that amazing changes happened, for the better, in many countries without seeming warning, just over 20 years ago. Who can ever forget the fall of the Berlin wall, and the joy so many East Germans felt gaining their freedom, and re-uniting with their western half. Who would have thought that would happen, just a few years before? Yet, East Germany (and Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, etc..) were collapsing from within due to their repression and hypocrisy, under the thumb of their mafia-like Stalinist bureaucracies.
We here at the A.P.R. sometimes fall into a funk, because we know so many people in this country continue to believe and act completely against their own interests, supporting the current two-party duopoly, that supports the increasingly corrupt, sociopathic, and globally menacing corporate oligarchy that runs our government. A system that puts corporate profit not just ahead of any support for people's needs, but is diametrically opposed to meeting them. With an increasingly desperate working class populace, because of higher and higher unemployment, wages and benefits can continually be cut.
The logical progression in this sequence, a Shock Doctrine, in every sense of the word, http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2009/10/capitalisms-dirty-warssecrets.html, is a complete roll-back of all that the labour movement fought suffered, and died for in the U.S., over the past 120+ years. The end of the 40 hour work week (to be sacrificed in the name of "economic recovery and national security"), minimum wage, unemployment benefits, medical benefits, paid vacations, and workmen's compensation. A return to the predatory and dangerous times of 1900.
http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/news-ludlow-massacre-picturesWhen you couldn't trust the food, water, or drugs, because of no oversight and regulations, and if you were injured on the job because of unsafe working conditions, you would be cast out, left to fend for yourself. Destruction of the environment accelerating (China's air pollution, because of it's non-existent environmental protections, now reaches California and is responsible for a third of it's pollution loading!). This is what the corporate media is pressuring us to accept, by demonising the government (military and police excepted!). The first step of which was the two-year salary freeze for federal employees, two weeks ago. Next will come hiring freezes, then layoffs and retirement age increases and benefit cuts. Which is already happening for many state and local government employees. Don't think so? It's already happening, and all these things we just mentioned, will happen within ten years, if people don't rise up and resist.
One of our favourite writers lately is Chris Hedges, who appears regularly on our most-used news-sites, Counterpunch and Common Dreams. He always tells things as they are, and provides cutting-edge insight and analysis. We found this article inspiring:
No Act of Rebellion Is Wasted
I stood with hundreds of thousands of rebellious Czechoslovakians in 1989 on a cold winter night in Prague’s Wenceslas Square as the singer Marta Kubišová approached the balcony of the Melantrich building. Kubišová had been banished from the airwaves in 1968 after the Soviet invasion for her anthem of defiance, “Prayer for Marta.” Her entire catalog, including more than 200 singles, had been confiscated and destroyed by the state. 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. 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 rebellion. It was then that I knew that no act of rebellion, however futile it appears in the moment, is wasted. It was then that I knew that the Communist regime was finished.
“The people will once again decide their own fate,” the crowd sang in unison with Kubišová.
I had reported on the fall of East Germany before I arrived in Prague. I would leave Czechoslovakia to cover the bloody overthrow of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu. The collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe was a lesson about the long, hard road of peaceful defiance that makes profound social change possible. The rebellion in Prague, as in East Germany, was not led by the mandarins in the political class but by marginalized artists, writers, clerics, activists and intellectuals such as Vaclav Havel, whom we met with most nights during the upheavals in Prague in the Magic Lantern Theater. These activists, no matter how bleak things appeared, had kept alive the possibility of justice and freedom. Their stances and protests, which took place over 40 years of Communist rule, turned them into figures of ridicule, or saw the state seek to erase them from national consciousness. They were dismissed by the pundits who controlled the airwaves as cranks, agents of foreign powers, fascists or misguided and irrelevant dreamers.
I spent a day during the Velvet Revolutionwith several elderly professors who had been expelled from the Romance language department at Charles University for denouncing the Soviet invasion. Their careers, like the careers of thousands of professors, teachers, artists, social workers, government employees and journalists in our own universities during the Communist witch hunts, were destroyed. After the Soviet invasion, the professors had been shipped to a remote part of Bohemia where they were forced to work on a road construction crew. They shoveled tar and graded roadbeds. And as they worked they dedicated each day to one of the languages in which they all were fluent—Latin, Greek, Italian, French, Spanish or German. They argued and fought over their interpretations of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Goethe, Proust and Cervantes. They remained intellectually and morally alive. Kubišova, who had been the most popular recording star in the country, was by then reduced to working for a factory that assembled toys. The playwright Havel was in and out of jail.
The long, long road of sacrifice, tears and suffering that led to the collapse of these regimes stretched back decades. Those who made change possible were 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, their protests would accomplish. But through it all they held 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 poets, playwrights, actors, singers and writers finally triumphed over state and military power. They drew the good to the good. They triumphed because, however cowed and broken the masses around them appeared, their message of defiance did not go unheard. It did not go unseen. The steady drumbeat of rebellion constantly exposed the dead hand of authority and the rot and corruption of the state.
The walls of Prague were covered that chilly winter with posters depicting Jan Palach. Palach, a university student, set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square on Jan. 16, 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 state media. A funeral march by university students was broken up by police. Palach’s gravesite, which became a shrine, saw the Communist authorities exhume his body, cremate his remains and ship them to his mother with the provision that his ashes could not be placed in a cemetery. But it did not work. His defiance remained a rallying cry. His sacrifice spurred the students in the winter of 1989 to act. Prague’s Red Army Square, shortly after I left for Bucharest, was renamed Palach Square. Ten thousand people went to the dedication
We may feel, in the face of the ruthless corporate destruction of our nation, our culture, and our ecosystem, powerless and weak. 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 by a media that caters to the needs and profits of corporations, chips away at corporate power. Any act of rebellion keeps alive the embers for larger movements that follow us. It passes on another narrative. It will, as the rot of the state consumes itself, attract wider and wider numbers. Perhaps this will not happen in our lifetimes. But if we persist we will keep this possibility alive. If we do not, it will die.
All energy directed toward reforming political and state structures is useless. All efforts to push through a “progressive” agenda within the corridors of power are naive. Trust in the reformation of our corporate state reflects a failure to recognize that those who govern, including Barack Obama, are as deaf to public demands and suffering as those in the old Communist regimes. We cannot rely on any systems of power, including the pillars of the liberal establishment—the press, liberal religious institutions, universities, labor, culture and the Democratic Party. They have been weakened to the point of anemia or work directly for the corporations that dominate our existence. We can rely now on only ourselves, on each other.
Go to Lafayette Park, in front of the White House, at 10 a.m. Dec. 16. Join dozens of military veterans, myself, Daniel Ellsberg, Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern, Dr. Margaret Flowers and many others who will make visible a hope the corporate state does not want you to see, hear or participate in. Don’t be discouraged if it is not a large crowd. Don’t let your friends or colleagues talk you into believing it is useless. Don’t be seduced by the sophisticated public relations campaigns disseminated by the mass media, the state or the Democratic Party. Don’t, if you decide to carry out civil disobedience, be cowed by the police. Hope and justice live when people, even in tiny numbers, stand up and fight for them.
Powerful stuff, thanks Chris. This very night I saw a clip on MSNBC of Madeleine Albright, the ex-US ambassador to the UN in the Clinton administration, speaking about tax cuts and the economy. She derisively referred to "bleeding hearts", i.e., liberals, not being realistic. So let's put this in perspective. A pillar of the political system in this country is saying that it is not realistic, or desirable, to show empathy or concern, for one's fellow human beings. And that is certainly reflected in what has been happening in this country, since 1980, especially.The trends are ominous.
One of our favourite books of all time, to which we have referred previously,
is The Dispossessed, and astounding tour-de-force science fiction/utopian novel by Ursula K. LeGuin (who is from Portland, OR). I first read it when I was 17, and was stunned by it's power and strong comparisons to our current society. Written amazingly, in 1973, it tells the story of a great and misunderstood physicist, Shevek, living in a utopian anarchist colony on the moon (to which they fled) of an Earth-like planet that has a greedy, sociopathic/militaristic society, much like ours. And his adventures as he returns to his home-world, to try and re-unite the two worlds. Naively returning to the home world under the auspices of accepting a Nobel-like physics prize, he quickly realises that the governments on them just want his research for their own gain. So he then flees and joins the left-wing opposition/underground. Which stages a massive rally and general strike on the eve of forced conscriptions for an unpopular, immoral, and unjust war. He gives a beautiful speech, in front of the main center of government in the U.S.-like country he was in:
"Annares [Shevek's home-world] had no flag to wave, but among the placards proclaiming the general strike, and the blue and white banners of the Syndicalists and the Socialist Workers, there were many home-made signs showing the green Circle of Life, the old symbol of the Odonian movement [that fled the home planet Urras, to the moon Annares] of two hundred years before. All the flags and signs shown bravely in the sunlight...
There might have been a hundred thousand human beings in Capitol Square, or twice that many. The individuals, like the particles of atomic physics, could not be counted, nor their positions ascertained, nor their behaviour predicted. And yet, as a mass, that enormous mass did what it had been expected to do by the organisers of the strike: it gathered, marched in order, sang, filled Capitol Square and all the streets around, stood in its numberlessness restless yet patient in the bright noon listening to the speakers, whose single voices, erratically amplified, clapped and echoed off the sunlit facades of the Senate and Directorate, rattled and hissed over the continuous, soft, vast murmur of the crowd itself.
There were more people standing here in the Square than lived in all Abbenay, Shevek thought, but the thought was meaningless, an attempt to quantify direct experience. He stood with Maedda and the others on the steps of the Directorate, in front of the columns and the tall bronze doors, and looked out over the tremulous, somber field of faces, and listened as they listened to the speakers; not hearing and understanding in the sense in which the individual rational mind perceives and understands, but rather as one looks at, listens to one's own thoughts, or as a thought perceives and understands the self. When he spoke, speaking was little different than listening. No conscious will of his own moved him, no self-consciousness was in him. The multiple echoes of his voice from distant loudspeakers and the stone fronts of the massive buildings, however, distracted him a little, making him hesitate at times, and speak very slowly. But he never hesitated for words...
"It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know of our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing, You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. And you have is what you are, and what you give.
I am here because you see in me the promise, the promise that we made two hundred years ago in this city-the promise kept. We have kept it, on Annarres. We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premieres, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Annarres you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution.You canot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere."
As he finished speaking the clattering racket of police helicopters drawing near began to drown out his voice.
He stood back from the microphones and looked upward, squinting into the sun. As many of the crowd did so the movement of their heads and hands was like the passage of wind over a sunlit field of grain.
The noise of the rotating vanes of the machines in the huge stone box of Capitol Square was intolerable, a clacking and yapping like the voice of a monstrous robot. It drowned out the chatter of the machine guns fired from the helicopters. Even as the crowd noise rose up in tumult the clack of the helicopters was still audible through it, the mindless yell of weaponry, the meaningless word.
The helicopter fire centered on the people who stood on or nearest the steps of the Directorate. The columned portico of the building offered immediate refuge to those on the steps, and within moments it was jammed solid. The noise of the crowd, as people pressed in panic toward the eight streets that led out of Capitol Square, rose up into a wailing like a great wind. The helicopters were close overhead, but there was no telling whether they had ceased firing, or were still firing; the dead and wounded in the crowd were too close pressed to fall.
The bronze-sheathed doors of the Directorate gave with a crash that no one heard. People pressed and trampled toward them to get to shelter, out from under the metal rain. They pushed by the hundreds into the high halls of marble, some cowering down to hide in the first refuge they saw, others finding a way through the building and out the back, others staying to wreck what they could until the soldiers came. When they came, marching in their neat black coats up the steps among dead and dying men and women, they found on the high, grey, polished wall in the great foyer a word written at the height of a man's eyes, in broad smears of blood: DOWN
They shot the dead man who lay nearest the word, and later on when the Directorate was restored to order the word was washed off the wall with water, soap, and rags, but it remained; it had been spoken; it had meaning."
Cheers.
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