By Chris Hedges
October 16, 2019 "Information
Clearing House" -
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.
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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, an ordained Presbyterian
minister, gave this sermon Sunday at the Claremont
Presbyterian Church in Claremont, Calif. Chris 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
This article was originally published by "TruthDig"-
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