Tuesday, January 13, 2015

A Message from the Dispossessed


Chris Hedges


Truthdig

The terrorist attack in France that took place at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo was not about free speech. It was not about radical Islam. It did not illustrate the fictitious clash of civilizations. It was a harbinger of an emerging dystopia where the wretched of the earth, deprived of resources to survive, devoid of hope, brutally controlled, belittled and mocked by the privileged who live in the splendor and indolence of the industrial West, lash out in nihilistic fury.

We have engineered the rage of the dispossessed. The evil of predatory global capitalism and empire has spawned the evil of terrorism. And rather than understand the roots of that rage and attempt to ameliorate it, we have built sophisticated mechanisms of security and surveillance, passed laws that permit the targeted assassinations and torture of the weak, and amassed modern armies and the machines of industrial warfare to dominate the world by force. This is not about justice. It is not about the war on terror. It is not about liberty or democracy. It is not about the freedom of expression. It is about the mad scramble by the privileged to survive at the expense of the poor. And the poor know it.

22 comments:

  1. Yeah--it's not the terrorists' fault that they executed a bunch of cartoonists. It's our fault. R-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-g-h-t.

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    1. Kurt you must try to understand the FEELINGS of the animals that want to cut your head off and it is our fault because we as a country have not given enough to the rest of the world to stop their FEELINGS of disenfranchisement..we must give more so they feel better about themselves ... The only way to stop the animals bad FEELINGS is to give them what they want and that is everything.....you just dont understand Kurt the animals need your hugs and well wishes for they are victims of the evil capitalist United States and only want life to be fair and to get that all the infidels must die in the name of a filthy disgusting religion...peace be with you

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    2. Kurt, it was already OUR fault because guns were used and , but now it's the fault of All the West as a monolithic structure, because the only way to prevent unjust and prejudicial proclamations of guilt against all Muslims is to say that the culture of the victims is the real perpetrator.

      Back when the preacher wanted to burn the Quran Lindsey Graham and others wanted to limit his free speech and blame him for any deaths that resulted in "protests" against his actions. Here, we have the same evil and stupidity of Lindsey, compounded with the evil and stupidity of Marxist social criticism. While it's possible to have a worse response than this, the attempt would be dangerous as the argument would likely collapse under its own weight into a singularity of stupidity, fully engulfing the speaker/writer and anyone standing nearby.

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    3. Yeah, I know, George--I'm such an insensitive bastard.

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    4. You guys can pretend to not get it, but there is something to the idea that US foreign policy and war mongering has contributed to this terrible problem.

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    5. Contributed--yes.

      Is the cause of it? Is to blame for it so much so as to be the REAL issue that we need to confront as this implies? Absolutely not.

      Will the problem go away if we amend our behavior? It might improve a little, but no, it won't go away because the root is much deeper. To pretend otherwise is just pie in the sky thinking.

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    6. Wow, I was joking about Mike and the others thinking it was Our fault as gun owners, but Penigma's got a post that explicitly says that.

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    7. I didn't see anything about foreign policy and war mongering in this excerpt. He was railing against capitalism.

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    8. Mike if it really is about "We have engineered the rage of the dispossessed. The evil of predatory global capitalism and empire has spawned the evil of terrorism." then some one needs to tell the Muslim Fucks because they believe they are fighting for the prophet and allah... “We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad” the jubilant killers yelled after they turned the newsroom of a French magazine into a bloody slaughterhouse.... Yep that sounds like its about lack of opportunity's to me, you fools on the left have these fucks in bed with us and when someone dare to say they are stinking up the joint you leftist do not now what to do other than call everyone a racist and claim the animals "misguided" ...well FUCK YOU Im sure many in France and the US would be happy to ship them to Rome so you can coddle them and im talking about the white ones the black ones the arab ones the persian ones the asian ones any muslim of any race you can have them all and if the christians ever start with their shit again you can have them too..

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    9. So U.S. foreign policy has "contributed" to these animals making the choice to commit mass murder in the name of the Religion of Peace, but Connecticut gun policy has not "contributed" to the creation of scores of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of new felons?

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    10. The US foreign policy CONTRIBUTED to the terrorism problem but the laws in CT DIRECTLY MADE "scores of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of new felons." At least that's the way TS likes to describe it. Why are you softening the accusation?

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    11. I don't presume to speak for TS--he handles you quite easily on his own.

      The comment of yours that I linked to above appears to be in response to my (not TS's) "[j]ust tens of thousands of newly-minted felons, a few of whom may somehow have missed all the controversy about the law in the months before the registration deadline," comment. I'm not sure how one would dispute my assertion that the tens of thousands of people standing in defiance of the new law would be "newly-minted" felons (and don't try to tell me that people don't become "felons" until convicted--Merriam-Webster knows better), whether the new law merely "CONTRIBUTED" to them becoming felons, or "DIRECTLY MADE" them such.

      But anyway, am I to understand that you are willing to concede, then, that the Connecticut law "contributed" to the creation of scores of thousands of new felons? That would be progress.

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    12. I don't concede that, Kurt. That's TS's thing. Every gun owner decides whether or not to obey the law. The law, being an inanimate concept, doesn't have the power to make people anything.

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    13. Hmm--strange that you thought it worth bringing up the difference between "CONTRIBUT[ING] to" and "DIRECTLY MA[KING]," then. But anyway, about this:

      Every gun owner decides whether or not to obey the law.

      And every adherent of the Religion of Peace decides whether or not to machine gun or behead infidels. Capitalism and U.S. foreign policy don't make then do anything.

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    14. Yeah, it's also the thing of Human Rights Watch dot Org:

      http://m.hrw.org/reports/2013/05/22/turning-migrants-criminals-0

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  2. Wow, I never considered that terrorism might really be because of income gap, and that the Charlie Hebdo attack was really the poor angry at those wealthy journalists.

    I guess I never considered that because I am smarter than that.

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    1. I think it's a bit more complex than that. It's not that terrorism is CAUSED by poverty. The have-nots who live in Gaza or the slums of Paris find release in radical Islam. Then comes the violence.

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  3. This is the type of self-loathing, moral equivalency hogwash that has led to many of France' problems which these attacks and the ongoing threat has focused the light on.

    This load of bull doesn't deserve a response, but to give it a little more than it deserves: Do we do bad things? Yes, and we should stop. Do our bad actions justify their attacks, make them less culpable, or mean that we share in the blame for their actions? No. Otherwise, we could make the same argument that it's THEIR fault we violate civil rights, etc. in response to their actions. We then get stuck in a futile loop of trying to trace every wrong back generations to see who wronged who first and bears the ultimate blame. Finally, the last response to this drivel is that if this was about the rage of the dispossessed proletariat against western decadence then we would be seeing similar actions by terrorists from non-Islamic parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, Australian natives, immigrants from Latin America. Heck, if this was about class and disenfranchisement rather than religion we'd see similar attacks by secular people from the Middle East.


    No, this author is so blinded by his own presuppositions that he has lost sight of the fact that there are people who have motivations other than the economic motives his views prescribe for the "haves and have nots." This is a common affliction for progressives too accustomed to their echo chamber and leads to the constant questions about why the poor rubes in the sticks let themselves get "brainwashed" to vote against their class interest whenever they hand an election to the Republicans. It's the same blindness that led to all of the "Why do they hate us?" questions after 9/11.

    Open your eyes, progressives. Yes, your economic dogmas motivate you and some others. They don't motivate everyone. Some people really believe in other philosophies, other religions, etc. and take guidance from them.

    The people behind this attack may have been angered by inequalities, and this may have been part of what helped prepare them for radicalization, but the religious motivation was the driving force that took over. This type of person will not be ameliorated by you improving the economic status of their people and ignoring their religious demands while talking among yourselves about how you've gotten to the base of the "real" problem. They will, instead, take such a response as an insult and an attempt to buy off their piety.

    Cont.

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    1. You can go on and on, but it's all based on a mistaken interpretation of what was said in the post. No one says the sins of the US justify terrorism or diminish the culpability of those who commit murder. The idea is that they CONTRIBUTE to it. That's all.

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  4. I know this is a hard concept to get your heads around, but since you've likely not met any radical Muslims, or if you did they likely didn't let you realize it, let's go with an example you might find a little closer culturally.

    Imagine you're dealing with a poor farming community of conservative Baptists. They've got lots of kids, not a lot of money, and scrape by on their farms. You see how miserable they are and how they're blindly misdirecting their rage against the system that keeps them down, and reinforcing it by going to, of all things, Tea Party rallies! Horrors!

    Then, in you come with sex ed classes, development plans for an abortion clinic, rules that protect the kids from the dangers of working on the farms, after school programs to fill the kids' time that they might have otherwise been doing farm work, and subsidies so the farmers can hire laborers to replace the lost child labor. You explain that the kids will be safer and learn more about making positive changes in the world, that they'll be as well off or better with the subsidies, that they won't have to pay more in taxes, just the rich deacon at their church will, and that the sex ed and clinic will ensure that the kids know how to use condoms and can get abortions so they won't have the family economy strained by unplanned pregnancies.

    After you get away from these suddenly very angry nutters, who you decide are probably racist--why? Because!--think about their motives. Did they get angry because they have lived their lives as the brainwashed and downtrodden pawns of the man? Or was it because of their "backwards" religious beliefs and the fact that they hold to "regressive" economic theories--beliefs and theories that your solutions violated the hell out of.

    Sometimes others' motivations really are that easy to divine...

    Meanwhile, all this progressive hand-wringing and self-loathing accomplish is to piss off our enemies who wonder how you could be dense enough to miss their motives, and ensure that progressives continue their vain attempts at appeasement which, as I said before, have led to many of the problems we now see France facing.

    How? Progressives decide that we can't be cultural imperialists and demand assimilation, so the culture and language barrier that exists between citizens of the host country and people from other countries now become culture and language barriers between different populations within the host country. Progressives decide that our imposing our culture and laws is also imperialistic, so, step by tiny step, they let in part after part of the camel until you have a situation like in France where you have no-go zones for police and civil services since the Immigrant community is allowed to handle all of its own affairs internally--a situation fertile for exploitation by radicals.

    Cont. in one more...

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  5. Will the radicals use the fact that these no-go zones are often dead end economic ghettos? Sure, among other tools for manipulating the impressionable--tools that would remain even if the economic woes of the community were solved--for example, feelings of alienation by those with a language barrier, cultural alienation, religion for the already pious, flat out lies and false flag attacks of their own, etc. etc.

    Stop with the appeasement that only adds to the problem and face the facts: we're up against an enemy that consists of an increasing number of violent "true believers" who are hiding among a wider population that consists of some other "true believers" who lack the initiative or conviction to be violent, some who willingly turn a blind eye to the extremists, some who are cowed into submission by fear of the violent ones and abused by the systems in these "no-go" communities, and some who are not violent at all and are oblivious to the evil in their midst since these true believers wear the same mask around these fellow Muslims that they wear around us "infidels".

    The only way to fight such an enemy both successfully and without turning into it is to face up to reality, determine to face down the violent and eradicate their evil philosophy, demand an appropriate amount of assimilation (no demands to abandon religion, etc., but do learn the language of your host country, respect its customs, abide by its laws, etc.) and offer a hand of friendship to the truly peaceful, encouraging them to stand against the evil in their midst.

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  6. And SJ did go on, and on, and on, and on, and on............HA HA HA HA HA

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