[Fresh Ink] Calling All Rebels

[Richard Menec]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/calling_all_rebels_20100308/

Calling All Rebels

Posted on Mar 8, 2010

By Chris Hedges

There are no constraints left to halt America's slide into a totalitarian 
capitalism. Electoral politics are a sham. The media have been debased and 
defanged by corporate owners. The working class has been impoverished and is 
now being plunged into profound despair. The legal system has been corrupted 
to serve corporate interests. Popular institutions, from labor unions to 
political parties, have been destroyed or emasculated by corporate power. 
And any form of protest, no matter how tepid, is blocked by an internal 
security apparatus that is starting to rival that of the East German secret 
police. The mounting anger and hatred, coursing through the bloodstream of 
the body politic, make violence and counter-violence inevitable. Brace 
yourself. The American empire is over. And the descent is going to be 
horrifying.

Those singled out as internal enemies will include people of color, 
immigrants, gays, intellectuals, feminists, Jews, Muslims, union leaders and 
those defined as "liberals." They will be condemned as anti-American and 
blamed for our decline. The economic collapse, which remains mysterious and 
enigmatic to most Americans, will be pinned by demagogues and hatemongers on 
these hapless scapegoats. And the random acts of violence, which are already 
leaping up around the fringes of American society, will justify harsh 
measures of internal control that will snuff out the final vestiges of our 
democracy. The corporate forces that destroyed the country will use the 
information systems they control to mask their culpability. The old game of 
blaming the weak and the marginal, a staple of despotic regimes, will 
empower the dark undercurrents of sadism and violence within American 
society and deflect attention from the corporate vampires that have drained 
the blood of the country.

"We are going to be poorer," David Cay Johnston told me. Johnston was the 
tax reporter of The New York Times for 13 years and has written on how the 
corporate state rigged the system against us. He is the author of "Free 
Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense 
and Stick You With the Bill," a book about hidden subsidies, rigged markets 
and corporate socialism. "Health care is going to eat up more and more of 
our income. We are going to have less and less for other things. We are 
going to have some huge disasters sooner or later caused by our failure to 
invest. Dams and bridges will break. Buildings will collapse. There are 
water mains that are 25 to 50 feet wide. There will be huge infrastructure 
disasters. Our intellectual resources are in decline. We are failing to 
educate young people and instill in them rigor. We are going to continue to 
pour money into the military. I think it is possible, I do not say it is 
probable, that we will have a revolution, a civil war that will see the end 
of the United States of America."

"If we see the end of this country it will come from the right and our 
failure to provide people with the basic necessities of life," said 
Johnston. "Revolutions occur when young men see the present as worse than 
the unknown future. We are not there. But it will not take a lot to get 
there. The politicians running for office who are denigrating the 
government, who are saying there are traitors in Congress, who say we do not 
need the IRS, this when no government in the history of the world has 
existed without a tax enforcement agency, are sowing the seeds for the 
destruction of the country. A lot of the people on the right hate the United 
States of America. They would say they hate the people they are arrayed 
against. But the whole idea of the United States is that we criticize the 
government. We remake it to serve our interests. They do not want that kind 
of society. They reject, as Aristotle said, the idea that democracy is to 
rule and to be ruled in turns. They see a world where they are right and 
that is it. If we do not want to do it their way we should be vanquished. 
This is not the idea on which the United States was founded."

It is hard to see how this can be prevented. The engines of social reform 
are dead. Liberal apologists, who long ago should have abandoned the 
Democratic Party, continue to make pathetic appeals to a tone-deaf corporate 
state and Barack Obama while the working and middle class are ruthlessly 
stripped of rights, income and jobs. Liberals self-righteously condemn 
imperial wars and the looting of the U.S. Treasury by Wall Street but not 
the Democrats who are responsible. And the longer the liberal class dithers 
and speaks in the bloodless language of policies and programs, the more 
hated and irrelevant it becomes. No one has discredited American liberalism 
more than liberals themselves. And I do not hold out any hope for their 
reform. We have entered an age in which, as William Butler Yeats wrote, "the 
best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity."

"If we end up with violence in the streets on a large scale, not random 
riots, but insurrection and things break down, there will be a coup d'état 
from the right," Johnston said. "We have already had an economic coup d'état. 
It will not take much to go further."

How do we resist? How, if this descent is inevitable, as I believe it is, do 
we fight back? Why should we resist at all? Why not give in to cynicism and 
despair? Why not carve out as comfortable a niche as possible within the 
embrace of the corporate state and spend our lives attempting to satiate our 
private needs? The power elite, including most of those who graduate from 
our top universities and our liberal and intellectual classes, have sold out 
for personal comfort. Why not us?

The French moral philosopher Albert Camus argued that we are separated from 
each other. Our lives are meaningless. We cannot influence fate. We will all 
die and our individual being will be obliterated. And yet Camus wrote that 
"one of the only coherent philosophical positions is revolt. It is a 
constant confrontation between man and his obscurity. It is not aspiration, 
for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, 
without the resignation that ought to accompany it."

"A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an 
object," Camus warned. "But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he 
reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be 
classified as an object."

The rebel, for Camus, stands with the oppressed-the unemployed workers being 
thrust into impoverishment and misery by the corporate state, the 
Palestinians in Gaza, the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the disappeared 
who are held in our global black sites, the poor in our inner cities and 
depressed rural communities, immigrants and those locked away in our prison 
system. And to stand with them does not mean to collaborate with parties, 
such as the Democrats, who can mouth the words of justice while carrying out 
acts of oppression. It means open and direct defiance.

The power structure and its liberal apologists dismiss the rebel as 
impractical and see the rebel's outsider stance as counterproductive. They 
condemn the rebel for expressing anger at injustice. The elites and their 
apologists call for calm and patience. They use the hypocritical language of 
spirituality, compromise, generosity and compassion to argue that the only 
alternative is to accept and work with the systems of power. The rebel, 
however, is beholden to a moral commitment that makes it impossible to stand 
with the power elite. The rebel refuses to be bought off with foundation 
grants, invitations to the White House, television appearances, book 
contracts, academic appointments or empty rhetoric. The rebel is not 
concerned with self-promotion or public opinion. The rebel knows that, as 
Augustine wrote, hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage-anger 
at the way things are and the courage to see that they do not remain the way 
they are. The rebel is aware that virtue is not rewarded. The act of 
rebellion defines itself.

"You do not become a 'dissident' just because you decide one day to take up 
this most unusual career," Vaclav Havel said when he battled the communist 
regime in Czechoslovakia. "You are thrown into it by your personal sense of 
responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You 
are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict 
with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being 
branded an enemy of society. ... The dissident does not operate in the realm 
of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for 
office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public. 
He offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his 
own skin-and he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming 
the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a 
citizen, regardless of the cost."

Those in power have disarmed the liberal class. They do not argue that the 
current system is just or good, because they cannot, but they have convinced 
liberals that there is no alternative. But we are not slaves. We have a 
choice. We can refuse to be either a victim or an executioner. We have the 
moral capacity to say no, to refuse to cooperate. Any boycott or 
demonstration, any occupation or sit-in, any strike, any act of obstruction 
or sabotage, any refusal to pay taxes, any fast, any popular movement and 
any act of civil disobedience ignites the soul of the rebel and exposes the 
dead hand of authority. "There is beauty and there are the humiliated," 
Camus wrote. "Whatever difficulties the enterprise may present, I should 
like never to be unfaithful either to the second or the first."

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes 
you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively 
take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the 
wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it 
stop," Mario Savio said in 1964. "And you've got to indicate to the people 
who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine 
will be prevented from working at all."

The capacity to exercise moral autonomy, the capacity to refuse to 
cooperate, offers us the only route left to personal freedom and a life with 
meaning. Rebellion is its own justification. Those of us who come out of the 
religious left have no quarrel with Camus. Camus is right about the 
absurdity of existence, right about finding worth in the act of rebellion 
rather than some bizarre dream of an afterlife or Sunday School fantasy that 
God rewards the just and the good. "Oh my soul," the ancient Greek poet 
Pindar wrote, "do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the 
possible." We differ with Camus only in that we have faith that rebellion is 
not ultimately meaningless. Rebellion allows us to be free and independent 
human beings, but rebellion also chips away, however imperceptibly, at the 
edifice of the oppressor and sustains the dim flames of hope and love. And 
in moments of profound human despair these flames are never insignificant. 
They keep alive the capacity to be human. We must become, as Camus said, so 
absolutely free that "existence is an act of rebellion." Those who do not 
rebel in our age of totalitarian capitalism and who convince themselves that 
there is no alternative to collaboration are complicit in their own 
enslavement. They commit spiritual and moral suicide.

===============================
Support the alternative online news service FreshInk.
Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend.
To view previous postings or to subscribe:
http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink
===============================