Chris Hedges - Happy as a Hangman

  Innocence, as defined by law, makes us complicit with the crimes of the state. To do nothing, to be judged by the state as an innocent, is to be guilty. It is to sanction, through passivity and obedience, the array of crimes carried out by the state.

To be innocent in America means we passively permit offshore penal colonies where we torture human beings, some of whom are children. To be innocent in America is to acquiesce to the relentless corporate destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species. To be innocent in America is to permit the continued theft of hundreds of billions of dollars from the state by Wall Street swindlers and speculators. To be innocent in America is to stand by as insurance and pharmaceutical companies, in the name of profit, condemn ill people, including children, to die. To be innocent in America is refusing to resist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that are not only illegal under international law but responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people. This is the odd age we live in. Innocence is complicity.

The steady impoverishment and misery inflicted by the corporate state on the working class and increasingly the middle class has a terrible logic. It consolidates corporate centers of power. It weakens us morally and politically. The fraud and violence committed by the corporate state become secondary as we scramble to feed our families, find a job and pay our bills and mortgages. Those who cling to insecure, poorly paid jobs and who struggle with crippling credit card debt, those who are mired in long-term unemployment and who know that huge medical bills would bankrupt them, those who owe more on their houses than they are worth and who fear the future, become frightened and timid. They seek only to survive. They accept the pathetic scraps tossed to them by the corporate elite. The internal and external corporate abuse accelerates as we become every day more pliant. 

Our corrupt legal system, perverting the concept that “all men are created equal,” has radically redefined civic society. Citizens, regardless of their status or misfortune, are now treated with the same studied indifference by the state. They have been transformed from citizens to commodities whose worth is determined solely by the market and whose value is measured by their social and economic functions. The rich, therefore, are rewarded by the state with tax cuts because they are rich. It is their function to monopolize wealth and invest. The poor are supposed to be poor. The poor should not be a drain on the resources of the state or the oligarchic elite. Equality, in this new legal paradigm, means we are all treated alike, no matter what our circumstances. This new interpretation of equality, under which the poor are abandoned and the powerful are unchecked, has demolished the system of regulations, legal restraints and services that once protected the underclass from wealthy and corporate predators.

The creation of a permanent, insecure and frightened underclass is the most effective weapon to thwart rebellion and resistance as our economy worsens. Huge pools of unemployed and underemployed blunt labor organizing, since any job, no matter how menial, is zealously coveted. As state and federal social welfare programs, especially in education, are gutted, we create a wider and wider gulf between the resources available to the tiny elite and the deprivation and suffering visited on our permanent underclass. Access to education, for example, is now largely defined by class. The middle class, taking on huge debt, desperately flees to private institutions to make sure their children have a chance to enter the managerial ranks of the corporate elite. And this is the idea. Public education, which, when it functions, gives opportunities to all citizens, hinders a system of corporate neofeudalism. Corporations are advancing, with Barack Obama’s assistance, charter schools and educational services that are stripped down and designed to train classes for their appropriate vocations, which, if you’re poor means a future in the service sector. The eradication of teachers’ unions, under way in states such as New Jersey, is a vital component in the dismantling of public education. Corporations know that good systems of public education are a hindrance to a rigid caste system. In corporate America everyone will be kept in his or her place.

The beating down of workers, exacerbated by the prospect that unemployment benefits will not be renewed for millions of Americans and that public sector unions will soon be broken, has transformed those in the working class from full members of society, able to participate in its debates, the economy and governance, into terrified people in fragmented pools preoccupied with the struggle of private existence. Those who are economically broken usually cease to be concerned with civic virtues. They will, history has demonstrated, serve any system, no matter how evil, and do anything for a salary, job security and the protection of their families.

There will be sectors of the society that, as the situation worsens, attempt to rebel. But the state can rely on a huge number of people who, for work and meager benefits, will transform themselves into willing executioners. The reconfiguration of American society into a corporate oligarchy is conditioning tens of millions not only to passively accept state and corporate crimes, but to actively participate in the mechanisms that ensure their own enslavement.

“Each time society, through unemployment, frustrates the small man in his normal functioning and normal self-respect,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1945 essay “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” “it trains him for that last stage in which he will willingly undertake any function, even that of hangman.”

Organs of state repression do not rely so much on fanatics and sadists as ordinary citizens who are desperate, who need a job, who are willing to obey. Arendt relates a story of a Jew who is released from Buchenwald. The freed Jew encountered, among the SS men who gave him certificates of release, a former schoolmate, whom he did not address but stared at. The SS guard spontaneously explained to his former friend: “You must understand, I have five years of unemployment behind me. They can do anything they want with me.”

Arendt also quotes an interview with a camp official at Majdanek. The camp official concedes that he has assisted in the gassing and burying of people alive. But when he is asked, “Do you know the Russians will hang you?” he bursts into tears. “Why should they? What have I done?” he says.

I can imagine, should the rule of law ever one day be applied to the insurance companies responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans denied medical care, that there will be the same confused response from insurance executives. What is frightening in collapsing societies is not only the killers, sadists, murderers and psychopaths who rise up out of the moral swamp to take power, but the huge numbers of ordinary people who become complicit in state crimes. I saw this during the war in El Salvador and the war in Bosnia. It is easy to understand a demented enemy. It is puzzling to understand a rational and normal one. True evil, as Goethe understood, is not always palpable. It is “to render invisible another human consciousness.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his book “The Gulag Archipelago” writes about a close friend who served with him in World War II. Solzhenitsyn’s defiance of the Communist regime after the war saw him sent to the Soviet gulags. His friend, loyal to the state, was sent there as an interrogator. Solzhenitsyn was forced to articulate a painful truth. The mass of those who serve systems of terrible oppression and state crime are not evil. They are weak.

“If only there were vile people ... committing evil deeds, and if it were only necessary to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them,” Solzhenitsyn wrote. “But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

The expansions of public and private organs of state security, from Homeland Security to the mercenary forces we are building in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the burgeoning internal intelligence organizations, exist because these “ordinary” citizens, many of whom are caring fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters, have confused conformity to the state with innocence. Family values are used, especially by the Christian right, as the exclusive definition of public morality. Politicians, including President Obama, who betray the working class, wage doomed imperial wars, abandon families to home foreclosures and bank repossessions, and refuse to restore habeas corpus, are morally “good” because they are loyal husbands and fathers. Infidelity, instead of corporate murder, becomes in this absurd moral reasoning the highest and most unforgivable offense.

The bureaucrats who maintain these repressive state organs, who prosecute the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or who maintain corporate structures that perpetuate human suffering, can define themselves as good—as innocent—as long as they are seen as traditional family men and women who are compliant to the laws of the state. And this redefinition of civic engagement permits us to suspend moral judgment and finally common sense. Do your job. Do not ask questions. Do not think. If these bureaucrats were challenged for the crimes they are complicit in committing, including the steady dismantling of the democratic state, they would react with the same disbelief as the camp guard at Majdanek.

Those who serve as functionaries within corporations such as Goldman Sachs or ExxonMobil and carry out crimes ask of their masters that they be exempted from personal responsibility for the acts they commit. They serve corporate structures that kill, but, as Arendt notes, the corporate employee “does not regard himself as a murderer because he has not done it out of inclination but in his professional capacity.” At home the corporate man or woman is meek. He or she has no proclivity to violence, although the corporate systems they serve by day pollute, impoverish, maim and kill.

Those who do not carry out acts of rebellion, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, are guilty of solidifying and perpetuating these crimes. Those who do not act delude themselves into believing they are innocent. They are not.

Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a weekly columnist for Truthdig. His newest book is “Death of the Liberal Class.” On Dec. 16 he, Daniel Ellsberg, Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern, Dr. Margaret Flowers and several others will hold a rally across from the White House to protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and attempt to chain themselves to the White House fence.  More information on the Dec. 16 protest can be found at www.stopthesewars.org.

Video Review: How Corporations Destroyed Democracy - Chris Hedges

REVIEW: 

Chris Hedges begins this lecture with a great quote, “In celebrity culture we destroy what we worship.” He goes onto describe the impact of corporatist structures on modern culture, properly identifying the pagan and idolatrous cornerstone of secular society today, an intellectualized materialism based on the same precepts and sensorial metaphysical underpinnings of all pagan societies before it, there is an applicable analogy here that marks a series of concepts not foreign from the dominant norms of Muslim societies and Muslim households as well. Unfortunately, the majority of us have long given up on the belief that Islam serves a greater social purpose. Instead, the shopping malls, complexes, and corporate advertising campaigns that represent the idols of consumerist culture so too represent an equivalent reality of the Muslim world.  Therefore, much of what is said applies to Muslims and Muslim nations as well.  

  

The principles underlying corporatist structures deem impossible any “greater good” from coming about. Free market adherents would argue that pursuit of selfish interest indirectly contributes to a greater good, but corporations are totalitarian and cannot produce anything productive for society other than profit; a axiom of principality that makes acquiring profit a religion and thereby reduces the human experience to financial gain. As institutions they swallow belief in a greater good and by their very underlying conceptions exist only to produce positive returns for shareholders and vested interests. Therefore, such institutions cannot act on any other principle regardless of the occasional good-intentioned individual found inside their corporate conclaves.  Therefore, the lecture is about the byproduct of these principles on real human beings, about the corporatization of human beings.

The critical mind must realize that we have so-too corporatized the religion of Islam, over hundreds of years we have added and subtracted from the preserved message and principles included in the Quran. Defining our success based on the status we have attained, looking for conformal acceptance in a world of norms that contradict the tenants of our religion, and stuck in between a historical context of immigration for freedom of economic gain while oftentimes ignoring and feeling unaccountable for a reality of authoritarianism and oppression at home. It the sense of accountability to all of humanity that make non-Muslims like Chris Hedges important voices for us to hear.

The principles of Islam have been corporatized: Ramadan is now less about restraint than consumption, Hajj a voyage commoditized as part of the tourism industry, seeking knowledge a pathway to marketing one’s self in ways that guarantee acceptance by the mainstream but only if one is willing to necessarily ignore some of the most important concepts of Islam. The list goes on, but most remain ignorant and ill-concerned with standing up to this increasing reality and adoption of pagan concepts in the norms of our societies, As if we can so too, separate religion from state, we seek to maintain the ritualization of religion while ignoring the substance of simplicity in worldly dabbling in exchange for depth of contemplation and development of the soul and mind, something that is impossible when interacting with the corporate machine.

Hedges goes through the transformation of democratic society as ‘Inverted totalitarianism’ – represented by a massive public relations campaign as statist propaganda – Similarly, our monks and rabbis call to the same simple expression of purpose in life. The science of objectives of the shariah (ilm-maqaasid-al shariah) is adulterated in order to hearken the call to conformity to what has become normal in a secular world. The principle of maslaha (or seeking the greater good) is misunderstood and invoked by leaders to designate “the believers” as part and parcel participants in the corporatist model and mandating consent to the corporatist wars that just happen to be waged on Muslim soil these days via silence. It is this silence that is that is also part and parcel of what the corporate machine desires. American Islam increasingly represents the commoditization of our religion, a path of altering the tenets of Islam so that they are suitable to Western norms and desires while ignoring the very many problems of the contemporary order, the hypocrisy of the theorized values of western, secular society. In reality, this modern, “American Islam” is marketed in the same way Gap sells jeans manufactured in sweat shops to ignorant consumers. With the rhetoric of the powerful trying to convince people that the US is not at war with Islam, few realize that for that to be true they have got to create an Islam suitable to their needs, a version of our religion that accepts the same corporatist, pagan norms dominate our economies, that we accept despots and dictators loyal to multinational firms and preventing true freedom of choice and expression from asserting themselves in Muslim societies.

A quote that is particularly profound can be hear near the end. Hedges, who lost his job at the NY Times for speaking against the Iraq War at a college graduation ceremony explains,    

“Totalitarianism, George Orwell pointed out is not so much an age of faith but an age of schizophrenia, a society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial, Orwell wrote. That is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud and force is soon all the elites will have left. We can march in Copenhagen, we can join Bill McKiven’s worldwide day of climate protests, we can compost in our backyard, and hang our laundry out to dry. We can write letters to our elected officials, and vote for Obama and chant ‘Yes We Can’, but the power elite is impervious to the charade of democratic participation. Power is in the hands of moral and intellectual trolls who are ruthlessly creating a system of neo-feudalism and killing the ecosystem that sustains life, and appealing to their better nature or seeking to influence the internal levels of power will no longer work. Yet, in the face of this catastrophe mass culture assures us that if we close our eyes, if we visualize what we want, if we have faith in ourselves, if we tell God that we believe in miracles, if we tap into our inner strength, if we grasp that we are truly exceptional, if we focus on happiness, our lives will be harmonious and complete. This cultural retreat into illusion, whether peddled by positive psychologists, Hollywood, Oprah or Christian preachers is a form of magical thinking. It turns worthless mortgages and debt into wealth. It turns the destruction of our manufacturing base into an opportunity for growth. It turns alienation and anxiety into a cheerful conformity, and it turns a nation that wages illegal wars, and administers offshore penal colonies where it administers torture into the greatest democracy on Earth.” 

  

While we spend the majority of our time concentrating on separating ourselves from the kuffar, while at the same time imitating them in their blind ignorance and allegiance to the falsified notions and oppressive, dominant norms of the day. We would do better to recognize that we have adopted many of the same views. We would also do better were we to attempt to revive some of the critical thought and sensible critique that is evident in discussions like these. We need Muslim speakers, authors and activists that attempt to correlate the responsibility to act for justice and truth to a moral obligation mandatory on us all.

At one point Hedges says that, “America’s most dangerous enemies are not Islamic Radicals but those that sold us the perverted ideology of free market capitalism and globalization.” Likewise we suffer from an internal hypocrisy that seems to dominate the age. It is time we join the conversation and opposition to corporate globalization, but first we must seek to understand the principles that challenge its existence. They are the principles we read every time we pick up the Quran, the principles we glaze over and ignore as we separate knowledge from implementation.  In conclusion, Mr. Hedges remarks about the importance of acting with a moral imperativeness that this system must be fought even if the outcome looks bleak… indeed this is the condition of humanity at large – the lacking sense of moral responsibility plagues us all. The sense of complacency and lack of courage to formulate alternatives and fight for the cause of justice haunts us as well. We should all become activists and voices like Chris Hedges, concerned and caring, yet rational and tactful in how approach the obstacles. 

This video gets 4/5 stars and is definitely recommended. Feel free to comment about your own interpretations by clicking on the comment button below.