Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

by Chris Hedges

  In November 1989, I was in Leipzig, East Germany, covering the street protests which had been started by a few intrepid church leaders. Leipzig, the country’s second-largest city and once a major industrial center, was in a state of decay that mirrored what we found in Camden and southern West Virginia. There were streets where all the houses were unoccupied. Roofs had caved in. The glass in the windows, along with the pipes, had been pilfered. The roads in the city were cratered with potholes. The hills outside Leipzig were coated in black coal dust from the lignite mines that produced more than two-thirds of East Germany’s electricity. The air was fetid, and the rivers and reservoirs were polluted with staggeringly high levels of mercury and other toxins. There were abnormally high rates of respiratory ailments, birth defects, cancer, and skin diseases.

  Like Occupy of 2011, the opposition in Leipzig of 1989, which came together under a group formed that September called New Forum, had nothing that could be called a platform or a specific list of demands. At first, it requested only a “dialogue” with the East German government. It held sparsely attended candlelight vigils in which protestors held up signs calling for peace, disarmament, and protection of the environment. New Forum applied for legal status and was denied. But a few days after the denial, one hundred and fifty thousand people, with little prompting, signed a petition calling for talks between the protestors and the regime. The central group of activists, usually no more than a few dozen, had been demonstrating for years. Now they were joined by hundreds and then thousands of others. On September 18, 1989, when fifteen thousand people attended a march, making it the largest unofficial demonstration in East Germany since 1953, the police and plainclothes internal security force known as the Stasi arrested around a hundred people. Police vans holding the arrested protestors plowed into the crowd, injuring about a dozen demonstrators. A split at that point opened up within the ruling elite between those who wanted to use harsher forms of violence to crush the movement and those who feared that increased force would plunge the country into chaos and street fighting.

  On October 9, with one of the largest demonstrations expected to date, Erich Mielke, the secret police chief, unilaterally issued a secret directive to shoot “troublemakers.” An elite paratroop regiment was sent to Leipzig and took up positions outside the city center and the railway station, along the route of the march. That evening more than seventy thousand people gathered. It was only at the last minute that the regime lost its nerve, ordering the paratroopers, some of whom were weeping and visibly distressed, to retire.1 “This was the turning point,” Victor Sebestyen writes in his book Revolution 1989, “when the people knew that the regime lacked the will or the strength to maintain power.”2 Communist dictator Erich Honecker, who had ruled for eighteen years, lasted in power another week.

  No one, including the leaders of the opposition, expected such a swift and stunning collapse. I was with the leaders of the opposition on the afternoon of November 9, 1989. They said they hoped that within a year there would be free access back and forth across the Berlin Wall. A few hours later, the wall, at least as an impediment to human traffic, did not exist. East Germany’s internal security apparatus had been one of the most pervasive, feared, and intrusive in the world. There was a Stasi officer or regular informer by the mid-1980s for every sixty-three East Germans.3 But the corruption, cynicism, rank opportunism, and deep disenchantment within the institutions of control proved fatal.

  The rebellion that same year in Prague, as in East Germany, was led not by the mandarins in the political class but by marginalized artists, writers, clerics, activists, labor leaders, and intellectuals such as Václav Havel, whom I and other reporters met with most nights during the Velvet Revolution in the dingy confines of the Magic Lantern Theater. These rebels, no matter how bleak things appeared, had kept alive the possibility of resistance. Their lonely stances and protests took place over forty years of Communist rule. They were pushed to the margins, usually ignored, or periodically denounced and ridiculed by the monolith of state media. The state sought to erase most of their names from national consciousness. Havel was better known abroad than within his own country. Many of these rebels spent years in jail. They were dismissed, when they were even acknowledged, as cranks, foreign agents, fascists, or misguided and irrelevant dreamers. But they persisted. They nurtured and preserved the embers of rebellion. They were to prove that no act of resistance, however solitary, hopeless, and futile it appears in the moment, is useless. These acts keep alive the possibility of resistance and finally hope.

  I was in Prague’s Wenceslas Square with hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovakians on a cold winter night in 1989, as the singer Marta Kubišová approached the balcony overlooking the square. Kubišová had been banished from the airwaves in 1968 after the Soviet invasion for her anthem of defiance, “Prayer for Marta.” Her entire catalogue, including more than two hundred singles, had been confiscated and destroyed by the state. She had disappeared from public view. That night her voice, heard in a public place for the first time in decades, flooded the square. Around me were throngs of students from Charles University, most of whom had not been born when she became a nonperson. They began to sing the words of the anthem along with her. There were tears running down their faces. It was then that I understood the intrinsic power of all acts of rebellion. It was then that I knew the Communist regime was finished.

  “The people will once again decide their own fate,” the crowd sang in thunderous unison with Kubišová.

  Kubišová had been the most popular recording star in the country. She was reduced, after being purged, to assembling toys in a factory. The playwright Havel was in and out of jail. Jiří Dienstbier, one of the country’s most prominent foreign correspondents, was blacklisted after the 1968 uprising. He was working as a janitor when I arrived in Prague and had to leave opposition meetings periodically to tend the boiler at the building where he was employed. He became the country’s foreign minister after the fall of communism.

  The long, long road of sacrifice, tears, and suffering that led to the collapse of these regimes stretched back decades. Those who made change possible were those who had discarded all notions of the practical. They did not try to reform the Communist Party. They did not attempt to work within the system. They did not know what, if anything, their protests would accomplish. But through it all they held fast to moral imperatives. They did so because these values were right and just. They expected no reward for their virtue, and they got none. They were marginalized and persecuted. And yet these poets, playwrights, actors, clerics, singers, and writers finally triumphed over state and military power. They drew the good to the good. They triumphed because, however cowed and broken the masses around them appeared, their message of defiance did not go unheard. It did not go unseen. The steady drumbeat of rebellion embodied in their lives exposed the rot, lies, and corruption of the state.

  The walls of Prague were covered that chilly winter with posters depicting Jan Palach, a university student who set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square on January 16, 1969, to protest the crushing of the country’s democracy movement. He died of his burns three days later. The state swiftly attempted to erase Palach and his act of defiance from national memory. There was no mention of it in state media. Police broke up a funeral march by Charles University students. The Communist authorities exhumed Palach’s body from its grave, which had become a shrine, cremated his remains, and shipped them to his mother with the provision that his ashes could not be placed in a cemetery. But it did not work. His revolt remained a rallying cry. His sacrifice spurred the students in the winter of 1989 to act. Shortly after I left for Bucharest, the Red Army Square in Prague was renamed Palach Square. Ten thousand people went to the dedication.4

  In his book Anatomy of a Revolution, the historian Crane Brinton laid out the common route to revolution.5 The preconditions for successful revolution, Brinton argued, are:

  •discontent that affects nearly all social clas
ses;

  •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 together with defections from the inner circle—a crippling isolation that leaves the power elite without any allies or outside support

  •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 met, would mean the end of the old power configurations. 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.

  At 1:00 A.M. on November 15, 2011, the New York City Police Department raided and shut down the two-month-old Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park. By that time the power elite had lost control of the narrative. The vision and structure of Occupy Wall Street had been imprinted into the minds of thousands of people who passed through the park, renamed Liberty Square by the protesters. The greatest gift the Occupation movement gave us was a blueprint for how to fight back. It recaptured the communitarian spirit of Native American tribes, forming a society where no one was turned away, where food and resources were shared rather than hoarded by a few, and where all had a say in decisions. The Occupy leadership, to protect against personality cults, was consciously horizontal rather than vertical. And its unequivocal denunciation of the corporate state gave it ideological ties to the revolutions in Eastern Europe. This blueprint, this example of another way to form and organize community, was soon transferred to cities and parks across the country and beyond the boundaries of the United States. The Occupy movement serves as a template, much as the Paris Commune of 1871, which only lasted seventy-two days,6 served as the physical model for nineteenth-century anarchists such as Mikhail Bakunin, who took part in the Commune, as did Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Commune was also decentralized, libertarian, and characterized by improvisation and direct action. And its vision of an egalitarian society was one that, as Paul Avrich wrote, had been articulated by rebels and dissenters since the Middle Ages. Similar social experiments would rise up in Russia at the inception of the revolution, in Germany following World War I, in Barcelona in 1936, in Budapest in 1956, and in Prague in 1968.7

  “Some defeats are really victories,” said the German socialist Karl Liebknecht shortly before his murder in 1919, “while some victories are more shameful than defeats.”8

  Welcome to the revolution. The elites have exposed their hand. They have shown 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 dumped into garbage trucks after the New York City police raid that November night. They have no ideas, no plans, and no vision for the future.

  Our decaying corporate regime has strutted in Portland, Oakland, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New York, sending its baton-wielding cops to clean up “the mess.” The state always employs the language of personal hygiene and public security in the effort to make 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, celebrity gossip, and political theater we feed you in twenty-four-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 platitudes about democracy, greatness, and freedom. Vote in our rigged corporate elections. Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide huge profits for corporations. Stand by mutely as our legislators plunge us into a society without basic social services while Wall Street speculators loot and pillage.

  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; David and Charles, the Koch brothers; and Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase & Co.—no doubt think the Occupy movement has passed. They think it is back to the business of harvesting what is left of America to swell their personal and corporate fortunes. But they have no concept of what is happening around them. They are as mystified and clueless about these uprisings as the courtiers at Versailles or the Forbidden City, or the inner sanctums of the communist elites in Eastern Europe, who never understood until the very last days that their world was collapsing. Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York, enriched by a deregulated Wall Street, is unable to grasp why people would spend two months sleeping in a park and demonstrating in front of Goldman Sachs. 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 amusement.9 But now, he says, it is time to let the adults handle the affairs of state. Democratic and Republican mayors, along with their parties, have sold us out.10 But for them this is the beginning of the end.

  The elites, and their mouthpieces in the media, were puzzled from the start over what the Occupy Wall Street movement wanted. They asked: “Where is the list of demands? Why don’t they present us with specific goals? Why can’t they articulate an agenda?” The lack of specific demands and goals was not initially deliberate, but was ultimately inevitable. The Occupy movement understood that it could not work within the system. All energy directed toward reforming political and state structures was wasted. They were not pleading with Congress for electoral reform. They were not looking for a viable candidate. They knew that electoral politics was a farce. They had no faith in the political system or the two major political parties. Anyone who trusts in the reformation of our corporate state fails to recognize that those who govern, including Barack Obama, are as deaf to public demands and suffering as the old communist regimes. The Occupy movement knew the media would not amplify their voices. So they created media of their own. They knew the economy serves the oligarchs, so they formed their own communal system. They found another way to be heard and build a society.

  Kevin Zeese is one of the activists who first called for the Occupy movements. We met on a snowy afternoon in Washington at Skewers, a small Middle Eastern restaurant. Zeese and others, including public health-care advocate Dr. Margaret Flowers, set up the Occupy encampment on Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. They got a four-day permit in the fall of 2011 and used the time to create an infrastructure—a medic tent, a kitchen, a legal station, and a media center—that would be there if the permit was not extended. The National Park Service did grant them an extended permit, but finally ordered the encampment shut down at the end of January 2012.

  “We do have a grand strategy,” says Zeese, who was the spokesman for Ralph Nader’s 2004 presidential campaign. “Nonviolent movements shift power by attacking the columns that hold the power structure in place. Those columns are the military, police, media, business, workers, youth, faith groups, NGOs, and civil serv
ants. Every time we deal with the police, we have that in mind. The goal is not to hit them, hit them, hit them, and weaken them. The goal is to pull people from those columns to our side. We want the police to know that we understand they’re not the 1 percent. The goal is not to get every police officer, but to get enough police so that you have a division.

  “We do this with civil servants,” he went on. “We do whistle-blower events. We go to different federal agencies with protesters blowing whistles and usually with an actual whistle-blower. We hand out literature to the civil servants about how to blow the whistle safely, where they can get help if they do, why they should do it. We also try to get civil servants by pulling them to our side.

  “One of the beautiful things about this security state is that they always know we’re coming,” Zeese says. “It’s never a secret. We don’t do anything as a secret. The EPA, for example, sent out a security notice to all of its employees—advertising for us [by warning employees about a coming protest]. So you get the word out.

  “Individuals become the media,” he says. “An iPhone becomes a live-stream TV. The social network becomes a media outlet. If a hundred of us work together and use our social networks for the same message we can reach as many people as the second-largest newspapers in town, the Washington Examiner or the Washington Times. If a thousand of us do, we can meet the circulation of the Washington Post. We can certainly reach the circulation of most cable news TV shows. The key is to recognize this power and weaken the media structure.