Carl,
I think that his message is that there's no way to solve the problem, but that
everyone should resist the system as best as he or she can, by peaceful means.
He's saying, "It's our ethical imperative to resist, even though it's hopeless."
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, March 3, 2021 10:03 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Chris Hedges: The Age of Social Murder
Prophet Chris Hedges at his finest!
But of course the one great flaw of any great Prophet is that they are
Prophets, not problem solvers. Certainly Prophet Hedges's propheces are
looking very real. So where are the Problem Solvers?
We've become a nation...a world of Eichmann's, each looking out for ourselves.
And all of this in the face of certain annihilation.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/2/21, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Chris Hedges: The Age of Social Murder The ruling elites, despite the
accelerating and tangible ecological collapse, mollify us, either by
meaningless gestures or denial.
by Chris Hedges
March 02nd, 2021
By Chris Hedges
Princeton, New Jersey (Scheerpost) — The two million deaths that have
resulted from the ruling elite’s mishandling of the global pandemic
will be dwarfed by what is to follow. The global catastrophe that
awaits us, already baked into the ecosystem from the failure to curb
the use of fossil fuels and animal agriculture, presage new, deadlier
pandemics, mass migrations of billions of desperate people, plummeting
crop yields, mass starvation, and systems collapse.
The science that elucidates this social death is known to the ruling
elites.
The science that warned us of this pandemic, and others that will
follow, is known to the ruling elites. The science that shows that a
failure to halt carbon emissions will lead to a climate crisis and
ultimately the extinction of the human species and most other species
is known to the ruling elites.
They cannot claim ignorance. Only indifference.
The facts are incontrovertible. Each of the last four decades have
been hotter than the last. In 2018, the UN International Panel on
Climate Change released a special report on the systemic effects of a
1.5 degrees Celsius
(2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) rise in temperatures. It makes for very grim
reading. Soaring temperature rises — we are already at a 1.2 degrees
Celsius
(2.16 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels — are already
baked into the system, meaning that even if we stopped all carbon
emission today, we still face catastrophe. Anything above a
temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius will render the earth
unhabitable. The Arctic ice along with the Greenland ice sheet are now
expected to melt regardless of how much we reduce carbon emissions. A
seven-meter (23-foot) rise in sea level, which is what will take place
once the ice is gone, means every town and city on a coast at sea
level will have to be evacuated.
Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, whose nonviolent
acts of mass civil disobedience offer the last, best chance to save
ourselves, lays it out in this video:
As the climate crisis worsens, the political constrictions will
tighten, making public resistance difficult. We do not live, yet, in
the brutal Orwellian state that appears on the horizon, one where all
dissidents will suffer the fate of Julian Assange. But this Orwellian
state is not far away.
This makes it imperative that we act now.
The ruling elites, despite the accelerating and tangible ecological
collapse, mollify us, either by meaningless gestures or denial. They
are the architects of social murder.
Social murder, as Friedrich Engels noted in his 1845 book “The
Condition of the Working-Class in England,” one of the most important
works of social history, is built into the capitalist system. The
ruling elites, Engels writes, those that hold “social and political
control,” were aware that the harsh working and living conditions
during the industrial revolution doomed workers to “an early and unnatural
death:”
When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that
death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew
in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder.
But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position
that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one
which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or
bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places
them under conditions in which they cannot live — forces them, through
the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that
death ensues which is the inevitable consequence — knows that these
thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to
remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single
individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can
defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees
the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one,
since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it
remains.”
— Friedrick Engels, “The Condition of the Working-Class in England”
The ruling class devotes tremendous resources to mask this social murder.
They control the narrative in the press. They falsify science and
data, as the fossil fuel industry has done for decades. They set up
committees, commissions and international bodies, such as UN climate
summits, to pretend to address the problem. Or they deny, despite the
dramatically changing weather patterns, that the problem even exists.
Scientists have long warned that as global temperatures rise,
increasing precipitation and heat waves in many parts of the world,
infectious diseases spread by animals will plague populations
year-round and expand into northern regions. Pandemics such as
HIV/AIDS, which has killed approximately
36 million people, the Asian flu, which killed between one and four
million, and COVID-19, which has already killed over 2.5 million, will
ripple across the globe in ever more virulent strains, often mutating
beyond our control.
The misuse of antibiotics in the meat industry, which accounts for 80
percent of all antibiotic use, has produced strains of bacteria that
are antibiotic resistant and fatal. A modern version of the Black
Death, which in the 14th century killed between 75 and 200 million
people, wiping out perhaps half of Europe’s population, is probably
inevitable as long as the pharmaceutical and medical industries are
configured to make money rather than protect and save lives.
Even with vaccines, we lack the national infrastructure to distribute
them efficiently because profit trumps health. And those in the global
south are, as usual, abandoned, as if the diseases that kill them will
never reach us.
Israel’s decision to distribute COVID-19 vaccines to as many as 19
countries while refusing to vaccinate the 5 million Palestinians
living under its occupation is emblematic of the ruling elite’s
stunning myopia, not to mention immorality.
What is taking place is not neglect. It is not ineptitude. It is not
policyfailure. It is murder. It is murder because it is premeditated.
It is murder because a conscious choice was made by the global ruling
classes to extinguish life rather than protect it. It is murder
because profit, despite the hard statistics, the growing climate
disruptions and the scientific modeling, is deemed more important than
human life and human survival.
The elites thrive in this system, as long as they serve the dictates
of what Lewis Mumford called the “megamachine,” the convergence of
science, economy, technics and political power unified into an
integrated, bureaucratic structure whose sole goal is to perpetuate
itself. This structure, Mumford noted, is antithetical to
“life-enhancing values.” But to challenge the megamachine, to name and
condemn its death wish, is to be expelled from its inner sanctum.
There are, no doubt, some within the megamachine who fear the future,
who are perhaps even appalled by the social murder, but they do not
want to lose their jobs and their social status to become pariahs.
Cancel Culture, Where Liberalism Goes to Die Chris Hedges: Cancel
culture is not the road to reform, it's the logical conclusion to
today's White Liberalism and the road to tyranny.
MintPress News | Chris Hedges | Feb 15 The massive resources allocated
to the military, which when the costs of the Veterans Administration
are added to the Department of Defense budget come to $826 billion a
year, are the most glaring example of our suicidal folly, symptomatic
of all decaying civilizations that squander diminishing resources in
institutions and projects that accelerate their decline.
The American military — which accounts for 38 percent of military
spending worldwide — is incapable of combating the real existential
crisis. The fighter jets, satellites, aircraft carriers, fleets of
warships, nuclear submarines, missiles, tanks and vast arsenals of
weaponry are useless against pandemics and the climate crisis. The war
machine does nothing to mitigate the human suffering caused by
degraded environments that sicken and poison populations or make life
unsustainable. Air pollution already kills an estimated 200,000
Americans a year while children in decayed cities such as Flint,
Michigan are damaged for life with lead contamination from drinking
water.
The prosecution of endless and futile wars, costing anywhere from $5
to $7 trillion, the maintenance of some 800 military bases in over 70
countries, along with the endemic fraud, waste and mismanagement by
the Pentagon at a time when the survival of the species is at stake is
self-destructive. The Pentagon has spent more than $67 billion alone
on a ballistic missile defense system that few believe will actually
work and billions more on a series of dud weapons systems, including the $22
billion Zumwalt destroyer.
And, on top of all this, the U.S. military emitted 1.2 billion metric
tons of carbon emissions between 2001 and 2017, twice the annual
output of the nation’s passenger vehicles.
A decade from now we will look back at the current global ruling class
as the most criminal in human history, willfully dooming millions upon
millions of people to die, including those from this pandemic, which
dwarf the murderous excesses of the killers of the past including the
Europeans that carried out the genocide of the indigenous peoples in
the Americas, the Nazis that exterminated some 12 million people, the
Stalinists or Mao’s Cultural Revolution. This is the largest crime
against humanity ever committed. It is being committed in front of us.
And, with few exceptions, we are willfully being herded like sheep to
the slaughter.
It is not that most people have faith in the ruling elites. They know
they are being betrayed. They feel vulnerable and afraid. They
understand that their misery is unacknowledged and unimportant to the
global elites, who have concentrated staggering amounts of wealth and
power into the hands of a tiny cabal of rapacious oligarchs.
The rage many feel at being abandoned often expresses itself in a
poisoned solidarity. This poisoned solidarity unites the
disenfranchised around hate crimes, racism, inchoate acts of vengeance
against scapegoats, religious and ethnic chauvinism and nihilistic
violence. It fosters crisis cults, such as those built by the
Christian fascists, and elevates demagogues such as Donald Trump.
Social divisions benefit the ruling class, which has built media silos
that feed packaged hate to competing demographics. The greater the
social antagonisms, the less the elites have to fear. If those gripped
by poisoned solidarity become numerically superior — nearly half of
the American electorate rejects the traditional ruling class and
embraces conspiracy theories and a demagogue — the elites will
accommodate the new power configuration, which will accelerate the social
murder.
The Biden administration will not carry out the economic, political,
social or environmental reforms that will save us. The fossil fuel
industry will continue to extract oil. The wars will not end. Social
inequality will grow.
Government control, with its militarized police forces of internal
occupation, wholesale surveillance and loss of civil liberties, will
expand.
New pandemics, along with droughts, wildfires, monster hurricanes,
crippling heat waves and flooding, will lay waste to the country as
well as a population burdened by a for-profit health care system that
is not designed or equipped to deal with a national health crisis.
The evil that makes this social murder possible is collective. It is
perpetrated by the colorless bureaucrats and technocrats churned out
of business schools, law schools, management programs and elite universities.
These systems managers carry out the incremental tasks that make vast,
complicated systems of exploitation and death work. They collect,
store and manipulate our personal data for digital monopolies and the
security and surveillance state. They grease the wheels for
ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They write the laws passed by the
bought-and-paid-for political class. They pilot the aerial drones that
terrorize the poor in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan. They
profit from the endless wars. They are the corporate advertisers,
public relations specialists and television pundits that flood the
airwaves with lies. They run the banks. They oversee the prisons. They
issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps and medical
coverage to some and unemployment benefits to others.
They carry out the evictions. They enforce the laws and the regulations.
They do not ask questions. They live in an intellectual vacuum, a
world of stultifying minutia. They are T.S. Eliot’s “the hollow men,”
“the stuffed men.” “Shape without form, shade without color,” the poet writes.
“Paralyzed
force, gesture without motion.”
These systems managers made possible the genocides of the past, from
the extermination of Native Americans to the Turkish slaughter of the
Armenians to the Nazi Holocaust to Stalin’s liquidations. They kept
the trains running. They filled out the paperwork. They seized the
property and confiscated the bank accounts. They did the processing.
They rationed the food. They administered the concentration camps and
the gas chambers. They enforced the law. They did their jobs.
These systems managers, uneducated in all but their tiny technical
specialty, lack the language and moral autonomy to question the
reigning assumptions or structures.
Hannah Arendt in “Eichmann in Jerusalem” writes that Adolf Eichmann
was motivated by “an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his
personal advancement.” He joined the Nazi Party because it was a good career
move.
Arendt continued:
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him,
and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were,
and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.
The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his
inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think,
namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No
communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because
he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against words
and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”
— Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem”
The Russian novelist Vasily Grossman in his book “Forever Flowing”
observed that “the new state did not require holy apostles, fanatic,
inspired builders, faithful, devout disciples. The new state did not
even require servants — just clerks.” This metaphysical ignorance fuels
social murder.
We cannot emotionally absorb the magnitude of the looming catastrophe
and therefore do not act.
Papering Over the Rot
The staggering concentration of wealth at the top has deformed our
governing institutions — new window dressing will not end oligarchy.
MintPress News | Chris Hedges | Feb 1
In Claude Lanzmann’s Holocaust documentary “Shoah,” he interviews
Filip Müller, a Czech Jew who survived the liquidations in Auschwitz
as a member of the “special detail., ”
One day in 1943 when I was already in Crematorium 5, a train from
Bialystok arrived. A prisoner on the ‘special detail’ saw a woman in
the ‘undressing room’ who was the wife of a friend of his. He came right out
and told her:
‘You are going to be exterminated. In three hours, you’ll be ashes.’
The woman believed him because she knew him. She ran all over and
warned to the other women. ‘We’re going to be killed. We’re going to
be gassed.’ Mothers carrying their children on their shoulders didn’t
want to hear that. They decided the woman was crazy. They chased her away.
So, she went to the men.
To no avail. Not that they didn’t believe her. They’d heard rumors in
the Bialystok ghetto, or in Grodno, and elsewhere. But who wanted to hear
that?
When she saw that no one would listen, she scratched her whole face.
Out of despair. In shock. And she started to scream. How do we resist?
Why, if this social murder is inevitable, as I believe it is, do we
even fight back? Why not give in to cynicism and despair? Why not
withdraw and spend our lives attempting to satiate our private needs
and desires? We are all complicit, paralyzed by the overwhelming force
of the megamachine and bound to its destructive energy by our allotted
slots within its massive machinery.”
— Filip Müller to Claude Lanzmann, “Shoah”
Yet, to fail to act, and this means carrying out mass, sustained acts
of nonviolent civil disobedience in an attempt to smash the
megamachine, is spiritual death. It is to succumb to the cynicism,
hedonism and numbness that has turned the systems managers and
technocrats that orchestrate this social murder into human cogs. It is
to surrender our humanity. It is to become an accomplice.
Albert Camus writes that “one of the only coherent philosophical
positions is revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and
his obscurity. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That
revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation
that ought to accompany it.”
“A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of
an object,” Camus warns. “But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved,
he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which
refuses to be classified as an object.”
The capacity to exercise moral autonomy, to refuse to cooperate, to
wreck the megamachine, offers us the only possibility left to personal
freedom and a life of meaning. Rebellion is its own justification. It
erodes, however imperceptibly, the structures of oppression. It
sustains the embers of empathy and compassion, as well as justice.
These embers are not insignificant. They keep alive the capacity to be
human. They keep alive the possibility, however dim, that the forces
that are orchestrating our social murder can be stopped. Rebellion
must be embraced, finally, not only for what it will achieve, but for
what it will allow us to become. In that becoming we find hope.
