Chris Hedges: American Democracy: A Last Chance for Resistance

[CousinIT]

Here is the single best and most succinct omen I have read of what is in store for America if Donald Trump and his cronies prevail. Chris Hedges is one of our most seasoned journalists and aroused patriots. As a foreign correspondent he reported from more than 50 countries for nearly two decades, including 15 years with The New York Times, where he was a member of a team that received the Pulitzer Prize. The author of 12 books, including three best-sellers, Hedges was twice named online journalist of the year for his columns at Truthdig.com.

Hedges is often criticized as a “radical” by his critics; we should all be so charged. For the real radicals now control the White House, Congress and the Republican Party and are sending wrecking crews into every government agency to pummel and plunder our public institutions and resources. Take the time to read this, then more time to think about it. Share it widely. Trump’s ultimate triumph is inevitable if not met by patriots as courageous and committed as Chris Hedges.

–Bill Moyers

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A Last Chance for Resistance
By Chris Hedges

This post originally appeared at Truthdig.

The crawl toward despotism within a failed democracy is always incremental. No regime planning to utterly extinguish civil liberties advertises its intentions in advance. It pays lip service to liberty and justice while obliterating the institutions and laws that make them possible. Its opponents, including those within the establishment, make sporadic attempts to resist, but week by week, month by month, the despot and his reactionary allies methodically consolidate power. Those inside the machinery of government and the courts who assert the rule of law are purged. Critics, including the press, are attacked, ridiculed and silenced. The state is reconfigured until the edifice of tyranny is unassailable.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago noted that the consolidation of Soviet tyranny “was stretched out over many years because it was of primary importance that it be stealthy and unnoticed.” He called the process “a grandiose silent game of solitaire, whose rules were totally incomprehensible to its contemporaries, and whose outlines we can appreciate only now.”

Czeslaw Milosz in The Captive Mind also chronicles the incremental expansion of tyranny, noting that it steadily progresses until intellectuals are not only forced to repeat the regime’s self-praising slogans but to advance its absurdist dogmas. Few ever see the tyranny coming. Those who do and speak out are treated by the authorities, and often the wider society, as alarmists or traitors.

http://billmoyers.com/story/american-democracy-last-chance-for-resistance/

[Docreed2003]

1. K&R...sobering piece!