Honoring Sheldon Wolin (1922-2015)

Sadly, the distinguished political theorist and philosopher Sheldon Wolin has died in Salem Oregon. Wolin was 93.

 

Wolin was one of the US's leading political philosophers and someone who enlivened leftist and radical political philosophy, whilst retaining a commitment to the radical possibilities of democracy.

 

Sheldon Wolin's final book Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Spectre of Inverted Totalitarianism is without doubt the most important book I have read in the last decade.

 

In that book, Wolin describes inverted totalitarianism as the fusion of corporate and political power. Wolin makes clear that inverted totalitarianism is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany. 

 

Wolin argues that contemporary democracies and corporate capitalism have inverted the ways that authoritarian regimes politicize all spheres of life.  State and corporate power are increasingly enmeshed. He warns that the combination of state power and unchecked economic and corporate power now verge on total power and has created its own pathologies.

 

Wolin argues that political and corporate forces don't necessarily seek to replace democratic structures. Rather, they claim to honour democracy, electoral politics, freedom of speech and the right to assembly, whilst all the while capturing, manipulating and corrupting the levers of power to serve  political, economic, corporate and business interests.  

 

Wolin also examines the myths and mythmaking used  to justify this interlocking of corporate and state power, including the claim of a failing economy, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, privatisation and the never-ending war on terror.

Wolin warns that corporate power no longer answers to state or citizen control. The institutions of government, economy, civil society and society no longer play the role they were intended for. They primarily serve the interests of the political, corporate and business classes.

 

For Wolin,  corporate power and political power are now so closely intertwined and the much of the citizenry so demobilised, that genuine democracy is a remote possibility, expressed in what he described as  rare “fugitive” expressions of the popular will. 

 

Wolin argues that inverted totalitarianism destroys democracy, politically demobilises citizens, projects power and wealth upwards and creates instability, passivity and precarious existence for the majority of citizens.

 

Wolin writes that inverted totalitarianism:

 

'is not expressly conceptualised as an ideology of objectified in public policy but is furthered by decision makers, power holders and citizens who unaware of or blind to the deeper consequences of their actions or actions'

 

Chris Hedges, who is a passionate supporter of Wolin's work has written this piece in memory of his friend and colleague. A series of interviews with Sheldon Wolin by Chris Hedges are here and here.

 

Other pieces written in memory of Sheldon Wolin are here, here, here, here, here and here

Who are the teachers and educators who inspired us?

This photo from 1953 shows four-year-old Ross Munro and his neighbour Phillip Noble playing in an asbestos sandpit in a residential backyard in Wittenoom in WA's northwest. Residents purchased the deadly tailings which were commonly used as sandpits in backyards for the purposes of children's play and also to reduce dust around houses.

When I read Chris Hedges latest piece about inspiring teachers and educators I thought of Ross Munro.

Chris Hedges, the American journalist, writer, war correspondent and political activist and campaigner has written a moving eulogy to one of his educational mentors and inspirations- the Reverend Coleman Brown who taught Hedges at Colgate University. Hedges writes that Coleman:

had the most profound impact of all my teachers on my education. I took seven courses as an undergraduate in religion. He taught six of them. But his teaching extended far beyond the classroom. The classroom was where he lit the spark.

Hedges describes how Coleman Brown used poetry to highlight the powerful sacred forces that writers and poets struggle to express:

"Coleman would read poems and cherished prose passages out loud as I met with him in his office. It was about the musicality of language. His sonorous voice rose and dipped with intonations and emphasis. To this day I still hear his recitation in pieces of writing and poems......... Poetry, he taught me, is alive. It must be felt. It has a hypnotic power that, as Shakespeare understood, is a kind of witchcraft. And poetry, along with all other writing, is just a spent, dead force if you do not surrender to its spell."

In thinking about the influence of his educational mentor, Hedges has written a beautiful summation of the significance and value of education:

"Education is not only about knowledge. It is about inspiration. It is about passion. It is about the belief that what we do in life matters. It is about moral choice. It is about taking nothing for granted. It is about challenging assumptions and suppositions. It is about truth and justice. It is about learning how to think. It is about, as James Baldwin wrote, the ability to drive “to the heart of every matter and expose the question the answer hides.” And, as Baldwin further noted, it is about making the world “a more human dwelling place.”

Many of us have had or known teachers and educators who paved the way for such inspiration and passion, either in ourselves or in others.

At both secondary school and university I had teachers- sadly too few- who managed to create and light a spark like that which Hedges describes. One was  John Croft, a secondary school teacher of history who bought to life the study of history and triggered my lifelong passion for the power and relevance of historical understanding and analysis as the basis for social thinking and action.

As  a young secondary school teacher I worked with an English teacher named Ross Munro, who brought alive the power of the written and spoken (and sung)  word to his students. Each day outside his classroom would be a quote, extract or lyrics from a text- a book, a play, a song, a poem- which was designed to engage, to provoke, to encourage thinking. 

Ross was  a man much loved by his students. Even now, some of those students still speak about his influence and legacy.  

Ross died young, aged just 38, a victim of the horrors and indiscriminate cruelty of asbestos and the neglect of mining corporations and government agencies. Ross was a victim of perhaps the greatest industrial and corporate crime in Australian history.

Ross was one of the 'Wittenoom kids' who spent their childhoods exposed to asbestos in the town of Wittenoom  in north-west of Western Australia who have gone on to develop a range of cancers and are dying at a rate well above the average population of mesothelioma.

Ross became the first non-mine worker to win a mesothelioma claim against CSR in January 1989, just before his death. His appalling treatment is documented in Ben Hills book Blue Murder.

More on Ross and events and the human cost of asbestos are  here and here

(1) Mining of the deadly blue asbestos at Wittenoom, 1106km north of Perth, commenced in the 1940's and ceased in 1966 and the town was later closed after airborne fibres in dust from mining operations were found to cause malignant mesothelioma, lung cancer, asbestosis and other serious diseases

Chris Hedges on the death of Tomas Young

Tomas Young with his wife, Claudia Cuellar, in March 2013.Creditphoto by Jill Toyoshiba/The Kansas City Star, via Associated Press

"Young hung on as long as he could. Now he is gone. He understood what the masters of war had done to him, how he had been used and turned into human refuse" 

Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges writes about the death of Tomas Young on November 10, 2014, who was one of the first US veterans to speak out publicly against the war. Young was a 34 year old veteran of the bloody US led war in Iraq who was shot and paralyzed below the waist in Iraq in April 2004.

Hedges writes:

his final months were marked by a desperate battle to ward off the horrific pain that wracked his broken body and by the callous indifference of a government that saw him as part of the disposable human fodder required for war.............................................................. We must grieve for Tomas Young, for all the severely wounded men and women hidden from view, suffering their private torments in claustrophobic rooms, for their families, for the hundreds of thousands of civilians that have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, for our own complicity in these wars. We must grieve for a nation that has lost its way, blinded by the psychosis of permanent war, that kills human beings across the globe as if they were little more than insects. It is a waste. We will leave defeated from Iraq and Afghanistan; we will leave burdened with the expenditure of trillions of dollars and responsible for mounds of corpses and ruined nations. Young, and here is the tragedy of it, was sacrificed for nothing. Only the masters of war, those who have profited from the rivers of blood, rejoice. And they know the dead cannot speak.

In October 2013 while contemplating suicide, Young sent an impassioned letter to George. W. Bush and other US leaders responsible for the Iraq War, in which he wrote:

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.

Chris Hedges and the lies of the liberal class

''It is only when we are not in pursuit of practical aims or material advantages that we can serve as a conscience and a corrective. Those who transfer their allegiance to the practical aims of power and material advantage emasculate themselves intellectually and morally........... Those who doggedly challenge the orthodoxy of belief, who question the reigning political passions, who refuse to sacrifice their integrity to serve the cult of power are pushed to the margins. They are denounced by the very people who, years later, will often claim these moral battles as their own. It is only the outcasts and rebels who keep truth and intellectual inquiry alive they alone name the crimes of the state. They alone give voice to the victims of oppression. They alone ask the difficult questions. Most importantly they expose the powerful, along with their liberal apologists, for what they have done"

Chris Hedges from The Treason of the Intellectuals, Truth Dig

Anzac Day: remembering Joe and Albert and the horror and pointlessness of war

 cartoon by Leunig, from The Age

“If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be impossible to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan and listen to the wails of their parents, we would not be able to repeat clichés we use to justify war. This is why war is carefully sanitized. This is why we are given war's perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war's consequences. The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and entertaining… .... The wounded, the crippled, and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted offstage. They are war's refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they tell is too painful for us to hear. We prefer to celebrate ourselves and our nation by imbibing the myths of glory, honor, patriotism, and heroism, words that in combat become empty and meaningless.”  

Chris Hedges

Here in Australia it is Anzac Day. April 25th. 

The day the nation remembers, both the landing (or more accurately the invasion of a foreign country) by Australian and other troops at Gallipoli, Turkey in 1915,  as well as Australians who served and died in all wars and conflicts (well some Australians, as they won't mention Aboriginal people who died in the Frontier Wars)

Thinking about the day brings to mind James Scott's fine book Domination and the Arts of Resistance in which he writes of the public rituals, performances and ceremonies- parades, memorials, state ceremonies- that the powerful use to distract attention away from the strategies they use to retain power. War and ceremonies celebrating war, of course, being among those.

I will spend the day reflecting on the horror and tragedy of war, and of Australia's history of fighting in other country's wars. I will think of my own family members who fought (and suffered) as a result of their war experiences. They had no interest in the glorification and memorialisaion of war.

And I will think of a former neighbor of mine. He fought in New Guinea in WW 2 where he saw the horror of war. He told me once that "war is just ordinary men with families and children killing other ordinary men with families and children...... unnecessary killing that’s what war is”. I wonder if his message will get spoken this Anzac Day.

A piece inspired by a conversation I had with him on the eve of the 2002 invasion of Iraq is below.

The piece was written in 2002 a few days after the Howard government's imperial ambitions resulted in Australia going to war in Iraq as part of the coalition of the willing. My son is nearly 18 now. We have moved and don't live on that street. I don't know if Joe is still alive. The Howard government is long gone, (although his disciples are back in power). But Australian troops are still in Afghanistan. Afghani children still die at the hands of  Australian and Coalition forces. 

As Chris Hedges reminds us- war is an addiction- it gives life meaning for those consumed by it, as well as for the political and military elite who speak in lofty tones and soaring rhetoric of honor and defending freedom and who knowingly send young men off to to die. What is the meaning of all this celebration of war?

Stories that go untold: Australia and war

Our street is always a cacophony of activity. From my office window I see it all. There are usually children everywhere. My son and I often count the number of children. There are 19 living on the street he tells me. Then he proceeds to tell me their names and ages and what year they are in at school.

They all play on the street, run in and out of houses and invent new games. They fight, argue and entertain themselves for hours. Their games always reflect something of what is happening in the wider world, of things they hear and see. In recent times the games have taken on more shooting and war like qualities. Goodies against baddies, policeman capturing baddies, ambushes, hiding from the enemy, shooting the enemy, people being shot. But I ask myself how can they not be affected by the terrible images of war.

Early on in this war of liberation (how I ask myself is it possible to liberate a country and a people by destroying both) my 6 year old son asks me “Daddy will we get bombed? Is Iraq near us?”. I try my best to explain that no we won’t get bombed and that Iraq is along way away from Perth. I try to show him on a map. He thinks about that for a while and then wanders off to continue his play. I ponder my son’s question. What must it be like for the children of Iraq who are being bombed? What would an Iraqi father say if asked the same question. 50% of the population are under 16. I am haunted by their faces and the images of children , the collateral damage, the casualties by this so called war of liberation. My son is safe but not Iraqi children who die in their hundreds under American (and Australian) bombs and bullets).

Joe is a noticeable figure on our street. Every day around 5pm Joe shuffles gently and quietly down the street. It is his daily circuit around the block and Joe always passes the front of our house. I am often sitting here in my office and I see him slowly wander by. Usually he has his walking stick. Joe’s gait is slow but determined. He is ever watchful of all the activity taking place on the street. I see him pause to watch the children- my son, the neighbors 2 boys and other boys from the street. Joe is one of those people who watch children play, perhaps remembering his own children at that age or his own childhood. Joe tells me he is 85 and has lived in this neighborhood for 50 years. He bought the land and built the house 50 years ago It cost him 160 pounds to build his house. Paid by a war loan he tells me.

It is Sunday afternoon and I am standing out the front deep in thought, an eye on the children who have gone down the local park to play footy. My 6 year old son has put on his new footy boots and gone with the older boys to play footy at the park. I am melancholic, pessimistic, depressed at the state of the world. And haunted by the terrible images coming out of Iraq. Of women and children shot by Coalition forces.

As Joe comes by we start talking. I ask him how he is. He talks to me of the daily events of his life, of his daily walks. I tell Joe I am thinking about this terrible war and the innocent lives lost in Iraq. “Ah War is a terrible thing” Joe tells me. When he speaks of war I listen. You see Joe speaks with authority about war . He has been there. He has seen men die. Men shot. Men blown to pieces.

You see Joe fought in WW2. He spent 4 years in New Guinea fighting the Japanese. He saw men die horrible deaths. Joe does not speak of war as honorable, as ethical, as just. It is not about big geo political agendas and plans. No war is just ordinary men with families and children killing other ordinary men with families and children. And of innocent men, women and children in foreign countries being blown to pieces in Australia's name. Simple as that. “Unnecessary killing that’s what war is” Joe tells me.

Joe’s words cut through all the bullshit of our political leaders, of our media commentators and all those embedded and other journalists. He speaks a simple truth. War kills ordinary men and women in their thousands, even million and they die in terrible horrible ways. Soldiers, mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, lovers, brothers, sisters, children. Just like us.

Joe speaks a truth like journalists such as Robert Fisk and Chris Hedges who tell us of the brutality and terrible nature of war and of the hypocrisy of political and military leaders.

Joe's words remind me of a fundamental truth: that most political leaders and commentators who adore and promote war have never been to war. Like John Howard who seems to have some romanticized and sanitized view of the honor and dignity of war fought for just causes ( like securing USA military interest, imposing American might and advancing American -and  Australian- corporate profits) Or George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield who send others off to die while fiercely avoiding military service himself.

Joe tells me that he drove tanks in the war. In the jungle the tanks could not do much. They could follow paths and tracks and support infantryman some time. But in the jungle they were of limited use.

One day he was told that someone else – a superior office - was going to command his tank. Joe was not pleased at the time but an order was an order. He had to drive another tank, further at the rear. Joe told me that later that day the tank he was supposed to be in was blown up by some enemy mines. He saw it blow up in front of him. Saw his friends and colleagues die. His voice trailed off as he told me. It was as if he was contemplating the fortunes and misfortunes of war. That he was alive but others weren’t and here he was nearly 60 years later on an autumn day in Perth talking about it to me. 

“War is a terrible business” he told me again. “ I saw that myself”

When he came back from the war and had children of his own Joe told me that he said to his wife that he would never let his children go to war to fight. If war came again he was going to take his family inland, out to the remote WA bush country where he was born and that knew well. He would hide his children away from any war.

My mother’s brother- my uncle- fought in the Western Desert and in New Guinea during WW2. His life was thereafter affected by that experience, not just because of the health effects of malaria. 

After his return from war he wanted nothing to do with all the celebratory war talk. He had no time for groups like the RSL. He used to say that those who talked the loudest about war were usually the ones who had never seen the real action close up. I am reminded of Albert’s words and of Joe's words and of the truths they knew.

Chris Hedges and Chris Floyd on the Manning sentence

Chris Hedges on the 35 year sentence handed down to Chelsea (Bradley) Manning:

Although it was less than I thought the judge was going to throw at him, my gut reaction was quite emotional. I was quite upset. I think that that’s because this is part of a larger process by which any attempt to shine a light on the inner workings of power is not only being shut down, but those with a conscience who attempt to inform the wider public of, in the case of Manning, crimes that have been committed—war crimes—have become, in this society, criminals. The whole moral and legal system has been inverted. … We are seeing all of the traditional checks by which we are able to thwart government tyranny ripped down. So I look at what happened today as a kind of process, and a very depressing process, whereby not only civil liberties are shredded, but any capacity for the investigation and uncovering of the abuse of power is effectively thwarted.

On his blog Empire Burlesque Chris Floyd  points out that Manning has been given a far harsher sentence for revealing war crimes than Lt. William Calley and his My Lai massacrers were given for actually committing war crimes.  Floyd writes:

35 years for leaking documents -- while the mass murderers, drone bombers and death-squadding assassins of the Potamac Empire live free in pomp and privilege.

In an earlier piece Chris Floyd writes:

Reality in such systems -- systems that have openly demonstrated their willingness to torture people, lock them up for years without trial or kill them outright at the arbitrary order of the leader and his minions -- is not a TV show, not a movie with well-marked 'character arcs' ending in triumph for the bruised but unbowed hero. It's a dirty, ugly, degrading business, an uneven fight, pitting unarmed truth against vast, implacable, dehumanizing forces of violent domination. It is a war with many bitter defeats, both outwardly and in the souls of those caught up in it. It involves loss, destruction, humiliation, torment, ruin and doubt. There are no "heroes" in it, only human beings: some of them fighting to hang on to their humanity as best they can -- and others who have surrendered their humanity to the forces of domination.

Bradley Manning doesn't have to be a "hero." He doesn't have to make a stirring speech to give people a vicarious thrill for a moment before they click over to check their Facebook page or pop in another box set. He has shown clearly that he stands on the side of humanity -- and now he is paying the price for it. The very fact of his case has revealed the true nature of the system arrayed against him, and again.

In a  longer piece in Truthdig Chris Hedges writes:

Wednesday’s sentencing marks one of the most important watersheds in U.S. history. It marks the day when the state formally declared that all who name and expose its crimes will become political prisoners or be forced, like Edward Snowden, and perhaps Glenn Greenwald, to spend the rest of their lives in exile. It marks the day when the country dropped all pretense of democracy, obliterated checks and balances under the separation of powers and rejected the rule of law. It marks the removal of the mask of democracy, already a fiction, and its replacement with the ugly, naked visage of corporate totalitarianism. State power is to be, from now on, unchecked, unfettered and unregulated. And those who do not accept unlimited state power, always the road to tyranny, will be ruthlessly persecuted.

Chris Hedges on the US elections

Chris Hedges  on the US election and the imperative of building radical social movements as a counterweight to corporate power.

"The November election is not a battle between Republicans and Democrats. It is not a battle between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. It is a battle between the corporate state and us. And if we do not immediately engage in this battle we are finished, as climate scientists have made clear. I will defy corporate power in small and large ways. I will invest my energy now solely in acts of resistance, in civil disobedience and in defiance. Those who rebel are our only hope..............

The corporate state has successfully waged a campaign of fear to disempower voters and citizens. By intimidating voters through a barrage of propaganda with the message that Americans have to vote for the lesser evil and that making a defiant stand for justice and democracy is counterproductive, it cements into place the agenda of corporate domination we seek to thwart. This fear campaign, skillfully disseminated by the $2.5 billion spent on political propaganda, has silenced real political opposition"

Chris Hedges on Daniel Berrigan: 92 and still protesting

Just a wonderful inspiring piece by Chris Hedges on the legendary American political activist and Christian radical Revered Daniel Berrigan.

Those of us who grew up during the Vietnam War remember Daniel Berrigan and his brother Phillip Berrigan for leading some of the first protests against the Vietnam War. After Phillip Berrigan was jailed for 6 years for civil disobedience against the war Daniel Berrigan became more radical in his civil disobedience and political activism, with the result that became a fugitive on the run from the US authorities, before he was arrested and imprisoned for 3 years. At one stage Phillip and Daniel Berrigan were listed on the FBI's most wanted list because of their political activism.

In the 1980's Daniel Berrigan and his brother and other anti-nuclear activists  illegally entered a nuclear facility to protest against nuclear power.

As Hedges points out Daniel Berrigan is 92 and and his life stands as a potent reminder of how people can live a life of constant agitation, constant defiance and constant disobedience to systems of unjust power.

Hedges writes:

".. His embrace of what has been called “Christian anarchism,” because of its persistent alienation and hostility to all forms of power, is the most effective form of resistance. And it is the clearest expression of the Christian Gospel. Berrigan has been arrested numerous times—“I don’t waste time counting,” he told me—for also protesting American intervention in Central America and the first Gulf War, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has demonstrated against the death penalty, in support of LGBT rights and against abortion. And even in his 90s he is not finished.

“.....I know that the prophetic vision is not popular today in some spiritual circles,” he goes on. “But our task is not to be popular or to be seen as having an impact, but to speak the deepest truths that we know. We need to live our lives in accord with the deepest truths we know, even if doing so does not produce immediate results in the world."

“But what of the price of peace?” Berrigan writes in his book “No Bars to Manhood.” “I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm in the direction of their loved ones, in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans—that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. ‘Of course, let us have the peace,’ we cry, but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties. ”

Chris Hedges interviews Tim DeChristopher

Chris Hedges has published this interview  with Tim DeChristopher whose case I wrote about in this recent blog piece.

Hedges writes that the prosecution of DeChristopher is evidence that the moral order has been turned upside down:

 The bankers and swindlers who trashed the global economy and wiped out some $40 trillion in wealth amass obscene amounts of money, much of it provided by taxpayers. They do not go to jail. Regulatory agencies, compliant to the demands of corporations, refuse to impede the destruction unleashed by the coal, oil and natural gas companies as they turn the planet into a hothouse of pollutants, poisoned water, fouled air and contaminated soil in the frenzied quest for greater and greater profits. Those who manage and make fortunes from pre-emptive wars, embrace torture, carry out extrajudicial assassinations, deny habeas corpus and run up the largest deficits in human history are feted as patriots. But when a courageous citizen such as DeChristopher peacefully derails the corporate and governmental destruction of the ecosystem, he is sent to jail.

 Hedges publishes extracts from his interview with De Christopher:

“Our strategies must be to not only change our energy system and food system, but to change our power structures,” he said. “We shouldn’t be looking for the big corporations running the show to become a little greener and cleaner. We should be overthrowing those corporations running our government. Our job as a movement is not just to reduce emissions; while we still need to do that, we also have this other challenge of maintaining our humanity through whatever challenges lie ahead. This is much more abstract and foreign to this movement.”

“Civil disobedience puts us in a vulnerable position,” DeChristopher said.

“It puts us in a position where we are refusing to be obedient to injustice. Civil disobedience puts us in a position where we are making a risk and possibly making a sacrifice to stand up against that injustice. It also puts us in a position where with that vulnerability we see how much we need other people. This is something I have experienced over the past few years as people have come out of nowhere to support me, to make actions more powerful and to help me personally get through this experience and grow from it. Appreciating these connections is one of the most important parts of resiliency. A lot of the unwillingness to take bold action is coming from a disempowerment that comes from a lack of connection. When we view ourselves as isolated individuals it does not make sense to stand up to a big powerful institution like a big corporation or big government.

"It is not until we gain the understanding that we are part of something much bigger that we feel empowered to take those necessary actions. This is a self-reinforcing cycle. The more we stick our neck out the more connected we become and the more empowered we become to do it again.”

Chris Hedges on the reported death of Osama Bin Laden

Chris Hedges is a wise journalist and writer whose opinions I deeply respect. He won a Pulitzer Prize reporting from the front lines as the Middle East Bureau Chief for the New York Times until he resigned because of comments he made about its pro war editorial policies. 

Here are his comments on the reported death of Osama Bin Laden from the US online publication Truthdig

Editor’s note: Chris Hedges made these remarks about Osama bin Laden’s death at a Truthdig fundraising event in Los Angeles on Sunday evening.

I know that because of this announcement, that reportedly Osama bin Laden was killed, Bob wanted me to say a few words about it … about al-Qaida. I spent a year of my life covering al-Qaida for The New York Times. It was the work in which I, and other investigative reporters, won the Pulitzer Prize. And I spent seven years of my life in the Middle East. I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. I’m an Arabic speaker. And when someone came over and told Jean and me the news, my stomach sank. I’m not in any way naïve about what al-Qaida is. It’s an organization that terrifies me. I know it intimately.

But I’m also intimately familiar with the collective humiliation that we have imposed on the Muslim world. The expansion of military occupation that took place throughout, in particular the Arab world, following 9/11 – and that this presence of American imperial bases, dotted, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Doha – is one that has done more to engender hatred and acts of terror than anything ever orchestrated by Osama bin Laden. 

And the killing of bin Laden, who has absolutely no operational role in al-Qaida – that’s clear – he’s kind of a spiritual mentor, a kind of guide … he functions in many of the ways that Hitler functioned for the Nazi Party. We were just talking with Warren about Kershaw’s great biography of Hitler, which I read a few months ago, where you hold up a particular ideological ideal and strive for it. That was bin Laden’s role. But all actual acts of terror, which he may have signed off on, he no way planned.

I think that one of the most interesting aspects of the whole rise of al-Qaida is that when Saddam Hussein … and I covered the first Gulf War, went into Kuwait with the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, was in Basra during the Shiite uprising until I was captured and taken prisoner by the Iraqi Republican Guard. I like to say I was embedded with the Iraqi Republican Guard. Within that initial assault and occupation of Kuwait, bin Laden appealed to the Saudi government to come back and help organize the defense of his country. And he was turned down. And American troops came in and implanted themselves on Muslim soil.

When I was in New York, as some of you were, on 9/11, I was in Times Square when the second plane hit. I walked into The New York Times, I stuffed notebooks in my pocket and walked down the West Side Highway and was at Ground Zero four hours later. I was there when Building 7 collapsed. And I watched as a nation drank deep from that very dark elixir of American nationalism … the flip side of nationalism is always racism, it’s about self-exaltation and the denigration of the other. 
 

And it’s about forgetting that terrorism is a tactic. You can’t make war on terror. Terrorism has been with us since Sallust wrote about it in the Jugurthine Wars. And the only way to successfully fight terrorist groups is to isolate themselves, isolate those groups, within their own societies. And I was in the immediate days after 9/11 assigned to go out to Jersey City and the places where the hijackers had lived and begin to piece together their lives. I was then very soon transferred to Paris, where I covered all of al-Qaida’s operations in the Middle East and Europe. 

So I was in the Middle East in the days after 9/11. And we had garnered the empathy of not only most of the world, but the Muslim world who were appalled at what had been done in the name of their religion. And we had major religious figures like Sheikh Tantawy, the head of al-Azhar – who died recently – who after the attacks of 9/11 not only denounced them as a crime against humanity, which they were, but denounced Osama bin Laden as a fraud … someone who had no right to issue fatwas or religious edicts, no religious legitimacy, no religious training. And the tragedy was that if we had the courage to be vulnerable, if we had built on that empathy, we would be far safer and more secure today than we are. 

We responded exactly as these terrorist organizations wanted us to respond. They wanted us to speak the language of violence. What were the explosions that hit the World Trade Center, huge explosions and death above a city skyline? It was straight out of Hollywood. When Robert McNamara in 1965 began the massive bombing campaign of North Vietnam, he did it because he said he wanted to “send a message” to the North Vietnamese—a message that left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead. 

These groups learned to speak the language we taught them. And our response was to speak in kind. The language of violence, the language of occupation—the occupation of the Middle East, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—has been the best recruiting tool al-Qaida has been handed. If it is correct that Osama bin Laden is dead, then it will spiral upwards with acts of suicidal vengeance. And I expect most probably on American soil. The tragedy of the Middle East is one where we proved incapable of communicating in any other language than the brute and brutal force of empire.

And empire finally, as Thucydides understood, is a disease. As Thucydides wrote, the tyranny that the Athenian empire imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. The disease of empire, according to Thucydides, would finally kill Athenian democracy. And the disease of empire, the disease of nationalism … these of course are mirrored in the anarchic violence of these groups, but one that locks us in a kind of frightening death spiral. So while I certainly fear al-Qaida, I know it’s intentions. I know how it works. I spent months of my life reconstructing every step Mohamed Atta took. While I don’t in any way minimize their danger, I despair. I despair that we as a country, as Nietzsche understood, have become a monster that we are attempting to fight.

Thank you.

The Liberal press and Arundhati Roy

  Photograph: Tom Pietrasik courtesy of the Guardian

"The nation state is such a cunning instrument in the hands of capitalism now. You have a democracy that strengthens the idea of the nation as a marketplace."
Arundhati Roy

The Guardian has this typically "liberal press" piece on the Indian writer, activist and radical Arundhati Roy which supposedly celebrates her political radicalism, but actually patronizes and trivializes her.

Why do journalists who write for "liberal newspapers" find it so difficult to engage with those who propose radical ideas and who shine the light on the brutality of imperial war and/or the excesses of corporate and political elites.

Instead of engaging seriously with the issues, liberal journalists too often display their mistrust and suspicion of radical thinkers and their ideas by falling back on all the rhetorical devices of supposedly objective journalism.

Here's Chris Hedges from his book The Death of the Liberal Class.

"The liberal class's disposal of its most independent and courageous members has long been part of its pathology"

Why every act of rebellion against corporate and state power matters

US writer, journalist and author Chris Hedges writes that no act of rebellion is ever wasted.

"Any act of rebellion keeps alive the embers for larger movements that follow us. It passes on another narrative. It will, as the rot of the state consumes itself, attract wider and wider numbers. Perhaps this will not happen in our lifetimes. But if we persist we will keep this possibility alive. If not it will die"

Chris Hedges and the need to confront corporate power

As always Chris Hedges speaks truths many Americans (and Australians) don't want to hear. For years Hedges has warned against the rising tide of anti-democratic corporate and political power in the USA.This is from his latest piece in Truth Dig:

"We will blunt these rising anti-democratic forces only when we organize outside conventional systems of power. It means dismantling the permanent war economy and the corporate state. It means an end to foreclosures and bank repossessions. It means a functional health care system for all Americans. It means taking care of our poor and unemployed. And it means a system of government that is freed from corporate interests......

Any effective resistance must begin with a condemnation of our political elite and liberal institutions, including the press, the universities, labor, the arts, religious institutions and the Democratic Party, for selling us out.....

"The issue is societal collapse. This issue is a corporate state that has carried out a coup d’etat. The issue is the rupture of all mechanisms within the political process to protect citizens from accelerating impoverishment, internal control and corporate abuse. Those who refuse to acknowledge this bleak reality cannot offer solutions........

"Our political theater has orphaned citizens who once looked to political parties to express and defend their interests. It has engendered apathy toward traditional social and political structures and an inchoate rage. This mixture of apathy and rage is a volatile cocktail. It finds its expression outside normal systems of dissent and in leaders who, in times of prosperity and stability, would be dismissed as lunatics.  

No rally, no positive message, no effort to expose the idiocies of those arrayed against us will work until we restore to the political process mechanisms by which ordinary citizens can be heard. Hannah Arendt in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” cites the collapse of traditional political mechanisms, which now plagues us, as the opening needed for all totalitarian movements: 

“The fall of protecting class walls transformed the slumbering majorities behind all parties into one great unorganized, structureless mass of furious individuals who had nothing in common except their vague apprehension that the hopes of party members were doomed, that, consequently, the most respected, articulate and representative members of the community were fools and that all the powers that be were not so much evil as they were equally stupid and fraudulent.”

 

The F word: the rise of reactionary social and political forces in the US

As the economic conditions globally and in the US worsen, distinguished progressive thinkers and writers, including Sheldon Wolin, Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Walden Bello, and Matthew Rothschild are all warning about the emergence of the pre-conditions for an authoritarian, even fascist revival in the US.

Sheldon Wolin's 2008 masterpiece Democracy Inc describes what he calls inverted totalitarianism, a form of managed democracy in which state and corporate power are co-joined and citizens marginal. Wolin argues that democracy is now managed by 'guardian groups and interests' (including the political class, political parties, their allies and funders) and that government operates to advance and protect the economic and political interests of corporations and the market.

Hedges and Chomsky have been warning about the political implications of the rise of the religious right, the power of the military-industrial complex and the American empire, growing anti-Islamic and racists movements and the massive growth of unconstrained corporate power. In these forces Hedges and Chomsky see the rise of a uniquely American tendency to a 21st century form of fascism.

Now Walden Bello and Matthew Rothschild add their voices, pointing to the potential for the rise of  reactionary social and cultural political programs that harness growing popular disenchantment  and anger at the worsening social and economic circumstances in the US.

But its not just so called "lefties" raising these concerns. Similar views are being expressed by military authorities in Europe and the USA. The German magazine Der Spiegel quotes German military reports warning of the risk of ideological and political extremism arising from the possible collapse of the  global economy and coming crises in oil markets due to peak oil and the collapse of oil availability.

Chris Hedges: Freedom in the Grace of the World

image from Truthdig

We are fooled by virtual mirages into mistaking the busy, corporate hives of human activity and the salacious images and gossip that clog our minds as real. The natural world, the real world, on which our life depends, is walled off from view as it is systematically slaughtered.
Chris Hedges

Journalist, writer, author and activist Chris Hedges's weekly column in the US online publication Truth Dig is always a "must read" for me. For me, Hedges is one of the finest writers on contemporary American social, economic and political life.

Hedges' most recent column is inspired by a two week long walk in the Appalachian Mountains in the US and he quotes extensively from the writings of Wendell Berry, another poet and writer who features regularly on this blog.

Freedom in the Grace of the World

By Chris Hedges

Earl Shaffer, adrift after serving in the South Pacific in World War II and struggling with the loss of his childhood friend Walter Winemiller during the assault on Iwo Jima, made his way to Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia in 1947. He headed north toward Mount Katahdin in Maine and for the next 124 days, averaging 16.5 miles a day, beat back the demons of war. His goal, he said, was to ‘‘walk the Army out of my system.’’ He was the first person to hike the full length of the Appalachian Trail.

The beauty and tranquility of the old-growth forests, the vistas that stretch for miles over unbroken treetops, the waterfalls and rivers, the severance from the noise and electronic hallucinations of modern existence, becomes, if you stay out long enough, a balm to wounds. It is in solitude, contemplation and a connection with nature that we transcend the frenzied and desperate existence imposed upon us by the distortions of a commodity culture.

The mountains that loom on the northern part of the trail in New Hampshire and Maine, most of them in the White Mountain National Forest, are also forbidding, even in summer, when winds can routinely reach 60 or 70 miles per hour accompanied by lashing rain. The highest surface wind speed recorded on the planet, 231 miles per hour, was measured on April 12, 1934, at the Mount Washington Observatory. Boulders and steep inclines become slippery and treacherous when wet and shrouded in dense fog. Thunderstorms, racing across treeless ridge lines with the speed of a freight train, turn the razor-backed peaks into lightning rods. The Penacooks, one of two Native American tribes that dominated the area, called Mount Washington, the highest peak in the Northeast, Agiochook or “place of the Great Spirit.”

The Penacooks, fearing the power of Agiochook to inflict death, did not climb to its summit. The fury you bring into the mountains is overpowered by the fury of nature itself. Nature always extracts justice. Defy nature and it obliterates the human species. The more we divorce ourselves from nature, the more we permit the natural world to be exploited and polluted by corporations for profit, the more estranged we become from the essence of life. Corporate systems, which grow our food and ship it across country in trucks, which drill deep into the ocean to extract diminishing fossil fuels and send container ships to bring us piles of electronics and cloths from China, have created fragile, unsustainable man-made infrastructures that will collapse. Corporations have, at the same time, destroyed sustainable local communities. We do not know how to grow our own food. We do not know how to make our own clothes. We are helpless appendages of the corporate state. We are fooled by virtual mirages into mistaking the busy, corporate hives of human activity and the salacious images and gossip that clog our minds as real. The natural world, the real world, on which our life depends, is walled off from view as it is systematically slaughtered. The oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico is one assault. There are thousands more, including the coal-burning power plants dumping gases into our atmosphere that are largely unseen. Left unchecked, this arrogant defiance of nature will kill us.

“We have reached a point at which we must either consciously desire and choose and determine the future of the Earth or submit to such an involvement in our destructiveness that the Earth, and ourselves with it, must certainly be destroyed,” writer-poet Wendell Barry warns. “And we have come to this at a time when it is hard, if not impossible, to foresee a future that is not terrifying.”

Year after year I returned to these forbidding peaks from conflicts in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. I had a house in Maine on an 800-foot hill with no television, cell phone or Internet service. The phone number was unlisted. It rarely rang. I refused to give the number to my employer, The New York Times. I brought with me the stench of death, the cries of the wounded, the bloated bodies on the side of the road, the fear, the paranoia, the alienation, the insomnia, the anger and the despair and threw it at these mountains. I strapped my pack on in the pounding rain at trailheads and drove myself, and later my son, up mountains. I rarely stopped. Once, in a bitter rain, I crested the peak of Mount Madison in August and was immediately thrown backward by howling winds whipping across the ridge and pelting hailstones. It was impossible to reach the summit. On a hike in the remote Pemigewasset Wilderness I made a wrong turn and, fearing hypothermia, walked all night. By the time the sun rose my blisters had turned to open sores. I wrung the blood out of my socks. I go to the mountains to at once spend this fury and seek renewal, to be reminded of my tiny, insignificant place in the universe and to confront mystery. Berry writes in “The Peace of Wild Things”:

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

I climbed my first mountain in the White Mountain National Forest when I was 7. It was Mount Chocorua. The mountain, capped with a rocky dome and perhaps the most beautiful in the park, is named for a legendary Pequawket chief who refused to flee with his tribe to Canada and was supposedly pursued to its summit by white settlers, where he leapt to his death. It is a climb I have repeated nearly every year, now with my children. I guided trips in the mountains in college. I would lie, years later, awake in San Salvador, Gaza, Juba or Sarajevo and try to recall the sound of the wind, the smell of the pine forests and the cacophony of bird song. To know the forests and mountains were there, to know that I would return to them, gave me a psychological and physical refuge. And as my two older children grew to adulthood I dragged them up one peak after another, pushing them perhaps too hard. My college-age son is deeply connected to the mountains. He works in the summer as a guide and has spent upward of seven weeks at a time backpacking on the Appalachian Trail. My teenage daughter, perhaps reflecting her sanity, is reticent to enter the mountains with the two of us.

I stood a few days ago in a parking lot at Crawford Notch with Rick Sullivan, an Army captain and Afghanistan war veteran. It was the end of our weeklong hike in the White Mountains. Sullivan noticed a man with a T-shirt that read “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” The shirt had Arabic and English script warning motorists not to come too close or risk being shot. The man, an Iraqi veteran, was putting on a pack and told us that he was the caretaker of a camp site. He said he left the Army a year ago, drifted, drank too much and worked at a bar as a bouncer. His life was unraveling. He then answered an ad for a park caretaker. The clouds hovering on the peaks above us were an ominous gray. The caretaker said he planned to beat the rain back to the tent site. I thought of Earl Shaffer.

“You try and forget the war but you carry pieces of it with you anyway,” the caretaker said. “In the mountains, at least, I can finally sleep.”

Worshiping wealth: Chris Hedges and the decline of religious institutions

The writings of American journalist, writer and public intellectual Chris Hedges have featured many times on this blog.

In his weekly column in Truth Dig and in his many books, Hedges describes the rise of a commodity culture and market society, in which celebrity, money, power and corporate capitalism reign. Hedges writes of a society that worships wealth above all else. His arguments are shaped by the American experience, but they apply no less to this country.

In his latest column piece Hedges describes the irreversible decline of Western religious institutions- The Catholic Church, The Jewish synagogues, and the various Protestant denominations. Hedges writes:

"They have failed to unequivocally denounce unfettered capitalism, globalization and pre-emptive war. The obsession with personal piety and "How- is- it- with- me- spirituality" that permeates most congregations is narcissism. And while the Protestant Church and reformed Judaism have not replicated the perfidiousness of the Catholic Bishops, who protect child-molesting priests, they have little to say in an age when we desperately need moral guidance...

In memory of Dr King

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
Martin Luther King

Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day in the US. Held on the third Monday in January to mark the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr, the day is intended as a reminder of all that Dr King fought for and died for.

Chris Hedges's writes that King's message has been sanitized and appropriated to serve the interests of the powerful:

"Martin Luther King Day has become a yearly ritual to turn a black radical into a red-white-and-blue icon. It has become a day to celebrate ourselves for “overcoming” racism and “fulfilling” King’s dream. It is a day filled with old sound bites about little black children and little white children that, given the state of America, would enrage King. Most of our great social reformers, once they are dead, are kidnapped by the power elite and turned into harmless props of American glory. King, after all, was not only a socialist but fiercely opposed to American militarism and acutely aware, especially at the end of his life, that racial justice without economic justice was a farce"

As Hedges points out the old racist rhetoric may have disappeared but the situation that King fought against remains:

"We pretend there is equality and equal opportunity while ignoring the institutional and economic racism that infects our inner cities and fills our prisons, where a staggering one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34 are incarcerated."

In the Nation Mark Engler has written of the Poor People's Campaign which King was planing when he was assassinated. King aimed to mobilise poor people throughout America to demand action from Congress, and engage in nonviolent civil disobedience to force the US government to end economic and social deprivation. Engler ponders how Dr King might respond to the current crises of recession, unemployment and gross inequality confronting the US:

"Without people taking action in the spirit of Martin Luther King's vision, a few Americans may continue to gather inordinate wealth, but many others, thrust against their will into idleness, insecurity or foreclosure by today's crisis, will have little recourse but to wait for relief from a capricious and uncertain economy".

The image is from the No Caption Needed website and appeared in the St Lois Dispatch.

Strategies for social and political change: addressing climate change

"The reason the ecosystem is dying is not because we still have a dryer in our basement. It is because corporations look at everything, from human beings to the natural environment, as exploitable commodities. It is because consumption is the engine of corporate profits."
Chris Hedges

Today is the International Day of Action for Climate Change 350. People in 181 countries have come together for the most widespread day of environmental action in the planet's history to call for strong action and bold leadership on the climate crisis.

In the lead-up to the day there has been considerable debate about the type of strategies needed to address climate change.

In the UK George Monbiot argues that strategies to address climate change must be directed at the rich who are the greatest contributors to the problem. Monbiot writes:

"So where are the movements protesting about the stinking rich destroying our living systems? Where is the direct action against super-yachts and private jets"

There is an important debate here involving Bill McKibben one of the leaders of the International Day of Action and Chris Hedges that points to different views on the type of strateies needed to address climate change.

McKibben argues that the situation is so serious we face total environmental catastrophe. The earth's atmosphere has exceeded the 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide above which the atmosphere begins to heat too an extent that we are all threatened. McKibben sees great potential in individual action and citizen- led grassroots movements to force governments to act.

Hedges applauds citizen led grassroots movements and small scale local action, but is skeptical about their capacity to force change. He argues that we can't address the release of carbon dioxide without addressing corporate power. Hedges writes:

" We have allowed the corporate state to sell the environmental crises as a matter of personal choice, when actually there is a need for profound social and economic reform"

Here in Australia the climate denialists continue to be accorded privileged status by their propaganda sheet- The Australian. But the fundamental failure of the Australian political system to find solutions to climate change (by pursuing a flawed ETS scheme) was the core message of Tony Kevin's recent piece (here).

Kevin's piece confirms that political processes and public policy making are unlikely to deliver the sort of radical solutions to climate change that are needed. His piece offers another salutatory lesson as well. That is, that many civil society groups and non-government organisations who make much of their advocacy on climate change are willing to compromise their climate agenda agenda for a seat at the table in the misguided belief that "staying in the tent to do some marginal good" is better than being outside the tent.