Wages of Rebellion

by Chris Hedges

  By the time they were done, America’s progressive and radical movements, which had given the country the middle class and opened up our political system, did not exist. It was upon the corpses of these radical movements, which had fought for the working class, that the corporate state was erected in the late twentieth century.

  The great wave of revolution that took place in 1989 with the collapse of the Soviet Union was the last revolutionary wave before the Arab uprisings in 2010. Fourteen Soviet republics in 1989 broke away to form independent states. Albania, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, East Germany, Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Somalia, the Congo-Brazzaville, Angola, Mozambique, Benin, Mongolia, and South Yemen all replaced their Communist governments. As a foreign correspondent, I witnessed the swift disintegration of the Communist regimes in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania.

  In all of these countries, a significant portion of the population had abandoned their faith in the ideological constructs of power, just as previous generations had abandoned the belief in the divine right of kings. These populations turned against a corrupt ruling elite. They lost hope for a better future unless those in power were replaced. And they seized in a revolutionary moment upon an ideal—one that was often more emotional than intellectual—that allowed them to defy established power. This revolutionary sentiment, as much a mood as an idea, is again on the march.

  In a 2011 New York Times article titled “As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge Around the Globe,” Nicholas Kulish made this point:

  Their complaints range from corruption to lack of affordable housing and joblessness, common grievances the world over. But from South Asia to the heartland of Europe and now even to Wall Street, these protesters share something else: wariness, even contempt, toward traditional politicians and the democratic political process they preside over.

  They are taking to the streets, in part, because they have little faith in the ballot box.38

  Whether an uprising will come in time to save us from the effects of climate change—which some experts say has already passed a point of no return—or whether it will be crushed by internal systems of security is unknown. It is worth remembering Blanqui’s warnings that human history can be a march to totalitarianism as well as to liberty. Since the uprisings in Tahrir Square in 2011, the Egyptian military has instituted a brutal counterrevolution. The Occupy encampments in the United States were cleared by force in cities across the country. The pervasive security and surveillance state, which makes us the most watched, spied and eavesdropped upon, monitored, photographed, and controlled population in human history, is being employed against all who rebel.

  In three previous books, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, Death of the Liberal Class, and Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, I examined a cultural, political, and economic system in terminal decline. I chronicled the rise of totalitarian corporate power, or what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin in Democracy Incorporated calls “inverted totalitarianism.” Inverted totalitarianism, which does not find its expression through a demagogue or charismatic leader, represents “the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry,” he writes.39 It is a dispersed, faceless power—“the rule of Nobody,” as Hannah Arendt wrote—that is expressed in the blank, terrifying anonymity of the corporate state.40

  Unlike classical totalitarian movements, the corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not boast of replacing decaying structures with a new, revolutionary structure. They purport to honor electoral politics, freedom of speech, the right to assembly, and the Constitution. But they so corrupt and manipulate the levers of power internally that democracy is extinguished. The Constitution remains in place but has been so radically reinterpreted by the courts and by the executive and legislative branches of government, all serving corporate power, as to be essentially nullified. Inverted totalitarianism, Wolin writes, is not “expressly conceptualized as an ideology or objectified in public policy. Typically it is furthered by power-holders and citizens who often seem unaware of the deeper consequences of their actions or inactions.”41 But inverted totalitarianism is as dangerous as classical forms of totalitarianism. Corporate totalitarianism, for me, is interchangeable with inverted totalitarianism, as Wolin uses that term throughout his book.

  I argued in my previous three books that change will only come from mass movements and large-scale acts of civil disobedience. Wages of Rebellion examines another aspect of revolt. Exploring the forces and personalities that foster rebellion, it looks at the personal cost of rebellion—what it takes emotionally, psychologically, and physically to defy absolute power.

  Rebels share much in common with religious mystics. They hold fast to a vision that often they alone can see. They view rebellion as a moral imperative, even as they concede that the hope of success is slim and at times impossible. Rebels, a number of whom I interviewed for this book, are men and women endowed with a peculiar obstinacy. Willing to accept deprivation and self-sacrifice, they are not overly concerned with defeat. They endure through a fierce independence and courage. Many, maybe most, have difficult and eccentric personalities. The best of them are driven by a profound empathy, even love, for the vulnerable, the persecuted, and the weak.

  Revolutions take time. They are often begun by one generation and completed by the next. “Those who give the first check to a state are the first overwhelmed in its ruin,” Michel de Montaigne wrote in 1580. “The fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed by him who was the first mover; he only beats the water for another’s net.”42 Revolutions can be crushed by force—as amply demonstrated by history—or hijacked by individuals, such as Lenin, Trotsky, and later Joseph Stalin, or movements that betray the populace.

  Revolutions can even be faux revolutions when, through the careful manipulation of counterrevolutionary forces, they demand not reform but the restoration of retrograde power elites. The Central Intelligence Agency has long been a master of this technique. It organized street demonstrations and protests in Iran in 1953 to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and his cabinet. It funded and stoked protests again in 1973 in Chile to prompt the Chilean military to overthrow President Salvador Allende. Seumas Milne raises this point in an article about the 2014 protests in Venezuela featuring the subhead: “Street action is now regularly used with western backing to target elected governments in the interests of elites.” Milne writes: “The upsurge in global protest in the past couple of years has driven home the lesson that mass demonstrations can have entirely different social and political meanings. Just because they wear bandannas and build barricades—and have genuine grievances—doesn’t automatically mean protestors are fighting for democracy or social justice.”43

  The closer one gets to the street during a revolution the messier it becomes. Movements within the revolutionary body frequently compete for power, fight over arcane bits of doctrine, dispute tactics, form counterproductive schisms, misread power, and engage in self-defeating power struggles. The state uses its resources to infiltrate, monitor, vilify, and arrest or assassinate the movement leaders—and all uprisings, even supposedly leaderless ones, have leaders.

  When they are authentic, these movements express a fundamental truth about societies in decay that even those who cannot articulate it are often able to feel. This is the secret of their power. They offer new possibilities, a new language and vocabulary, to those who are being abused by failed systems of governance. Once this truth is unleashed, once it can be expressed, it is very hard to silence.

  The Zapatista leader Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, in an interview with Gabriel García Márquez in The Nation magazine, made this point. He pointed out that revolutions entail a new way of communicating. “In my family, words had a very special value,” Marcos told the Colombian novelist.

  The way we went out into the world was through language. We didn’t learn to read in school but by reading newsp
apers. My mother and father made us read books that rapidly permitted us to approach new things. Some way or another, we acquired a consciousness of language not as a way of communicating with each other but as a way of building something. As if it were more of a pleasure than a duty or assignment. When the age of catacombs arrives, the word is not highly valued for the intellectual bourgeoisie. It is relegated to a secondary level. It’s when we are in the indigenous communities that language is like a catapult. You realize that words fail to express certain things, and this obliges you to work on your language skills, to go over and over words to arm and disarm them.44

  There is nothing rational about rebellion. To rebel against insurmountable odds is an act of faith, without which the rebel is doomed. This faith is intrinsic to the rebel the way caution and prudence are intrinsic to those who seek to fit into existing power structures. The rebel, possessed by inner demons and angels, is driven by a vision. I do not know if the new revolutionary wave and the rebels produced by it will succeed. But I do know that without these rebels, we are doomed.

  I/Doomed Voyages

  So it came about that multitudes of people acted out with fierce energy a shared phantasy which though delusional yet brought them such intense emotional relief that they could live only through it and were perfectly willing to die for it. It is a phenomenon which was to recur many times between the eleventh century and the sixteenth century, now in one area, now in another, and which, despite the obvious differences in cultural context and in scale, is not irrelevant of the growth of totalitarian movements, with their messianic leaders, their millennial mirages and their demon-scapegoats, in the present century.1

  —NORMAN COHN, THE PURSUIT OF THE MILLENNIUM

  Seventy-six-year-old Avgi Tzenis stood in the hall of her small brick row house on Bragg Street in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Gray-haired and stocky, she was dressed in a bathrobe and open-toed sandals. The hall was dark and cold. It had been dark and cold since Hurricane Sandy slammed into the East Coast a month earlier. Three feet of water and raw sewage had flooded and wrecked her home.

  “We never had this problem before,” she said. “We never had water from the sea come down like this.”

  For the poor of the Eastern Seaboard, Hurricane Sandy in October 2012 was the Katrina of the North. It once again exposed the nation’s fragile, dilapidated, and shoddy infrastructure, one that crumbles under minimal stress. The storm highlighted the inability of utility companies as well as state and federal agencies to cope with the looming environmental disasters that the climate crisis will cause to grow in intensity and frequency. But most important, Sandy illustrated the depraved mentality of an oligarchic and corporate elite that, as conditions worsen, retreats into self-contained gated communities, guts basic services, and abandons the wider population.

  Sheepshead Bay, along with Coney Island, the Rockaways, parts of Staten Island, and long stretches of the New Jersey coast, were obliterated by the 2012 hurricane. In the aftermath, stores a block away, their merchandise destroyed by the water, sat boarded up and closed. Rows of derelict cars, with the tires and license plates removed and the windows smashed, hugged the sidewalks, looking like the skeletal remains of large metal fish. Food distribution centers, most of them set up by volunteers from Occupy Sandy Relief, hastily closed before dark because of looters and thieves. And storm victims who remained in their damaged homes, often without heat, electricity, or running water, told me they clutched knives at night to protect themselves from the gangs that prowled through the wreckage.

  Increasingly freakish weather patterns ensure that storms like Sandy—which resulted in some $42 billion in property and infrastructure damage, as well as 147 direct deaths—will become routine.2 Sandy was the second-costliest hurricane to hit the United States since 1900.3 Only Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which resulted in $108 billion in damage, was more severe.4 Many of the 305,000 houses in New York destroyed by Sandy have never been rebuilt.5 New York City estimated that it would have to spend $800 million just to repair its roads.6 And that is only the start. Hurricanes will descend on the Eastern Seaboard and other coastal areas with even greater destructive fury. A couple of more disasters like this one and sections of the Eastern Seaboard will become uninhabitable.

  This is the new America. It is an America where economic and environmental catastrophes will converge to trigger systems breakdown and collapse. It is an America that, as things unravel, will increasingly sacrifice the weak, the poor, and the destitute.

  The emotional cost of the storm for the victims was often as devastating as the physical cost. Tzenis, who was born in Cyprus and immigrated to the United States with her husband in 1956, listed for me her mounting bills. Since the storm, the septuagenarian had paid a plumber $2,000, but that did not cover all the plumbing work that needed to be done. A contractor gave her an estimate of $40,000 to $50,000 for repairs, which included ripping out the walls and floors. Tzenis had received a $5,000 check from an insurance company, Allstate, and a $1,000 check from FEMA. But $6,000 would not begin to cover the cost of repairing her house.

  “The insurance company told me I didn’t have the water insurance,” she said. “The contractor said he has to break all the walls and floors to get the mold out. I don’t know how I am going to pay for this.”

  As she spoke, Josh Ehrenberg, twenty-one, an aspiring filmmaker, and Dave Woolner, a thirty-one-year-old electrician with Local 52, both volunteers with Occupy Sandy, hauled waterlogged and ruined items out of her garage. They put them in green plastic garbage bags.

  “My husband had dementia,” she told me softly. “I took care of him for six years with these two hands. For a few months the insurance gave me help. Certain medications they pay after six years. They told me once he couldn’t swallow no more there was nothing we could do.… He died at home last year.”

  She began to sob.

  She muttered, “Oye, oye, oye.”

  “I was going to hang myself in the closet,” she said in a hoarse whisper, gesturing to the hall closet behind me. “I can’t take life anymore. My husband. Now this. I don’t sleep good. I jump up every hour watching the clock. I’ve been through a lot in my life. Every little thing scares me. I’m on different pills. I’ve come to the age where I ask why doesn’t God take me. I pray a lot. I don’t want to give my soul to the devil because they would not put me in a church to bury me. But you get to an age where you are only able to take so much.”

  She fell silent. She told me about the bombing of Cyprus during World War II. She said that as a girl she watched a British military airport go up in flames after German and Italian bombs hit it. She talked about the 1950s struggle for Cypriot independence that took place between the British and the underground National Organization of Cypriot Fighters, Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston, known as EOKA. She said she wished there was another strong populist leader such as the Cypriot Archbishop Makarios III, who openly defied British authorities in the island’s campaign for independence.

  “People were hung by the British soldiers,” she said. “Women were raped. People had their fingernails pulled out. They were tortured and beaten. My cousin was beaten so badly in jail he was bleeding from his bottom.”

  The horrors of the past had merged with the horrors of the present.

  “They say [hurricanes like] this will happen again because the snow is melting off all the mountains,” she said. “It never flooded here before. No matter how hard it rained, not a drop came through the door. But now it has changed. If it happens again, I don’t want to be around.”

  I left her and walked down the street, where I found Rene Merida, twenty-seven, standing on the corner. His house on Emmons Avenue, like all the houses in the neighborhood, did not have electricity, running water, or heat. He and his pregnant wife and two children, ages seven and four, huddled inside the ruined home at night. They fled periodically to live for a few days with relatives. Merida, who had recently lost his job as an ironworker, managed to reach his landl
ord once on the phone. That had been three weeks earlier. It was the only time the landlord, despite Merida’s persistent calls, answered.

  “He told me it [the repair] will get done when it gets done,” Merida said. “The temperature inside my house is fifteen degrees. I got a thermometer to check.”

  The state provided little in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane to those affected by the storm. Volunteers hastily collected food in church basements and drove it out to the devastated communities. I made my way to the 123-year-old St. Jacobi Evangelical Lutheran Church; founded by German immigrants, it served as one of the Brooklyn distribution centers. Lauren Ferebee, originally from Dallas, with short auburn hair and black frame glasses, sat behind a table in the chilly basement of the church. On large pieces of cardboard hanging from the ceiling were the words Occupy SANDY RELIEF. The basement was filled with stacks of donated supplies, including pet food, diapers, infant formula, canned goods, cereal, and pasta. The church was converted two days after the storm into a food bank and distribution center. Hundreds of people were converging daily on the church to work in the relief effort, and volunteers with cars or vans were delivering supplies to parts of New York and in New Jersey.

  Ferebee, a playwright, and hundreds of other volunteers had instantly resurrected the Occupy movement when the tragedy hit to build structures of support and community. As we descend into a world where we can depend less and less on those who hold power, movements like Occupy will become vital. These movements might not be called Occupy, and they might not look like Occupy. But whatever the names and forms of the self-help we create, we will have to find ways to fend for ourselves. And we will fend for ourselves only by building communitarian organizations.