[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [ufpj-activist] Chris Hedges: ONWT March to Nowhere
C. G. Estabrook
galliher at illinois.edu
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/
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> ufpj-activist mailing list
>>
>> Post: ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org <mailto:ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org>
>> List info: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/ufpj-activist
>>
>> To Unsubscribe
>> Send email to: ufpj-activist-unsubscribe at lists.mayfirst.org
>> <mailto:ufpj-activist-unsubscribe at lists.mayfirst.org>
>> Or visit:
>> https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/options/ufpj-activist/brussel%40uiuc.edu
>>
>> You are subscribed as: brussel at uiuc.edu <mailto:brussel at uiuc.edu>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20101006/dbf3c8c0/attachment-0001.html>
More information about the Peace-discuss
mailing list