Chris Hedges' prescription for humanity-saving action — working class strikes

06 April 2023

Cut the 'bastids' down to size?

Given the United States' official embraces of evil — should We the People gnaw away this Oligarchy's knees?

One plausibly good answer comes . . .

. . . from Chris Hedges.

Here in excerpts:

We are undergoing the most vicious class war in U.S. history.

The legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, along with the media and universities, have been seized by a tiny cabal of billionaires and corporations who pass laws and legislation that consolidate their power and obscene wealth at our expense.

It is one of the great ironies that the corporate state needs the abilities of the educated, intellectuals and artists to maintain power, yet the moment any begin to think independently they are silenced.

Those with the courage to shine a light into the inner workings of the machinery, such as Noam Chomsky, are turned into pariahs, or, like Julian Assange, relentlessly persecuted.

A population beset by despair, a sense of dethronement and powerlessness, is intoxicated by an orgy of annihilation, which soon morphs into self-annihilation.

It has no interest in nurturing a world that has betrayed them. It seeks to eradicate this world and replace it with a mythical one. It retreats into self-adulation fed by self-delusion and historical amnesia.

This is the deformed world our corporate masters have created. It is one we must confront and dismantle.

As history has repeatedly proven, organized labor, allied with a political party dedicated to its interests, is the only way we can protect ourselves from the oligarchs.

[I]f we focus on the oppressor, rather than demonizing those who are also oppressed, if we do the hard work of building mass movements to keep the powerful in check, if we accept that civil disobedience has a cost, including jail time, if we are willing to use the most powerful weapon we have – the strike – we can reclaim our country.

The moral? — One of the United States' biggest cultural disappointments . . .

. . . is its population's passivity in the face of the reigning corporatocracy's (fascist-in-character) oppression, thievery, murder and intentional societal degradation.

We Americans are (generally speaking) a people who are easily manipulated, distracted and noosed through the noses.

On the one hand, if we change this culture-groveling trait by waking up — our serf-like condition, as well as the murdering harm that our government does abroad, would substantially lessen.

On the other, I am not optimistic. We are, I tentatively conclude, too historically ignorant to apply critical thinking and critically thought-out actions competently and in context.

Without recognizing the sources of our quasi-enslavement, we likely will not fuel a workable resistance to the tyranny that we continually experience, but without recognizing it, its origins, or its mechanisms of action.

Guess who intentionally cultivated this ignorance on our parts.

Oligarchs know that (again generally speaking) stupidity and self-blinded-ness cannot be fixed by those who have been daily-propagandized to exemplify both.

My shaky forecast is that Hedges' observations about "self-annihilation" are more in keeping with our probable future, than the reverse.

The Phoenix of Possibility will be sad.

May the prophets among us keep that spirit-based bird alive.

PeteFree.com

Chris Hedges' prescription for humanity-saving action — working class strikes