<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Disgust and rage… Is he wrong? Is this how Thomas Payne wrote?<div><div id="content_focus"><div id="articles"><div class="main"><div class="article">
<h3>How Democracy Dies: Lessons From a Master </h3><p class="article_date">Monday 11 October 2010</p><p class="jgasm"><a target="_blank" href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_democracy_dies_lessons_from_a_master_20101011/">by: Chris Hedges | <b>Truthdig | Op-Ed</b></a></p><p class="alignright"><img src="http://www.truth-out.org/files/images/101110hedgesC.jpg" alt="photo"><br>
<span class="photo_source">(Image: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/truthout" target="_blank">Jared Rodriguez / <span style="white-space: nowrap;">t r u t h o u t</span></a>; Adapted: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/alun/38029348/" target="_blank">Alun Salt</a>, <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/zphaze/4701919237/" target="_blank">zphaze</a>)</span> </p>
<div class="article_content"><p class="rteleft">The ancient Greek playwright<a target="_blank" href="http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc13.htm"> Aristophanes </a>spent
his life battling the assault on democracy by tyrants. It is
disheartening to be reminded that he lost. But he understood that the
hardest struggle for humankind is often stating and understanding the
obvious. Aristophanes, who had the temerity to portray the ruling Greek
tyrant, Cleon, as a dog, is the perfect playwright to turn to in trying
to grasp the danger posed to us by movements from the tea party to
militias to the Christian right, as well as the bankrupt and corrupt
power elite that no longer concerns itself with the needs of its
citizens. He saw the same corruption 2,400 years ago. He feared
correctly that it would extinguish Athenian democracy. And he struggled
in vain to rouse Athenians from their slumber.</p><p class="rteleft">There is a yearning by tens of millions of Americans,
lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement, to destroy the
intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment. They seek out of
ignorance and desperation to create a utopian society based on
“biblical law.” They want to transform America’s secular state into a
tyrannical theocracy. These radicals, rather than the terrorists who
oppose us, are the gravest threat to our open society. They have, with
the backing of hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate money,
gained tremendous power. They peddle pseudoscience such as “Intelligent
Design” in our schools. They keep us locked into endless and futile wars
of imperialism. They mount bigoted crusades against gays, immigrants,
liberals and Muslims. They turn our judiciary, in the name of
conservative values, over to corporations. They have transformed our
liberal class into hand puppets for corporate power. And we remain meek
and supine.</p><p class="rteleft">They want to transform America’s secular state into a
tyrannical theocracy. These radicals, rather than the terrorists who
oppose us, are the gravest threat to our open society.</p><p class="rteleft">The huge amount of taxpayer money doled out to Wall
Street, investment banks, the oil and natural gas industry and the
defense industry, along with the dismantling of our manufacturing
sector, is why we are impoverished. It is why our houses are being
foreclosed on. It is why some 45 million Americans are denied medical
care. It is why our infrastructure, from public schools to bridges, is
rotting. It is why many of us cannot find jobs. We are being fleeced.
The flagrant theft of public funds and rise of an obscenely rich
oligarchic class is masked by the tough talk of demagogues, themselves
millionaires, who use fear and bombast to keep us afraid, confused and
enslaved.</p><p class="rteleft">Aristophanes saw the same psychological and political
manipulation undermine the democratic state in ancient Athens. He
repeatedly warned Athenians in plays such as “The Clouds,” “The Wasps,”
“The Birds,” “The Frogs” and “Lysistrata” that permitting political
leaders who shout “I shall never betray the Athenian!” or “I shall keep
up the fight in defense of the people forever!” to get their hands on
state funds and power would end with the citizens enslaved.</p><p class="rteleft"><em><a target="_blank" href="http://www.truth-out.org/newsletter">Get Truthout in your inbox every day! Click here to sign up for free updates.</a></em></p><p class="rteleft">“The truth is, they want you, you see, to be poor,”
Aristophanes wrote in his play “The Wasps.” “If you don’t know the
reason, I’ll tell you. It’s to train you to know who your tamer is.
Then, whenever he gives you a whistle and sets you against an opponent
of his, you jump out and tear them to pieces.”<br>
Our democracy, through years of war, theft and corruption, is also being
diminished. But the example Aristophanes offers is not a hopeful one.
He held up the same corruption to his fellow Greeks. He repeatedly
chided them for not rising up and fighting back. He warned, ominously,
that by the time most citizens awoke it would be too late. And he was
right. The appearance of normality lulls us into a false hope and
submission. Those who shout most loudly in defense of the ideals of the
founding fathers, the sacredness of Constitution and the values of the
Christian religion are those who most actively seek to subvert the
principles they claim to champion. They hold up the icons and language
of traditional patriotism, the rule of law and Christian charity to
demolish the belief systems that give them cultural and political
legitimacy. And those who should defend these beliefs are cowed and
silent.</p><p class="rteleft">“For a considerable length of time the normality of
the normal world is the most efficient protection against disclosure of
totalitarian mass crimes,” <a target="_blank" href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/">Hannah Arendt</a>
wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” “Normal men don’t know that
everything is possible, refuse to believe their eyes and ears in the
face of the monstrous. ... The reason why the totalitarian regimes can
get so far toward realizing a fictitious, topsy-turvy world is that the
outside non-totalitarian world, which always comprises a great part of
the population of the totalitarian country itself, indulges in wishful
thinking and shirks reality in the face of real insanity. ...”</p><p class="rteleft">All ideological, theological and political debates
with the representatives of the corporate state, including the feckless
and weak Barack Obama, are useless. They cannot be reached. They do not
want a dialogue. They care nothing for real reform or participatory
democracy. They use the tricks and mirages of public relations to mask a
steadily growing assault on our civil liberties, our inability to make a
living and the loss of basic services from education to health care.
Our gutless liberal class placates the enemies of democracy, hoping
desperately to remain part of the ruling elite, rather than resist. And,
in many ways, liberals, because they serve as a cover for these
corporate extremists, are our greatest traitors. </p><p class="rteleft">Aristophanes too lived in a time of endless war. He
knew that war always empowered anti-democratic forces. He saw how war
ate away at the insides of a democratic state until it was hollowed out.
His play “Lysistrata,” written after Athens had spent 21 years consumed
by the Peloponnesian War, is a satire in which the young women refuse
to have sex with their men until the war ends and the older women seize
the Acropolis, where the funds for war are stored. The play called on
Athenians to consider radical acts of civil disobedience to halt a war
that was ravaging the state. The play’s heroine, Lysistrata, whose name
means “Disbander of Armies,” was the playwright’s mouthpiece for the
folly and self-destructiveness of war. But Athens, which would lose the
war, did not listen.</p><p class="rteleft">The tragedy is that liberals and secularists, like
Obama, are not viewed as competitors by the corporate forces that hold
power, but as contaminates that must be eliminated. They have sought to
work with forces that will never be placated. They have abandoned the
most basic values of the liberal class to play a game that in the end
will mean their political and cultural extinction. There will be no
swastikas this time but seas of red, white and blue flags and Christian
crosses. There will be no stiff-armed salutes, but recitations of the
Pledge of Allegiance. There will be no brown shirts but nocturnal visits
from Homeland Security. The fear, rage and hatred of our dispossessed
and confused working class are being channeled into currents that are
undermining the last vestiges of the democratic state. These dangerous
emotions, directed against a liberal class that as in ancient Athens
betrayed the population, have a strong appeal. And unless we adopt the
radicalism held by Aristophanes, unless we begin to hinder the
functioning of the corporate state through acts of civil disobedience,
we are finished.</p><p class="rteleft">Let us not stand at the open gates of the city meekly
waiting for the barbarians. They are coming. They are slouching towards
Bethlehem. Let us, if nothing else, like Aristophanes, begin to call
our tyranny by its name.</p><p><em></em></p></div></div></div></div></div></div></body></html>