Image by Glenn Halog via Flickr
with Chris Hedges
RT America on Mar 12, 2017
On this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges is joined by Linh Dinh, author of “Postcards from the End of America”. Dinh traveled across the US to lift up the voices of those who have been disappeared by our corporate state. RT Correspondent Anya Parampil reveals the stark statistics of those living in poverty in America.
See also:
https://linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com/
From the archives:
Poverty Will Kill More Of Us Than Terrorism
If This Is The Last Century Of Capitalism, What Will Replace It? by Pete Dolack
Chris Hedges: Confronting the Signs of a Society in Decline
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Strong stuff from Linh Dinh.
It really is a crisis of imagination. The ruling illusion of necessary doom is a despotism of the mind, the supreme symptom of the money disease.
The fact is that many Americans, unless they have had the opportunity to be freely immersed in cultures abroad, really do not know a great deal about how most of the world lives, has lived or in many cases, still subsists or starves. The notion that the US is a force for ‘enlightened’ development is frankly a profane and obscene delusion.
The notable exception was arguably the Marshall Plan that enabled (Western) Europe to rebuild itself, while actually serving the interests of corporate power and governing elites; but that was when the class and gender stratification of the industrial West was still deeply ingrained.
It’s not difficult to understand, really, how things have turned out when we consider the epic benchmarks of US-style aggressive intervention ~ Hiroshima/Nagasaki, Vietnam, Latin America, Indonesia, the Middle-east, now Africa etc. What’s more remarkable is how obvious the decline has been, and how it has been in direct inverse correlation to the rise of US militarism & petrodollar hegemony.
It is also worth noting that the police in the US are said be trained by Israeli specialists. Hardly great exemplars of “peace keeping.”
Chomsky argues that there have been genuine American advances, with a steady improvement in the standards and quality of life and human rights; yet again, most of these changes have arisen as a result of generic factors common to a great many diverse global cultural contexts ~ almost all of which could have done so much better without direct US interference; especially in the prevailing form of ‘third-world’ debt-bondage to “first world” banks.
The problem all along, has been the insidious propaganda and brainwashing to which the US public has been subjected; socially engineered and subdued into submission, since Dulles & his covert quasi-Nazi MKULTRA (CIA) experiments taught them to love their servitude as Huxley coined it.
Also we have to be accurate if we say ‘compared’ to what? All such comparisons are predicated on certain arbitrary measures, like prosperity, affluence ~ generic values loosely associated with rights and privileges….albeit backed by a smattering of hard historical statistics; but many indices are at best inadequate, at worst totally distorted or even false, others completely absent or ignored. We do well to heed Ralph Nader to grasp that empirical nettle.
As I see it, the rot set in with Reagan’s methodical red-lining destruction of inner-city communities couple with the CIA’s illicit policy toward lethally addictive drugs. That has proved to be an exercise of iniquitous, but extremely profitable genocide, that has spread squalor all round the planet. It’s a perfect criminal mess, but it only remains a mess if we do nothing.
Three constellations of possibility remain in variable dynamic phase-entangled relation to each other, that are really one & one, against the other: (further) horrendous atomic misadventure coupled with violent financial meltdown…&/or a consensual global breakthrough; necessarily arresting the inertial trend toward imminent biosphere catastrophe ~ reining in and regulating the industrial-corporate juggernaut of planetary decimation, that will otherwise lockstep us mindlessly into the abyss.
This last will require a supreme effort and commitment on the part of sane movements & individuals everywhere and anywhere; to link arms in the cause of survival, and compel the nuclear-world-powers by our sheer force of determined Will to reject the commercial politics of extinction and embrace intelligent regenerative cooperation. Life or death; a simple choice.
We shall not prevail until we are able to demonstrate our unequivocal Trust in the ethical (ecological) processes of Life itself….pure, unrestricted, mutually dependent, thriving and truly joyous.
Thanks for your commentary, as always, David. Have you read any of Dinh’s articles? Check them out on his blog, http://linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com/. Great photography, too. He shows the real America.
Thanks Lo, amazing work, resonates deeply with my own perceptions. Terrifying and deeply insightful. I think Henry Miller got it right way back, when he came up with the “air-conditioned nightmare.” How surreal, extreme, desperate, corporate America is. Lin Dinh is clearly a National Treasure.
I recently recommended a terrific French doc-film to Jerry Alatalo; “Demain” was released about a year ago and just screened at our local arts centre here in N Devon. If you haven’t heard about it yet, it’s superb….another world is not only possible, it is already emerging through the ruinous detritus of the current ‘paradigm.’
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