Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

by Chris Hedges

  The state is determined to crush all resistance. It is terrified this will spread. It has its long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, rows of white paddy wagons, black helmeted foot soldiers with shields and batons hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic nets. It has its agents provocateurs spurring groups such as Black Bloc anarchists—named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police, and destroy property—on to vandalism and violent clashes with police. The Black Bloc’s thought-terminating cliché of “diversity of tactics” opens the way for hundreds or thousands of peaceful marchers to be discredited by a handful of hooligans. It turns attention away from the mandarins of power to the security apparatus that serves them. The state could not be happier. Police and security operatives planted within Occupy slander and discredit the most effective organizers and attempt to funnel energy back into the dead game of electoral politics.

  The corporate state understands and welcomes the language of force. It uses confrontational tactics and destruction of property to justify draconian forms of control and to frighten the wider population away from supporting the Occupy movement. Once the Occupy movement is painted as a flag-burning, rock-throwing, angry mob, it is finished. If it becomes isolated from the mainstream, which it represents, it can be crushed.

  This is a struggle to win over the wider public and those within the structures of power, including the police, who are possessed of a conscience. It is not a war. Nonviolent movements, on some level, embrace police brutality. The continuing attempt by the state to crush peaceful protesters who call for justice delegitimizes the power elite. It prompts a passive population to respond. It brings some within the structures of power to our side and creates internal divisions that will lead to paralysis within the systems of power. Martin Luther King kept holding marches in Birmingham because he knew Public Safety Commissioner “Bull” Connor was a thug who would overreact.

  Fear is the psychological weapon of choice for totalitarian systems of power. Make people afraid. Get them to surrender their rights in the name of national security. Demonize all who dissent. And then finish off the few who aren’t afraid enough.

  The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), signed into law on December 31, 2011, authorizes the military, for the first time in more than two hundred years, to carry out domestic policing. The military can detain, without trial, any U.S. citizen deemed to be a terrorist or an accessory to terrorism. And suspects can be shipped by the military to our offshore penal colony in Guantánamo Bay until “the end of hostilities.” It is a catastrophic blow to civil liberties.

  Why, a decade after the start of the “war on terror,” do these draconian measures need to be implemented? Why do U.S. citizens need to be specifically singled out for military detention and denial of due process, when under the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force, the president can apparently find the legal cover to serve as judge, jury, and executioner to assassinate U.S. citizens, as he did with the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen? Why is this bill necessary, when the government routinely ignores our Fifth Amendment rights—”No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”—as well as our First Amendment right of free speech? How much more power do they need to fight “terrorism”?

  The FBI, the CIA, the director of national intelligence, the Pentagon, and the attorney general did not support the NDAA. FBI director Robert Mueller said he feared the bill would actually impede the bureau’s ability to investigate terrorism since it would be harder to win cooperation from suspects held by the military.

  “The possibility looms that we will lose opportunities to obtain cooperation from the persons in the past that we’ve been fairly successful in gaining,” he told Congress.

  But it passed anyway. And I suspect it passed because the corporations, seeing the unrest in the streets, knowing that things are about to get much worse, worrying that the Occupy movement will expand, do not trust the police to protect them. They want to be able to call in the Army. And now they can.

  Major cities such as New York and Chicago are not far behind. Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, amended various provisions of the Chicago Municipal Code so that nearly all street protests in the city center will be forced to purchase liability insurance, obtain a permit, and register sound equipment, signs, banners, and contingents within the march. The new provisions increase the number of surveillance cameras and closes parks and beaches to the public at night. They mandate heavy increases in fines for “resisting or obstructing the performance of a police officer” and makes no distinction between active and passive. The mayor said he needed the harsh security measures, which he describes as temporary, to contain protesters during the NATO summit in May.38 The G8 summit, which was also supposed to have been held in Chicago in May, was hastily moved to the more secure and remote site of Camp David. But few expect these provisions to be rescinded.

  These security measures are designed to ensure the pillage continues unimpeded by popular discontent. In the seventeenth century, speculation was a crime. Speculators were hanged. Today they run the state and the financial markets. They write the laws. They make the rules. They disseminate the lies that pollute our airwaves. They know, even better than you, how pervasive the corruption and theft have become, how gamed the system is against you. Corporations have cemented into place a thin oligarchic class and an obsequious cadre of politicians, judges, and journalists who live in their little gated Versailles while 3.6 million Americans are thrown out of their homes,39 a number expected to rise to ten million.40 A million people a year go bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills, and forty-five thousand die from lack of proper care.41 In this system, real joblessness is at least 15.6 percent,42 and the citizens, including students, spend lives toiling in debt peonage, working dead-end jobs, when they have jobs, in a world devoid of hope.

  “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” Orwell wrote in 1984:

  We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.43

  Corporations are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospect of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees, and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools, and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, and the polluted air degrade until the species dies.

  Who the hell cares
? If the stock values of ExxonMobil or the coal industry or Goldman Sachs are high, life is good. Profit. Profit. Profit. They have their fangs deep in your neck. If you do not shake them off very, very soon, they will kill you. And they will kill the ecosystem, dooming your children and your children’s children. They are too stupid and too blind to see that they will perish with the rest of us. So either you rise up and supplant them, either you dismantle the corporate state for a world of sanity, a world where we no longer kneel before the absurd idea that the demands of financial markets should govern human behavior, or we are frog-marched toward self-annihilation.

  The Occupy movements are the physical embodiment of hope. They returned us to a world where empathy is a primary attribute. They defied the profit-driven hierarchical structures of corporate capitalism. They know that hope has a cost, that it is not easy or comfortable, that it requires self-sacrifice and discomfort and finally faith. In Zuccotti Park and throughout the country, they slept on concrete every night. Their clothes were soiled. They ate more bagels and peanut butter than they ever thought possible. They tasted fear, were beaten, went to jail, were blinded by pepper spray, cried, hugged each other, laughed, sung, talked too long in general assemblies, saw their chants drift upward to the office towers above them, wondered if it is worth it, if anyone cared, if they would win.

  A society is in serious trouble when its political pariahs have at the core of their demands a return to the rule of law. This inversion, with our political and cultural outcasts demanding a respect for law, highlights the awful fact that the most radical and retrograde forces within the body politic have seized control. All conventional forms of dissent, from electoral politics to open debates, have been denied us. We cannot rely on the institutions that once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible. The only route left is to disconnect as thoroughly as possible from the consumer society and engage in acts of civil disobedience and obstruction. The more we sever ourselves from the addictions of fossil fuel and the consumer society, the more we begin to create a new paradigm for community. The more we engage in physical acts of defiance—as Bill McKibben and others did in front of the White House to protest the building of the Keystone XL pipeline—the more we can keep alive a new, better way of relating to one another and the ecosystem.

  We must stop being afraid. We have to turn our backs for good on the Democrats, no matter what ghoulish candidate the Republicans offer up for president. All the public disputes between candidates in the election cycle are a carnival act. On the issues that matter, there is no disagreement among the Republicans and the Democrats. We have to defy all formal systems of power. We have to create monastic enclaves where we can retain and nurture the values being rapidly destroyed by the wider corporate culture and build the mechanisms of self-sufficiency that will allow us to survive.

  In William Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus, the Roman consul is deposed by the mob. Coriolanus, whatever his faults, turns on those who thrust him from power with a valediction we should deliver to our ruling elites and all those who remain in their service.

  BRUTUS: There’s no more to be said, but he is banish’d

  As enemy to the people and his country.

  It shall be so.

  ALL [PLEBEIANS]: It shall be so, it shall be so.

  CORIOLANUS: You common cry of curs, whose breath I hate

  As reek a’ th’ rotten fens, whose loves I prize

  As the dead carcasses of unburied men

  That do corrupt my air, I banish you!

  And here remain with your uncertainty!

  Let every feeble rumor shake your hearts!

  Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes,

  Fan you into despair! Have the power still

  To banish your defenders, till at length

  Your ignorance (which finds not till it feels,

  Making not reservation of yourselves,

  Still your own foes) deliver you as most

  Abated captives to some nation

  That won you without blows! Despising,

  For you, the city, thus I turn my back;

  There is a world elsewhere.44

  Faces appeared to me moments before protestors from Occupy Wall Street and I were arrested on a windy November afternoon in front of Goldman Sachs. They were not the faces of the smug Goldman Sachs employees, who peered at us through the revolving glass doors and lobby windows, a pathetic collection of middle-aged fraternity and sorority members. They were not the faces of the blue-uniformed police with their dangling plastic handcuffs, or the thuggish Goldman Sachs security personnel, whose buzz cuts and dead eyes reminded me of the Stasi. They were not the faces of the demonstrators around me, the ones with massive student debts and no jobs, the ones weighed down by their broken dreams, the ones whose anger and betrayal triggered the street demonstrations and occupations for justice. They were not the faces of the onlookers—the construction workers, who seemed cheered by the march on Goldman Sachs, or the suited businessmen, who did not. They were faraway faces. They were the faces of children dying. They were tiny, confused, bewildered faces I had seen in the southern Sudan, Gaza, the slums of Brazzaville, Nairobi, Cairo, Delhi, and the wars I covered. They were faces with large, glassy eyes above bloated bellies. They were the small faces of children convulsed by the ravages of starvation and disease.

  I carry these faces. They do not leave me. I look at my own children and cannot forget them, these other children who never had a chance. War brings with it a host of horrors, but the worst is always the human detritus that war and famine leave behind, the small, frail bodies whose tangled limbs and vacant eyes condemn us all. The wealthy and the powerful, the ones behind the glass at Goldman Sachs, laughed and snapped pictures of us as if we were an odd lunchtime diversion from commodities trading, from hoarding and profit, from the collective sickness of money worship, as if we were creatures in a cage, which in fact we soon were.

  Goldman Sachs’ commodities index is the most heavily traded in the world. The financial firm hoards futures of rice, wheat, corn, sugar, and livestock and jacks up commodity prices by as much as two hundred percent on the global market so that poor families can no longer afford basic staples and literally starve. Hundreds of millions of poor in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America do not have enough to eat in order to feed this mania for profit. The technical jargon, learned in business schools and on trading floors, effectively masks the reality of what is happening: murder. The cold, neutral words of business and commerce are designed to make systems operate, even systems of death, with a ruthless efficiency.45

  The people behind the windows and those of us with arms locked in a circle on the concrete outside, did not speak the same language. Profit. Trade. Speculation. Globalization. War. National security. These are the words they use to justify the snuffing out of tiny lives, acts of radical evil. The glass tower before us is filled with people carefully selected for the polish and self-assurance that come with having been formed in institutions of privilege. Their primary attributes are a lack of consciousness, a penchant for deception, aggressiveness, a worship of money, and an incapacity for empathy or remorse.

  It is always the respectable classes, the polished Ivy League graduates, the prep school boys and girls who grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, or Short Hills, New Jersey, who are the most susceptible to evil. To be intelligent, as many are, at least in a narrow, analytical way, is morally neutral. These respectable citizens are inculcated in their elitist ghettos with “values” and “norms,” including pious acts of charity used to justify their privilege, and a belief in the innate goodness of American power. They are trained to pay deference to systems of authority. They are taught to believe in their own goodness, unable to see or comprehend—and are perhaps indifferent to—the cruelty inflicted on others by the exclusive systems they serve. And as norms change, as the world is steadily transformed by corporate forces into a small cabal of predators and a vast herd of human prey, these elites
seamlessly replace one set of “values” with another. These elites obey the rules. They make the system work. And they are rewarded for this. In return, they do not question.

  We seemed to have lost, at least until the advent of the Occupy Wall Street movement, not only all personal responsibility but all capacity for personal judgment. Corporate culture absolves all of responsibility. This is part of its appeal. It relieves all from moral choice. There is an unequivocal acceptance of principles such as unregulated capitalism and globalization as a kind of natural law. The steady march of corporate capitalism requires a passive acceptance of new laws and demolished regulations, of bailouts in the trillions of dollars and the systematic looting of public funds, of lies and deceit. The corporate culture, epitomized by Goldman Sachs, has seeped into our classrooms, our newsrooms, our entertainment systems, and our consciousness. This corporate culture has stripped us of the right to express ourselves outside of the narrow confines of the established political order. We are forced to surrender our voice. 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.”46