[THS] !!!! Chris Hedges: Calling All Rebels

[Peter Webster]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24941.htm

Calling All Rebels

By Chris Hedges

March 08, 2010 "Truthdig" - -There are no constraints left to halt America's slide into
a totalitarian capitalism. Electoral politics are a sham. The media have been debased
and defanged by corporate owners. The working class has been impoverished and is
now being plunged into profound despair. The legal system has been corrupted to
serve corporate interests. Popular institutions, from labor unions to political parties,
have been destroyed or emasculated by corporate power. And any form of protest,
no matter how tepid, is blocked by an internal security apparatus that is starting to
rival that of the East German secret police. The mounting anger and hatred, coursing
through the bloodstream of the body politic, make violence and counter-violence
inevitable. Brace yourself. The American empire is over. And the descent is going to
be horrifying.

Those singled out as internal enemies will include people of color, immigrants, gays,
intellectuals, feminists, Jews, Muslims, union leaders and those defined as "liberals."
They will be condemned as anti-American and blamed for our decline. The economic
collapse, which remains mysterious and enigmatic to most Americans, will be pinned
by demagogues and hatemongers on these hapless scapegoats. And the random
acts of violence, which are already leaping up around the fringes of American society,
will justify harsh measures of internal control that will snuff out the final vestiges of
our democracy. The corporate forces that destroyed the country will use the
information systems they control to mask their culpability. The old game of blaming
the weak and the marginal, a staple of despotic regimes, will empower the dark
undercurrents of sadism and violence within American society and deflect attention
from the corporate vampires that have drained the blood of the country.

"We are going to be poorer," David Cay Johnston told me. Johnston was the tax
reporter of The New York Times for 13 years and has written on how the corporate
state rigged the system against us. He is the author of "Free Lunch: How the
Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You With
the Bill," a book about hidden subsidies, rigged markets and corporate socialism.
"Health care is going to eat up more and more of our income. We are going to have
less and less for other things. We are going to have some huge disasters sooner or
later caused by our failure to invest. Dams and bridges will break. Buildings will
collapse. There are water mains that are 25 to 50 feet wide. There will be huge
infrastructure disasters. Our intellectual resources are in decline. We are failing to
educate young people and instill in them rigor. We are going to continue to pour
money into the military. I think it is possible, I do not say it is probable, that we will
have a revolution, a civil war that will see the end of the United States of America."

"If we see the end of this country it will come from the right and our failure to
provide people with the basic necessities of life," said Johnston. "Revolutions occur
when young men see the present as worse than the unknown future. We are not
there. But it will not take a lot to get there. The politicians running for office who are
denigrating the government, who are saying there are traitors in Congress, who say
we do not need the IRS, this when no government in the history of the world has
existed without a tax enforcement agency, are sowing the seeds for the destruction
of the country. A lot of the people on the right hate the United States of America.
They would say they hate the people they are arrayed against. But the whole idea of
the United States is that we criticize the government. We remake it to serve our
interests. They do not want that kind of society. They reject, as Aristotle said, the
idea that democracy is to rule and to be ruled in turns. They see a world where they
are right and that is it. If we do not want to do it their way we should be vanquished.
This is not the idea on which the United States was founded."

It is hard to see how this can be prevented. The engines of social reform are dead.
Liberal apologists, who long ago should have abandoned the Democratic Party,
continue to make pathetic appeals to a tone-deaf corporate state and Barack Obama
while the working and middle class are ruthlessly stripped of rights, income and jobs.
Liberals self-righteously condemn imperial wars and the looting of the U.S. Treasury
by Wall Street but not the Democrats who are responsible. And the longer the liberal
class dithers and speaks in the bloodless language of policies and programs, the
more hated and irrelevant it becomes. No one has discredited American liberalism
more than liberals themselves. And I do not hold out any hope for their reform. We
have entered an age in which, as William Butler Yeats wrote, "the best lack all
conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity."

"If we end up with violence in the streets on a large scale, not random riots, but
insurrection and things break down, there will be a coup d'état from the right,"
Johnston said. "We have already had an economic coup d'état. It will not take much
to go further."

How do we resist? How, if this descent is inevitable, as I believe it is, do we fight
back? Why should we resist at all? Why not give in to cynicism and despair? Why not
carve out as comfortable a niche as possible within the embrace of the corporate
state and spend our lives attempting to satiate our private needs? The power elite,
including most of those who graduate from our top universities and our liberal and
intellectual classes, have sold out for personal comfort. Why not us?

The French moral philosopher Albert Camus argued that we are separated from each
other. Our lives are meaningless. We cannot influence fate. We will all die and our
individual being will be obliterated. And yet Camus wrote that "one of the only
coherent philosophical positions is revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man
and his obscurity. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the
certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it."

"A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object,"
Camus warned. "But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence
of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object."

The rebel, for Camus, stands with the oppressed-the unemployed workers being
thrust into impoverishment and misery by the corporate state, the Palestinians in
Gaza, the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the disappeared who are held in our
global black sites, the poor in our inner cities and depressed rural communities,
immigrants and those locked away in our prison system. And to stand with them does
not mean to collaborate with parties, such as the Democrats, who can mouth the
words of justice while carrying out acts of oppression. It means open and direct
defiance.

The power structure and its liberal apologists dismiss the rebel as impractical and see
the rebel's outsider stance as counterproductive. They condemn the rebel for
expressing anger at injustice. The elites and their apologists call for calm and
patience. They use the hypocritical language of spirituality, compromise, generosity
and compassion to argue that the only alternative is to accept and work with the
systems of power. The rebel, however, is beholden to a moral commitment that
makes it impossible to stand with the power elite. The rebel refuses to be bought off
with foundation grants, invitations to the White House, television appearances, book
contracts, academic appointments or empty rhetoric. The rebel is not concerned with
self-promotion or public opinion. The rebel knows that, as Augustine wrote, hope has
two beautiful daughters, anger and courage - anger at the way things are and the
courage to see that they do not remain the way they are. The rebel is aware that
virtue is not rewarded. The act of rebellion defines itself.

"You do not become a ‘dissident' just because you decide one day to take up this
most unusual career," Vaclav Havel said when he battled the communist regime in
Czechoslovakia. "You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility,
combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the
existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an
attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. ...
The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not
seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not
attempt to charm the public. He offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if
anything, only his own skin-and he offers it solely because he has no other way of
affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen,
regardless of the cost."

Those in power have disarmed the liberal class. They do not argue that the current
system is just or good, because they cannot, but they have convinced liberals that
there is no alternative. But we are not slaves. We have a choice. We can refuse to be
either a victim or an executioner. We have the moral capacity to say no, to refuse to
cooperate. Any boycott or demonstration, any occupation or sit-in, any strike, any act
of obstruction or sabotage, any refusal to pay taxes, any fast, any popular movement
and any act of civil disobedience ignites the soul of the rebel and exposes the dead
hand of authority. "There is beauty and there are the humiliated," Camus wrote.
"Whatever difficulties the enterprise may present, I should like never to be unfaithful
either to the second or the first."

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you
so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and
you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers,
upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop," Mario Savio said in 1964.
"And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that
unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."

The capacity to exercise moral autonomy, the capacity to refuse to cooperate, offers
us the only route left to personal freedom and a life with meaning. Rebellion is its
own justification. Those of us who come out of the religious left have no quarrel with
Camus. Camus is right about the absurdity of existence, right about finding worth in
the act of rebellion rather than some bizarre dream of an afterlife or Sunday School
fantasy that God rewards the just and the good. "Oh my soul," the ancient Greek
poet Pindar wrote, "do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the
possible." We differ with Camus only in that we have faith that rebellion is not
ultimately meaningless. Rebellion allows us to be free and independent human
beings, but rebellion also chips away, however imperceptibly, at the edifice of the
oppressor and sustains the dim flames of hope and love. And in moments of
profound human despair these flames are never insignificant. They keep alive the
capacity to be human. We must become, as Camus said, so absolutely free that
"existence is an act of rebellion." Those who do not rebel in our age of totalitarian
capitalism and who convince themselves that there is no alternative to collaboration
are complicit in their own enslavement. They commit spiritual and moral suicide.

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