Or they're all using Face book. Things are really becoming less democratic. On
email lists, we're all equal members. On Face Book, we have, "friends". On
Twitter, people have, "followers". Nobody just talks to each other anymore,
not on the phone, not in person. People communicate with text messages which
are brief and can be easily misinterpreted.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, October 19, 2019 3:06 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Age of Radical Evil
Agreed. And even when Hedges isn't point on, he's closer than anyone else.
Experience coupled with an open mind makes for top level journalism.
On a stranger note, the ACB chat list is almost shut down. Perhaps there's
just too much overwhelming news coming from all directions.
Carl Jarvis
On 10/19/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Chris Hedges is a phenomenon. What he says, probably frightens a lot
of people. But no matter how uncomfortable he makes me, it seems like
he's always proved to be correct.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, October 19, 2019 11:38 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: jamesjarvis98 <jamesjarvis98@xxxxxxxxx>; Matthew
<mcblack@xxxxxxxxx>; Jennifer Ford <dandjford88@xxxxxxxx>; delores
selset <dselset@xxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Age of Radical Evil
Chris Hedges is one of my most reliable journalists. Hedges has been
in the middle of many battles and has survived, sharing his
observations for all who will listen. The following quote sums up
what I believe is wrong with this nation. Is this the "return to our
Greatness" that Donald Trump is so eager to promote? If you have the time,
read the entire article.
Dad/Grandpa/Carl
***************
"Black and brown bodies are worth nothing to our corporate masters
when on the streets of our decayed cities, but locked in cages they
each generate 50 or
60 thousand dollars a year. Some people say the system does not work.
They are wrong. The system works exactly as it is designed to work.
These architects of radical evil are the white militias and Army units
that stole the land, decimated the herds of buffalo, signed the
treaties that were promptly violated and carried out a campaign of
genocide against indigenous people, penning the few who remained in prisoner
of war camps."
On 10/14/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Age of Radical Evil
The Age of Radical Evil
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
Chris Hedges, an ordained Presbyterian minister, gave this sermon
Sunday at the Claremont Presbyterian Church in Claremont, Calif.
Immanuel Kant coined the term "radical evil." It was the privileging
of one's own interest over that of others, effectively reducing those
around you to objects to be manipulated and used for your own ends.
But Hannah Arendt, who also used the term "radical evil," saw that it
was worse than merely treating others as objects. Radical evil, she
wrote, rendered vast numbers of people superfluous. They possessed no
value at all. They were, once they could not be utilized by the
powerful, discarded as human refuse.
We live in an age of radical evil. The architects of this evil are
despoiling the earth and driving the human species toward extinction.
They are stripping us of our most basic civil liberties and freedoms.
They are orchestrating the growing social inequity, concentrating
wealth and power in the hands of a cabal of global oligarchs. They
are destroying our democratic institutions, turning elected office
into a system of legalized bribery, stacking our courts with judges
who invert constitutional rights so that unlimited corporate money
invested in political campaigns is disguised as the right to petition
the government or a form of free speech. Their seizure of power has
vomited up demagogues and con artists including Donald Trump and
Boris Johnson, each the distortion of a failed democracy. They are
turning America's poor communities into internal militarized colonies
where police carry out lethal campaigns of terror and use the blunt
instrument of mass incarceration as a tool of social control. They
are waging endless wars in the Middle East and diverting half of all
discretionary spending to a bloated military. They are placing the
rights of the corporation above the rights of the citizen.
Arendt captured the radical evil of a corporate capitalism in which
people are rendered superfluous-surplus labor as Karl Marx said-and
pushed to the margins of society where they and their children are no
longer considered to have value, value always determined by the
amount of money produced and amassed. But as the Gospel of Luke
reminds us, "what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the
sight of God."
Who are those who would sacrifice us on the altar of global
capitalism? How did they amass the power to deny us a voice, to
insist that the earth is an inert commodity they have a right to
exploit until the ecosystem that sustains life collapses and the
human species, along with most other species, becomes extinct?
These architects of radical evil have been here from the beginning.
They are the slaveholders who crammed men, women and children into
the holds of ships and sold them in auctions in Charleston and
Montgomery, rending families apart, taking from them their names,
language, religion and culture. They wielded the whips, the chains,
the dogs and the slave patrols. They orchestrated the holocaust of
slavery, and when slavery was abolished, after a war that left
700,000 dead, they used convict leasing-slavery by another name-along
with lynching and black codes, to carry out a reign of terror that
continues today in our deindustrialized cities and our prisons. Black
and brown bodies are worth nothing to our corporate masters when on
the streets of our decayed cities, but locked in cages they each
generate 50 or
60 thousand dollars a year. Some people say the system does not work.
They are wrong. The system works exactly as it is designed to work.
These architects of radical evil are the white militias and Army
units that stole the land, decimated the herds of buffalo, signed the
treaties that were promptly violated and carried out a campaign of
genocide against indigenous people, penning the few who remained in
prisoner of war camps.
They are the gun thugs, Baldwin-Felts and Pinkerton agents who gunned
down, by the hundreds, American workers struggling to organize,
forces of the kind that today oversee the bonded labor of workers in
China, Vietnam and Bangladesh. They are the oligarchs, J.P. Morgan,
Rockefeller and Carnegie, who paid for these rivers of blood, and who
today, like Tim Cook at Apple and Jeff Bezos at Amazon, amass
staggering fortunes from human misery.
We know these architects of radical evil. They are the DNA of
American capitalism. You can find them on the commodity desks at Goldman
Sachs.
The financial firm's commodities index is the most heavily traded in
the world.
These traders buy up futures of rice, wheat, corn, sugar and
livestock and jack up the commodity prices by as much as 200% on the
global market so that the poor in Asia, Africa and Latin America can
no longer afford basic staples, and starve. Hundreds of millions of
people go hungry to feed this mania for profit, this radical evil
that sees human beings, including children, as worth nothing.
These architects of radical evil extract the coal, oil and gas,
poisoning our air, soil and water, while demanding huge taxpayer
subsidies and blocking the urgent transition to renewable energy.
They are the massive corporations that own the factory farms, egg
hatcheries and dairy farms where tens of billions of animals endure
horrendous abuse before being needlessly slaughtered, part of an
animal agriculture industry that is one of the leading multifactorial
causes of climate catastrophe. They are the generals and arms
manufacturers. They are the bankers, hedge fund managers and global
speculators who looted $7 trillion from the U.S. treasury after the
pyramid schemes and fraud they carried out imploded the global
economy in 2007-2008. They are the goons in state security who make
us the most spied-upon, watched, monitored and photographed
population in human history.
When your government watches you 24 hours a day you cannot use the
word "liberty." This is the relationship between a master and a slave.
Corporate culture serves a faceless system. It is, as Hannah Arendt
wrote, "the rule of nobody and for this very reason perhaps the least
human and most cruel form of rulership." It will stop at nothing.
Anyone or any movement that attempts to impede their profits will be
targeted for obliteration. These architects of radical evil are
incapable of reform.
Appealing to their better nature is a waste of time. They don't have one.
They have rigged the system, elections dominated by corporate money,
the courts, the press a vast burlesque show for profit, which is why
they spend so much time focused on Trump. There is no way to vote
against the interests of Goldman Sachs or Exxon, Shell, BP and
Chevron, which along with the other top 20 fossil fuel corporations
have contributed 35% of all energy-related carbon dioxide and methane
emissions worldwide-480 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent
since 1965.
We know these architects of radical evil. They have been and always
will be with us.
But who are those who resist? Where do they come from? What
historical, social and cultural forces created them?
They too are familiar. They are Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, John
Brown, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. They are Sitting Bull,
Crazy Horse and Chief Joseph. They are Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B.
Anthony and Emma Goldman. They are "Big Bill" Haywood, Joe Hill and
Eugene V. Debs. They are Woody Guthrie, Martin Luther King Jr.,
Malcolm X, Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer. They are Andrea Dworkin
and Caesar Chavez. They are those who from the beginning fought back,
often to be defeated by this radical evil but knowing they were
called to defy it, even at the cost of their own reputations,
financial security, social standing and sometimes their lives.
The architects of radical evil are disemboweling every last social
service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social
Security, because lives that do not swell their profits are
considered superfluous. Let the sick die. Let many of the poor-41
million people, including children-go to bed hungry. Let families be
tossed into the streets. Let the young graduate have no meaningful
employment. Let the U.S. prison system, with 25% of the world's prison
population, swell.
Let torture continue. Let assault rifles proliferate to fuel the
epidemic of mass shootings. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees,
power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries
crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures, the freak weather
patterns, the monster cyclones and hurricanes, the droughts, the
flooding, the tornadoes, the wildfires, the melting polar ice caps,
the poisoned water systems and the polluted air worsen until the
species dies.
Many in the church are complicit in this radical evil, failing to
name it and denounce it, just as we failed to see in the thousands of
men, women and children who were lynched the very crucifixion itself,
as James Cone pointed out. And this complicity and silence condemns us.
It is why W.E.B. Du Bois called "white religion" a "miserable
failure."
"Black people did not need to go to seminary and study theology to
know that white Christianity was fraudulent," Cone wrote in "The
Cross and the Lynching Tree." "As a teenager in the South where
whites treated blacks with contempt, I and other blacks knew that the
Christian identity of whites was not a true expression of what it
means to follow Jesus. Nothing their theologians and preachers could
say would convince us otherwise. We wondered how whites could live
with their hypocrisy-such blatant contradiction of the man from
Nazareth. (I am still wondering about that!) White conservative
Christianity's blatant endorsement of lynching as a part of its
religion, and white liberal Christians' silence about lynching placed
both outside of Christian identity. I could not find one sermon or
theological essay, not to mention a book, opposing lynching by a
prominent liberal white preacher.
There was no way a community could support or ignore lynching in
America, while still representing in word and deed the one who was
lynched by Rome."
We have failed to denounce the Christian fascists who peddle a magic
Jesus who will make us rich, a Jesus who blesses America above other
countries and the white race above other races, a Jesus who turns the
barbarity of war into a holy crusade, for the heretics they are. And
we have failed, as well, to confront the radical evil of corporate
capitalism. Let us not once again render our faith a miserable
failure.
Defying evil cannot be rationally defended. It makes a leap into the
moral, which is beyond rational thought. It refuses to place a
monetary value on human life or the natural world. It refuses to see
anyone as superfluous.
It
acknowledges human life, indeed all life, as sacred. And this is why,
as Arendt points out, the only morally reliable people are not those
who say "this is wrong" or "this should not be done," but those who
say "I can't do this."
Those who come out of a religious tradition, any religious tradition,
have a responsibility to fight this latest iteration of radical evil,
which is swiftly ensuring that our species and many other species
will not have a future on this earth. It is our religious duty to
place our bodies in front of the machine, as many of us did in the
protests organized by Extinction Rebellion last week around the globe.
"The law, as presently revered and taught and enforced, is becoming
an enticement to lawlessness," Dan Berrigan wrote. "Lawyers and laws
and courts and penal systems are nearly immobile before a shaken
society, which is making civil disobedience a civil (I dare say a
religious) duty. The law is aligning itself more and more with forms
of power whose existence is placed more and more in question. . So,
if they would obey the law, [people] are being forced, in the present
crucial instance, either to disobey God or to disobey the law of humanity."
Let us not in this present historical period replicate our sins of
the past.
Let us affirm our faith by affirming our defiance, our willingness to
engage in the acts of sustained civil disobedience against the forces
of radical evil. Let future generations say of us that we tried, that
we were not complicit through our collaboration or our silence. There
will be a cost.
History shows us that. All moral battles have a cost, and if there is
not a cost then the battle is not moral. Accept becoming an outcast.
Jesus, after all, was an outcast. We are called by God to defy
radical evil. This defiance is the highest form of spirituality.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the
college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by
Rutgers.
Chris Hedges
