Chris Hedges
Hurry up to listen to this week's free podcast episode courtesy of Alternative Radio. This one's by Chris Hedges, who speaks about 'American sadism'.
https://www.alternativeradio.org/arpodcast.xml
An excerpt:
The new state did not even require servants, just clerks. This metaphysical ignorance the product of an educational system that is primarily national, greases the cogs for the culture of sadism and social murder.
We will not extract ourselves from predatory capitalism and its culture of sadism with meagre government handouts. We will not extract ourselves because Biden's slick speech writers and public relation specialists who use poles and focus groups to feedback to us what we want to here can make us feel the administration is on our side. There is no good will in the Biden white house, the congress, the courts, the media, which has become an echo chamber of the privileged classes, or corporate board rooms.
They are the enemy. We will extract ourselves from this culture of sadism the way the dispossessed extracted them selves from the strangle hold of crony capitalism during the great depression, by organizing, protesting and disrupting the system until the ruling elites are forced to grant a measure of social and economic justice. The bonus army, World War I veterans who had been denied pension payments set up huge encampments in Washington, which were violently dispersed by the army.
Neighborhood groups, many of them members of the [...] or the communist party, in the 1930s, physically prevented sheriff departments from evicting families in 1936. In 1937, the united auto workers carried out a sit-down strike inside factories that crippled General Motors, forcing the company to recognize the union, raise wages and meet union demands for job protection and safe working conditions. Farmers forced into bankruptcy and foreclosures by the big banks in wall street, founded the farmers holiday association to protest the seizure of family farms. One of the reasons bank robbers such as John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde and the Barker Gang were folk heroes. The farmers blocked roads and destroyed mountains of farm products, reducing supply and raising prices.
The farmers, like unionized auto workers, endured widespread government surveillance and violent attacks from the FBI company goons hired gun thugs, militias and sheriffs departments. But the militancy on the farmers forced the state to accept an ad facto moratorium on farm foreclosures. Mass demonstrations outside state capitals at the same time, pressured state legislatures to block the collection of overdue mortgage payments. Tenant farmers and share croppers in the south unionized. The department of labor called their collective action a miniature civil war. The unemployed and the hungry throughout the country squatted in vacant homes and on vacant land. Foremen forming shanty towns that were known as Hoovervilles.
The destitute took over public buildings and public utilities. This constant pressure, not the good will of FDR, created the New Deal. He and his fellow oligarchs understood that if there was not reform, there would be revolution, something Roosevelt acknowledged in his private correspondence.
It is not until people are reintegrated into society, not until corporate and oligarchic control over our educational, politic and media systems are removed, not until we recover the ethic of the common good that we have any hope of rebuilding the positive social bonds that foster a healthy society. History has amply illustrated how this process works. It is a game of fear. And until we make the ruling elites afraid, until a terrified Joe Biden - and the oligarchs he served - look out on a sea of pitchforks, we will not blunt the culture of sadism and social murder they have engineered.
Rebellion, however, must be its own justification. It is a moral imperative, not a practical one. It not only erodes, however imperceptibly, the structures of oppression, but it sustains the embers of ampathy and compassion, as well as justice within us that defy the satism that colors every layer of our existence. In short, it keeps us human.
A ruptured society retreats into hedonism and the cult of the self. It celebrates, as corporations on wall street or popular reality television shows celebrate, the classic traits of psychopaths, superficial charm, grandiocity and self importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation in the incapacity for remorse or guilt.
Get what you can as fast as you can, before some one else gets it. This is the state of nature, the war of all against all, Thomas Hobbes saw as the consequence of social disintegration, a world in which life become solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. It is a world in which powerful men like Jeffrey Epstein or Harvey Weinstein reduce bodies, the bodies and self hoods of their victims to nothing.
We know what this sadism looks like. It looks like Derek Chauvin nonchalantly choking to death George Floyd as his police colleagues watch impassively. It looks like Andrew Brown Jr., shot five times by police in North Carolina, including once in the back of the head. It looks like Abner Louima had a broomstick pushed up his rectum by police in a bathroom at the seventieth precinct station house in Brooklyn, requiring three major operations to repair the internal injuries. It looks like the Navy Seal special operations chief Edward Gallagher randomly shooting to death unarmed civilian and using a hunting knife to repeatedly stab and injured, sedated seventeen-year-old Iraqi prisoner, and then photographing himself with a corpse. It looks like Iraqi civilians, few of whom had anything to do with the insurgency, naked, bound, beaten and sexually humiliated and raped and at times murdered by army guards and private contractors in Abu Ghraib.
Why is the malaise of a dying civilization expressed through sadism rather than a kind of righteous anger? And here we must turn to Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche warned that those who are humiliated and disempowered are poisoned by resentment because they have been stripped of agency, they lack the power to harm those who they believe harm them. In short, there is no cathartic release. Resentment is bred from damaged self esteem. It festers and corrodes the soul the powerless. And Nietzsche is writing about christianity as a slave. Religion must express their resentment obliquely and surreptitiously. Hence the coded racism, islamophobia and supposed yearning for a return to the traditional family. And, christian values.
Resentment is produced by feelings of inferiority, failure and worthlessness. And this resentment, fuelled by self-loathing, expresses itself through sadism, what Nietzsche calls wrecking the will of those who are weaker or more vulnerable. Nietzsche understood that this wrecking the will of others imparts a perverted, sadistic pleasure. He writes in on the genealogy of morals that to see others suffer does one good. To make others suffer even more.
Without cruelty, there is no festival. And in punishment there is so much that is festive. The resentment in American society, the political scientist Wendy Brown writes, is born not only from feelings of powerlessness and worthlessness, but feelings of dethronement and lost entitlement. It explains what she calls the permanent politics of revenge, of attacking those blamed for the dethronement of white maleness, feminist multiculturalist globalists who both unseat and disdain them. For this reason, the rage cannot, as it could be in christian theology, sublimated into self-abnegation and a call to love thy neighbour.