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Ron, Linda, & I discussed read & discussed this on AOTA this
week. (I'll post the program to the FB page next week.)<br>
<br>
Hedges' hysterical (not funny) edge is visible, but it's employed in
a good cause - exposing the administration's co-option of this
rally. <br>
<br>
The anti-war movement will reconstitute only when it realizes that
the Obama administration is the enemy, not a misguided friend. <br>
<br>
<br>
On 10/6/10 4:04 PM, Brussel Morton K. wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:90BE355D-FC6B-4860-B1EE-E671B62352D6@comcast.net"
type="cite"><base href="x-msg://519/">Reflections on the October 2
Washington demonstrations.<br>
<div><br>
<div>Begin forwarded message:</div>
<br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
<blockquote type="cite">
<div style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:
'Helvetica'; font-size: medium; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><b>From:
</b></span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica';
font-size: medium;">"Mark Stahl" <<a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:mcstahl3@cox.net">mcstahl3@cox.net</a>><br>
</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:
'Helvetica'; font-size: medium; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><b>Date:
</b></span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica';
font-size: medium;">October 6, 2010 2:48:17 AM CDT<br>
</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:
'Helvetica'; font-size: medium; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><b>To:
</b></span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica';
font-size: medium;">"ufpj-activist" <<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:ufpj-activist@lists.mayfirst.org">ufpj-activist@lists.mayfirst.org</a>><br>
</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:
'Helvetica'; font-size: medium; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><b>Subject:
</b></span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica';
font-size: medium;"><b>[ufpj-activist] Chris Hedges: ONWT
March to Nowhere</b><br>
</span></div>
<br>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse:
separate; font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal;
font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing:
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<div bgcolor="#ffffff">
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"><font face="Times New
Roman" size="3">Attached below is an essay by Chris
Hedges about the One Nation rally on 10/2 which he
refers to as the "March to Nowhere". Following are
my prefatory comments to his essay.<br>
<br>
Overall, I think that participation by the
peace/antiwar movement in the ONWT rally was a
worthy experiment, but not a truly successful one,
although I think there was benefit provided by the
Peace Table/UNAC contingents and by the socialist
contingent, which met in the late morning and
marched to the main event.<br>
<br>
Other than the Belafonte speech, however, there was
very little peace/antiwar content at the main rally,
with the exception of UAW president Bob King, who
called for an end to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Given the major escalations in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, any truly liberal/progressive rally should
have had a major focus on ending the wars. Nor was
there much emphasis on Guantanamo or the steady
erosion of civil liberties in this country.<br>
<br>
We know why the rally did not seriously address such
critical issues as the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and
Pakistan, the erosion of civil liberties, or the
growing role of corporate interests: because the
Obama administration and the Democratic Congress
have not only maintained the policies of the Bush
administration, but in many cases they are actually
worse than Bush, including the steady escalation of
the drone war in Pakistan.<br>
<br>
Yet, the major purpose of the rally was to encourage
people to vote for Democrats on November 2. Since
the Obama administration is weak to catastrophic on
virtually every major issue, they had no choice but
to avoid any serious challenges to the party in
power on these critical issues.<br>
<br>
Only a movement which is independent of the major
political parties, committed to a strong platform of
immediate withdrawal from all foreign wars and
occupations, and prepared to address issues of
global imperialism and economic collapse, will be
able to mobilize people effectively for the kind of
radical changes necessary to move our society
forward in the face of a growing reactionary trend
in our public institutions. The article by Chris
Hedges follows.<br>
<br>
<br>
Mark Stahl<br>
Providence</font></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"> </font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">
<h1><font size="4">March to Nowhere</font></h1>
<h6>Posted on Oct 5, 2010</h6>
<div class="printlinks"><font face="georgia, times new
roman, times, serif">
<p><font size="3">By Chris Hedges</font></p>
<p><font size="3">We can hold One Nation marches
every week. It will not make any difference
until we revolt against the formal structures
of power.</font></p>
<p><font size="3">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.</font></p>
<p><font size="3">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. </font></p>
<p><font size="3">“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.”</font></p>
<p><font size="3">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.</font></p>
<p><font size="3">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.</font></p>
<p><font size="3">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.</font></p>
<p><font size="3">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.</font></p>
<p><font size="3">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. </font></p>
<p><font size="3">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. </font></p>
<p><font size="3">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:</font></p>
<p><font size="3">“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.”</font></p>
<p><font size="3">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.</font></p>
<p><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/march_to_nowhere_20101005/"><font
size="3">http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/march_to_nowhere_20101005/</font></a></p>
</font></div>
<br>
</font></div>
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