[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [ufpj-activist] Chris Hedges: ONWT March to Nowhere

Wed Oct 6 16:24:34 CDT 2010

  Ron, Linda, & I discussed read & discussed this on AOTA this week.  (I'll post 
the program to the FB page next week.)

Hedges' hysterical (not funny) edge is visible, but it's employed in a good 
cause - exposing the administration's co-option of this rally.

The anti-war movement will reconstitute only when it realizes that the Obama 
administration is the enemy, not a misguided friend.

On 10/6/10 4:04 PM, Brussel Morton K. wrote:
> Reflections on the October 2 Washington demonstrations.
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
>> *From: *"Mark Stahl" <mcstahl3 at cox.net <mailto:mcstahl3 at cox.net>>
>> *Date: *October 6, 2010 2:48:17 AM CDT
>> *To: *"ufpj-activist" <ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org 
>> <mailto:ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org>>
>> *Subject: **[ufpj-activist] Chris Hedges: ONWT March to Nowhere*
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>>
>> Mark Stahl
>> Providence
>>
>>
>>   March to Nowhere
>>
>>
>>             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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