Yup, I've got it. Just haven't worked my way down to it yet.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/10/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On one of the digests I forwarded, there was also a link to a video of his
RT program, On Contact.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, September 10, 2020 10:42 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: CHRIS HEDGES: AMERICAN BLOODLANDS
Thanks, I always look forward to Chris Hedges. I'm sure all my friends over
on the suddenly cancelled ACB Chat List, will miss my occasional posting of
this insightful journalist/Prophet.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/9/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
CHRIS HEDGES: AMERICAN BLOODLANDS
By Chris Hedges, Scheer Post.
September 8, 2020 | EDUCATE!,
Above photo: The body of Michael Reinoehl is taken away early Friday
morning, Sept. 4, 2020, in Lacey, WA. Reinoehl was killed Thursday
night as investigators moved in to arrest him after he had been
suspected of fatally shooting a supporter of a right-wing group in
Portland, Oregon, last week after a caravan of Donald Trump backers
rode through downtown Portland. AP Photo/Ted S. Warren.
The Enraged, Polarized Segments Of The Population Are Rapidly
Consolidating As The Political Center Disintegrates.
The tinder that could soon ignite widespread violent conflagrations
throughout the United States lies ominously stacked around us.
Millions of disenfranchised white Americans, who see no way out of
their economic and social misery, struggling with an emotional void,
are seething with rage against a corrupt ruling class and bankrupt
liberal elite that presides over political stagnation and grotesque,
mounting social inequality. Millions more alienated young men and
women, also locked out of the economy and with no realistic prospect
for advancement or integration, gripped by the same emotional void,
have harnessed their fury in the name of tearing down the governing
structures and anti-fascism. The enraged, polarized segments of the
population are rapidly consolidating as the political center
disintegrates. They stand poised to tear apart the United States,
awash in military-grade weapons, unable to cope with the crisis of the
COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout, cursed with militarized
police forces that function as internal armies of occupation and de facto
allies of the neofascists.
The spark that usually sets such tinder ablaze is martyrdom. Aaron “Jay”
Danielson, a supporter of the right wing group Patriot Prayer, was was
wearing a loaded Glock pistol in a holster and had bear spray and an
expandable metal baton when he was shot dead on August 29, allegedly
by Michael Forest Reinoehl, a supporter of antifa, in the streets of
Portland.
A woman in the crowd can be heard shouting after the shooting: “I am
not sad that a fucking fascist died tonight.” On Thursday, Reinoehl,
allegedly armed with a handgun, was shot and killed by federal agents in
Washington state.
Once people start being sacrificed for the cause, it takes little for
demagogues of the radical left and the radical right to insist that
self-preservation necessitates violence and is a prerequisite for
victory.
Violence is a narcotic. It fills the emotional void. It imparts a
feeling of God-like omnipotence to the powerless. It instills feelings
of comradeship and belonging to the alienated. It gives to social
outcasts, crippled by humiliation and rejection, a sense of meaning
and higher purpose. It obliterates the despair that once defined their
lives and replaces it with feelings of ecstatic self-importance and
self-adulation, a state of being outside the self. The world suddenly
becomes a Manichean battleground between them and us, the forces of dark
and the forces of light.
When I wrote War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a reflection on the
culture of war after two decades as a correspondent in Central
America, Africa, The Middle East and the Balkans, I meant it. I have
seen this dark elixir at work in other disintegrating societies. I
know too intimately the rush that violence engenders, the overpowering
lusts that seize a mob or armed unit when it destroys, even human
beings, and the heady attraction of suspending all personal morality
and individual responsibility for the wild intoxication of violence.
It is the absence of empathy, perhaps the best definition of evil.
The words left and right, once violence becomes the primary form of
communication, are meaningless. These are death cults. They venerate
and worship death. The martyrs justify the murder of the enemy,
including the detested voices that call for understanding, reconciliation
and nonviolence.
To suggest anything other than the total annihilation of the enemy—and
the enemy includes all who do not fully and uncritically support the
cause—is apostasy. It is the dead who rule. Their voices cry out from
beyond the grave demanding vengeance and new heroes and martyrs to take
their place.
There are constant and repeated acts of remembrance for the fallen.
This cult of the dead is integral to combat units in the military.
Those who attend the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program, an
8-week course held at Fort Benning, Georgia, to become an Army Ranger
must select a “Ranger in the sky” who was killed in action. Recruits,
who are warned not to pick Pat Tillman, are required to know the
details of the dead Ranger’s personal life before enlistment and his
military career. They must carry this information on a piece of paper with
them at all times. It is an inspectable item.
Idealists, seeking to lift themselves up from the depths of social
obscurity and be fêted as heroes, become, whether as Army Rangers or
members of violent militias, willing sacrificial victims. But as
deaths accumulate, these martyrs, once so important and precious,
disappear into faceless, nameless piles of corpses.
The Nazi Party in 1930 found its primary martyr in the 19-year-old
brownshirt Horst Wessel who led a branch of the Nazi paramilitaries
that attacked Communists, especially those who made up the rival
Communist militia the Red Front-Fighters’ League (RFB). Wessel was
shot dead by Albrecht “Ali” Höhler, a Communist militant and petty
criminal — later assassinated by the Nazis — after a complaint was
made to the party about Wessel by his Communist landlady. Wessel
instantly became a “martyr for the Third Reich.” The Horst Wessel song
became the official anthem of the Nazi Party. Fascist and Communist
violence, with deaths on both sides, exploded in the streets of Weimar
Germany in the early 1930s. The mayhem, much of it instigated by the
fascists, eventually exhausted the German public and made it
susceptible to the right-wing and fascist promises to impose law and
order.
Martyrdom also played a central role in the eruption of the war in the
former Yugoslavia. On March 1, 1992, a wedding procession of Bosnian
Serbs in Sarajevo was attacked by Ramiz Delalić, a career criminal and
a Muslim known by his nicknameĆelo. The father of the groom, Nikola
Gardović, was killed. A Serbian Orthodox priest was wounded. The
shooting of Gardović, like that of Wessel, was used by Serb nationalists
to whip up a blood fury.
It saw Serbs erect armed barricades and roadblocks throughout the
city, that led not long afterwards to a war in which most of Bosnia
was destroyed, 2.2 million people were displaced from their homes and at
least 100,000 died.
“It is the first death which infects everyone with the feeling of
being threatened.”
Elias Canetti
I watched many funerals in Gaza for Palestinian martyrs. They were
little more than recruiting ceremonies for militants and suicide
bombers. A truck with a generator in the back and huge loudspeakers on
the cab would be at the head of the funeral procession. The speakers
would blast out verses from the Koran, along with slogans calling on
heroes to fight and die for Palestine and become a “shaheed,” or
martyr. Young boys would run alongside or behind the truck. The
funeral processions made their way slowly down the dusty, narrow
streets of the refugee camps, past the concrete hovels, the walls
decorated with pictures of the newest martyr or murals that depicted
past attacks, such as a bus with the Israeli Star of David on it being
consumed in a fiery explosion. “Don’t be merciful to those inside,” the
Arabic script read below the picture of the bus. “Blow it up! Hit it!”
“It is the first death which infects everyone with the feeling of
being threatened,” wrote Elias Canetti, a Bulgarian refugee from Nazi
persecution, in “Crowds and Power”:
“It is impossible to overrate the part played by the first dead man in
the kindling of wars. Rulers who want to unleash war know very well
that they must procure or invent a first victim. It need not be anyone
of particular importance, and can even be someone quite unknown.
Nothing matters except his death; and it must be believed that the enemy
is responsible for this.
Every possible cause of his death is suppressed except one: his
membership of the group to which one belongs oneself.”
The flashing red lights are all around us. Joe Biden and the
Democratic Party will do little to restore the social bonds or address
the social inequality and disenfranchisement of tens of millions of
Americans, now facing evictions and bankruptcy, which is fueling the
social collapse.
Donald Trump and the Republican Party, along with media outlets such
as FOX News, in a bid to retain power, are fanning the flames of
violence, seeing in the incitement of far-right mobs a route to a ruthless
police state.
In armed conflicts, facts and truth no longer matter. Lies, if used to
further the cause, become righteous. Truth, if it hurts the cause, is
blasphemy. If your side commits an atrocity, it’s justified by an
atrocity, real or invented, carried out by the enemy. The ends always
justify the means. The moral universe is banished, replaced by a
self-serving pseudo-morality.
“In the beginning war looks and feels like love,” I wrote in War is a
Force That Gives Us Meaning. “But unlike love it gives nothing in
return but an ever deepening dependence, like all narcotics, on the
road to self-destruction. It does not affirm but places upon us
greater and greater demands. It destroys the outside world until it is
hard to live outside war’s grip. It takes a higher and higher dose to
achieve any thrill.
Finally, one ingests war only to remain numb. The world outside
becomes, as Freud wrote, ‘uncanny.’ The familiar becomes strangely
unfamiliar — many who have been to war find this when they return
home. The world we once understood and longed to return to stands
before us as alien, strange, and beyond our grasp.”
Chris Hedges writes a regular original column for Scheerpost twice a
month.
