Chris Hedges writes: "Attack the symptoms and the state will be
passive. Attack the disease and the state will be ruthless."
******
> Fight the Disease, Not the Symptoms
> Published on
> Monday, November 13, 2017
> by
> Truthdig
> Fight the Disease, Not the Symptoms
> If we can mount sustained acts of defiance in the face of severe state
> repression, we have a chance.
> by
> Chris Hedges
>
> They seek a return to the polished mendacity of politicians such as Hillary
> Clinton and Barack Obama. They hope to promote the interests of global
> capitalism by maintaining the fiction of a functioning democracy and an
> open
> society.
>
> The disease of globalized corporate capitalism has the same effects across
> the planet. It weakens or destroys democratic institutions, making them
> subservient to corporate and oligarchic power. It forces domestic
> governments to give up control over their economies, which operate under
> policies dictated by global corporations, banks, the World Trade
> Organization and the International Monetary Fund. It casts aside hundreds
> of
> millions of workers now classified as "redundant" or "surplus" labor. It
> disempowers underpaid and unprotected workers, many toiling in global
> sweatshops, keeping them cowed, anxious and compliant. It financializes the
> economy, creating predatory global institutions that extract money from
> individuals, institutions and states through punishing forms of debt
> peonage. It shuts down genuine debate on corporate-owned media platforms,
> especially in regard to vast income disparities and social inequality. And
> the destruction empowers proto-fascist movements and governments.
>
> These proto-fascist forces discredit verifiable fact and history and
> replace
> them with myth. They peddle nostalgia for lost glory. They attack the
> spiritual bankruptcy of the modern, technocratic world. They are
> xenophobic.
> They champion the "virtues" of a hyper-masculinity and the warrior cult.
> They preach regeneration through violence. They rally around demagogues who
> absolve followers of moral choice and promise strength and protection. They
> marginalize and destroy all individuals and institutions, including
> schools,
> that make possible self-criticism, self-reflection and transcendence and
> that nurture empathy, especially for the demonized. This is why artists and
> intellectuals are ridiculed and silenced. This is why dissent is attacked
> as
> an act of treason.
>
> These movements are also deeply misogynistic. They disempower girls and
> women to hand a perverted power to men who feel powerless in the global
> economy. They blame ethnic and religious minorities for the national
> decline. They foster bizarre conspiracy theories. And they communicate in
> the Orwellian newspeak of alternative facts. They claim the sole right to
> represent and use indigenous patriotic and religious symbols.
>
> India, built on the foundations of caste slavery, has become one of many
> new
> neofeudal states, among them Turkey, Poland, Russia and the United States.
> Its neofeudal structure continues to carry out atrocities against
> Dalits-the
> former "untouchables"-and now increasingly against Muslims. India's Prime
> Minister Narendra Modi, who as the chief minister of the western Indian
> state of Gujarat oversaw a vicious anti-Muslim pogrom, has defended
> sectarian discrimination and violence even though this year he made a tepid
> declaration that "[w]e will not tolerate violence in the name of faith" and
> issued other unconvincing appeals for religious peace. As prime minister he
> has employed threats, harassment and force to silence those who decry human
> rights abuses and atrocities carried out in India. He attacks his critics
> as
> "anti-national"-the equivalent of "unpatriotic" in the United States.
>
> Modi, like his fellow demagogues in other parts of the world, including
> Donald Trump, speaks in the language of moral purity and promotes
> self-serving historical myth. Indians who eat beef-a huge number-are
> targeted, school history books are being rewritten to conform to right-wing
> Hindu ideology and its open admiration for fascism, and entertainers
> considered too political or too salacious are under attack.
>
> There are within America's corporate power structures individuals, parties
> and groups that find the hysterical, imbecilic and irrational rants of
> demagogues such as Trump repugnant. They seek a return to the polished
> mendacity of politicians such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. They
> hope
> to promote the interests of global capitalism by maintaining the fiction of
> a functioning democracy and an open society. These "moderates" or
> "liberals," however, are also the architects of the global corporate
> pillage. They created the political vacuum that the demagogues and
> proto-fascist movements have filled. They blind themselves to their own
> complicity. They embrace their own myths-such as the belief that former FBI
> Director James Comey and the Russians were responsible for the election of
> Trump-to avoid examining the social inequality that is behind the global
> crisis and their defeat.
>
> The 400 richest individuals in the United States have more wealth than the
> bottom 64 percent of the population, and the three richest Americans have
> more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the U.S. population. This social
> inequality will only get worse as the weak controls that once regulated the
> economy and the tax code are abolished or rewritten to further increase the
> concentration of wealth among the ruling oligarchs. Social inequality at
> this level, history has shown, always results in these types of pathologies
> and political distortions. It also, potentially, presages revolution.
>
> The short-term political and economic gains made by the Democratic Party
> and
> liberal class in the last few decades came at the expense of the working
> class. The liberal class, because of its complicity in globalization, has
> destroyed its credibility as well as the credibility of the "liberal"
> democratic values it claims to represent. Enraged workers, lied to for
> decades by "liberal" politicians such as Bill and Hillary Clinton and
> Obama,
> delight in Trump's crude taunts and insults directed at the power structure
> and elites they loath. Many Americans are perhaps aware that Trump is a con
> artist, but he at least appears to share their disdain for the "liberal"
> elites who abandoned them.
>
> It will eventually become apparent to some, perhaps many, of Trump's
> supporters that he is cravenly in the service of the 1 percent and has
> turbocharged the corporate kleptocracy. The Democratic Party, busy purging
> Bernie Sanders supporters from its ranks, is banking on this epiphany to
> revive its political fortunes. The Democratic leadership has no real
> political strategy, other than to hope that Trump implodes. They are
> backing
> and funding opposition movements such as Indivisible and the women's
> marches, as well as the witch hunt about Russian interference in the 2016
> U.S. presidential election, all of which have as their sole focus removing
> Trump and restoring the Democratic Party to power. This form of resistance
> is sterile and useless.
>
> But there are other resistance movements-the most prominent being the
> battle
> by the water protectors at Standing Rock to block the Dakota Access
> pipeline-that attack the disease. It is easy to tell the resistance from
> the
> faux resistance by the response of the state. During the women's marches,
> Democrats, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz, were honored participants.
> The police were usually courteous and helped facilitate the marches;
> arrests
> were few and coverage by the corporate press was sympathetic. In contrast,
> during the long encampment at Standing Rock, which took place under the
> Obama administration, the nonviolent resisters were physically attacked by
> police, the National Guard and private security contractors. These forces
> used dogs, pepper spray, water cannons in subzero temperatures, sound
> machines, drones, armored vehicles and hundreds of arrests in their efforts
> to destroy the resistance.
>
> Attack the symptoms and the state will be passive. Attack the disease and
> the state will be ruthless.
>
> Once Trump's base begins to abandon him-the repression in Turkey under
> President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a good example of what will happen-the
> political landscape will turn very ugly. Trump and his allies, in a
> desperate bid to cling to power, will openly stoke hate crimes and violence
> against Muslims, undocumented workers, African-Americans, progressives,
> intellectuals, feminists and dissidents. He and his allies on the
> "alt-right" and the Christian right will move to silence all organs of
> dissent, including corporate media outlets fighting to restore the patina
> of
> civility that is the window dressing to corporate pillage. They will
> harness
> the power of the nation's substantial internal security apparatus to crush
> public protests and to jail opponents, even those who are part of the faux
> resistance.
>
> Time is not on our side. If we can build counter-capitalist movements that
> include the working class we have a chance. If we can, like the water
> protectors at Standing Rock, mount sustained acts of defiance in the face
> of
> severe state repression, we have a chance. If we can organize nationwide
> campaigns of noncooperation we have a chance. We cannot be distracted by
> the
> symptoms. We must cure the disease.
>
>
>
>
> © 2017 TruthDig
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> Chris Hedges
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>
> Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated
> from
> Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign
> correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books,
> including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should
> Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on
> America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy
> and the Triumph of Spectacle.
>
>
>
>
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