Maurice,
Sorry, but I don't enjoy debate. I was referring to the very probable end of
human life due to climate change. It is highly unlikely that at this point in
time, since meaningful measures haven't been taken previously, that appropriate
measures will be taken to keep global warming in check. It's conceivable,
though, that humanity will be ended by nuclear war before that.
Yes, there is a great deal about Cuba that is very positive. But it has its
flaws, partly caused by its need to defend against the US. I believe it has
begun to change a bit, moving toward a mixed economy.
Certainly, there is organization around important issues. Some of it is done by
people within the groups affected. Some of it is done by outside organizers who
have particular talents and training which permit them to do this work.
I think that what bothered me about what you wrote, is that to me, what you
wrote about Hedges, seemed highly disrespectful. It isn't particularly hedges
that concerns me, it is the feeling that your writing conveys, (and I've come
across it before), that anyone who doesn't see the world as you do, is wrong.
In my case, you said I was condescending. So I will resort to what I generally
do on this list, which is to post articles that I think are interesting and
informative, and not respond to critical comments about the articles. After
all, I'm just posting them. I didn't write them and it isn't my responsibility
to defend them.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Maurice Peret
Sent: Tuesday, December 8, 2020 8:57 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Chris Hedges: The Collective Suicide of the
Liberal Class
Dearest Miriam,
Where is this place called a point of no return? Do you mean to suggest some
sort of Armageddon?
A strenuous discussion and even rigorous debate about politics is a fine and
welcome thing without resorting to condescension to suggest that one could not
possibly grasp the complexity of a subject. AS I have stated before, I am
well-read on Chris Hedges and have spent many hours listening to his speeches,
podcasts, and interviews on his weekly RT News show, On Contact. But to my
points you never bothered to address directly. It amounts to dismissive at best
and avoidance at worse the pure and simple indisputable fact that we live in a
class divided society. More divided, as statistical evidence of staggering
economic and social inequality persistently demonstrates. To articulate where
we are and how we got here is an important historic matter and Hedges is a fine
thinker in this regard. And yes, I was aware of his position as New York Times
Middle East Bureau Chief. My assertion stands, however, since I read nothing in
Hedges writings that indicate the dynamic part of this social equation, that is
the demonstrated capacity and power of the working class to transform society
in our own interests. It is as though slavery was ended by the enlightened
Commander in Chief, Honest Abe Lincoln, in a sweeping edict called the
Emancipation Proclamation; that New Deal concessions from Social Security
protections to the WPA programs were somehow charitably gifted by New York’s
own aristocrat, FDR; that civil rights were won by LBJ’s signature legislation;
or that imperialist backed colonial regimes underwent a “peaceful transition of
power.” This is the stuff of revisionist propaganda disguised as history. Hence
the sentimental shock of liberals and intellectual radicals opining the
disintegration of democracy, as if in some golden age, such a thing existed as
a benevolent liberal class who saw to the universal good of the people.
Certainly, Hedges and his ilk spare no criticism of this bankrupt meritocracy,
but their focus remains neck strainingly upon the rulers and their government.
I have been around a while, myself, and know intimately what a proletarian led
movement can accomplish. To be sure, Hedges possesses at least a cursory
understanding of Marxism but contrary to utilizing Marxist theoretical
approaches in his world analysis, he, in fact, completely disavows Marxism as a
viable movement, as is its true character, rather than a static theory. Folks
like this tend to dismiss the example of the Bolshevik revolution, choosing
instead to buy into the Stalinist fraud that misrepresented itself as communist
until the disintegration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Hedges has
nothing to say about the living, breathing, and thriving Cuban revolution which
ranks head and shoulders above the most so-called advanced nations in
education, medicine, culture, and rates of infant mortality and life expectancy.
How much more complicated must it be to implore that we, in our vast majority,
recognize that we are a class, that we should act in our own class interests
and organize our own class defense? To view the world in these terms is neither
simplistic nor static. I dare to state that this is seeing the world as it is,
in all its horrific eternal wars, genocidal abuse of human and natural
resources, and utter irrational logic of a system that has outlived its
historic purpose. That there will come massive class struggles cannot be in
doubt. How those battles will come out, that cannot be for certain known. Trust
me, I have considered numerous philosophical approaches to existence and of
social forces. I do not, as you might condescend to suggest, come to this
conversation ill equipped of alternate ways of viewing things.
Challenge my assertions, I invite you. But save the condescension to suggest
that the complexities of the world are out of reach for a younger, perhaps more
naive body. :) Hedges concludes doom and gloom and neglects the most powerful
class in history to advance humanity forward. There can be no alternative.
On 12/7/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Maurice,
I kind of agree with Carl's point which is that he wonders, as do I,
if there are any solutions, at this point. I think that I was trying
to say that these issues are incredibly complex and we are moving
toward a point of no return, very quickly. And I was also trying to
say that I know that people who use Marxist theory as the way in
which to see and analyze the world, believe that the theory is a
science that holds the answers. The interesting thing about Chris
Hedges is that his way of seeing the world is very complicated. He
uses Marxist theory, but he is also very well read so he's read a
great deal of philosophy and he's also an ordained minister. He was,
in case you weren't aware of it, a foreign bureau chief for the New
York Times for many years. Again, my point is only that things are a lot more
complicated than we would wish them to be.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Maurice Peret
Sent: Monday, December 7, 2020 6:48 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Chris Hedges: The Collective Suicide of
the Liberal Class
Hi Miriam,
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I respect and appreciate your
point of view as very well articulated. From your own description of
your past experiences, I am surprised that you would tag my reference
to the working class as somehow abstract. as a matter of practical
fact, all of the variations that you described of various levels of
servitude or near slavery conditions, do not obscure the definition of
working class. insofar as respecting intellectuals such as Chris
Hedges and Cornell West for their proposed solutions, I would prevail
upon you to define exactly what their solutions are. You might well
justifiably characterize my comments as being from a narrow lens,
just as I would not dismiss your opinion as without merit, it should
also be noted that my perspective is based upon historical evidence and
scientific analyses. history cannot be reduced to subjectivity.
For example, the so called “woke culture” cannot represent itself and
its revisionist worldview, as a replacement for objective reality of a
class divided society. The facts are indisputable. I am here to
assert that we are a society divided by those who produce the massive
wealth upon which the parasitic ruling class exist. Until these social
relations are fundamentally replaced, we cannot begin to deal with
injustices such as racism, sexism, and gender biases.
Peace, Maurice
OOn Dec 7, 2020, at 17:31, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Maurice,
I understand that you see the world through a particular lens and
tend to be critical of anyone who does not see the world precisely as
you do. My position has always been that anyone who cares about
humanity, and who is willing to offer thoughts and possible
solutions, particularly people with the intellect and ethical stature
of Chris Hedges and Cornell West, deserve our respect, not our
criticism. I've been around for a long time, long enough to know that
terms like, "the working class" are abstractions, used to make a
point. Certainly, society is stratified with a power elite on top and
powerless people on the bottom. When I was a child, back in the
1940's, my father was a factory worker who never graduated from high
school. College in New York City was free back then. But I remember
that when I was very small, for a short time, my parents paid an
African American woman to clean our one bedroom apartment once a
week. And now that I am in my eighties with several disabilities and
health problems, I have had a part-time home health aid who has an I
phone, just got a new car, and tells me with pride, that back in
Jamaica, her family owns property. Perhaps the working class to which
people refer, are the slave laborers in some Asian countries or the farmers
in India who are commiting suicide or going on strike in order to survive.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Maurice Peret
Sent: Monday, December 7, 2020 3:19 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Chris Hedges: The Collective Suicide
of the Liberal Class
I have read several books authored by Chris Hedges and find him quite
wise in his take-no-prisoners critique of capitalism. He even
advocates some form of revolution. The trouble with Hedges is in his
utter lack of confidence in the working class to assume its historic
role in seizing power from the parasitic ruling class and wielding it
as a vehicle for genuine progressive societal change and the
transformation of human beings. Hedges is clear about the
disintegration of capital but falls short of action-based
revolutionary clarity and confidence. He sits somewhere in the
ecumenical anarcho-intellectual towers along with Cornell West and
his ilk. When the chips fall, they tend to fall in with the
Democratic Socialists who historically played a treacherous anti
working class role, which opened the door to fascism in Italy, Germany, and
Spain.
What we require are disciplined proletarian organizations
who study and understand a line of march that recognizes that the
initiative belongs to the oppressed in society. It cannot be
overstated the extent to which those who control every institution
from education to production, dominate the narrative in their
exaggerated role in society, most grossly expressed in ideas like
American exceptionalism, rather more like imperialist hubris. But
make no mistake, the conditions are fast being readied for struggles
that will realize the fear by the rulers of the working class. Those
of us who are blind, whether among the vast army of the unemployed or
super-exploited in a network of sheltered workshops, have a great stake in
joining in these battles.
MSP
On 12/7/20, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Prophet Cris Hedges speaks with straight tongue. Can we dub him,
The Grim Speaker?
Carl Jarvis
On 12/7/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Chris Hedges: The Collective Suicide of the Liberal Class
BIDEN ADMIN CHRIS HEDGES ORIGINAL
Chris Hedges: The Collective Suicide of the Liberal Class December
7,
2020
3 Commentson Chris Hedges: The Collective Suicide of the Liberal
Class No one can, or should, take them seriously. They stand for
nothing. They fight for nothing.
Original illustration by Mr. Fish
By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost
Liberals who express dismay, or more bizarrely a fevered hope,
about the corporatists and imperialists selected to fill the
positions in the Biden administration are the court jesters of our
political burlesque. They long ago sold their soul and abandoned
their most basic principles to line up behind a bankrupt Democratic
Party. They chant, with every election cycle, the mantra of the
least worst and sit placidly on the sidelines as a Bill Clinton or
a Barack Obama and the Democratic Party leadership betray every
issue they claim to support.
The only thing that mattered to liberals in the presidential race,
once again, was removing a Republican, this time Donald Trump, from
office.
This,
the liberals achieved. But their Faustian bargain, in election
after election, has shredded their credibility. They are ridiculed,
not only among right-wing Trump supporters but by the hierarchy of
the Democratic Party that has been captured by corporate power. No
one can, or should, take liberals seriously. They stand for nothing.
They fight for nothing. The cost is too onerous. And so, the
liberals do what they always do, chatter endlessly about political
and moral positions they refuse to make any sacrifices to achieve.
Liberals, largely comprised of the professional managerial-class
that dutifully recycles and shops for organic produce and is
concentrated on the two coasts, have profited from the ravages of
neoliberalism.
They seek to endow it with a patina of civility. But their routine
and public humiliation has ominous consequences. It not only
exposes the liberal class as hollow and empty, it discredits the
liberal democratic values they claim to uphold.
Liberals should have abandoned the Democratic Party when Bill
Clinton and political hacks such as Biden transformed the
Democratic Party into the Republican Party and launched a war on
traditional liberal values and left-wing populism. They should have
defected by the millions to support Ralph Nader and other Green Party
candidates.
This defection, as Nader understood, was the only tactic that could
force the Democrats to adopt parts of a liberal and left-wing
agenda and save us from the slow-motion corporate coup d’état. Fear
is the real force behind political change, not oily promises of
mutual goodwill. Short of this pressure, this fear, especially with
labor unions destroyed, there is no hope. Now we will reap the
consequences of the liberal class’s moral and political cowardice.
The Democratic Party elites revel in taunting liberals as well as
the left-wing populists who preach class warfare and supported
Bernie Sanders.
How are we supposed to interpret the appointment of Antony Blinken,
one of the architects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and
supporter of the apartheid state of Israel, as Secretary of State?
Or John Kerry, who championed the massive expansion of domestic oil
and gas production, largely through fracking, and, according to
Barack Obama’s memoir, worked doggedly to convince those concerned
about the climate crisis to “offer up concessions on subsidies for
the nuclear power industry and the opening of additional U.S.
coastlines to offshore oil drilling” as the new climate policy czar?
Or Brian Deese, the executive who was in charge of the “climate
portfolio” at BlackRock, which invests heavily in fossil fuels,
including coal, and who served as a former Obama economic adviser
who advocated austerity measures, to run the White House’s economic
policy? Or Neera Tanden, for director of the Office of Management
and Budget, who as president of the Center for American Progress
raised millions in dark money from Silicon Valley and Wall Street
while relentlessly ridiculing Bernie Sanders and his supporters on
cable news and social media and who proposed a plank in the
Democratic platform calling for bombing Iran?
The Biden administration resembles the ineffectual German
government formed by Franz von Papen in 1932 that sought to
recreate the ancien régime, a utopian conservatism that ensured
Germany’s drift into fascism. Biden, bereft like von Papen of new
ideas and programs, will eventually be forced to employ the brutal
tools Biden as a senator was so prominent in creating to maintain
social control – wholesale surveillance, a corrupt judicial system,
the world’s largest prison system and police that have been
transformed into lethal paramilitary units of internal occupation.
Those that resist as social unrest mounts will be attacked as
agents of a foreign power and censored, as many already are being
censored, including through algorithms and deplatforming on social
media. The most ardent and successful dissidents, such as Julian
Assange, will be criminalized.
The shock troops of the state, already ideologically bonded with
the neofascists on the right, will hunt down and wipe out an
enfeebled and often phantom left, as we saw in the chilling state
assassination by U.S.
Marshals
of the antifa activist Michael Reinoehl, who was unarmed and
standing outside an apartment complex in Lacey, Washington, in
September when he was shot multiple times. I witnessed this kind of
routine state terror during the war in El Salvador. Reinoehl
allegedly killed Aaron Danielson, a member of the far-right group
Patriot Prayer during a pro-Trump rally in Portland, Oregon in August.
Compare the gunning down of Reinoehl by federal agents to the
coddling of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old accused of killing
two protesters and injuring a third on August 25 in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Police officers, moments before the shooting, are seen on video
thanking Rittenhouse and other armed right-wing militia member for
coming to the city and handing them bottles of water. Rittenhouse
is also seen in a video walking toward police with his hands up
after his shooting spree as protesters yell that he had shot
several people. Police, nevertheless, allow him to leave.
Rittenhouse’s killings have been defended by the right, including
Trump.
Rittenhouse, who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in
donations for his legal fees, has been released on $2 million bail.
We stand on the cusp of a frightening authoritarianism. Social
unrest, given a continuation of neoliberalism, the climate crisis,
the siphoning off of diminishing resources to the bloated war
machine, political stagnation and the failure to contain the
pandemic and its economic fallout, is almost certain. Absent a
left-wing populism, a disenfranchised working class will line up,
as it did with Trump, behind its counterfeit, a right-wing populism.
The liberal elites will, if history is any guide, justify state
repression as a response to social chaos in the name of law and order.
That
they, too, are on the Christian Right and the corporate state’s
long list of groups to be neutralized will become evident to them
when it is too late.
It was Friedrich Ebert and the Social Democratic Party of Germany,
siding with the conservatives and nationalists, that created the
Freikorps, private paramilitary groups composed of demobilized
soldiers and malcontents. The Freikorps ruthlessly crushed
left-wing uprisings in Berlin, Bremen, Brunswick, Hamburg, Halle,
Leipzig, Silesia, Thuringia and the Ruhr. When the Freikorps was
not gunning down left-wing populists in the streets and carrying
out hundreds of political assassinations, including the murder of
Walther Rathenau, the foreign minister, it was terrorizing
civilians, looting and pillaging. The Freikorps became the
antecedent of the Nazi Brownshirts, led by Ernst Röhm, a former Freikorps
commander.
All the pieces are in place for our own descent into what I suspect
will be a militarized Christianized fascism. Political dysfunction,
a bankrupt and discredited liberal class, massive and growing
social inequality, a grotesquely rich and tone-deaf oligarchic
elite, the fragmentation of the public into warring tribes,
widespread food insecurity and hunger, chronic underemployment and
unemployment and misery, all exacerbated by the failure of the
state to cope with the crisis of the pandemic, combine with the rot
of civil and political life to create a familiar cocktail leading
to authoritarianism and fascism.
Trump and the Republican Party, along with the shrill incendiary
voices on right-wing media, play the role the antisemitic parties
played in Europe during the late 19th and early 20th century. The
infusion of anti-Semitism into the political debate in Europe
destroyed the political decorum and civility that is vital to
maintaining a democracy. Racist tropes and hate speech, as in
Weimar Germany, now poison our political discourse.
Ridicule
and cruel taunts are hurled back and forth. Lies are
interchangeable with fact. Those who oppose us are demonized as
human embodiments of evil.
This poisonous discourse is only going to get worse, especially
with millions of Trump supporters convinced the election was rigged
and stolen.
The German Social Democrat Kurt Schumacher in the 1930s said that
fascism “is a constant appeal to the inner swine in human beings”
and succeeds by “mobilizing human stupidity.” This mobilized
stupidity, accompanied by what Rainer Maria Rilke called “the evil
effluvium from the human swamp,” is being amplified and intensified
in the siloed media chambers of the right.
This hate-filled rhetoric eschews reality to cater to the desperate
desire for emotional catharsis, for renewed glory and prosperity
and for acts of savage vengeance against the phantom enemies blamed
for our national debacle.
The constant barrage of vitriol and fabulist conspiracy theories
will, I fear, embolden extremists to carry out political murder,
not only of mainstream Democrats, Republicans Trump has accused of
betrayal such as Georgia governor Brian Kemp and those targeted as
part of the deep state, but also those at media outlets such as CNN
or The New York Times that serve as propaganda arms of the
Democratic Party. Once the Pandora’s box of violence is opened it
is almost impossible to close. Martyrs on one side of the divide
demand martyrs on the other side. Violence becomes the primary form
of communication. And, as Sabastian Haffner wrote, “once the
violence and readiness to kill that lies beneath the surface of
human nature has been awakened and turned against other humans, and
even made into a duty, it is a simple matter to change the target.”
This, I suspect, is what is coming. The blame lies not only with
the goons and racists on the right, the corporatists who pillage
the country and the corrupt ruling elite that does their bidding,
but a feckless liberal class that found standing up for its beliefs
too costly. The liberals will pay for their timidity and cowardice,
but so will we.
--
Maurice Peret
MOBILE/TEXT: 804.928.4015
