Carl,
Marx had a blueprint. The problem is that he was writing an economic theory
without taking psychology, anthropology, and sociology into account. In other
words, it is theory that somehow, omits human nature. So we've seen how it's
been applied in various situations, but it doesn't follow the script because
reality keeps getting in the way.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, March 3, 2021 1:32 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Chris Hedges: The Age of Social Murder
Miriam,
In a gloomier frame of mind I would suggest that, as bright as he is, Chris
Hedges has no solution. This is why I call him a Prophet rather than a
Visionary.
Karl Marx had not only figured out the problems of his day, but charted out, on
paper anyway, a technically feasible solution. Of course it has never been
practiced in our day because Greedy People keep getting in the way.
But maybe if Hedges and others keep pointing out where our behavior is leading
us, then maybe some unborn Visionary will come forth with a solution. But
don't hold your breath.
As an afterthought, maybe the solution is easy to figure out, but applying it
will be next to impossible.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/3/21, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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.
