Stop Fascism: Chris Hedges in Portland, Oregon. A KBOO Benefit.

[Applause] hi welcome everybody and thank you for coming tonight my name is Becky Mayer times the development director for KBOO and I sometimes use social media and things like that it's light enough for a picture that's okay we can pass that up so it's an honor and a pleasure to welcome all of you to this kaboo benefit I'm proud to be a part of this nearly 50-year old community institution and independent radio outlet I'd like to thank you all for coming tonight and I have a few other thank-yous before we get started I'd like to thank our grassroots media heroes sponsors open signal Portland Community Media thank you thank you to the jupiter hotel for being the bringing truth to light sponsors yay thanks also to the Aladdin theater who take amazing care of us and have a beautiful facility thank you we have books available for purchase up front from Barnes & Noble Lloyd Center so thank you for coming and before I depart I would like to invite you to consider joining us tomorrow when we have our discussion with Joe Sacco and Chris Hedges here which will be a phenomenon Chris Hedges is in the back here Joe Sacco is a Portland treasurer and so please consider joining us tomorrow for a show at 2 p.m. without much further ado I'd like to introduce you to Paul Rowland who will be emceeing tonight he's the host on kibou community radio for Wednesday talk radio and Reisman the rooster crows if you may join me in giving him a big welcome [Applause] all right welcome to the big time since you're all here to listen to Chris Hedges you probably know about as much about him as I do you've probably already read one or more of his books or his regular column for TruthDig or seen his TV program on RT on contact I'm a little too green to say that I came across his writing pretty late probably because I've been living on a farm in the Italian Alps for much of his career the first time I recall seeing his byline though was on a piece that appeared in Adbusters in February 2010 the zero point of systemic collapse which began with a Russian reminding a group of anarchists a century ago that it wasn't their job to save a dying system but to replace it he said we think we are the doctors we are the disease and Chris continues all resistance must recognize that the body politic and global capitalism are dead we should stop wasting energy trying to reform or appeal to it well I was hooked and then I looked at the end of the article and read that he had he was or had been a New York Times columnist it correspondent which kind of shocked me and impressed me so anyway I just want to read a few things from his true state bio which you can see for yourself he was a he's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist he's written the 11 books and cleaning the bestseller days of destruction days of revolt his most recent wages of rebellion the moral imperative revolt of revolt he spent nearly 2 decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America the Middle East Africa and the Balkans he speaks Arabic French and Spanish he currently teaches a class through Princeton University at a state prison in New Jersey where half of the students are Princeton undergraduates and half our prisoners indeed in 2014 he was ordained as a minister for social witness at the Second Presbyterian Church in Elizabeth New Jersey the theologian James cone the father of Black Liberation Theology preached the sermon along with Cornel West any is a damn fine damn client and passionate and powerful writer and thinker one of the best we got thank you so I wrote this out and felt a little bit like Noam Chomsky when I saw him give a lecture a couple years ago where he got up and said a lot of people say I'm boring and I'm proud to be boring the decision by the deep state in ancient Rome like the United States in 2017 dominated by a bloated military and corrupt oligarchy to strangle the Emperor Commodus in his bath in the year 192 did not halt the growing chaos and precipitous decline of the Roman Empire commodious like a number of other late Roman empires and like Donald Trump was incompetent and consumed by his own vanity he commissioned innumerable statues of himself as hercules and had little interest in governance he used his position as head of state to make himself the star of his own ongoing public show he fought victoriously as a gladiator in the arena in fixed bouts power for commodious as it is for Trump was primarily about catering to his bottomless narcissism hedonism and lust for wealth he sold public offices so the ancient equivalents of Betsy DeVos and Steve minutiae could orchestrate a vast kleptocracy commodious was replaced by the reformer perto knocks the bernie sanders of his day who attempted to curb the unchecked power of the Praetorian guards the ancient version of the military industrial complex this effort saw the Praetorian guards assassinate perto knox after three months in office the guards then auctioned off the office of Emperor to the highest bidder the next Emperor Didius Juliana's lasted 66 days there would be five Emperor's in 193 ad the year after the assassination of commodious Trump and our decaying Empire have ominous historical precedents if the deep state replaces Trump whose ineptitude and imbecility are embarrassing to the Empire that action will not restore our democracy any more than replacing Komodos restored the Republic to Rome the choice is between inept fascists like Trump and competent fascists like pence our republic is dead the idiots seen in the decay the chance for personal advancement and profit takeover in the final days of crumbling civilizations idiot generals wage endless unwinnable wars that bankrupt the nation idiot economists call for reducing taxes for the rich and cutting social service programs for the poor and project economic growth on the basis of myth idiot industrialists poison the water the soil in the air slash jobs and depress wages idiot bankers gamble on self created financial bubbles and impose crippling debt peonage on the citizens idiot journalists and public intellectuals pretend despotism is democracy idiot intelligence operatives orchestra the overthrowing of foreign governments to create lawless enclaves that give rise to enraged fanatics an idiot professors experts and specialists busy themselves with unintelligible jargon and arcane theory that buttress the policies of the rulers idiot entertainers and producers create lurid spectacles of sex gore and fantasy there is a familiar checklist for extinction we are ticking off every item on it the idiots know only one word more they are unencumbered by common sense they hoard wealth and resources until workers cannot make a living and the infrastructure collapses they live in privileged compounds where they eat chocolate cake in order missile strikes they see the state as a projection of their own vanity the Roman Mayan French Habsburg Ottoman Romanov wilhelmine pallavi and Soviet dynasties crumbled because the whims and obsessions of ruling idiots were law Trump is the face of our collective idiocy he is what lies behind the mask of our professed civility and rationality a sputtering narcissistic bloodthirsty megalomaniac this face in the past was hidden at least to most white Americans but with the destruction of democratic institutions and the disempowerment of the citizen the oligarchs and the kleptocrats have become brazen they no longer need to pretend they steal and lie openly they wield armies and fleets against the wretch of the earth blithely ignore the looming catastrophe caused by global warming and cannibalized the nation while at night like some monster from the Grand Guignol the idiot in chief overseeing our self-immolation sits slack-jawed in front of a television set before opening his beautiful Twitter account forget the firing of James Comey forget the paralysis in Congress forget the inanity of a press that covers our descent into tyranny as if it were a sports contest between corporate Republicans and corporate Democrats or reality show starring our maniacal president forget the noise the crisis we face is not embodied in the public images of the politicians that run our dysfunctional government the crisis we face is the result of a four decade long slow-motion corporate coup d'etat that has left corporations and the war machine amna Putin turned our electoral system into legalized bribery and elevated pública figures who master the arts of entertainment and artifice Trump is the symptom symptom he is not the disease our descent into despotism began with the pardoning of Richard Nixon all of whose impeachable crimes are now legal and the extradition assault including targeted assassinations and imprisonment carried out on dissidents and radicals especially black radicals this is so done in the name of law and order put the organs of internal security from the FBI to homeland security beyond the reach of the law it began with the creation of corporate funded foundations and organizations that took control the press the courts the universities scientific research and the two major political parties it began with empowering militarized police to kill unarmed citizens and the spread of a horrendous system of mass incarceration and the death penalty it began with a stripping away of our most basic constitutional rights privacy due process habeas corpus fair elections and dissent it began when big money was employed by political operatives such as Roger stone a close advisor to Trump who created negative political advertisements and spread militia malicious malicious gossip and false narratives all eagerly amplified by a media devoted to profits and ratings rather than truth to deceive the public until political debate became burlesque the ruling elites terrified by the mobilization of the left in the 1960s or by what the political scientist Samuel Huntington called America's excess of democracy built counter institutions to deal Ajith amide and marginalize critics of corporate capitalism and imperialism they bought the allegiances of the two main political parties they imposed obedience to the neoliberal ideology within academia and the press this campaign laid out by Lewis Powell in his 1971 memorandum titled attack on American free enterprise system was the blueprint for the creeping coup d'etat that 45 years later is complete our failure to defend the rights of those who are demonized and persecuted leaves us all demonized and persecuted our failure to demand justice for everyone leaves us all without justice our failure to halt the crushing of popular movements that stand unequivocally with the oppressed leaves us all oppressed our failure to protect our democracy leaves us without a democracy the persecution of the radicals of four decades ago is not ancient history it is the genesis of the present its spawn the corporate coup and the machinery of state terror we will pay for our complacency we are trapped like rats in a cage a con-artist may be turning the electric shocks on and off but the problem is the corporate state and until we dismantle that we are doomed racist violent and despotic forces have always been part of the American landscape they have often been tolerated and empowered by the state to persecute poor people of color and dissidents these forces are denied absolute power as long as a majority of citizens have a say in their own governance but once citizens are locked out of government and denied a voice power shifts into the hands of the enemies of the open society when democratic institutions cease to function when the consent of the governed becomes a joke despots fill the political void they give vent to popular anger and frustration while arming the state to do - the majority what it has long done to the minority this tale is as old as civilization it was played out in ancient Greece and Rome the Soviet Union fascist Germany fascist Italy and the former Yugoslavia once a tiny cabal seizes power monarchist communist fascist or corporate it creates a mafia economy and a mafia State Trump and his coterie of billionaires generals half-wits Christian fascists criminals racists and deviants play the role of the Snopes klan in some of William Faulkner's novels the Snopes has filled the power vacuum of the decayed south and ruthlessly seized control from the degenerated former slaveholding aristocratic elites flemm Snopes and his extended family which includes a killer a pedophile a bigamist an arsonist a mentally disabled man who copulates with a cow and a relative who sells tickets the witness the bestiality our fictional representations of the moral rot unleashed by unfettered capitalism the usual reference to a morality while accurate is not sufficiently distinctive and by itself does not allow us to place them as they should be placed in a historical moment The Critic Irving how wrote of the Snopes --is perhaps the most important thing to be said is that they are what comes afterwards the creatures that emerge from the devastation with a slime still upon their lips let a world collapse in the south or Russia and there are peer figures of course ambition driving their way up from beneath the social bottom men to whom moral claims are not so much absurd as incomprehensible sons of bushwhackers and musics drifting in from nowhere and taking over through the sheer outrageousness of their monolithic force they become presidents of local banks and chairman of party regional committees and later a trifle slicked up they muscle their way into Congress or the Politburo scavengers without inhibition they need not believe in the crumbling official code of their society they need only learn to mimic it sounds societies that had democratic traditions are easy prey for the enemies of democracy demagogues pay deference to the patriotic ideals rituals and practices and forums of the open society while they dismantle it when the Roman Emperor Augustus he referred to himself as the first citizen neutered the Republic he was careful to maintain the form of the Old Republic Lenin and the Bolsheviks did the same when they seized and crushed the autonomous so viens even the Nazis and the Stalinist insisted they ruled democratic states despotic government as Thomas Paine wrote is a fungus that grows out of a corrupt civil society this is what happened to these older democracies it is what happened to us corporations are legally empowered to exploit and Lou it is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs or ExxonMobil the pharmaceutical and insurance industries are legally empowered to hold sick children hostage while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves trying to save their sons or daughters banks are legally empowered to burden people with student loans that cannot be forgiven by declaring bankruptcy the animal agriculture industry is legally empowered in many states to charge those who attempt to publicize the conditions in the vast factory farms where diseased animals are warehouse for slaughter with a criminal offense corporations are legally empowered to carry out tax boycotts free trade deals legally empower global corporations to destroy small farmers and businesses and D industrialize the country government agencies designed to protect the public from contaminated air water and food and from us aureus creditors and lenders have been gutted the Supreme Court an inversion of rights worthy of George Orwell defines unlimited corporate contributions to electoral campaigns as the right to petition the government and a form of free speech the press owned by corporations is an echo chamber for the elites state and city enterprises and utilities are the corporations that hike rates and deny services the educational system is being privatized and turned into a species of rote vocational training wages or stagnant or have declined unemployment and underemployment masked by falsified statistics have thrust half the country into chronic poverty social services are abolished in the name of austerity culture and the arts have been replaced by sexual commodification banal entertainment and graphic depictions of violence the infrastructure neglected and underfunded is collapsing bankruptcies foreclosures food shortages and untreated illnesses that lead to early death plague a harried underclass the desperate flee into an underground economy dominated by drugs crime and human trafficking the state rather than address the economic misery militarized police departments and empowers them to use lethal force against unarmed citizens it fills the prisons with 2.3 million people only a tiny percentage of whom ever got a trial and 1 million prisoners now work for corporations inside prisons as modern-day slaves paid pennies on the dollar without any rights or protection they are the corporate states ideal worker the amendments of the Constitution designed to protect the citizen from tyranny are meaningless the 4th amendment for example reads the right of the people to be secure in their persons houses papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause supported by oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized the reality is that our telephone calls emails texts and financial judicial and medical records along with every website we visit and our physical travels are tracked recorded and stored in perpetuity in government computer banks the state tortures not only in black sites such as Bagram or Guantanamo Bay but in Supermax facilities such as the one in Florence Colorado where inmates suffer psychological breakdowns from prolonged solitary confinement prisoners into around-the-clock electronic monitoring and 23 hour a day lock downs they undergo extreme sensory deprivation they are beaten they must shower and go to the bathroom on camera they can write only one letter a week to one relative and cannot use more than three pieces of paper they often have no access to fresh air and take their one hour of daily recreation in a huge cage that resembles a treadmill for hamsters the state uses special administration measures known as Sams to strip citizens of their judicial rights Sam's restrict a citizen's communication with the outside world they end calls letters and visits with anyone except attorneys and sharply limit contact with family members citizens under Sam's are not permitted to see most of the evidence against them because of a legal provision called the classified information Procedures Act or SEPA SEPA instituted on the Reagan administration allows evidence in a trial to be classified and those who are tried and convicted like Joseph K in Franz Kafka's the trial can be found guilty without ever seen the evidence brought against them and under Sam's it is against the law for those who have contact with someone held under Sam's including attorneys to speak about the physical and psychological conditions being inflicted on the prisoner when prisoners in our society are released they have lost the right to vote and receive public assistance they are burdened with finds that if unpaid will put them back behind bars they are subject to arbitrary searches and arrests they spend the rest of their lives marginalized as members of a vast criminal caste system and that is why 76% of those released from State Penitentiary's return to prison within five years our system of mass incarceration however is not as critic critics charge broken it works exactly the way it is designed to work the bodies of poor people of color do not generate money for corporations on the streets of our de-industrialized cities but they generate forty or fifty thousand dollars a year if we lock them in cages and that is why they are there [Applause] the executive branch of government is empowered to assassinate US citizens it can call the army into the streets to quell civil unrest under section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act overturning the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act which prohibited the military from acting as a domestic police force the executive branch can order the military to seize US citizens deemed to be terrorists or associated with terrorists and this is called extraordinary rendition those seized can be denied do process and habeas corpus and held indefinitely in military facilities constitutionally protected statements beliefs and associations are now criminalized the state can detain and prosecute people not for what they have done or even for what they are planning to do but for holding religious or political beliefs the state deems seditious the first of those targeted have been observant Muslims but they will not be the last the outward forms of democratic participation voting competing political parties judicial oversight and legislation are meaningless theater no one who lives under constant surveillance who is subject to detention anywhere at any time who has lost their legal rights who cannot protect themselves from corporate exploitation whose conversations messages meetings proclivities and habits are recorded stored and analyzed can be described as free the relationship between the state and the citizen who is watched constantly is one of master and slave and the shackles will not be removed if Trump disappears the dismantling of democratic institutions places where the citizen has agency in a voice is far graver than the ascendency to the White House of trouble the coup destroyed the two-party system it destroyed labor unions it destroyed public education it destroyed the judiciary it destroyed the press it destroyed academia it destroyed consumer and Environmental Protection it destroyed our industrial base it destroyed communities and cities and it destroyed the lives of tens of millions of Americans no longer able to find work that provides a living wage cursed to live in chronic poverty or locked in cages perhaps even more ominously this coup destroyed the credibility of liberal democracy itself self-identified liberals such as the Clintons and Barack Obama mouthed the words of liberal democratic values by making war on these values in the service of corporate power and this rendered these values meaningless the revolt we see rippling across the country is a revolt not only against a corporate system that has betrayed workers but also for many the tenants that define a traditional democracy and this is very dangerous it will allow the radical right with or without trouble to cement into place and Americanized fascism the acceleration of deindustrialization by the 1970s created a crisis that forced the ruling elites to adopt a new ideology as Stuart Hall explains in his book policing the crisis this ideology trumpeted by a compliant medium shifted its focus from the common good to race crime and law and order it told those undergoing profound economic and political change that they're suffering stemmed not from corporate greed but from a threat to national integrity the old consensus that buttress the programs of the New Deal in the welfare state was discredited as enabling criminal black youth welfare queens and social parasites these parasites were to blame and this opened the door to an authoritarian populism begun by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher which supposedly championed family values traditional morality individual autonomy law and order the Christian faith and the return of a mythical past it turns out 45 years later that those who truly hate us for our freedoms are not the array of dehumanized enemies cooked up by the war machine the Vietnamese Cambodians Afghans Iraqis Iranians even the Taliban al Qaeda or Isis they are the financed ears bankers politicians public intellectuals and pundits lawyers journalists and businesspeople cultivated in the elite universities and business schools who sold us the utopian dream of neoliberalism we are entering the twilight phase of capitalism capitalists unable to generate profits by expanding markets has at Karl Marx predicted begun to cannibalize the state like ravenous parasites wealth is no longer created by producing or manufacturing it is created by manipulating the prices of stocks and commodities and imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public this casino capitalism is designed to prey on the desperate young men and women burdened by student loans underpaid workers burdened by credit card debt and mortgages towns and cities forced to borrow to maintain municipal services this seminal moment in human history marks the end of a long tragic tale of plunder and murder by the white race it is inevitable it is inevitable that for the final act we vomited up Trump Europeans and Americans have spent five centuries conquering plundering exploiting and polluting the earth in the name of civilization and human progress they use their technological superiority to create the most efficient killing machines on the planet directed against anyone or anything especially indigenous cultures which stood in their way they stole and hoarded the planets wealth and resources they believe this orgy of blood and gold will never end they do not understand that the dark ethic of ceaseless capitalism and imperialist expansion is over and that it is dooming the exploiters as well as the exploited but even as we stand on the cusp of extinction we lack the ability to free ourselves from the myth of human progress walter benjamin wrote in 1940 amid the rise of European fascism and looming world war this ackley painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating his eyes are staring his mouth is open his wings are spread this is how one pictures the angel of history his face is turned towards the past where we perceive a chain of events he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet the angel would like to stay awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed but a storm is blowing from paradise it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them the storm it resists ibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned while the pile of debris before him grows skyward this storm is what we call progress the more the warning signs are palpable rising temperatures global financial meltdowns mass migrations endless wars poisoned ecosystems rampant corruption among the ruling elites the more we turn to those who insist that what worked in the past will work in the future that progress is inevitable factual evidence since it is impediment to what we desire is banished the taxes of corporations and the rich who have turned most of our cities into wastelands are cut regulations and laws are rescinded to bring back the supposed golden era of the 1950s for white American workers public lands are opened up to the oil and gas industry even as rising carbon emissions doom our species declining crop yields stemming from heat waves and droughts are ignored war becomes the principal business of the kleptocratic state magical thinking is not limited to the beliefs and practices of pre-modern cultures it defines the ideology of capitalism quotas and projected sales can always be met profits can always be raised growth is inevitable the impossible is always possible human societies if they bow before the dictates of the marketplace will be ushered into a capitalist paradise it is only a question of having the right attitude and the right technique when capitalism thrives we are assured we thrive the merging of the self with a capitalist collective has robbed us of our agency creativity capacity for self-reflection and moral autonomy we define our words not by our independence or our character but by the material standards set by capitalism well brands status career advancement we have been molded into a compliant and repressed collective this conformity of care is characteristic of totalitarian and authoritarian States it is expressed in the Disneyfication of America the land of eternally happy thoughts and positive attitudes and when magical thinking does not work we are told and often accept that we are the problem we must have more faith we must envision what we want we must try harder the system is never to blame we failed it it does not fail us at all our systems of information from self-help gurus to Hollywood to charlatans such as Trump sell us this snake oil what does resistance look like now it will not come by investing hope in the Democratic Party which did not lose the elections because of Comey or the Russians but but because it betrayed working men and women on behalf of corporate power and used its machinery to deny the one candidate Bernie Sanders who could have defeated Trump from getting the nomination the proposed cuts nine point two billion dollars from the Department of Education six hundred and sixteen billion dollars from Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program over ten years two hundred billion dollars from the food stamp program a lifeline for forty four million people seventy two billion dollars for people with disabilities thirty nine billion dollars for subsidized student loans at eight hundred and fifty nine million dollars for public service loan forgiveness along with a half a trillion dollar increase to the Pentagon's budget over the next decade accelerates the austerity programs and militarism that has been embraced by the Democratic Party as Diane Ravitch pointed out for example the Democrats bear as much responsibility for Betsy DeVos as the Republicans the bosses provoked proposed voucher system allowing parents to use public funding for private and religious school schools is modeled on a school choice program introduced by then Governor Bill Clinton this voucher system was promoted by Obama and Arne Duncan Obama closed countless public schools he doubled the number of students attending charter schools and it was Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party who gave us NAFTA the destruction of welfare the deregulation of the FCC the explosion of our prison population and the abolishment of glass-steagall that precipitated the global financial meltdown resistance will entail a personal commitment to refused to cooperate in large and small ways with the machinery of corporate power especially the fossil fuel industry after all the only say figure for carbon emissions is zero this will require us as Ralph Nader has long said to show up we have to as Max Weber advised make politics a vocation and resistance will begin locally as we transform our neighborhoods and our communities in the conflicts I covered as a reporter in Latin America Africa the Middle East and the Balkans I encountered singular individuals of varying creeds religions races and nationalities who majestically rose up to defy the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed some of them are dead some of them are forgotten most of them are unknown these individuals despite their vast cultural differences had common traits a profound commitment to the truth in corruptibility courage a distrust of power a hatred of violence and a deep empathy that was extended to people who are different from them even to people defined by the dominant culture as the enemy they are the most remarkable men and women I met in my 20 years as a foreign correspondent and to this day I set my life by the standards they set you have heard of some such as Vaslav Havel whom I and other foreign reporters met most evenings during the Velvet Revolution in Prague in 1989 at the Magic Lantern theater others no less great you may not know such as the Jesuit priest Ignacio a Acharya who was assassinated in El Salvador in 1989 and then there are those ordinary people although as the writer V s Pritchett said no people are ordinary who risked their lives in wartime to shelter and protect those of an imposing religion or ethnicity who were being persecuted and hunted and to some of these ordinary people I owe my life to resist radical evil is to endure a life that by the standards of the wider society is a failure it is to defy injustice at the cost of your career your reputation your financial solvency and at times your life it is to be a life long heretic and perhaps this is the most important point it is to accept the dominant culture and perhaps and maybe even especially the liberal elites will push you to the margins and attempt to discredit not only what you do but your character when I return to the newsroom at the New York Times in 2003 after denouncing the invasion of Iraq and being publicly reprimanded for my stance against the war reporters and editors I had known and worked with for 15 years lowered their heads or turned away when I was nearby ruling institutions the state the press the church the courts academia mouths the language of morality but they serve the structures of power no matter how venal which provides them with money status and authority in times of national distress one has only to look at Nazi Germany all these institutions including the Academy are complicit through their silence or their active collaboration with radical evil and our institutions are no different the lonely individuals who defy tyrannical power within these institutions as we saw with the thousands of academics who were fired from their jobs and blacklisted during the McCarthy era are usually purged and turned into pariahs all institutions including the church Paul Tillich once wrote are inherently demonic and a life dedicated to resistance has to accept that a relationship with any institution is usually temporary because sooner or later that institution is going to demand acts of silence or obedience your conscience will not allow you to make to be a rebel is to reject the capitalist mantra that I come first the theologian James Cohen in his book the cross and the lynching tree writes that for oppressed blacks the cross was a paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the worlds value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat but suffering and death do not have the last word that the last shall be first and the first last cone continues that God could make a way out of no way in Jesus's cross was truly absurd to the intellect yet profoundly real in the souls of black folk enslaved blacks who first heard the gospel message seized on the power of the cross Christ crucified manifested God's loving and liberating presence in the contradictions of black life that transcendent presence in the lives of black Christians that empowered them to believe that ultimately in God's eschatological future they would not be defeated by the troubles of this world no matter how great and painful their suffering believing this paradox this absurd claim of faith was only possible in humility and repentance there was no place for the proud and the mighty for people who think that God called them to rule over others the cross was God's pratik of power white power with powerless love snatching victory out of defeat Reinhold Niebuhr labeled this capacity defy the forces of oppression a sublime madness in the soul niba wrote that nothing but madness will do battle with malignant power and spiritual wickedness in high places this sublime madness as never understood is dangerous but it is vital without it truth is obscured and niebuhr also knew that traditional liberalism was a useless force in moments of extremity liberalism neighbor said lacks the spirit of enthusiasm not to say fanaticism which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks it is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history the prophets in the Hebrew Bible had this sublime madness the words of the Prophet says Abraham Heschel wrote or a scream in the night while the world is at ease and asleep the Prophet feels the blast from heaven the Prophet because he or she saw and faced an unpleasant reality was as Herschel wrote compelled to proclaim the very opposite of what his or her heart expected this sublime madness is the essential quality for a life of resistance it is the acceptance that although empirically all that we struggle to achieve during our lifetime maybe worse our struggle validates itself [Applause] Daniel Berrigan once told me that faith is the belief that the good draws to it the good the Buddhists call this Karma but he said for us we did not know where it goes we trust that it goes somewhere we do not know where but we are called to do the good or at least the good in so far as we can determine it and then let it go as Hannah Aaron wrote in the origins of totalitarianism the only morally reliable people are not those who say this is wrong or this should not be done but those who say I can't they know that as Immanuel Kant wrote if justice perishes human life on earth has lost its meaning and this means that like Socrates we must come to a place where it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong we must at once see an act and given what it means to see this will require the surmounting of despair not by reason but by faith I saw in the conflicts I covered the power of this faith which lies outside of any religious or philosophical creed this faith is what Havel called in his essay the power of the powerless living in truth living in truth exposes the corruption and deceit of the state it is a refusal to be part of the Sharad and it hasn't cost you don't have become a dissident just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career Havel wrote you are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility combined with a calm set of external circumstances you are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them it begins as an attempt to do your work well and ends with being branded an enemy of society the dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all he or she is not seeking power he or she has no desire for office and does not gather votes he or she does not attempt to charm the public he or she offers nothing and promises nothing he or she can offer if anything only their own skin and they offer it solely because they have no other way of affirming the truth they stand for their actions simply articulate their dignity as a citizen regardless of the cost the long long road of sacrifice and defiance that led to the collapse of the communist regime stretched back decades those who made change possible where those who had discarded all notions of the practical they did not try to reform the Communist Party they did not attempt to work within the system they did not even know what if anything they're tiny protests ignored by the state controlled media would accomplish but through it all they helped fast to moral imperatives they did so because these values were right and just they expected no reward for their virtue indeed they got none they were marginalized and persecuted and yet these rebels poets playwrights actors singers and writers ultimately triumph over state and military power they drew the good to the good they triumphed because however cowed and broken the people around them appeared their message did not go unheard it did not go unseen the steady drumbeat of rebellion exposes the dead hand of authority and the rot of the state I stood with hundreds of thousands of Czechs in 1989 on a cold winter night in Prague Wenzel a square as the singer Marta kuba Shova approached the balcony of the malarek building kuba Shova had been banished from the airwaves in 1968 after the soviet invasion for her anthem of defiance a prayer for marta her entire catalogue including more than 200 singles had been confiscated and destroyed she had disappeared from public view her voice that night suddenly flooded the square pressing around me were throngs of students most of whom had not been born when she vanished from public view they began to sing the words of the anthem there were tears running down their faces it was then that I understood the power of resistance it was then that I knew that no act of rebellion however futile it appears in the moment is wasted and it was then that I knew that the communist regime was finished the walls of Prague recovered that winter with posters of Yann Pollock Pollock a University Juden set himself on fire invent salah square on january 16th 1969 in the middle of the day to protest the crushing of the country's democracy movement he died of his burns three days later the state swiftly attempted to erase his act from national memory there was no mention of it on the state media a funeral march by university students was broken up by the police Pollux gravesite which became a shrine so the communist authorities exhume his body cremate his remains and shipped them to his mother with a provision that his ashes could not be placed in the cemetery but it did not work his sacrifice spurred the students in the winter of 1989 to act Prague's red army square shortly after I left for Bucharest to cover the uprising in Romania was renamed Pollux Square and ten thousand people were at the dedication we may feel powerless but we are not we have a power that terrifies the corporate state any act of rebellion no matter how few people show up or how heavily it is censored chips away at corporate power any act of rebellion keeps alive the embers for larger movements to follow it passes on another narrative and it will as the state consumes itself attract wider and wider numbers perhaps this will not happen in our lifetimes but if we persist we keep this possibility alive and if we do not it will die dr. Rieux and Albert Camus's novel the plague is not driven to act by ideology he is driven by empathy the duty to minister to the suffering of others no matter the cost to act on this empathy the empathy for human beings locked in cages the empathy for undocumented mothers and fathers being torn from their children on the streets of our cities the empathy for Muslims were demonized and banned from our shores fleeing the wars and terror we created the empathy for poor people of color gunned down by police in our streets the empathy for girls and women trafficked into prostitution the empathy for our great inglorious earth which gives us life and which is being destroyed is not only viewed by despots as political but seditious a life of faith and we are all called faith is a life of confrontation as Flannery O'Connor writes of Saint Cyril Jerusalem and instructing catechumens the dragon sits by the side of the road watching those who pass beware least he devour you we go to the Father of souls but it is necessary to pass by the dragon no matter what form the dragon may take it is of this mysterious passage past him or into his jaws that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell and this being the it requires considerable courage at any time in any country not to turn away from the storyteller except sorrow for who cannot be profoundly sorrowful the state of our nation the world what we are doing to our planet but know that in resistance there is a bomb that leads to wisdom and if not joy a strange transcendent happiness know that as long as we resist we keep hope alive my faith has been tempered in hell wrote Vasily Grossman in life and faith faith my faith has been has emerged from the flames of the crematoria from the concrete of the gas chamber I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man the powerlessness of kindness of senseless kindness is the secret of its immortality it can never be conquered the more stupid the more senseless the more helpless it may seem the vaster it is evil is impotent before it the prophets religious leaders reformers social and political leaders are impotent before it this dumb blind love is man's meaning human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil it is the battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush the small kernel of human kindness but if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now then evil will never conquer the days ahead will be dark and frightening but we must fight for the sacred we must fight for life we must fight the forces of death we fight not only for ourselves but for those who will come after us our children revolt is a political necessity it is a moral imperative we must not be complicit we must live in truth the moment we defy power in any form we are victorious the moment we stand with the oppressed and accept being treated like the oppressed we are victorious the moment we hold up a flickering light in the darkness for others to see we are victorious the moment we thwart the building of a pipeline or a fracking site we are victorious the moment we keep a mother faced with deportation with her children we are victorious the moment we mass in the streets to defy police violence we are victorious we must turn the tide of fear we must by taking the streets make the ruling elites frightened of us to sit idle to refuse to defy these forces to buy our silence be complicit will atrophy and wither our souls it will leave us husks of human beings this is not only a fight for life it is a fight that gives life it is the supreme expression of faith it is the belief that no matter how great is the power of evil the power of love is greater I do not in the end fight fascists because I will win I fight fascists because they are fascists thank [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thank you [Applause] well there's not really that much to do as an MC actually because we're not going to have questions tonight but there will be a extended opportunity for give-and-take tomorrow if you want to come back but he is going to stay here for book signing out in the library and he wanted to have a lot of time to interact individually with people I encourage everybody to hang out with each other form uh affinity groups cadres of resistance anyways thank you all so much for coming [Applause]

Channel: KBOO Radio

Views: 37,362

Keywords: chris hedges, portland, portland oregon, aladdin theater, KBOO, KBOO Community Radio, community radio, stop fascism, truthdig, open signal, open signal portland community media, politics, speech, activism, activist, journalism, chris hedges portland, portland activism, portland radio

Id: Q2klcRVZs0g

Length: 74min 21sec (4461 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 07 2017

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[u/A_gent_Orange]

"School is not important, work is not important, nothing is more important than stopping fascism because fascism will stop us all." - Fred Hampton