by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
March 29, 2010
The language of violence always presages violence. I watched it in war after war from Latin America to the Balkans. The impoverishment of a working class and the snuffing out of hope and opportunity always produce angry mobs ready to kill and be killed. A bankrupt, liberal elite, which proves ineffectual against the rich and the criminal, always gets swept aside, in times of economic collapse, before thugs and demagogues emerge to play to the passions of the crowd. I have seen this drama. I know each act. I know how it ends. I have heard it in other tongues in other lands. I recognize the same stock characters, the buffoons, charlatans and fools, the same confused crowds and the same impotent and despised liberal class that deserves the hatred it engenders.
“We are ruled not by two parties but one party,” Cynthia McKinney, who ran for president on the Green Party ticket, told me. “It is the party of money and war. Our country has been hijacked. And we have to take the country away from those who have hijacked it. The only question now is whose revolution gets funded.”
The Democrats and their liberal apologists are so oblivious to the profound personal and economic despair sweeping through this country that they think offering unemployed people the right to keep their unemployed children on their nonexistent health care policies is a step forward. They think that passing a jobs bill that will give tax credits to corporations is a rational response to an unemployment rate that is, in real terms, close to 20 percent. They think that making ordinary Americans, one in eight of whom depends on food stamps to eat, fork over trillions in taxpayer dollars to pay for the crimes of Wall Street and war is acceptable. They think that the refusal to save the estimated 2.4 million people who will be forced out of their homes by foreclosure this year is justified by the bloodless language of fiscal austerity. The message is clear. Laws do not apply to the power elite. Our government does not work. And the longer we stand by and do nothing, the longer we refuse to embrace and recognize the legitimate rage of the working class, the faster we will see our anemic democracy die.
The unraveling of America mirrors the unraveling of Yugoslavia. The Balkan war was not caused by ancient ethnic hatreds. It was caused by the economic collapse of Yugoslavia. The petty criminals and goons who took power harnessed the anger and despair of the unemployed and the desperate. They singled out convenient scapegoats from ethnic Croats to Muslims to Albanians to Gypsies. They set in motion movements that unleashed a feeding frenzy leading to war and self-immolation. There is little difference between the ludicrous would-be poet Radovan Karadzic, who was a figure of ridicule in Sarajevo before the war, and the moronic Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin. There is little difference between the Oath Keepers and the Serbian militias. We can laugh at these people, but they are not the fools. We are.
The longer we appeal to the Democrats, who are servants of corporate interests, the more stupid and ineffectual we become. Sixty-one percent of Americans believe the country is in decline, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, and they are right. Only 25 percent of those polled said the government can be trusted to protect the interests of the American people. If we do not embrace this outrage and distrust as our own it will be expressed through a terrifying right-wing backlash.
“It is time for us to stop talking about right and left,” McKinney told me. “The old political paradigm that serves the interests of the people who put us in this predicament will not be the paradigm that gets us out of this. I am a child of the South. Janet Napolitano tells me I need to be afraid of people who are labeled white supremacists but I was raised around white supremacists. I am not afraid of white supremacists. I am concerned about my own government. The Patriot Act did not come from the white supremacists, it came from the White House and Congress. Citizens United did not come from white supremacists, it came from the Supreme Court. Our problem is a problem of governance. I am willing to reach across traditional barriers that have been skillfully constructed by people who benefit from the way the system is organized.”
We are bound to a party that has betrayed every principle we claim to espouse, from universal health care to an end to our permanent war economy, to a demand for quality and affordable public education, to a concern for the jobs of the working class. And the hatred expressed within right-wing movements for the college-educated elite, who created or at least did nothing to halt the financial debacle, is not misplaced. Our educated elite, wallowing in self-righteousness, wasted its time in the boutique activism of political correctness as tens of millions of workers lost their jobs. The shouting of racist and bigoted words at black and gay members of Congress, the spitting on a black member of the House, the tossing of bricks through the windows of legislators’ offices, are part of the language of rebellion. It is as much a revolt against the educated elite as it is against the government. The blame lies with us. We created the monster.
When someone like Palin posts a map with cross hairs on the districts of Democrats, when she says “Don’t Retreat, Instead—RELOAD!” there are desperate people cleaning their weapons who listen. When Christian fascists stand in the pulpits of megachurches and denounce Barack Obama as the Antichrist, there are messianic believers who listen. When a Republican lawmaker shouts “baby killer” at Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak, there are violent extremists who see the mission of saving the unborn as a sacred duty. They have little left to lose. We made sure of that. And the violence they inflict is an expression of the violence they endure.
These movements are not yet full-blown fascist movements. They do not openly call for the extermination of ethnic or religious groups. They do not openly advocate violence. But, as I was told by Fritz Stern, a scholar of fascism who has written about the origins of Nazism, “In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented.” It is the yearning that we now see, and it is dangerous. If we do not immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around the edges of American society will become a full-blown conflagration.
Left unchecked, the hatred for radical Islam will transform itself into a hatred for Muslims. The hatred for undocumented workers will become a hatred for Mexicans and Central Americans. The hatred for those not defined by this largely white movement as American patriots will become a hatred for African-Americans. The hatred for liberals will morph into a hatred for all democratic institutions, from universities to government agencies to the press. Our continued impotence and cowardice, our refusal to articulate this anger and stand up in open defiance to the Democrats and the Republicans, will see us swept aside for an age of terror and blood.
Copyright © 2010 Truthdig
Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He has written nine books, including Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009) and War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2003).
see
Chris Hedges: War is a Force that Gives us Meaning (2004; must-see)
Financing Fascism, Part I by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
The Iron Heel (1908) by Jack London
“The 15% Solution,” Serialization, 3rd Installment: Chapter Two
Chris Hedges: Are the two main US parties just proto-fascist misfits?
Filed under: Dandelion Salad Featured Writers, Dandelion Salad Posts News Politics and-or Videos 2, Death-destruction, Democrats, Fascism, Racism, Republicans, The Economy Sucks and or Collapse 2 Tagged: | Chris Hedges, Chris Hedges on Dandelion Salad, Fascism on Dandelion Salad, Hedges-Chris, McKinney-Cynthia, Palin-Sarah
[...] Is America ‘Yearning For Fascism?’ by Chris Hedges [...]
[...] Is America ‘Yearning For Fascism?’ by Chris Hedges [...]
[...] Is America ‘Yearning For Fascism?’ by Chris Hedges [...]
Very good article. The ridiculous rhetoric of the “teabaggers” notwithstanding, it seems odd to be arguing that the U.S. stands on the cusp of falling into the fascist abyss given that a black president is in power, but this article illustrates well the distance between the elite and the populace that create the permissive atmosphere for the emergence of fascism in the U.S. I would also add another point. It seems that although the U.S. is touted as the last enlightenment society on the planet, it more accurately resembles those European countries that stood between the late middle ages and the early modern period. It was in these nations that the scientific revolutions that preceded the Enlightenment co-existed with witchcraft and witch trials. This is one distinguishing feature of fascism, namely that it prospered in nations where substantial cross-sections of the population were unable to adjust to the onward march of “capitalism” or “progress” or “modernity”. My point is that, though the U.S. has the trappings of modernity it is still hemmed in by a cultural outlook amongst the mass of the population which is resolutely unreconciled to modernity.
This makes for a very unstable mix.
As with cancer…the longer we wait to eradicate it, the more impossible it will be to do so.
[...] Is America ‘Yearning For Fascism?’ by Chris Hedges
[...] Is America ‘Yearning For Fascism?’ by Chris Hedges [...]
[...] Is America ‘Yearning For Fascism?’ by Chris Hedges [...]
Fascinating article. I will not comment on it in detail. I will refer to one detail, however. Fritz Stern, a man with a brilliant mind and an insatiable appetite for work, was a professor of mine at Columbia College in 1967. I don’t remember all of my Columbia professors, but I surely remember him. I do think that one should be careful in interpreting his statement: “In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented.” I don’t how far back in time Prof. Stern was going with this statement, but post-World War I what we now refer to as the fascist state first appeared in Hungary in 1919 and then first in a major power of course in Italy in 1923. So unless the “Germans” were yearning for it before World War I, when they lived under a constitutional but authoritarian monarchy, by the time “they” could have been yearning for it, it already existed. Much more important than that, fascism and most expressly Nazism was not “yearned for” by the “German people” as a whole the highest vote total the Nazi Party ever got in a fully free election was 37%, in 1932 (similar to what the Tea Party would get now, in a multi-party election). No, Nazism was a minority movement in Germany, which came to power as a minority party and then quickly turned to terror, especially first against their main enemies, the SPD and the KPD, to impose its will on the whole of the German people. Then, combined with the terror, with its success in dealing with the Great Depression, first and foremost because they were Keynesians, they gained much wider popularity.
This reeks of class bigotry. What America lacks is revolutionary socialism.
Take a step in the right direction …
Join the Green Party … being registered Dem or independent means they have you in their grasp … Tell TPTB you are not their fool … register Green …
Chris, thank you for your very articulate article that concisely identifies the problem and foreseeable consequences.
Based on your observations and experience, can you recommend any specific, concrete steps to Americans of good faith to help prevent America’s sad slide into decline and conflict? For example, should we embrace a new third party and abandon the Democratic Party’s nominees in the upcoming 2010 Congressional and state Gubernatorial elections that would almost certainly, as a practical matter, allow the divided Republicans to have their more demagogic candidates elected instead? But that does not seem like such a promising solution during this unfortunate time of religiously driven right-wing ideologies that would serve to help progressives achieve any meaningful results to prevent what you describe. Then shall we attempt to do more public protests to make the progressives cause more visible and in order to help awaken our obliviously misinformed but stressed populace to the dangers? But such protests by progressives have in the past been rendered all but invisible by a manipulative corporate press that without shame ignores such protests and by compliant police actions that coral protests to places where they are least noticeable.
I recommend that progressive groups attempt to organize brief but frequent, non-violent, lawful protests directed at the sources of the problems such as offices of the corporate press, prime offending industries, and of Democratic and Republican Parties and their elected office holders themselves. The goal of such protests should be to loudly but lawfully demand that complacent liberal elites become more effectual, behind-the-scene string pullers of regressive policies be exposed to sunlight, and to interfere with the normal patronage system of corporate wealth dictating public policy by making their method of influence ever more expensive.
To maximize effectiveness, such protests should likely appear to be random and be unpredictable in locations and duration, but need not and should not involve unlawful behavior that is designed to lead to fruitless arrests. Such arrests usually merely increase the cost of protests to the protestors without contributing to effectiveness. Nevertheless, ultimately, local police agencies will predictably compliantly cooperate with officials in falsely arresting leaders of such protests in an attempt to discourage them. Accordingly, it would be useful for progressive groups to be prepared by also organizing legal defense teams with sufficient funds to provide immediate legal assistance. Since the corporate press can not be counted on to report about such issues and protests, I propose that progressive groups should also engage in massive efforts of leafleting pamphlets to the public, as well as using blog sites, email, and texting to communicate.
Don Farkas, Los Angeles
While not familiar with Mr. Hedges writings, I find what is here
a truthful glimpse at the reality that is the U.S.. We are desending into madness.
When the end of the world is nigh, take me to a conderate state they are 50 years behind.