What It Means to Be a Socialist
By Chris Hedges
September 21, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "Truthdig"
- We live in a revolutionary moment. The
disastrous economic and political experiment that attempted to
organize human behavior around the dictates of the global
marketplace has failed. The promised prosperity that was to have
raised the living standards of workers through trickle-down
economics has been exposed as a lie. A tiny global oligarchy has
amassed obscene wealth, while the engine of unfettered corporate
capitalism plunders resources, exploits cheap, unorganized labor and
creates pliable, corrupt governments that abandon the common good to
serve corporate profit. The relentless drive by the fossil fuel
industry for profits is destroying the ecosystem, threatening the
viability of the human species. And no mechanisms to institute
genuine reform or halt the corporate assault are left within the
structures of power, which have surrendered to corporate control.
The citizen has become irrelevant. He or she can participate in
heavily choreographed elections, but the demands of corporations and
banks are paramount.
History has amply demonstrated that the seizure of
power by a tiny cabal, whether a political party or a clique of
oligarchs, leads to despotism. Governments that cater exclusively to
a narrow interest group and redirect the machinery of state to
furthering the interests of that group are no longer capable of
responding rationally in times of crisis. Blindly serving their
masters, they acquiesce to the looting of state treasuries to bail
out corrupt financial houses and banks while ignoring chronic
unemployment and underemployment, along with stagnant or declining
wages, crippling debt peonage, a collapsing infrastructure, and the
millions left destitute and often homeless by deceptive mortgages
and foreclosures.
A bankrupt liberal class, holding up values it
does nothing to defend, discredits itself as well as the purported
liberal values of a civil democracy as it is swept aside, along with
those values. In this moment, a political, economic or natural
disaster—in short a crisis—will ignite unrest, lead to instability
and see the state carry out draconian forms of repression to
maintain “order.” This is what lies ahead.
We will, as
Friedrich Engels wrote, make a transition to either socialism or
barbarism. If we do not dismantle global capitalism we will descend
into the
Hobbesian chaos of failed states, mass migrations—which we are
already witnessing—and endless war. Populations, especially in the
global South, will endure misery and high mortality rates caused by
collapsing ecosystems and infrastructures on a scale not seen since
perhaps the black plague. There can be no accommodation with global
capitalism. We will overthrow this system or be crushed by it. And
at this moment of crisis we need to remind ourselves what being a
socialist means and what it does not mean.
First and foremost, all socialists are unequivocal
anti-militarists and anti-imperialists. They understand that there
is no genuine social, political, economic or cultural reform as long
as the militarists and their corporatist allies in the war industry
continue to loot and pillage the state budget, leaving the poor to
go hungry, workingmen and -women in distress, the infrastructure to
collapse and social services to be slashed in the name of austerity.
The psychosis of permanent war, which infected the body politic
after World War I with the internal and external war on communism,
and which today has mutated into the war on terror, is used by the
state to strip us of civil liberties, redirect our resources to the
war machine and criminalize democratic dissent. We have squandered
trillions of dollars and resources in endless and futile wars, from
Vietnam to the Middle East, at a time of ecological and fiscal
crisis. The folly of endless war is one of the signs of a dying
civilization. One F-22 Raptor fighter plane costs $350 million. We
have 187 of them. One Tomahawk cruise missile costs $1.41 million.
We fired 161 of them when we attacked Libya. This missile attack on
Libya alone cost us a quarter of a billion dollars. We spend an
estimated $1.7 trillion a year on war, far more than the official 54
percent of discretionary spending, or roughly $600 billion. If we
don’t break the back of the war machine, profound change will be
impossible.
We have been at war almost continuously since the
first Gulf War in 1991, followed by Somalia in 1992, Haiti in 1994,
Bosnia in 1995, Serbia-Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, where we
have now been fighting for 14 years, and Iraq in 2003. And we can
toss in Yemen, Libya, Pakistan and Syria, along with Israel’s proxy
war against the Palestinian people.
The human cost has been horrendous. Over 1 million
dead in Iraq. Millions more are displaced or are refugees. Iraq will
never be reconstituted as a unified state. And it was our war
industry that created the mess. We attacked a country that did not
threaten us, and had no intention of threatening its neighbors, and
destroyed one of the most modern infrastructures in the Middle East.
We brought not only terror and death—including the Shiite death
squads we armed and trained—but power outages, food shortages and
the collapse of basic services, from garbage collection to sewer and
water treatment. We dismantled Iraq’s institutions, disbanded its
security forces, threw its health service into crisis and engineered
massive poverty and unemployment. And out of the chaos rose
insurgents, gangsters, kidnapping rings, jihadists and rogue
paramilitary groups—including our hired mercenaries, like [the
current army of] Iraq. Gary Leupp in an
article in Counterpunch titled “How George W. Bush Destroyed the
Temple of Baal” got it when he wrote:
Bush destroyed the law and order which had
permitted girls to walk to school, heads uncovered, in modern
western dress. He destroyed the freedom of physicians and other
professionals to go about their work and caused masses of them
to exit their country. He destroyed neighborhoods whose
residents were forced to flee for their lives. He destroyed the
Christian community, which dropped from 1.5 million in 2001 to
perhaps 200,000 a decade later. He destroyed the prevalent
ideology of secularism and ushered in an era of bitterly
contested sectarian rule. He destroyed the right to broadcast
rock ‘n roll music, or sell liquor and DVDs.
He destroyed the stability of Anbar province
by sowing the chaos that allowed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to
establish—for the first time—an al-Qaeda branch in Iraq.
He destroyed the stability of Syria when
“Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia” (now ISIL) retreated into that
neighboring country during the “surge” of 2007. By creating
power vacuums and generating new chapters and spin-offs of
al-Qaeda, he destroyed Yazidi communities and their freedom from
genocide and slavery. By hatching the forerunner of ISIL, he
destroyed the prospects for a peaceful “Arab Spring” in Syria
three years after his presidency ended.
Through his actions he destroyed the border
between Syria and Iraq. He destroyed the Tomb of Jonah in Mosul.
He destroyed 3,300 year old monuments, the glorious art of the
Assyrians, in Nimrud. On August 23 while sitting in his home
artist’s studio in Crawford, Texas, he destroyed the
2,000-year-old Temple of Baalshamin in Palmyra, Syria.
The most complete structure in that gorgeous
pearl of an ancient preserved city, a mix of Roman, Syrian and
Egyptian artistic influences, is now
a pile of rubble.
Foreign battlefields are laboratories for the
architects of industrial slaughter. They perfect the tools of
control and annihilation on the demonized and the destitute. But
these tools eventually make their way back to the heart of empire.
As the corporatists and the militarists disembowel the nation,
rendering our manufacturing centers boarded-up wastelands and
tossing our citizens into poverty and despair, the methods of
subjugation familiar to those on the outer reaches migrate back to
us—wholesale surveillance, indiscriminate use of lethal force in the
streets of our cities against unarmed citizens, a stripping away of
our civil liberties, a dysfunctional court system, drones, arbitrary
arrest, detention and mass incarceration. The tyranny empire imposes
on others, as Thucydides reminded us, it finally imposes on itself.
Those who kill in our name abroad soon kill in our name at home.
Democracy is snuffed out. As the German socialist
Karl Liebknecht said during the First World War: “The main enemy
is at home.” We will destroy the engines of endless war and shut
down the war profiteers or we will become the next victims; indeed
many in our marginal communities already are its victims.
You cannot be a socialist and an imperialist. You
cannot, as Bernie Sanders has done, support the Obama
administration’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia
and Yemen and be a socialist. You cannot, as Sanders has done, vote
for every military appropriations bill, including every bill and
resolution that empowers and sanctions Israel to carry out its
slow-motion genocide of the Palestinian people, and be a socialist.
And you cannot laud, as Sanders has done, military contractors
because they bring jobs to your state. Sanders may have the rhetoric
of inequality down, but he is a full-fledged member of the
Democratic Caucus, which kneels before the war industry and their
lobbyists. And no genuine grass-roots movement will ever be born
within the bowels of the Democratic Party establishment, which is
currently attempting to shut down Sanders to make sure its anointed
candidate is the nominee. No elected official dares to challenge any
weapons system, no matter how costly or redundant. And Sanders, who
votes with the Democrats 98 percent of the time, steers clear of
confronting the master of war.
Sanders, of course, like all elected officials,
profits from this Faustian pact. The Vermont Democratic Party
leadership, in return for his deference, has not supported any
candidate to run against Sanders since 1990. Sanders endorses
Democratic candidates, no matter how much they push
neoliberalism down our throats, including Bill Clinton and
Barack Obama. And Sanders, carrying water for the Democrats, is the
primary obstacle to the building of a third party in Vermont.
There is a reason no establishment politician,
including Sanders, dares say a word against the war industry. If you
do, you end up like Ralph Nader, tossed into the political
wilderness. Nader was not afraid to speak this truth. And it is in
the wilderness, I am afraid, that real socialists must for the
moment reside. Socialists understand that if we do not dismantle the
war industry, nothing, absolutely nothing, will change; indeed,
things will only get worse.
War is a business. Imperial wars seize natural
resources on behalf of corporations and ensure the profits of the
arms industry. This is as true in Iraq as it was in our campaigns of
genocide against Native Americans. And, as
A. Philip Randolph said, it is only when it is impossible to
profit from war that wars will be dramatically curtailed, if not
stopped. No one sitting in the boardroom of General Dynamics is
hoping peace breaks out in the Middle East. No one in the Pentagon,
especially the generals who build their careers by fighting and
managing wars, prays for a cessation of conflict.
War, wrapped in the cant of nationalism and the
euphoria that comes with the giddy celebration of power and
violence, is used by ruling elites to thwart and destroy the
aspirations of workingmen and -women and distract us from our
disempowerment.
“Wars throughout history have been waged for
conquest and plunder. ... And that is war, in a nutshell,” the
[five-time] socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs said
during World War I. “The master class has always declared the wars;
the subject class has always fought the battles.”
Debs, who in 1912 received almost a million votes,
was sentenced to 10 years in prison for saying this. The judge who
sentenced him denounced those “who would strike the sword from the
hand of this nation while she is engaged in defending herself
against a foreign and brutal power.”
“I have been accused of obstructing the war,” Debs
said in court. “I admit it. I abhor war. I would oppose war if I
stood alone.”
Debs, who would spend 32 months in prison, until
1921, also delivered to many a socialist credo at his sentencing
after being found guilty of violating the Espionage Act:
“Your honor, years ago I recognized my kinship
with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit
better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that
while there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal
element, I am of it. While there is a soul in prison, I am not
free.”
The capitalist class and its doppelgängers in the
military establishment have carried out what
John Ralston Saul calls a coup d’état in slow motion. The elites
use war, as they always have, as a safety valve for class conflict.
War, as
W.E.B. Du Bois said, creates an artificial community of interest
between the oligarchs and the poor, diverting the poor from their
natural interests. The redirecting of national frustrations and
emotions into the struggle against a common enemy, the cant of
patriotism, the endemic racism that is the fuel of all ideologies
that sustain war, the false bonding that comes with the sense of
comradeship, seduces those on the margins of society. They feel in
wartime that they belong. They feel they have a place. They are
offered the chance to be heroes. And off they march like sheep to
the slaughter. By the time they find out, it is too late.
“Modern totalitarianism can integrate the masses
so completely into the political structure, through terror and
propaganda, that they become the architects of their own
enslavement,” wrote
Dwight Macdonald. “This does not make slavery less, but on the
contrary more—a paradox there is no space to unravel here.
Bureaucratic collectivism, not capitalism, is the most dangerous
future enemy of socialism.”
“War,” as
Randolph Bourne
wrote, “is the health of the state.” It allows the state to accrue
to itself power and resources that in peacetime a citizenry would
never permit. And that is why the war state, like the one we live
in, has to make certain that we are always afraid. Constant violence
by the war machine, we are assured, will alone make us safe. Any
attempt to rein in spending or expanding power will profit the
enemy.
It was the militarists and the capitalists that at
the end of World War II conspired to roll back the gains made by
workingmen and -women under the New Deal. They used the rhetoric of
the Cold War to cement into place an economy geared towards total
war, even in peacetime. This permitted the arms industry to continue
to make weapons, with guaranteed profits from the state, and
permitted the generals to continue to preside over their fiefdoms.
The incestuous relations between the corporatists and the
militarists see retired generals and officers offered lucrative jobs
in the war industry.
The manufacturing of weapons systems and the
waging of war is today the chief activity of the state. It is no
longer one among other means of advancing the national interest, as
Simone Weil pointed out, but has become the sole national
interest.
These corporatists and militarists are the enemy
of socialists. They bankrolled and promoted movements in the early
20th century that called for reforms within these structures of
capitalism—that spoke in the language of the “politics of
productivism,” that eschewed the language of class conflict and
talked only about economic growth and a partnership with the
capitalist class. The NAACP, for example, was formed to lure
African-Americans away from the Communist Party, the only radical
organization in the early 20th century that did not discriminate.
The AFL-CIO was [later] fed CIA money to help crush and supplant
radical unions abroad and at home. The AFL-CIO, like the NAACP, is
today a victim of its own corruption and bureaucratic senility. Its
bloated leadership pulls down huge salaries as its dwindling rank
and file is stripped of benefits and protections. The capitalists no
longer need what they once called “responsible” unionism—which meant
pliable unionism. And once the capitalists and the militarists
killed off the radical movements and unions they finished off the
dupes who had helped them do it. And that is why less than 12
percent of our country’s workforce is unionized and why we have such
vast income disparities and chronic unemployment and
underemployment. Surplus labor, desperate for work and unwilling to
challenge the bosses to retain a job, is the bulwark of capitalism.
The radicals, such as the Industrial Workers of
the World (IWW), or Wobblies, founded by Mother Jones and Big Bill
Haywood in 1905, were destroyed by the state. Department of Justice
agents in 1912 made simultaneous raids on 48 IWW meeting halls
across the country and arrested 165 IWW union leaders. One hundred
one went to trial, including
Big Bill Haywood, who testified for three days. One of the IWW
leaders told the court:
You ask me why the I.W.W. is not patriotic to
the United States. If you were a bum without a blanket; if you
had left your wife and kids when you went west for a job, and
had never located them since; if your job had never kept you
long enough in a place to qualify you to vote; if you slept in a
lousy, sour bunkhouse, and ate food just as rotten as they could
give you and get by with it; if deputy sheriffs shot your
cooking cans full of holes and spilled your grub on the ground;
if your wages were lowered on you when the bosses thought they
had you down; if there was one law for
Ford, Suhr, and
Mooney and another for
Harry Thaw: if every person who represented law and order
and the nation beat you up, railroaded you to jail, and the good
Christian people cheered and told them to go to it, how in hell
do you expect a man to be patriotic?
This war is a business man’s war and we don’t
see why we should go out and get shot in order to save the
lovely state of affairs that we now enjoy.
The Wobblies once led strikes involving hundreds
of thousands of workers and preached an uncompromising doctrine of
class warfare. It went the way of the passenger pigeon. The
Socialist Party by 1912 had 126,000 members, 1,200 officeholders in
340 municipalities, and 29 English and 22 foreign-language weeklies,
along with three English and six foreign-language dailies. It
included in its ranks tenant farmers, garment workers, railroad
workers, coal miners, hotel and restaurant workers, dock workers and
lumberjacks. It too was liquidated by the state. Socialist leaders
were jailed or deported. Socialist publications such as The Masses
and Appeal to Reason were banned. The assault, aided later by
McCarthyism, has left us without the vocabulary to make sense of
our own reality, to describe the class war being waged against us by
our corporate oligarchs. And it has left us without the radical
movements that, as
Howard Zinn made clear, opened up all the spaces in American
democracy.
We will regain this militancy, this uncompromising
commitment to socialism, or the system the political philosopher
Sheldon Wolin calls
“inverted totalitarianism” will establish the most efficient
security and surveillance state in human history and a species of
neofeudalism. We must stop pouring our energy into mainstream
political campaigns. The game is rigged. We will rebuild our radical
movements or become hostages to the capitalists and the war
industry. Fear is the only language the power elite understands.
This is a dark fact of human nature. It is why Richard Nixon was our
last liberal president. Nixon was not a liberal [personally]. He was
devoid of empathy and lacked a conscience. But he was frightened of
movements. You do not make your enemy afraid by selling out. You
make your enemy afraid by refusing to submit, by fighting for your
vision and by organizing. It is not our job to take power. It is our
job to build movements to keep power in check. Without these
movements nothing is possible.
“You get freedom by letting your enemy know that
you’ll do anything to get your freedom; then you’ll get it,” Malcolm
X said. “When you get that kind of attitude, they’ll label you as a
‘crazy Negro,’ or they’ll call you a “crazy nigger”—they don’t say
Negro. Or they’ll call you an extremist or a subversive, or
seditious, or a red, or a radical. But when you stay radical long
enough, and get enough people to be like you, you’ll get your
freedom. ... So don’t you run around here trying to make friends
with somebody who’s depriving you of your rights. They’re not your
friends, no, they’re your enemies. Treat them like that and fight
them, and you’ll get your freedom; and after you get your freedom,
your enemy will respect you. And I say that with no hate. I don’t
have hate in me. I have no hate at all. I don’t have any hate. I’ve
got some sense. I’m not going to let anybody who hates me tell me to
love him.”
The New Deal—which as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a
charter member of the oligarchic class, said—saved capitalism, was
put in place because socialists were strong and a serious threat.
The oligarchs understood that with the breakdown of
capitalism—something I expect we will again witness in our
lifetimes—there was a real possibility of a socialist revolution.
They were terrified they would lose their wealth and power.
Roosevelt, writing to a friend in 1930, said there was “no question
in my mind that it is time for the country to become fairly radical
for at least one generation. History shows that where this occurs
occasionally, nations are saved from revolution.”
In other words, Roosevelt went to his fellow
oligarchs and said hand over some of your money or you will lose all
your money in a revolution. And his fellow capitalists complied. And
that is how the government created 15 million jobs, Social Security,
unemployment benefits and public works projects. The capitalists did
not do this because the suffering of the masses moved them. They did
this because they were scared. And they were sacred of radicals and
socialists.
George Bernard Shaw got it right in his play
“Major Barbara.” The greatest crime is poverty. It is the crime
every socialist is dedicated to eradicating. As Shaw wrote:
All the other crimes are virtues beside it;
all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison.
Poverty blights whole cities, spreads horrible pestilences,
strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound,
or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here
and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then. What do they
matter? They are only the accidents and illnesses of life; there
are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But
there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people,
ill-fed, ill-clothed people. They poison us morally and
physically; they kill the happiness of society; they force us to
do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural
cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down
into their abyss. Only fools fear crime; we all fear poverty.
We must stop looking for our salvation in strong
leaders. Strong people, as
Ella Baker said, do not need strong leaders. Politicians, even
good politicians, play the game of compromise and are too often
seduced by the privileges of power. Sanders, from all I can tell,
began his political life as a socialist in the 1960s when this was
hardly a bold political statement, but quickly figured out he was
not going to have a seat at the table if he remained one. He wants
his seniority in the Senate. He wants his committee chairmanships.
He wants his ability to retain his seat unchallenged. This was no
doubt politically astute. But in this process he sold us out.
Jeremy Corbyn, the new head of the [British]
Labour Party, offers another example. He spent three decades
marginalized even within his own party because he held fast to the
central tenets of socialism. And as the lie of neoliberalism,
championed by the two ruling parties in Britain, became apparent,
people knew whom they could trust. Corbyn never made an astute
career move in his life. And that is why the establishment is so
frightened of him. They know they cannot buy Corbyn off, any more
than you could buy off
Mother Jones or Big Bill Haywood. Integrity and courage are
powerful weapons. We have to learn how to use them. We have to stand
up for what we believe in. And we have to accept the risks and even
the ridicule that comes with this stance. We will not prevail any
other way.
As a socialist I am not concerned with what is
expedient or what is popular. I am concerned with what is right. I
am concerned with holding fast to the core ideals of socialism, if
for no other reason than keeping this option alive for future
generations. And these ideals are the only ones that make possible a
better world.
If you will not call for an arms embargo along
with the boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, you are
not a socialist. If you will not demand we dismantle our military
establishment, which is managing the government’s wholesale
surveillance of every citizen and storing all our personal
information in perpetuity in government computer banks, and if you
will not abolish the for-profit arms industry, you are not a
socialist. If you will not call for the prosecution of those
leaders, including George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who engage in
aggressive acts of pre-emptive war, which under post-Nuremberg laws
is a criminal act, you are not a socialist. If you will not stand
with the oppressed across the globe you are not a socialist.
Socialists do not pick and choose whom among the oppressed it is
convenient to support. Socialists understand that you stand with all
the oppressed or none of the oppressed, that this is a global fight
for life against global corporate tyranny. We will win only when we
stand together, when we see the struggle of workingmen in Greece,
Spain and Egypt as our own struggle.
If you will not call for full employment and
unionized workplaces you are not a socialist. If you will not call
for inexpensive mass transit, especially in impoverished
communities, you are not a socialist. If you will not call for
universal, single-payer health care and a banning of for-profit
health care corporations you are not a socialist. If you will not
raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour you are not a socialist. If
you are not willing to provide a weekly income of $600 to the
unemployed, the disabled, stay-at-home parents, the elderly and
those unable to work you are not a socialist. If you will not repeal
anti-union laws, like the Taft-Hartley Act, and trade agreements
from NAFTA to the TPP and CAFTA, you are not a socialist. If you
will not guarantee all Americans a pension in old age you are not a
socialist. If you will not support two years of paid maternity
leave, as well as shorter workweeks with no loss in pay and
benefits, you are not a socialist. If you will not repeal the
Patriot Act and Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization
Act as well as halt government spying on citizens, along with mass
incarceration, you are not a socialist. If you will not put into
place laws that prohibit all forms of male violence against women
and criminalize the trafficking and pimping out of prostituted girls
and women, while not criminalizing the exploited girls and women,
you are not a socialist. If you do not support a woman’s right to
control her own body you are not a socialist. If you do not support
full equality for our GBLT community you are not a socialist. If you
will not declare global warming a national and global emergency and
divert our energy and resources to saving the planet through public
investment in renewable energy and an end to our reliance on fossil
fuels you are not a socialist. If you will not nationalize public
utilities, including the railroads, energy companies and banks, you
are not a socialist. If you will not support government funding for
the arts and public broadcasting to create places where creativity,
self-expression and voices of dissent can be heard and seen you are
not a socialist. If you will not terminate our nuclear weapons
programs and build a nuclear-free world you are not a socialist. If
you will not demilitarize our police, meaning that police no longer
carry weapons when they patrol our streets but rely on specialized
armed units that have to be authorized case-by-case to use lethal
force, you are not a socialist. If you will not support government
training and rehabilitation programs for the poor and those in our
prisons, along with the abolition of the death penalty, you are not
a socialist. If you will not grant full citizenship to undocumented
workers you are not a socialist. If you do not declare a moratorium
on foreclosures and bank repossessions you are not a socialist. If
you will not provide free education from day care to university, and
forgive all student debt, you are not a socialist. And if you will
not provide free, state-run mental health care, especially for those
now caged in our prisons, you are not a socialist. If you will not
dismantle our empire and bring our soldiers and Marines home you are
not a socialist.
Socialists do not sacrifice the weak and the
vulnerable, especially children, on the altars of profit. And the
measure of a successful society for a socialist is not the GDP or
the highs of the stock market but the right of everyone, especially
children, never go to bed hungry, to live in safety and security, to
be nurtured and educated, and to grow up fulfill his or her
potential. Work is not only about a wage, it is about dignity and a
sense of self-worth.
I am not naive about the forces arrayed against
us. I understand the difficulty of our struggle. But we will never
succeed if we attempt to accommodate the current structures of
power. Our strength lies in our steadfastness and our integrity. It
lies in our ability to hold fast to our ideals, as well as our
willingness to sacrifice for those ideals. We must refuse to
cooperate. We must march to the beat of a different drum. We must
rebel. And we must grasp that rebellion is not carried out finally
for what it achieves, but for whom it allows us to become. Rebellion
sustains in an age of darkness hope and the capacity for love.
Rebellion must become our vocation.
“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.”
These neoliberal forces are rapidly destroying the
earth. Polar ice caps and glaciers are melting. Temperatures and sea
levels are rising. Species are gong extinct. Floods, monster
hurricanes, mega-droughts and wildfires have begun to eat away at
the planet. The great mass migrations predicted by climate
scientists have begun. And even if we stopped all carbon emissions
today we would still endure the effects of catastrophic climate
change. Out of the disintegrating order comes the nihilistic
violence that always characterizes societies that fall apart—mass
shootings at home and religious persecution, beheadings and
executions by individuals that neoliberalism and globalism have
demonized, attacked and discarded as human refuse.
I cannot promise you we will win. I cannot promise
you we will even survive as a species. But I can promise you that an
open and sustained defiance of global capitalism and the merchants
of death, along with the building of a socialist movement, is our
only hope. I am a parent, as are many of you. We have betrayed our
children. We have squandered their future. And if we rise up, even
if we fail, future generations, and especially those who are most
precious to us, will be able to say we tried, that we stood up and
fought for life. The call to resistance, which will require civil
disobedience and jail time, is finally a call to the moral life.
Resistance is not about what we achieve, but about what it allows us
to become. In the end, I do not fight fascists because I will win. I
fight fascists because they are fascists.
Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a
foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa
and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has
worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The
Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a
foreign correspondent for 15 years.