[Hackupy-discuss] This Is What Revolution Looks Like
Jake
jake at spaz.org
Thu Dec 8 02:12:24 CET 2011
In light of the raid on Occupy San Francisco last night, i thought i'd
post this again.
This Is What Revolution Looks Like
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/this_is_what_revolution_looks_like_20111115/
By Chris Hedges
Welcome to the revolution. Our elites have exposed their hand. They have
nothing to offer. They can destroy but they cannot build. They can repress
but they cannot lead. They can steal but they cannot share. They can talk
but they cannot speak. They are as dead and useless to us as the
water-soaked books, tents, sleeping bags, suitcases, food boxes and
clothes that were tossed by sanitation workers Tuesday morning into
garbage trucks in New York City. They have no ideas, no plans and no
vision for the future.
Our decaying corporate regime has strutted in Portland, Oakland and New
York with their baton-wielding cops into a fool's paradise. They think
they can clean up "the mess"-always employing the language of personal
hygiene and public security-by making us disappear. They think we will all
go home and accept their corporate nation, a nation where crime and
government policy have become indistinguishable, where nothing in America,
including the ordinary citizen, is deemed by those in power worth
protecting or preserving, where corporate oligarchs awash in hundreds of
millions of dollars are permitted to loot and pillage the last shreds of
collective wealth, human capital and natural resources, a nation where the
poor do not eat and workers do not work, a nation where the sick die and
children go hungry, a nation where the consent of the governed and the
voice of the people is a cruel joke.
Get back into your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the
lies, absurdities, trivia and celebrity gossip we feed you in 24-hour
cycles on television. Invest your emotional energy in the vast system of
popular entertainment. Run up your credit card debt. Pay your loans. Be
thankful for the scraps we toss. Chant back to us our phrases about
democracy, greatness and freedom. Vote in our rigged political theater.
Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars
that provide corporations with huge profits. Stand by mutely as our
bipartisan congressional supercommittee, either through consensus or
cynical dysfunction, plunges you into a society without basic social
services including unemployment benefits. Pay for the crimes of Wall
Street.
The rogues' gallery of Wall Street crooks, such as Lloyd Blankfein at
Goldman Sachs, Howard Milstein at New York Private Bank & Trust, the media
tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers and Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase
& Co., no doubt think it's over. They think it is back to the business of
harvesting what is left of America to swell their personal and corporate
fortunes. But they no longer have any concept of what is happening around
them. They are as mystified and clueless about these uprisings as the
courtiers at Versailles or in the Forbidden City who never understood
until the very end that their world was collapsing. The billionaire mayor
of New York, enriched by a deregulated Wall Street, is unable to grasp why
people would spend two months sleeping in an open park and marching on
banks. He says he understands that the Occupy protests are "cathartic" and
"entertaining," as if demonstrating against the pain of being homeless and
unemployed is a form of therapy or diversion, but that it is time to let
the adults handle the affairs of state. Democratic and Republican mayors,
along with their parties, have sold us out. But for them this is the
beginning of the end.
The historian Crane Brinton in his book "Anatomy of a Revolution" laid out
the common route to revolution. The preconditions for successful
revolution, Brinton argued, are discontent that affects nearly all social
classes, widespread feelings of entrapment and despair, unfulfilled
expectations, a unified solidarity in opposition to a tiny power elite, a
refusal by scholars and thinkers to continue to defend the actions of the
ruling class, an inability of government to respond to the basic needs of
citizens, a steady loss of will within the power elite itself and
defections from the inner circle, a crippling isolation that leaves the
power elite without any allies or outside support and, finally, a
financial crisis. Our corporate elite, as far as Brinton was concerned,
has amply fulfilled these preconditions. But it is Brinton's next
observation that is most worth remembering. Revolutions always begin, he
wrote, by making impossible demands that if the government met would mean
the end of the old configurations of power. The second stage, the one we
have entered now, is the unsuccessful attempt by the power elite to quell
the unrest and discontent through physical acts of repression.
I have seen my share of revolts, insurgencies and revolutions, from the
guerrilla conflicts in the 1980s in Central America to the civil wars in
Algeria, the Sudan and Yemen, to the Palestinian uprising to the
revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania as well as the
wars in the former Yugoslavia. George Orwell wrote that all tyrannies rule
through fraud and force, but that once the fraud is exposed they must rely
exclusively on force. We have now entered the era of naked force. The vast
million-person bureaucracy of the internal security and surveillance state
will not be used to stop terrorism but to try and stop us.
Despotic regimes in the end collapse internally. Once the foot soldiers
who are ordered to carry out acts of repression, such as the clearing of
parks or arresting or even shooting demonstrators, no longer obey orders,
the old regime swiftly crumbles. When the aging East German dictator Erich
Honecker was unable to get paratroopers to fire on protesting crowds in
Leipzig, the regime was finished. The same refusal to employ violence
doomed the communist governments in Prague and Bucharest. I watched in
December 1989 as the army general that the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had
depended on to crush protests condemned him to death on Christmas Day.
Tunisia's Ben Ali and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak lost power once they could no
longer count on the security forces to fire into crowds.
The process of defection among the ruling class and security forces is
slow and often imperceptible. These defections are advanced through a
rigid adherence to nonviolence, a refusal to respond to police provocation
and a verbal respect for the blue-uniformed police, no matter how awful
they can be while wading into a crowd and using batons as battering rams
against human bodies. The resignations of Oakland Mayor Jean Quan's
deputy, Sharon Cornu, and the mayor's legal adviser and longtime friend,
Dan Siegel, in protest over the clearing of the Oakland encampment are
some of the first cracks in the edifice. "Support Occupy Oakland, not the
1% and its government facilitators," Siegel tweeted after his resignation.
There were times when I entered the ring as a boxer and knew, as did the
spectators, that I was woefully mismatched. Ringers, experienced boxers in
need of a tuneup or a little practice, would go to the clubs where
semi-pros fought, lie about their long professional fight records, and toy
with us. Those fights became about something other than winning. They
became about dignity and self-respect. You fought to say something about
who you were as a human being. These bouts were punishing, physically
brutal and demoralizing. You would get knocked down and stagger back up.
You would reel backward from a blow that felt like a cement block. You
would taste the saltiness of your blood on your lips. Your vision would
blur. Your ribs, the back of your neck and your abdomen would ache. Your
legs would feel like lead. But the longer you held on, the more the crowd
in the club turned in your favor. No one, even you, thought you could win.
But then, every once in a while, the ringer would get overconfident. He
would get careless. He would become a victim of his own hubris. And you
would find deep within yourself some new burst of energy, some untapped
strength and, with the fury of the dispossessed, bring him down. I have
not put on a pair of boxing gloves for 30 years. But I felt this twinge of
euphoria again in my stomach this morning, this utter certainty that the
impossible is possible, this realization that the mighty will fall.
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