Chris Hedges' latest piece,
Let’s Get This Class War Started is excellent, I thought. I found it less depressing than most of his writings, though in fact, the subject matter ought to depress. It's one of my own hobby horses he's writing about this time - class. Maybe that's why I can relate easily, am so used to the feelings class war can bring about that I no longer find them depressing. I must have antipathy to oligarchs, ruling classes, "the gentry" buried deep in my genes. My ancestors, or most of them, in England would have been under the boot of wealthy land owners and the aristocracy for centuries, they knew no other way of life. Maybe I feel these feelings more deeply than most in the USA, apart from African Americans that is. I'm angry on their behalf too, and on behalf all peasants and serfs who have struggled throughout the ages. Enough!!
What can be done to bring about change in the USA in 2013 and onward is not easy to see though. Online petitions, tweets, Facebook entries and blogging isn't going to cut it. Boycotts of corporations and their output could help if enough people joined in the effort; a re-birth of Occupy Wall Street, or a new movement along similar lines, better and more tightly organised and led would be a big step forward.
Chris Hedges says it's time for pitchforks (metaphorically, I guess). Prodding a few still sleeping citizens with the sharp ends of those pitchforks would be a start.
Some snips from his article at Common Dreams (also at
Truthdig).
The inability to grasp the pathology of our oligarchic rulers is one of our gravest faults. We have been blinded to the depravity of our ruling elite by the relentless propaganda of public relations firms that work on behalf of corporations and the rich. Compliant politicians, clueless entertainers and our vapid, corporate-funded popular culture, which holds up the rich as leaders to emulate and assures us that through diligence and hard work we can join them, keep us from seeing the truth...........
Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith and Karl Marx all began from the premise there is a natural antagonism between the rich and the masses. “Those who have too much of the goods of fortune, strength, wealth, friends, and the like, are neither willing nor able to submit to authority,” Aristotle wrote in “Politics.” “The evil begins at home; for when they are boys, by reason of the luxury in which they are brought up, they never learn, even at school, the habit of obedience.” Oligarchs, these philosophers knew, are schooled in the mechanisms of manipulation, subtle and overt repression and exploitation to protect their wealth and power at our expense. Foremost among their mechanisms of control is the control of ideas. Ruling elites ensure that the established intellectual class is subservient to an ideology—in this case free market capitalism and globalization—that justifies their greed. “The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships,” Marx wrote, “the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”...........
The rise of an oligarchic state offers a nation two routes, according to Aristotle. The impoverished masses either revolt to rectify the imbalance of wealth and power or the oligarchs establish a brutal tyranny to keep the masses forcibly enslaved. We have chosen the second of Aristotle’s options. The slow advances we made in the early 20th century through unions, government regulation, the New Deal, the courts, an alternative press and mass movements have been reversed. The oligarchs are turning us—as they did in the 19th century steel and textile factories—into disposable human beings. They are building the most pervasive security and surveillance apparatus in human history to keep us submissive........
The piece ends:
The seesaw of history has thrust the oligarchs once again into the sky. We sit humiliated and broken on the ground. It is an old battle. It has been fought over and over in human history. We never seem to learn. It is time to grab our pitchforks.
In another piece at Common Dreams yesterday, by staff writer Jon Queally, a current concern, not unconnected with class war is referenced:
Absent Progressive Uproar, Social Security and Medicare Face Axe.
I feel sure that commenter to the article, John Tredrea, would not object to my copying his very good, and eloquently put, observation here:
What happens in a democracy when the political process is dominated by two political parties entrenched in contributions from a small but powerful oligarchy and when neither party is responsive to the expressed will of the electorate?
What happens when elections no longer provide for "redress of grievances" no matter how clearly and loudly the electorate cries out for responsive legislation?
What happens when the party that professes to be on the side of the electoral majority routinely promises reforms and then betrays its promises without the slightest degree of honesty or remorse?
What happens when the "free press", established by the Founding Fathers as a check on political corruption and abuse sells its soul to wealth, power, and oligarchy?
This is not the country that I was born in and it is not the country that I grew up in and it is not the country that I expected to one day die in.
God Bless America?
God Forgive America.
