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    Chris Hedges: America’s Death March Archived Message

    Posted by sashimi on August 11, 2020, 4:07 pm

    (quote)
    Regardless of the outcome, the election will not stop the rise of
    hypernationalism, crisis cults and other signs of an empire's terminal
    decline.

    The terminal decline of the United States will not be solved by
    elections. The political rot and depravity will continue to eat away
    at the soul of the nation, spawning what anthropologists call crisis
    cults - movements led by demagogues that prey on an unbearable
    psychological and financial distress. These crisis cults, already well
    established among followers of the Christian Right and Donald Trump,
    peddle magical thinking and an infantilism that promises - in exchange
    for all autonomy - prosperity, a return to a mythical past, order and
    security. The dark yearnings among the white working class for
    vengeance and moral renewal through violence, the unchecked greed and
    corruption of the corporate oligarchs and billionaires who manage our
    failed democracy, which has already instituted wholesale government
    surveillance and revoked most civil liberties, are part of the twisted
    pathologies that infect all civilizations sputtering towards
    oblivion. I witnessed the deaths of other nations during the collapse
    of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and later in the former
    Yugoslavia. I have smelled this stench before.

    The removal of Trump from office will only exacerbate the lust for
    racist violence he incites and the intoxicating elixir of white
    nationalism. The ruling elites, who first built a mafia economy and
    then built a mafia state, will continue under Biden, as they did under
    Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan,
    to wantonly pillage and loot. The militarized police will not stop
    their lethal rampages in poor neighborhoods. The endless wars will not
    end. The bloated military budget will not be reduced. The world's
    largest prison population will remain a stain upon the country. The
    manufacturing jobs shipped overseas will not return and the social
    inequality will grow. The for-profit health care system will gouge the
    public and price millions more out of the health care system. The
    language of hate and bigotry will be normalized as the primary form of
    communication. Internal enemies, including Muslims, immigrants and
    dissidents, will be defamed and attacked. The hypermasculinity that
    compensates for feelings of impotence will intensify. It will direct
    its venom towards women and all who fail to conform to rigid male
    stereotypes, especially artists, LGBTQ people and intellectuals. Lies,
    conspiracy theories, trivia and fake news - what Hannah Arendt called
    "nihilistic relativism" - will still dominate the airwaves and social
    media, mocking verifiable fact and truth. The ecocide, which presages
    the extinction of the human species and most other life forms, will
    barrel unabated towards its apocalyptic conclusion.

    "We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of
    us to stop us seeing it," Pascal wrote.

    The worse it gets - and it will get worse as the pandemic hits us in
    wave after deadly wave with an estimated 300,000 Americans dead by
    December and possibly 400,000 by January - the more desperate the
    nation will become. Tens of millions of people will be thrown into
    destitution, evicted from their homes and abandoned. Social collapse,
    as Peter Drucker observed in Weimar Germany in the 1930s, brings with
    it a loss of faith in ruling institutions and ruling ideologies. With
    no apparent answers or solutions to mounting chaos and catastrophe -
    and Biden and the Democratic Party have already precluded the kind of
    New Deal programs and assault on oligarchic power that saved us during
    the Great Depression - demagogues and charlatans need only denounce
    all institutions, all politicians, and all political and social
    conventions while conjuring up hosts of phantom enemies. Drucker saw
    that Nazism succeeded not because people believed in its fantastic
    promises, but in spite of them. Nazi absurdities, he pointed out, had
    been "witnessed by a hostile press, a hostile radio, a hostile cinema,
    a hostile church, and a hostile government which untiringly pointed
    out the Nazi lies, the Nazi inconsistency, the unattainability of
    their promises, and the dangers and folly of their course." Nobody, he
    noted, "would have been a Nazi if rational belief in the Nazi promises
    had been a prerequisite." The poet, playwright and socialist
    revolutionary Ernst Toller, who was forced into exile and stripped of
    his citizenship when the Nazis took power in 1933, wrote much the same
    in his autobiography: "The people are tired of reason, tired of
    thought and reflection. They ask, what has reason done in the last few
    years, what good have insights and knowledge done us." After Toller
    committed suicide in 1939, W.H. Auden in his poem "In Memory of Ernst
    Toller" wrote:

    We are lived by powers we pretend to understand: They
    arrange our loves; it is they who direct at the end The
    enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand.

    The poor, the vulnerable, those who are not white or not Christian,
    those who are undocumented or who do not mindlessly repeat the cant of
    a perverted Christian nationalism, will be offered up in a crisis to
    the god of death, a familiar form of human sacrifice that plagues sick
    societies. Once these enemies are purged from the nation, we are
    promised, America will recover its lost glory, except that once one
    enemy is obliterated another takes its place. Crisis cults require a
    steady escalation of conflict. This is what made the war in the former
    Yugoslavia inevitable. Once one stage of conflict reaches a crescendo
    it loses its efficacy. It must be replaced by ever more brutal and
    deadly confrontations. The intoxication and addiction to greater and
    greater levels of violence to purge the society of evil led to
    genocide in Germany and the former Yugoslavia. We are not immune. It
    is what Ernst Jünger called a "feast of death."

    These crisis cults are, as Drucker understood, irrational and
    schizophrenic. They have no coherent ideology. They turn morality
    upside down. They appeal exclusively to emotions. Burlesque and
    celebrity culture become politics. Depravity becomes
    morality. Atrocities and murder become heroism. Crime and fraud become
    justice. Greed and nepotism become civic virtues. What these cults
    stand for today, they condemn tomorrow. At the height of the reign of
    terror on May 6, 1794 during the French Revolution, Maximilien
    Robespierre announced that the Committee for Public Safety now
    recognized the existence of God. The French revolutionaries, fanatical
    atheists who had desecrated churches and confiscated church property,
    murdered hundreds of priests and forced another 30,000 into exile,
    instantly reversed themselves to send to the guillotine those who
    disparaged religion. In the end, exhausted by the moral confusion and
    internal contradictions, these crisis cults yearn for
    self-annihilation.

    The French sociologist Emile Durkheim in his classic book "On Suicide"
    found that when social bonds are shattered, when a population no
    longer feels it has a place or meaning in a society, personal and
    collective acts of self-destruction proliferate. Societies are held
    together by a web of social bonds that give individuals a sense of
    being part of a collective and engaged in a project larger than the
    self. This collective expresses itself through rituals, such as
    elections and democratic participation or an appeal to patriotism, and
    shared national beliefs. The bonds provide meaning, a sense of
    purpose, status and dignity. They offer psychological protection from
    impending mortality and the meaninglessness that comes with being
    isolated and alone. The breaking of these bonds plunges individuals
    into deep psychological distress. Durkheim called this state of
    hopelessness and despair anomie, which he defined as "ruleless-ness."
    (/quote)
    Cont'd at https://scheerpost.com/2020/08/10/chris-hedges-americas-death-march/

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