The No. 1 ally of tyranny is fear and the unscrupulous billionaires waging class warfare against the poor and middle class have done a pretty good job of terrifying their fellow Americans in recent years.
So much so, that many people are now convinced that if they say anything the Predatory 1 Percent finds evenly remotely offensive they will lose their jobs and become unemployable.
Some Americans have begun reacting to this limit on their freedom of speech in unlikely venues, like the Amazon product reviews. The fisherman who posted this review couched his contempt for the right wing in remarks about a recently purchased 6.5 foot fishing pole, much as pro-democracy activists in the USSR once hid their critiques of Joseph Stalin in plain sight via allegories embedded within plays, poems and songs.
This reviewer questions the manhood of those who support the far right by noting that his new pole is smaller than the ones he normally uses, but feels just fine if he pretends to be a Fox News viewer.
There aren’t many places left for the poor and middle class to speak their minds with the Koch Brothers, private equity funds, hedge funds, House of Saud, Rupert Murdochs, Micheael Bloombergs and Sheldon Adelsons of the world controlling the mainstream news media through the power of their investments and combined advertising dollars. Still, messages of popular resistance are beginning to show up in odd places just like this, often in couched terms using coded language.
The use of hidden messages is a common development in police states. It was widely employed by democratic activists in Stalinist Russia, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
Full Disclosure: The Amazon review was written by a contributor to The Cynical Times.
