Absolutely correct!
Any time we resort to the tactics of the Corporate State, we lose.
Remember the hard and fast rule: Violence begets violence.
Carl Jarvis
On 10/20/17,
comes the following message: > Only Nonviolent Resistance Will Destroy
Corporate State
> By Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com
> October 19th, 2017
>
> Above Photo: The Oceti Sakowin camp, near the Standing Rock reservation in
> North Dakota, in November 2016. (Becker1999 / Flickr)
>
> The encampments by Native Americans at Standing Rock, N.D., from April 2016
> to February 2017 to block construction of the Dakota Access pipeline
> provided the template for future resistance movements. The action was
> nonviolent. It was sustained. It was highly organized. It was grounded in
> spiritual, intellectual and communal traditions. And it lit the conscience
> of the nation.
>
> Native American communities-more than 200 were represented at the Standing
> Rock encampments, which at times contained up to 10,000 people-called
> themselves "water protectors." Day after day, week after week, month after
> month, the demonstrators endured assaults carried out with armored
> personnel
> carriers, rubber bullets, stun guns, tear gas, cannons that shot water
> laced
> with chemicals, and sound cannons that can cause permanent hearing loss.
> Drones hovered overhead. Attack dogs were unleashed on the crowds. Hundreds
> were arrested, roughed up and held in dank, overcrowded cells. Many were
> charged with felonies. The press, or at least the press that attempted to
> report honestly, was harassed and censored, and often reporters were
> detained or arrested. And mixed in with the water protectors was a small
> army of infiltrators, spies and agents provocateurs, who often initiated
> vandalism and rock throwing at law enforcement and singled out
> anti-pipeline
> leaders for arrest.
>
> The Democratic administration of Barack Obama did not oppose the pipeline
> until after the election of Donald Trump, who approved the project in
> January 2017 soon after he became president. The water protectors failed in
> their ultimate aim to stop the construction, but if one looks at their
> stand
> as a single battle in a long war, Standing Rock was vitally important
> because it showed us how to resist.
>
> In November of last year I spoke with Kandi Mossett, one of the water
> protector leaders, when I visited the North Dakota encampments. We were
> standing over one of the sacred fires.
>
> "He starts throwing rocks at police," she said of an infiltrator who
> shadowed her and pointed her out to law enforcement for arrest. "When he
> throws rocks I see a few other people throw water bottles. One of our women
> says, 'Stop throwing shit!' So people stop. But there's instigators and
> infiltrators. We've had, here at this fire, two women who were called
> bikers
> because of the way they were dressed. When they lifted up their hands with
> everybody, people saw they had wires on. [Water protector] security went to
> them. They said, 'We see that you're miked.' They took off running. Went
> over the fence. And a car came zooming, picked them up, and they took off.
> It's not easy to keep [infiltrators] out. They can roll under the fence.
> They can come from under the security gates. We know they're here."
>
> The corporate state, no longer able to peddle a credible ideology, is
> becoming more overtly totalitarian. It will increasingly silence dissidents
> out of fear that the truth they speak will spark a contagion. It will, as
> in
> China's system of totalitarian capitalism, use the tools of censorship,
> blacklisting, infiltration, blackmailing, bribery, public defamation,
> prison
> sentences on trumped-up charges and violence. The more discredited the
> state
> becomes, the more it will communicate in the language of force.
>
> "This world is heading towards economic systems that continue to eat up
> life
> itself, even the heart of workers, and it's not sustainable," Native
> American and environmental leader Tom B.K. Goldtooth told me when we spoke
> at one of the camps last year. "We're at that point where Mother Earth is
> crying out for a revolution. Mother Earth is crying out for a new
> direction."
>
> "As far as a new regime, we'll need something based on earth
> jurisprudence,"
> he said. "A new system away from property rights, away from privatization,
> away from financialization of nature, away from control over our . DNA,
> away
> from control over seeds, away from corporations. It's a common law with
> local sovereignty. That's why it's important we have a system that
> recognizes the rights of a healthy and clean water system, ecosystem.
> Mother
> Earth has rights. We need a system that will recognize that. Mother Earth
> is
> not an object. We have an economic system that treats Mother Earth as if
> she's a liquidation issue. We have to change that. That's not sustainable."
>
> "If the pipeline is built, is that a defeat?" I asked him. He replied
> wryly,
> "That oil is going to run dry a lot sooner than they think. Maybe that
> corporation is going to go bankrupt. Who knows?"
>
> "I talk about the need for young people to have patience, to put the prayer
> first, rather than just jumping out there and putting their energy into
> action," he said. Angry reaction is "what the corporations want. That's
> what
> the government wants. They want us to react. They want us to feel that
> anger. When the anger escalates, our feelings, frustrations, it goes back
> to
> that rage. The rage of the machines. It's also unhappy. It feeds off the
> unhappiness of people."
>
> George Lakey, the Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professor for Issues in Social
> Change emeritus at Swarthmore College and a sociologist who focuses on
> nonviolent social change, talked about Sweden and Norway's response in the
> 1920 and '30s to the rise of fascism and compared it with the response in
> Italy and Germany. We live in a historical moment similar to when fascism
> was ascendant between the two world wars, he argues. Lakey was a trainer
> during the civil rights movement for Mississippi Freedom Summer and
> co-authored "A Manual for Direct Action: Strategy and Tactics for Civil
> Rights and All Other Nonviolent Protest Movements," one of the seminal
> texts
> of the civil rights movement.
>
> "Fascism was a definite threat," he said of the situation faced by Sweden
> and Norway. "And they were also experiencing [economic] depression.
> Norway's
> degree of depression was even worse than Germany's. It was the worst in
> Europe. The highest unemployment in Europe. People were literally starving.
> The pressure, the pro-fascist setup that the depression brings, was very
> present both in Sweden and in Norway. What the Nazis did there-what they
> did
> in Germany and what the fascists did in Italy-was provocation, provocation,
> provocation. 'Bait the left. The left will come. And we'll have street
> fighting.' "
>
> Street violence, he said in echoing Native American elders, always
> "strengthens the state."
>
> "It puts more pressure on the state-which is presided over by the 1
> percent-to step in more and more forcefully, with the middle class saying,
> 'We care about order. We don't want chaos,' " he said. "That's what
> happened
> in Germany. It was a strengthening of the state. This happened in Italy as
> well. That's what the game plan was for fascists in Norway and Sweden. It
> didn't work. It didn't work because the left didn't play their game. They
> didn't allow themselves to be baited into paying attention to them, doing
> street fighting."
>
> "Instead, [what was done] in the civil rights movement we would have called
> 'they kept their eyes on the prize,' " Lakey said. "They knew the prize was
> to push away the economic elite, get rid of its dominance, so they can set
> up a new economic system, which is now called the Nordic model. What they
> did was: massive strikes, massive boycotts, massive demonstrations. Not
> only
> in the urban areas, which is what you expect, but also in the rural areas.
> During the Depression [in Sweden and Norway], there were lots of farmers
> who
> had their farms foreclosed on. Farmers are perennially in debt and had no
> way of repaying that debt. When the sheriff came, farmers in that county
> would come to join them and collectively not cooperate-not violently, but
> very strongly-in such a way that the sheriff couldn't carry out the
> auction."
>
> "Remember who is actually running things, and we keep our focus on them
> both
> politically and economically," Lakey said.
>
> "The group I'm involved with [Earth Quaker Action Team] loves to go after
> corporations," he said. "We went after a bank [PNC], the seventh largest
> bank in the country but it was the No. 1 financier of mountaintop-removal
> coal mining in Appalachia. We forced that bank out of [the] business of
> financing mountaintop coal mining. Nonviolently. Disrupting. Disrupting. We
> were in bank branches all over the place. We shut down two shareholder
> meetings. We led a boycott in which people took out money from that bank
> and
> were putting it in their local credit unions. So there's more than one way
> to go after the 1 percent."
>
> "These days, a very smart way to do that is to focus on the economic
> entities that are owned by the 1 percent, who are basically responsible for
> the oppression that we experience," he said.
>
> Resistance, he stressed, will come from outside the formal political
> system.
> It will not be embraced by either of the two main political parties or the
> establishment, which is now under corporate control.
>
> "The Democratic Party is out to lunch," he said. "The Republican Party is
> actively grinding us. But even so we can make tremendous strides and start
> building that mass movement, which in Norway and Sweden was able to push
> the
> economic elites away. So that's an indication of the way to build a
> movement-which is not to take them on the way antifa suggests. Instead, in
> the way the civil rights movement did. It worked. I was there. The Ku Klux
> Klan was much stronger then than it is now. In the Deep South, the Ku Klux
> Klan virtually ran the [region]."
>
> Resistance, he said, means movements have to keep "pushing, pushing,
> pushing. Campaign after campaign after campaign." It must always stay "on
> the offensive. That's the secret."
>
> "As soon as they lost that sense of going on the offensive, choosing
> campaign after campaign and winning those campaigns, that was when they
> lost
> their momentum," he said of the civil rights movement. "The important thing
> about what happened in Norway and Sweden was they kept their momentum. The
> campaigns continued to grow in number and in power until the economic elite
> was out."
>
> "I was very influenced by Bayard Rustin, who was the chief strategist for
> Dr. [Martin Luther] King," he said. "I heard Bayard say over and over and
> over, 'If we don't get this economic justice thing done, in 50 years we're
> still going to have rampant racism.' He was right. But Dr. King and the
> other leaders who understood that were not able to get a sufficient number
> of people to make it. Now, the '63 march was for jobs and justice. So they
> were able to do it to some degree. They kept moving in that direction,
> involving white trade unions in that process. But in the situation of
> general prosperity, there were many people who were content with our
> economic system."
>
> Economic decline, deindustrialization, austerity, debt peonage, decay and
> collapse of social services and infrastructure and the impoverishment of
> the
> working class, Lakey said, have changed the configuration. The working
> class, in short, can no longer be bought off.
>
> "We're in a very different situation," he said. "We're still in austerity.
> There's not the degree of [contentment] that there once was. Trump has
> obviously capitalized on that fact. There's discontent. I think what Dr.
> King and Bayard and others wanted to happen in the '60s is now realizable."
>
> "The impact of ignoring climate change is going to be more and more
> disastrous," he added. "We're just through it now with [a devastating
> hurricane in] Houston. We're going to see more and more money drained off
> by
> that [kind of natural disaster]. Again, the 1 percent won't want to pay
> their fair share. What that leaves us is a population that is more and more
> discontent. We see that polarization going on. Polarization always goes
> along with increased inequality. We can expect more polarization. That's a
> part of the temptation of antifa: 'I'm more and more upset.' "
>
> "When dealing with mountaintop-removal coal mining, we went from an
> organization [Earth Quaker Action Team] that started in a living room to 13
> states," he said. "We were steadfastly nonviolent. And we were targeting
> something people understood. 'Wow, you're going after the bank that's
> financing this? I want to join that.' Even though there were some people
> who
> were like, 'We'd like a little more politeness, please.' They didn't get it
> because what we were about was making the bank's life so difficult that
> they
> would choose instead to get out of the business [of mountaintop mining]."
>
> Lakey cautioned against diverting energy to attacking neo-Nazi and white
> supremacist groups. That, he said, is a gift to the state.
>
> "There's really no need for us to shift our attention from going after the
> 1
> percent to go after, often, working-class guys on the extreme right," he
> said. "For one thing, we look at their real, genuine grievances and address
> them. For example, how many people on the right are from working-class
> families who have family members who are not being served by our health
> care
> system? Many people on the far right are from a demographic that is
> actually
> losing life expectancy for the first time in U.S. history. The health care
> system in the U.S is a mess. Obamacare is better than previous, but it's a
> mess. So what we can do is address the genuine grievances instead of
> writing
> people off as if obsession with racism is all that's going on. Fascism
> grows
> when the economy declines. So let's address the real thing instead of the
> symptom."
>
> While refusing to be baited into violent confrontations with the radical
> right, we must also be vigorous in using militant, nonviolent tactics to
> block hate speech. Article 4 of the International Covenant on the
> Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted by the United
> Nations in 1965, stipulates that "all propaganda and all organizations"
> based on ideas or theories of racial or ethnic superiority should be
> illegal. It urges states to take positive steps to eliminate them.
>
> Dr. Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese of Popular Resistance dealt with the
> issue of hate speech recently when a Baltimore chapter of the League of
> Women Voters held a series of panel discussions on immigration. The chapter
> invited speakers from anti-immigrant white supremacist groups listed as
> hate
> groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Despite public outcry, the
> league
> refused to withdraw the invitations. At the initial event the speaker was
> prevented from completing his presentation by anti-racist activists and
> members of the local chapter of the Green Party.
>
> "Organizations and institutions do not have a requirement to include those
> who espouse hate," Flowers and Zeese wrote of the event. "They are not
> required to give a platform to or legitimize white supremacist views. In
> fact, one could argue that it is anti-social to do so."
>
> "We would do better as a society to debate the best ways to eliminate white
> supremacy," they added.
>
> Lakey's prescription: "Consistently occupy the moral high ground, and that
> attracts support." "It defangs those who want to do us in," he said. "It's
> not like the 1 percent was fond of the civil rights movement. They had to
> be
> dragged kicking and screaming into making concessions. J. Edgar Hoover was
> even quoted as saying, 'He's [King] the most dangerous man in America.' "
>
> And, Lakey said, "there's a psychological reward. Going for what you want,
> instead of opposing what you don't want, is itself fulfilling. It was civil
> rights. It was called the Freedom Movement. It's also called a black
> liberation movement. It was all about positivity."
>
>
>
>
>
>
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