inconvenient truthin his movie of the same name. Actually Al Gore missed the truth about capitalism; and, he missed the truth about socialism. I don't know if this was an act of convenience or inconvenience.
I often get asked: Why bother talking about socialism?
People often say using the word "socialism" scares people away; or they say there is a "better" alternative to capitalism. Quite frequently we hear people say the socialist alternative is not on the political agenda right now. I don't agree with any of this. Nor do I agree that socialism is dead even though the capitalist rags have written its obituary; the longest ongoing obituary I have ever heard of.
No matter how this question is placed we arrive at the same point... there is "an inconvenient truth" that needs to be discussed.
The intended, and sometimes unintended, purpose of posing the question: Why talk about socialism? is to prevent socialism from being discussed in the first place... in the same way other "inconvenient truths" are not supposed to be discussed.
It is always easier, and more convenient, to win an argument if you don't expect, or don't allow, your opposition to respond... another inconvenient truth. The big-business controlled media has done one heck of a big-brainwash in proclaiming socialism dead while refusing to allow living socialists to respond, all the while sanctimoniously proclaiming to be the voice of democracy... now, that is one heck of a clever trick and deception to pull off indefinitely... kind of like the way global warming was denied for so long.
The only equivalent I would be able to think of is if some day in the near future we were to see George Bush and Dick Cheney walking down Wall Street laughing on the way to the bank with their arms around their old buddy Saddam Hussein.
While I am sure the American media would never participate in this kind of hoax and hoodwinking just because they helped Nazi war criminals live out their lives in obscurity in this country until they were ready to die anyways, I doubt that Saddam Hussein escaped the hangman's noose as so many Nazi war criminals did... but, socialism has escaped its hope for death as we can see by developments in South America... as Mark Twain once remarked, "News of my death has been greatly exaggerated." I have often thought what great fun Mark Twain would have had with all the obituaries that have been written for socialism these past fifteen years.
There are even those on the left who have been bullied into being silenced concerning this "inconvenient truth" and have decided in their wisdom that now is not the time to push the socialist alternative to capitalism.
On the contrary, I don't think we will ever find a better time to bring forward the socialist alternative to capitalism then what we have today... as inconvenient a truth as this may be.
If we wait to talk about socialism until there is no opposition to it we will most likely participate in humanity's demise... another "inconvenient truth."
Obviously that ain't good... not for the present or the future... quite frankly, the powers that be will never agree that it is a good time to talk about replacing capitalism... let alone replacing it with socialism.
As we can see from the media and the educational institutions which conduct an unending campaign against socialism while pronouncing it dead, they do not intend to voluntarily allow anything they say about socialism to be challenged; not in the class-room, not in the media, and not in the mines, mills, and factories by working people.
I have always found it very strange that such a struggle would have to be waged against anything that has previously been pronounced dead... certainly George Bush will not continue to hold Saddam Hussein up as his enemy... he died in the hangman's noose... and was pronounced dead. According to all the same publications that gave us the word that Saddam is dead, these same people pronounced socialism dead... over fifteen years ago... socialism must have one heck of an after-life as its ghost continues to linger over most everything these people write about.
I think we all know that socialism is alive and well, otherwise these people in the mainstream media wouldn't have to go on, and on, and on "proving" that "it doesn't work." After all, no one is going to have to prove that Saddam Hussein is really dead every time someone says they have seen him; yet the big-business media has to continually attempt to prove that socialism is dead... if something is dead, be it a person or an idea... it is dead... and you get over the death and move on... there is nothing to fear from the rotting corpse of an idea or that of a person.
I am sure most of humanity will soon forget the name Saddam Hussein just like all the other two bit dictators the CIA installed in power then became expendable when their planned schemes and intrigues to undermine the peoples' struggles for power went sour.
But, unlike Saddam Hussein, the socialist corpse hasn't turned up yet; in fact, capitalism is more likely to be buried in a way that people will never look back and probably won't even remember it any more than they will remember Saddam Hussein... if people do remember capitalism after its passing it will simply be remembered as a terrible tragedy in the human experience, just like General George Armstrong Custer, Jefferson Davis, Henry Ford, Hitler, Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Augusto Pinochet, Ronald Reagan, Saddam Hussein... and George Bush.
I guess it all depends who has made the associations for us, that socialism is somehow bad and evil... I find it very ironic that we kind of allow the same people to do our thinking for us in creating the negative associations for socialism while supporting every other dirty deed... the same people do our thinking for us about the war in Iraq, single-payer, universal health care, social security, plant closings, global warming... and of course when it comes to socialism.
We have seen the progression of history... you can't just pretend there is no past and start all over again from scratch... life doesn't work that way.
No matter what you call "it," whatever replaces capitalism will have all the characteristics and features of socialism... and the people doing our thinking for us will attack it in the same way they attack socialism.
We can wait to find a better alternative to capitalism than socialism; we can put off discussing socialism because now is not the time for such discussion--- but we do so at our own peril; especially if scientific projections about global warming and everything it entails is correct... let us not forget, the same media that ridiculed the scientists who began talking about global warming is the very same media that pronounced socialism dead.
I have always wanted to meet Al Gore to ask him: Do you think the capitalist system has played a role in global warming? If so, what might that role be? Did you want to ask Al Gore these questions as you watched the movie "An Inconvenient Truth?" Are we all supposed to wait for Al Gore to produce Part II of "An Inconvenient Truth" to get the answers? Something to sit around the kitchen table and ponder.