail time, and they scarpered to Mexico to cook up a new scheme. Whilst there, they met Che Guevara, an Argentinian aristocrat who was seriously up for a row. Guevara said he’d join the pair in overthrowing the corrupt Batista regime. I’ve agreed to some crazy things with people I’ve met on holiday myself, but I’ve never gone as far as saying I’d help a couple of lads take their country back, so respect to Che for that.

  Also present in Mexico was Alberto Bayo, who had fought on the side of the socialists during the civil war that followed the Spanish Revolution. He gave the lads guerrilla training to toughen them up. They took to it like ducks to water, and within a few months, with a crew of eighty like-minded revolutionaries, they set off back to Cuba on a yacht called Granma, a vessel seemingly designed to undermine the whole enterprise. A yacht—posh—called Granma: bit lame.

  The nautical aspect of the Revolution was a right balls-up: When they practiced sailing, they’d done it with only a few people on board, so when they set off the boat was much slower. Also, some dope fell in the drink, and that put the mockers on things. Castro insisted the boat stop and rescue the chump, which really slowed things down but also created a real sense of morale and cohesion. I suppose if Fidel had just looked over at the spluttering prat, tugged on his cigar, and gone, “Fuck him,” the others might’ve felt their leader lacked compassion.

  Due to all the maritime calamities, they arrived in Cuba two days late, meaning their allies in the harbor weren’t there. Instead, Batista’s troops were, and they knocked off 60 percent of the rebels, including, I bet, that nitwit who fell in. The surviving revolutionaries fled into the Sierra Maestra mountains and hung out there for ages; it was a total shambles. They recruited peasants that they met in the mountains that were sympathetic to the cause and trained them in warfare. Obviously they did a good job, because they won a few battles where the odds were heavily stacked against them, Sparta style, like in the film 300.

  Che Guevara identified how a comparatively small resistance can overcome a national military:

  The enemy soldier, in the Cuban example which at present concerns us, is the junior partner of the dictator; he is the man who gets the last crumb left by a long line of profiteers that begins in Wall Street and ends with him. He is disposed to defend his privileges, but he is disposed to defend them only to the degree that they are important to him. His salary and his pension are worth some suffering and some dangers, but they are never worth his life. If the price of maintaining them will cost it, he is better off giving them up; that is to say, withdrawing from the face of the guerrilla danger.

  Amazing to hear that the domination of sovereign governments by Wall Street was already an established pattern; also encouraging is Che’s verdict that people won’t fight to the death to protect a wage and a pension. Eventually the unavoidable conclusion that Revolution will benefit the people hired to prop the state up cannot be ignored.

  28

  Stick Your Blue Flag

  SOLDIERS ARE GIVEN A TERRIBLE TIME IN THE UK AND THE UNITED States. I am always surprised by how many homeless people have been in the services in both countries. There are almost 60,000 homeless veterans in the States—12 percent of all homeless people. In the UK it could be as high as 25 percent. I chat to homeless people a lot. Partly because it makes me look nice but also out of a genuine concern for people that are, as I’ve already indicated, living in conditions that for most of us would be regarded as apocalyptic, the end of the world.

  The people that are in poverty, pain, prison, those that are suffering—I feel like they carry the burden for us all, like troops on a foreign front to ensure our freedom.

  Homelessness is a bit of a scourge on our society, a shrill whistle from the canary in the cage of our collective conscience that all is not well. Recent studies have shown that it’s not cost-effective for a society to have human beings scattered around like living litter, and the economic argument is surely the only one that people are averring. “It would cost too much to house them,” people might say. Well, that’s not true, according to separate research in Florida, North Carolina, and Utah, hardly enclaves of pie-eyed hippiedom, it’s proven to be three times as expensive to leave people lying around like half-finished suicides than to stick them in a flat.

  We know it’s wrong; we all feel a bit of a cramp of entanglement when we walk past a rough sleeper, especially when alone, like it’s an ex-lover or something. Is there anyone who strides mightily by, untroubled, with a smile? I bet even Trump, or Murdoch, or Boris feels something.

  Louis C.K. does a brilliant bit of stand-up in which a friend’s cousin, who has never been to a city, first encounters a homeless person. Louis describes how the man is “particularly homeless” and th
at he and his New Yorker friend habitually ignore the man, but the out-of-towner is overwhelmed with compassion and attempts to help. “Sir, are you okay?” Louis and his cousin “start correcting her behavior, like she’s doing something wrong.” The woman asks the man, “What happened?” Louis’s proxy response is, “America happened.”

  This is a beautifully executed demonstration of how an extraordinary attitude has been incrementally inculcated. It is also useful to see how astonishing transgressions are normalized, as it helps us to see more-obvious violations in a different light.

  The Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing tells the story of the gangster leaders who carried out anti-communist purges in Indonesia in 1965 to usher in the regime of Suharto.

  The film’s hook, which makes it compelling and accessible, is that the filmmakers get Anwar—one of the death-squad leaders, who murdered around a thousand communists using a wire rope—and his acolytes to reenact the killings and events around them on film in a variety of genres of their choosing.

  In the film’s most memorable sequence, Anwar—who is old now and actually really likable, a bit like Nelson Mandela, all soft and wrinkly with nice, fuzzy gray hair—for the purposes of a scene plays the role of a victim in one of the murders that he in real life carried out.

  A little way into it, he gets a bit tearful and distressed and, when discussing it with the filmmaker on camera in the next scene, reveals that he found the scene upsetting. The off-camera director asks the poignant question, “What do you think your victims must’ve felt like?” and Anwar initially almost fails to see the connection. Eventually, when the bloody obvious correlation hits him, he thinks it unlikely that his victims were as upset as he was, because he was “really” upset. The director, pressing the film’s point home, says, “Yeah but it must’ve been worse for them, because we were just pretending; for them it was real.”