Posted on Oct 5, 2010
By Chris Hedges
We can hold One Nation marches every week. It will not make any
difference until we revolt against the formal structures of power.
The liberal preoccupation with positive forms of propaganda ignores
the root of our problem. The tea party and hate mongers on Fox such as
Glenn Beck, however repugnant, are the manifestation of the crisis,
not its cause. The forces assaulting the remnants of American
democracy will not be cowed or discredited with rallies, such as the
one in Washington on Saturday. We will blunt these rising
anti-democratic forces only when we organize outside conventional
systems of power. It means dismantling the permanent war economy and
the corporate state. It means an end to foreclosures and bank
repossessions. It means a functional health care system for all
Americans. It means taking care of our poor and unemployed. And it
means a system of government that is freed from corporate interests.
Mass support for anti-democratic movements and public acceptance of
open violations of human rights are not caused, in the end, by the
skillful dissemination of misinformation or brainwashing. They are
caused by the breakdown of a society and the death of a liberal class
that once made reform and representative government possible. The
timidity of our liberal class was on public display during the march
in Washington. Speakers may have called for jobs, but none would call
on citizens to abandon the rotting hull of the Democratic Party and
our moribund political system or put Wall Street speculators in
prison. The speakers at the rally proposed working within the current
electoral system, although most Americans are aware that it has been
gamed by corporate interests. This is hardly a call, especially given
the failures of the Obama administration, that will fire up the
unemployed and underemployed.
We need jobs, the Rev. Al Sharpton said at the march. We ve bailed
out the banks. We bailed out the insurance companies. Now it s time to
bail out the American people.
But Sharpton and the other speakers, too close to the power elite in
the Democratic Party, did not call for rebellion. There was no war cry
against Wall Street and the purveyors of death in the defense and
health industry. There was no acknowledgement that unfettered
capitalism and globalization are killing our ecosystem and creating a
worldwide system of neo-feudalism. There was no acceptance that the
corporate state must be dismantled if we are to save ourselves. Any
effective resistance must begin with a condemnation of our political
elite and liberal institutions, including the press, the universities,
labor, the arts, religious institutions and the Democratic Party, for
selling us out. But the speakers on the mall in Washington would not
go there. And I suspect, for this reason, the Americans who are
hurting most found nothing they said of interest.
All totalitarian movements, even those that are openly criminal,
succeed because they have widespread mass support. They are the
expression of a yearning that sweeps through a nation that has been
convulsed by economic dislocation, a loss of hope and flagrant
political corruption. And in these times of lament and deprivation the
absurdities, crimes and excesses of reactionary forces do not matter.
It wasn t hard to find out what Slobodan Milosevic was doing in
Bosnia. It wasn t hard in Nazi Germany to hear about the widespread
massacres of Jews in Poland. It is not a secret to most Americans that
Muslim detainees, held for years without charges, are tortured in
black sites around the world. The murder of tens of thousands of
civilians by our forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan is tacitly
acknowledged by the public as the price of war. The massive human
suffering in the open-air prison that is Gaza is not a mystery. We
know what happens to the millions of undocumented workers who live as
stateless citizens among us and have become a kind of modern day slave
labor force.
The rising proto-fascist movement in America is caused by a hatred and
alienation so profound that the crimes of the state, along with the
buffoonish antics of those who defend and champion these crimes, do
not matter. We will not discredit the right-wing with facts, a demand
for a respect of law or rational discussion. Propaganda or counter
messages of tolerance are not the issue. The issue is societal
collapse. This issue is a corporate state that has carried out a coup
d etat. The issue is the rupture of all mechanisms within the
political process to protect citizens from accelerating
impoverishment, internal control and corporate abuse. Those who refuse
to acknowledge this bleak reality cannot offer solutions.
The right-wing propagandists have not created the problem. They have
tapped into the moral void that has left tens of millions of Americans
yearning for a profound and radical change. And if torture, war,
racist attacks on immigrants, gays and Muslims, along with increased
repression against internal dissidents, is the price for moral and
economic renewal, many Americans are ready to sign on. If those who
lead this rising proto-fascist movement insist on a Christian nation,
teach creationism and believe in the physical existence of Satan, many
Americans will sign on for this too. Hatred, when mobilized, is a very
effective political force. And hatred, including the hatred for a
liberal class that abandoned the working class, is what we face.
The decimation of our working class through outsourcing and
globalization dynamited two of the most important props of the
democratic system class consciousness and class conflict. This has
left traditional political parties, which once represented differing
class interests, with nothing to offer the public beyond fringe issues
such as abortion or gay marriage. Those in the liberal class who cling
to the corpse of the Democratic Party do so not because they believe
in the policies of the party it does not differ in any significant way
from the Republican Party but because they hope against hope that the
party will somehow restore itself to its former position as a defender
of liberal values and the working class interests. It is the politics
of nostalgia.
Our political theater has orphaned citizens who once looked to
political parties to express and defend their interests. It has
engendered apathy toward traditional social and political structures
and an inchoate rage. This mixture of apathy and rage is a volatile
cocktail. It finds its expression outside normal systems of dissent
and in leaders who, in times of prosperity and stability, would be
dismissed as lunatics.
No rally, no positive message, no effort to expose the idiocies of
those arrayed against us will work until we restore to the political
process mechanisms by which ordinary citizens can be heard. Hannah
Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism cites the collapse of
traditional political mechanisms, which now plagues us, as the opening
needed for all totalitarian movements:
The fall of protecting class walls transformed the slumbering
majorities behind all parties into one great unorganized,
structureless mass of furious individuals who had nothing in common
except their vague apprehension that the hopes of party members were
doomed, that, consequently, the most respected, articulate and
representative members of the community were fools and that all the
powers that be were not so much evil as they were equally stupid and
fraudulent.
The One Nation March in Washington, which lacked moral and political
courage, did nothing to educate or rally our most important
constituency those out of work, those being foreclosed, those without
hope. It refused to confront the real, corporate structures of power.
It refused to disown Barack Obama and the Democrats. And in the end it
only confirmed what those who hate us think of liberals.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/march_to_nowhere_20101005/
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News Dissector Danny Schechter: Saturday’s "One Nation" March on Washington Was "More Movie than Movement"
"Sadly, the One Nation that came together in Washington was not there to be organized into an ongoing force," writes longtime media analyst Danny Schechter. "No follow-up program was announced, no emails collected, no vision on how to turn all that energy on the Mall into a powerful progressive alternative to the tea party was offered. No longer march strategy was announced. It was a moment in itself not for anything more."
video: http://www.democracynow.org...danny_schechter_saturdays_march
[includes rush transcript]
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| "When they come for the innocent without crossing over your body, cursed be your religion and your life." ~Brendan Walsh, a planner for the Catonsville-Nine " The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life." ~Muhammad Ali (also see Robert Louis Stevenson) " If God does exist, I don't think he's vengeful; I just think he's an underachiever." ~Woody Allen pf soto |
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