Chris Hedges

Posted on May 14, 2012

Dear Folks, Here a person who knows our country as a war correspondent and as a son of an evangelical father. In the first he shows the addiction of war and the second the addiction of narrow and dangerous minds. John G

By Chris Hedges

In Robert E. Gamer’s book “The Developing Nations” is a chapter called
“Why Men Do Not Revolt.” In it Gamer notes that although the oppressed
often do revolt, the object of their hostility is misplaced. They vent
their fury on a political puppet, someone who masks colonial power, a
despised racial or ethnic group or an apostate within their own
political class. The useless battles serve as an effective mask for
what Gamer calls the “patron-client” networks that are responsible for
the continuity of colonial oppression. The squabbles among the
oppressed, the political campaigns between candidates who each are
servants of colonial power, Gamer writes, absolve the actual centers
of power from addressing the conditions that cause the frustrations of
the people. Inequities, political disenfranchisement and injustices
are never seriously addressed. “The government merely does the minimum
necessary to prevent those few who are prone toward political action
from organizing into politically effective groups,” he writes.



Gamer and many others who study the nature of colonial rule offer the
best insights into the functioning of our corporate state. We have
been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized. We are
controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty to the
nation and indeed in the language of traditional patriotism are
traitors. They strip us of our resources, keep us politically passive
and enrich themselves at our expense. The mechanisms of control are
familiar to those whom the Martinique-born French psychiatrist and
writer Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” including
African-Americans. The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are
reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged into desperation.
Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The school
system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior
education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse,
as well as criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and
instability—keenly felt this past weekend by the more than 200,000
Americans who lost their unemployment benefits—ensure political
passivity by diverting all personal energy toward survival. It is an
old, old game.

A change of power does not require the election of a Mitt Romney or a
Barack Obama or a Democratic majority in Congress, or an attempt to
reform the system or electing progressive candidates, but rather a
destruction of corporate domination of the political process—Gamer’s
“patron-client” networks. It requires the establishment of new
mechanisms of governance to distribute wealth and protect resources,
to curtail corporate power, to cope with the destruction of the
ecosystem and to foster the common good. But we must first recognize
ourselves as colonial subjects. We must accept that we have no
effective voice in the way we are governed. We must accept the
hollowness of electoral politics, the futility of our political
theater, and we must destroy the corporate structure itself.

The danger the corporate state faces does not come from the poor. The
poor, those Karl Marx dismissed as the Lumpenproletariat, do not mount
revolutions, although they join them and often become cannon fodder.
The real danger to the elite comes from déclassé intellectuals, those
educated middle-class men and women who are barred by a calcified
system from advancement. Artists without studios or theaters, teachers
without classrooms, lawyers without clients, doctors without patients
and journalists without newspapers descend economically. They become,
as they mingle with the underclass, a bridge between the worlds of the
elite and the oppressed. And they are the dynamite that triggers
revolt.

This is why the Occupy movement frightens the corporate elite. What
fosters revolution is not misery, but the gap between what people
expect from their lives and what is offered. This is especially acute
among the educated and the talented. They feel, with much
justification, that they have been denied what they deserve. They set
out to rectify this injustice. And the longer the injustice festers,
the more radical they become.

The response of a dying regime—and our corporate regime is dying—is to
employ increasing levels of force, and to foolishly refuse to
ameliorate the chronic joblessness, foreclosures, mounting student
debt, lack of medical insurance and exclusion from the centers of
power. Revolutions are fueled by an inept and distant ruling class
that perpetuates political paralysis. This ensures its eventual death.

In every revolutionary movement I covered in Latin America, Africa and
the Middle East, the leadership emerged from déclassé intellectuals.
The leaders were usually young or middle-aged, educated and always
unable to meet their professional and personal aspirations. They were
never part of the power elite, although often their parents had been.
They were conversant in the language of power as well as the language
of oppression. It is the presence of large numbers of déclassé
intellectuals that makes the uprisings in Spain, Egypt, Greece and
finally the United States threatening to the overlords at Goldman
Sachs, ExxonMobil and JPMorgan Chase. They must face down opponents
who understand, in a way the uneducated often do not, the lies
disseminated on behalf of corporations by the public relations
industry. These déclassé intellectuals, because they are conversant in
economics and political theory, grasp that those who hold power, real
power, are not the elected mandarins in Washington but the criminal
class on Wall Street.

This is what made Malcolm X so threatening to the white power
structure. He refused to countenance Martin Luther King’s fiction that
white power and white liberals would ever lift black people out of
economic squalor. King belatedly came to share Malcolm’s view. Malcolm
X named the enemy. He exposed the lies. And until we see the corporate
state, and the games it is playing with us, with the same kind of
clarity, we will be nothing more than useful idiots.

“This is an era of hypocrisy,” Malcolm X said. “When white folks
pretend that they want Negroes to be free, and Negroes pretend to
white folks that they really believe that white folks want ’em to be
free, it’s an era of hypocrisy, brother. You fool me and I fool you.
You pretend that you’re my brother and I pretend that I really believe
you believe you’re my brother.”

Those within a demoralized ruling elite, like characters in a Chekhov
play, increasingly understand that the system that enriches and
empowers them is corrupt and decayed. They become cynical. They do not
govern effectively. They retreat into hedonism. They no longer believe
their own rhetoric. They devote their energies to stealing and
exploiting as much, as fast, as possible. They pillage their own
institutions, as we have seen with the newly disclosed loss of $2
billion within JPMorgan Chase, the meltdown of Chesapeake Energy Corp.
or the collapse of Enron and Lehman Brothers. The elites become
cannibals. They consume each other. This is what happens in the latter
stages of all dying regimes. Louis XIV pillaged his own nobility by
revoking patents of nobility and reselling them. It is what most
corporations do to their shareholders. A dying ruling class, in short,
no longer acts to preserve its own longevity. It becomes fashionable,
even in the rarefied circles of the elite, to ridicule and laugh at
the political puppets that are the public face of the corporate state.

“Ideas that have outlived their day may hobble about the world for
years,” Alexander Herzen wrote, “but it is hard for them ever to lead
and dominate life. Such ideas never gain complete possession of a man,
or they gain possession only of incomplete people.”

This loss of faith means that when it comes time to use force, the
elites employ it haphazardly and inefficiently, in large part because
they are unsure of the loyalty of the foot soldiers on the streets
charged with carrying out repression.

Revolutions take time. The American Revolution began with protests
against the Stamp Act of 1765 but did not erupt until a decade later.
The 1917 revolution in Russia started with a dress rehearsal in 1905.
The most effective revolutions, including the Russian Revolution, have
been largely nonviolent. There are always violent radicals who carry
out bombings and assassinations, but they hinder, especially in the
early stages, more than help revolutions. The anarchist Peter
Kropotkin during the Russian Revolution condemned the radical
terrorists, asserting that they only demoralized and frightened away
the movement’s followers and discredited authentic anarchism.

Radical violent groups cling like parasites to popular protests. The
Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Weather Underground,
the Red Brigades and the Symbionese Liberation Army arose in the
ferment of the 1960s. Violent radicals are used by the state to
justify harsh repression. They scare the mainstream from the movement.
They thwart the goal of all revolutions, which is to turn the majority
against an isolated and discredited ruling class. These violent fringe
groups are seductive to those who yearn for personal empowerment
through hyper-masculinity and violence, but they do little to advance
the cause. The primary role of radical extremists, such as Maximilien
Robespierre and Vladimir Lenin, is to hijack successful revolutions.
They unleash a reign of terror, primarily against fellow
revolutionaries, which often outdoes the repression of the old regime.
They often do not play much of a role in building a revolution.

The power of the Occupy movement is that it expresses the widespread
disgust with the elites, and the deep desire for justice and fairness
that is essential to all successful revolutionary movements. The
Occupy movement will change and mutate, but it will not go away. It
may appear to make little headway, but this is less because of the
movement’s ineffectiveness and more because decayed systems of power
have an amazing ability to perpetuate themselves through habit,
routine and inertia. The press and organs of communication, along with
the anointed experts and academics, tied by money and ideology to the
elites, are useless in dissecting what is happening within these
movements. They view reality through the lens of their corporate
sponsors. They have no idea what is happening.

Dying regimes are chipped away slowly and imperceptibly. The
assumptions and daily formalities of the old system are difficult for
citizens to abandon, even when the old system is increasingly hostile
to their dignity, well-being and survival. Supplanting an old faith
with a new one is the silent, unseen battle of all revolutionary
movements. And during the slow transition it is almost impossible to
measure progress.

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong,” Fanon wrote
in “Black Skin, White Masks.” “When they are presented with evidence
that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted.
It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called
cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the
core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that
doesn’t fit in with the core belief.”

The end of these regimes comes when old beliefs die and the organs of
security, especially the police and military, abandon the elites and
join the revolutionaries. This is true in every successful revolution.
It does not matter how sophisticated the repressive apparatus. Once
those who handle the tools of repression become demoralized, the
security and surveillance state is impotent. Regimes, when they die,
are like a great ocean liner sinking in minutes on the horizon. And no
one, including the purported leaders of the opposition, can predict
the moment of death. Revolutions have an innate, mysterious life force
that defies comprehension. They are living entities.

The defection of the security apparatus is often done with little or
no violence, as I witnessed in Eastern Europe in 1989 and as was also
true in 1979 in Iran and in 1917 in Russia. At other times, when it
has enough residual force to fight back, the dying regime triggers a
violent clash as it did in the American Revolution when soldiers and
officers in the British army, including George Washington, rebelled to
raise the Continental Army. Violence also characterized the 1949
Chinese revolution led by Mao Zedong. But even revolutions that turn
violent succeed, as Mao conceded, because they enjoy popular support
and can mount widespread protests, strikes, agitation, revolutionary
propaganda and acts of civil disobedience. The object is to try to get
there without violence. Armed revolutions, despite what the history
books often tell us, are tragic, ugly, frightening and sordid affairs.
Those who storm Bastilles, as the Polish dissident Adam Michnik wrote,
“unwittingly build new ones.” And once revolutions turn violent it
becomes hard to speak of victors and losers.

A revolution has been unleashed across the globe. This revolution, a
popular repudiation of the old order, is where we should direct all
our energy and commitment.  If we do not topple the corporate elites
the ecosystem will be destroyed and massive numbers of human beings
along with it. The struggle will be long. There will be times when it
will seem we are going nowhere. Victory is not inevitable. But this is
our best and only hope. The response of the corporate state will
ultimately determine the parameters and composition of rebellion. I
pray we replicate the 1989 nonviolent revolutions that overthrew the
communist regimes in Eastern Europe. But this is not in my hands or
yours. Go ahead and vote this November. But don’t waste any more time
or energy on the presidential election than it takes to get to your
polling station and pull a lever for a third-party candidate—just
enough to register your obstruction and defiance—and then get back out
onto the street. That is where the question of real power is being
decided.