Chris Hedges: Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand

[marmar]

from truthdig:




Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand
Posted on Mar 14, 2011

By Chris Hedges


The liberal class is discovering what happens when you tolerate the intolerant. Let hate speech pollute the airways. Let corporations buy up your courts and state and federal legislative bodies. Let the Christian religion be manipulated by charlatans to demonize Muslims, gays and intellectuals, discredit science and become a source of personal enrichment. Let unions wither under corporate assault. Let social services and public education be stripped of funding. Let Wall Street loot the national treasury with impunity. Let sleazy con artists use lies and deception to carry out unethical sting operations on tottering liberal institutions, and you roll out the welcome mat for fascism.

The liberal class has busied itself with the toothless pursuits of inclusiveness, multiculturalism, identity politics and tolerance—a word Martin Luther King never used—and forgotten about justice. It naively sought to placate ideological and corporate forces bent on the destruction of the democratic state. The liberal class, like the misguided democrats in the former Yugoslavia or the hapless aristocrats in the Weimar Republic, invited the wolf into the henhouse. The liberal class forgot that, as Karl Popper wrote in “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

Workers in this country paid for their rights by suffering brutal beatings, mass expulsions from company housing and jobs, crippling strikes, targeted assassinations of union leaders and armed battles with hired gun thugs and state militias. The Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Carnegies and the Morgans—the Koch Brothers Industries, Goldman Sachs and Wal-Mart of their day—never gave a damn about workers. All they cared about was profit. The eight-hour workday, the minimum wage, Social Security, pensions, job safety, paid vacations, retirement benefits and health insurance were achieved because hundreds of thousands of workers physically fought a system of capitalist exploitation. They rallied around radicals such as “Mother” Jones, United Mine Workers’ President John L. Lewis and “Big” Bill Haywood and his Wobblies as well as the socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs.

Lewis said, “I have pleaded your case from the pulpit and from the public platform—not in the quavering tones of a feeble mendicant asking alms, but in the thundering voice of the captain of a mighty host, demanding the rights to which free men are entitled.” ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/power_concedes_nothing_without_a_demand_20110314/

[PADemD]

1. The whole article is worth reading.

[starroute]

2. This smacks far too much of blaming the victim

When Chris Hedges joins the fundamentalist Christians in demonizing "tolerance," I know something's gone seriously awry.

It isn't the "liberal class" that's let the corporate wolves into the sheepfold. It isn't multiculturalism and inclusiveness that's allowed the robber barons to ride roughshod over workers' rights. It's not the liberals' fault -- it's the centrists and the Blue Dogs and the people who call themselves Democrats but are really just pushing Reaganism-with-a-human-face.

The worst I'd be inclined to say about liberals is that they got spooked by McCarthyism 60 years ago, and spooked again by the "love it or leave it" days of the late 60s, and never regained the will to fight back. And that's not tolerance -- it's more like a form of Stockholm syndrome.

For that matter, what is a "liberal class"? It certainly isn't a class by any of the usual criteria -- income level, conditions of employment, or even taste in home decoration. It's a demonizing term, out of the right wing playbook, and Hedges ought to know better.

[Blue_Tires]

3. ttt