Chris Hedges: Violence will increasingly mark a nation in terminal decline

[HomerRamone]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/the_rhetoric_of_violence_20140420

when our breakdown begins, “the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words ‘nigger’ and ‘kike’ will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”

Our inability to formulate a coherent, militant revolutionary ideology, meanwhile, leaves us powerless in the face of mounting violence. We wander around in a daze. We lack the toughness and asceticism of the radicals who went before us—the Wobblies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World ) , the anarchists, the socialists and the communists. We preach a mishmash of tolerance and Oprah-like hope and exude a fuzzy faith in the power of the people. And because of this we are run over like frogs blindly hopping up and down on a road.

Our most cherished civil liberties have been taken from us. Our incomes are in free fall while obscene wealth is in the hands of a few oligarchs. We are watched and monitored by the most pervasive security and surveillance system in human history. We are hemmed in by archipelagos of prisons. And the ecosystem on which we depend for life is being destroyed. And, through it all, we are bombarded with propaganda, manipulated and mocked by our elites as we dance in their choreographed political charades.

We must begin to speak in the language of revolution, not accommodation. We must direct the rage that grips huge swaths of the population not against the oppressed but against the structures of corporate power that create oppression.

[Warpy]

1. It's going to take charismatic leaders to do any of that stuff

and we all know what's going to happen to them. They'll be whacked before they finish their first sentence.

[SevenSixtyTwo]

2. There's a whole

Lot of negativity in that sermon. It might be a far right fantasy but it's not going to happen. We aren't perfect but we are America.

[FSogol]

7. +1. Maybe he's campaigning for head Eeyore.

[socialist_n_TN]

15. Well, we can always lay back and enjoy it.......

since it's inevitable, huh?

[1000words]

3. Did Hedges spend Easter alone or something?

[AngryAmish]

4. Too many Morrissey songs, I guess

Crime is falling.

[BlindTiresias]

14. The article isn't about crime though?

[RainDog]

5. I often find his work...off putting

He came out of divinity school and his rhetoric, to me, is really out of the same sort of impulse and mindset.

I think his work about war providing meaning was really sharp in relation to the era of the neocons (spit, spit, hopefully over forever, lol) because it examined their idea that people should be misled by the governing and nations should promote war, like religion, for social cohesion.

Beyond that - he seems to cry in the wilderness that the end is at hand a bit too often. If that's his view - he should use his public position to create actions, not words, to correct our current path.

[Brigid]

8. A modern-day Jeremiah.

But don't forget: Jeremiah, like Cassandra, was right. They just weren't listened to.

[gratuitous]

6. For the most part, I agree

But as for the missing "toughness and ascetism" that marked the marginalized, abandoned, abolished, outlawed and mostly forgotten Wobblies, anarchists, socialists and communists, Hedges appears to have made a common mistake. I think he knows better than to conflate passivity with pacifism.

[1000words]

9. Indeed.

[jwirr]

10. When our breakdown begins - hasn't it already? And yes that is a good explaination of why we are

having to fight to keep everything we built in the 60-70s.

[heaven05]

11. begins?????

done began!!!! 1980

[stevenleser]

12. This is at least 50-60 years off, assuming we continue in the current trajectory.

As bad as we think things are for the 99%, they are far from pushing people into what Hedges is contemplating.

[Flying Squirrel]

13. Omg.....

The text at the link was so horrible I had to copy and paste it into Word to read it.

[BlindTiresias]

16. Excellent quote from Rorty in that article

“the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words ‘nigger’ and ‘kike’ will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”