The Language of Violence

Is America ‘Yearning For Fascism?’

 
The language of violence always presages violence. I watched it in
war after war from Latin America to the Balkans. The impoverishment
of a working class and the snuffing out of hope and opportunity
always produce angry mobs ready to kill and be killed. A bankrupt,
liberal elite, which proves ineffectual against the rich and the
criminal, always gets swept aside, in times of economic collapse,
before thugs and demagogues emerge to play to the passions of the
crowd. I have seen this drama. I know each act. I know how it ends. I
have heard it in other tongues in other lands. I recognize the same
stock characters, the buffoons, charlatans and fools, the same
confused crowds and the same impotent and despised liberal class that
deserves the hatred it engenders. 
 
"We are ruled not by two parties but one party", Cynthia McKinney,
who ran for president on the Green Party ticket, told me. "It is the
party of money and war. Our country has been hijacked. And we have to
take the country away from those who have hijacked it. The only
question now is whose revolution gets funded". 
 
The Democrats and their liberal apologists are so oblivious to the
profound personal and economic despair sweeping through this country
that they think offering unemployed people the right to keep their
unemployed children on their nonexistent health care policies is a
step forward. They think that passing a jobs bill that will give tax
credits to corporations is a rational response to an unemployment
rate that is, in real terms, close to 20 percent. They think that
making ordinary Americans, one in eight of whom depends on food
stamps to eat, fork over trillions in taxpayer dollars to pay for the
crimes of Wall Street and war is acceptable. They think that the
refusal to save the estimated 2.4 million people who will be forced
out of their homes by foreclosure this year is justified by the
bloodless language of fiscal austerity. The message is clear. Laws do
not apply to the power elite. Our government does not work. And the
longer we stand by and do nothing, the longer we refuse to embrace
and recognize the legitimate rage of the working class, the faster we
will see our anemic democracy die. 
 
The unraveling of America mirrors the unraveling of Yugoslavia. The
Balkan war was not caused by ancient ethnic hatreds. It was caused by
the economic collapse of Yugoslavia. The petty criminals and goons who
took power harnessed the anger and despair of the unemployed and the
desperate. They singled out convenient scapegoats from ethnic Croats
to Muslims to Albanians to Gypsies. They set in motion movements that
unleashed a feeding frenzy leading to war and self-immolation. There
is little difference between the ludicrous would-be poet Radovan
Karadzic, who was a figure of ridicule in Sarajevo before the war,
and the moronic Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin. There is little difference
between the Oath Keepers
<http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/03/oath-keepers>
margotbnews@hotmail.com and the Serbian militias. We can laugh at these
people, but they
are not the fools. We are. 
 
The longer we appeal to the Democrats, who are servants of corporate
interests, the more stupid and ineffectual we become. Sixty-one
percent of Americans believe the country is in decline, according to
a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, and they are right. Only
25 percent of those polled said the government can be trusted to
protect the interests of the American people. If we do not embrace
this outrage and distrust as our own it will be expressed through a
terrifying right-wing backlash. 
 
"It is time for us to stop talking about right and left," McKinney
told me. "The old political paradigm that serves the interests of the
people who put us in this predicament will not be the paradigm that
gets us out of this. I am a child of the South. Janet Napolitano
tells me I need to be afraid of people who are labeled white
supremacists but I was raised around white supremacists. I am not
afraid of white supremacists. I am concerned about my own government.
The Patriot Act did not come from the white supremacists, it came from
the White House and Congress. Citizens United
<http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Citizens_United>
 1 did not come from white supremacists, it came from the Supreme
Court. Our problem is a problem of governance. I am willing to reach
across traditional barriers that have been skillfully constructed by
people who benefit from the way the system is organized." 
 
We are bound to a party that has betrayed every principle we claim to
espouse, from universal health care to an end to our permanent war
economy, to a demand for quality and affordable public education, to
a concern for the jobs of the working class. And the hatred expressed
within right-wing movements for the college-educated elite, who
created or at least did nothing to halt the financial debacle, is not
misplaced. Our educated elite, wallowing in self-righteousness, wasted
its time in the boutique activism of political correctness as tens of
millions of workers lost their jobs. The shouting of racist and
bigoted words at black and gay members of Congress, the spitting on a
black member of the House, the tossing of bricks through the windows
of legislators' offices, are part of the language of rebellion. It is
as much a revolt against the educated elite as it is against the
government. The blame lies with us. We created the monster. 
 
When someone like Palin posts a map with cross hairs on the districts
of Democrats, when she says "Don't Retreat, Instead-RELOAD!" there are
desperate people cleaning their weapons who listen. When Christian
fascists stand in the pulpits of megachurches and denounce Barack
Obama as the Antichrist, there are messianic believers who listen.
When a Republican lawmaker shouts "baby killer" at Michigan Democrat
Bart Stupak, there are violent extremists who see the mission of
saving the unborn as a sacred duty. They have little left to lose. We
made sure of that. And the violence they inflict is an expression of
the violence they endure. 
 
These movements are not yet full-blown fascist movements. They do not
openly call for the extermination of ethnic or religious groups. They
do not openly advocate violence. But, as I was told by Fritz Stern, a
scholar of fascism who has written about the origins of Nazism, "In
Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was
invented." It is the yearning that we now see, and it is dangerous.
If we do not immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor
back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling
debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around
the edges of American society will become a full-blown conflagration. 
 
Left unchecked, the hatred for radical Islam will transform itself
into a hatred for Muslims. The hatred for undocumented workers will
become a hatred for Mexicans and Central Americans. The hatred for
those not defined by this largely white movement as American patriots
will become a hatred for African-Americans. The hatred for liberals
will morph into a hatred for all democratic institutions, from
universities to government agencies to the press. Our continued
impotence and cowardice, our refusal to articulate this anger and
stand up in open defiance to the Democrats and the Republicans, will
see us swept aside for an age of terror and blood. 
 
� 2010 TruthDig.com 
 
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com
<http://www.truthdig.com/>
 0. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for
nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He
is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning

 0r, What Every Person Should Know About War
 2008-08-18 14:25:50, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the
War on America.

 2008-08-18 14:25:50 His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of
Literacy and the  Triumph of Spectacle .


 
Reprinted from COMMON DREAMS

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