It's true. I have a mental vision of Chris Hedges wearing a camel
skin robe, tied with a course rope belt, bare footed, shaggy hair,
walking with a tall staff that keeps turning into a serpant. As he
walks among the early morning shadows he moans, "Wo unto you mindless
mortals. The day of reckoning is at hand." Where upon he leaps to
the back of his trusty kcamel, it's a two humper, and rides off into
the desert.
carl Jarvis
On 12/7/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
You know, I'm sad to say that I think that everything in this piece is true.
Thomas Frank is basically saying the same thing in his books and in his
interviews, but he's somehow, much more cheerful. I've noticed this before.
They see and predict the same things, but I don't feel as gloomy after
hearing Frank.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, December 7, 2020 1:43 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Chris Hedges: The Collective Suicide of the
Liberal Class
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.
