| Waiting for
the Barbarians
By Chris Hedges
November 29,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Truth
Dig"
- We
await the crisis. It could be economic. It could be a
terrorist attack within the United States. It could be
widespread devastation caused by global warming. It
could be nationwide unrest as the death spiral of the
American empire intensifies. It could be another defeat
in our endless and futile wars. The crisis is coming.
And when it arrives it will be seized upon by the
corporate state, nominally led by a clueless real estate
developer, to impose martial law and formalize the end
of American democracy.
When we look
back on this sad, pathetic period in American history we
will ask the questions all who have slid into despotism
ask. Why were we asleep? How did we allow this to
happen? Why didn’t we see it coming? Why didn’t we
resist?
Why did we
allow the corporate state to strip away the rights of
poor people of color and force them to live in terror in
mini-police states? Why did we build the world’s largest
system of mass incarceration? Did we not see that the
rest of us would be next? Why did we agree that those
defined by the state as terrorists could not only be
deprived of their rights but be assassinated? Did we
think the state would restrict itself to persecuting and
murdering Muslims? Why did we remain silent as the state
arrogated to itself the right to detain and prosecute
people not for what they had done, or even for what they
were planning to do, but for holding religious or
political beliefs that the state deemed seditious? Why
did we stand by and permit the state to torture? Did we
not see that once rights became privileges the state
would one day revoke them?
The failure of
our capitalist democracy was collective. It was bred by
ignorance, indifference, racism, bigotry and the
seduction of mass propaganda. It was bred by elites,
especially in the press, the courts and academia, who
chose careerism over moral and intellectual courage. Our
rights as citizens were taken from us one by one. There
was hardly a word of protest.
Where were the
lawyers, judges, law professors and law school deans who
should have ferociously defended our rights to privacy,
due process and habeas corpus? Why didn’t they challenge
Barack Obama’s signing into law
Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization
Act? Section 1021 overturns the 1878 Posse Comitatus
Act, which prohibited the military from acting as a
domestic police force. The section also permits the
military to carry out
extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens, strip them
of due process and hold them indefinitely in military
detention centers.
Why didn’t the
legal profession fight against the Obama
administration’s misinterpretation of the 2001
Authorization for Use of Military Force Act as giving
the executive branch the right to order the
assassination of U.S. citizens? How did lawyers and
judges allow the misuse of the Espionage Act to target
and imprison whistleblowers? How did they permit the
Supreme Court to define unlimited corporate
contributions to electoral campaigns as a right to
petition the government or a form of free speech? Why
did they allow those branded as terrorists by the state,
and allow poor people of color, to be locked for years
in solitary confinement or special detention centers
without fair trials? Why were they silent as the state
built “black sites” around the globe, including in
Chicago, to torture? Why did they permit the state to
impose special administrative measures, known as SAMs,
to prevent or severely restrict prisoners’ communication
with other prisoners, attorneys, family, the media and
people outside the jails, crippling any possibility of
an adequate defense? Did they not know where the erosion
of the legal system would lead?
And where were
all the economists pointing out the absurdity of the
neoliberal ideology that told us that human society
should be governed by the dictates of the market—that
is, until the market collapsed in an orgy of fraud and
corruption and needed the government to bail it out? Why
did the political scientists chase after “value-free”
data, carry out quantitative projects and seek an
unachievable scientific clarity? Why didn’t they and
others warn us about the dire consequences of eroding
democratic institutions? Why did they stand mute as
money replaced the vote and lobbyists authored our laws?
Where were they when constitutionally protected
statements, beliefs and associations were criminalized?
Why didn’t they protest when dissidents, even those who
broke no laws, were stripped of their rights and
imprisoned without due process? Why did they continue to
speak and write as if the fiction of our democracy was
real? Why didn’t they illuminate our constitutional
crisis? Why did those in academia commit intellectual
treason? They traded their intellectual integrity and
autonomy for tenure, publishing contracts, lecture fees,
research grants and coveted deanships or college
presidencies.
Why did the
press render the poor and the working poor invisible?
Why did it walk away from its role as the investigator
of corruption and abuse of power? Why did it become a
courtier to the elites? Why did it measure the success
of its broadcasts and publications solely by the profits
produced? Why did it refuse to give a platform to
critics of corporate capitalism and imperial war? Why
did it serve as an echo chamber for the arms industry
and Wall Street? Why did it hide behind the fiction of
neutrality and objectivity? Why did it debase reporting
to quoting establishment experts—most of whom lied—in
order to stay within the narrow confines of opinion
sanctioned by the power elites? Why did the press
obscure the truth?
Where were the
great moral and religious truth tellers? Why did they
use the language of identity politics as a substitute
for the language of social justice? Why did they refuse
to condemn as heretics those on the Christian right,
which fused the symbols of the state with those of the
Christian religion? Why did they collaborate with the
evil of corporate capitalism? Why did they retreat into
churches and synagogues, establishing exclusive social
clubs, rather than fight the injustice outside their
doors? Why did they abandon the poor? Why did they
replace prophetic demands for justice with cloying
political correctness and personal piety?
The desiccation
of our liberal institutions ensured the demise of our
capitalist democracy. History has amply demonstrated
what was to come next. The rot and political paralysis
vomited up a con artist as president along with an array
of half-wits, criminals and racist ideologues. They will
manufacture scapegoats as their gross ineptitude and
unachievable promises are exposed. They will fan the
flames of white supremacy and racial and religious
bigotry. They will use all the tools of legal and
physical control handed to them by our system of
“inverted totalitarianism” to crush even the most
tepid forms of dissent.
The last
constraints will be removed by a crisis. The crisis will
be used to create a climate of fear. The pretense of
democracy will end.
“A fascism of
the future—an emergency response to some still
unimagined crisis—need not resemble classical fascism
perfectly in its outward signs and symbols,”
Robert Paxton writes in “The Anatomy of Fascism.”
“Some future movement that would ‘give up free
institutions’ in order to perform the same functions of
mass mobilization for the reunification, purification,
and regeneration of some troubled group would
undoubtedly call itself something else and draw on fresh
symbols. That would not make it any less dangerous.”
Our ruling
mafia will use the crisis much as the Nazis did in 1933
when the Reichstag was burned. It will publish its own
version of the “Order of the Reich President for the
Protection of People and State.” The U.S. Constitution
will be in effect suspended. Personal freedom, including
freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom to
organize and freedom of assembly, will be abolished.
Privacy will be formally eradicated. Search warrants
will be unnecessary. America’s emergency decrees will
cement into place what largely exists now. When they
come, the loss of freedoms will be openly acknowledged
and made permanent.
Anyone who is
not white or “loyal” will be attacked, first verbally
and then physically. Everyone will be constantly
watched. The prisons will swell. Militarized police will
no longer be confined to operating in marginal
communities. Lethal, indiscriminant force by the state
will be common. The courts will condemn with little or
no evidence. The press will utterly unplug itself from
reality and speak to us as if we lived in a functioning
democracy. Academics will burrow deeper into their
holes of obtuse jargon and quantitative irrelevance. The
last remnants of our labor unions will be crushed.
Religious institutions, as silent about the evils of
corporate capitalism as Goldman Sachs, will take the
safe route of spirituality and piety rather than social
justice. The lawyers, courts and law schools will serve
the law even when the law overturns our constitutional
rights by judicial fiat and is a tool of naked
repression. Hollywood and the rest of mass entertainment
will churn out the usual tawdry fare of sexually
explicit and violence-drenched spectacles. The military
“virtues” of hypermasculinity and patriarchy will be
celebrated.
There will be
rebels. They will live in the shadows. They will be the
renegade painters, sculptors, poets, writers,
journalists, musicians, actors, dancers, organizers,
activists, mystics, intellectuals and other outcasts who
are willing to accept personal sacrifice. They will not
surrender their integrity, creativity, independence and
finally their souls. They will speak the truth. The
state will have little tolerance of them. They will be
poor. The wider society will be conditioned by mass
propaganda to write them off as parasites or traitors.
They will keep alive what is left of dignity and
freedom. Perhaps one day they will rise up and triumph.
But one does not live in poverty and on the margins of
society because of the certainty of success. One lives
like that because to collaborate with radical evil is to
betray all that is good and beautiful. It is to become a
captive. It is to give up the moral autonomy that makes
us human. The rebels will be our hope.
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.
© 2016 Truthdig,
LLC. All rights reserved.
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