If you want to know what future resistance looks like, Chris Hedges writes, take a good long look at what transpired at Standing Rock:
Day after day, week after week, month after month, the demonstrators endured assaults carried out with armored personnel carriers, rubber bullets, stun guns, tear gas, cannons that shot water laced with chemicals, and sound cannons that can cause permanent hearing loss. Drones hovered overhead. Attack dogs were unleashed on the crowds. Hundreds were arrested, roughed up and held in dank, overcrowded cells. Many were charged with felonies. The press, or at least the press that attempted to report honestly, was harassed and censored, and often reporters were detained or arrested. And mixed in with the water protectors was a small army of infiltrators, spies and agents provocateurs, who often initiated vandalism and rock throwing at law enforcement and singled out anti-pipeline leaders for arrest.
No one should estimate what and who the resistors are up against:
The corporate state, no longer able to peddle a credible ideology, is becoming more overtly totalitarian. It will increasingly silence dissidents out of fear that the truth they speak will spark a contagion. It will, as in China’s system of totalitarian capitalism, use the tools of censorship, blacklisting, infiltration, blackmailing, bribery, public defamation, prison sentences on trumped-up charges and violence. The more discredited the state becomes, the more it will communicate in the language of force.
Native leader Tom B.K. Goldtooth sees the battle in existential terms:
This world is heading towards economic systems that continue to eat up life itself, even the heart of workers, and it’s not sustainable. We’re at that point where Mother Earth is crying out for a revolution. Mother Earth is crying out for a new direction.
As far as a new regime, we’ll need something based on earth jurisprudence.A new system away from property rights, away from privatization, away from financialization of nature, away from control over our … DNA, away from control over seeds, away from corporations. It’s a common law with local sovereignty. That’s why it’s important we have a system that recognizes the rights of a healthy and clean water system, ecosystem. Mother Earth has rights. We need a system that will recognize that. Mother Earth is not an object. We have an economic system that treats Mother Earth as if she’s a liquidation issue. We have to change that. That’s not sustainable.
This is not just a battle for one nation's soul -- although the battle for the American soul is seminal. This is a battle for the future of the planet. And time is running out.
Image: dfreeberg.wordpress.com
4 comments:
The future may look like that, or worse, whether we are demonstrating or not. It took relatively little for Pierre Trudeau to send out the troops. Rest assured that other Prime Ministers and Presidents will not lose much sleep doing the same thing.
The powers that be will defend what they see as their territory, Toby. And they will not be easy to dislodge.
I've long suspected this is the reason they've worked so hard to set us, the masses, at each others' throats. Anything to prevent or undermine the return of some functional social cohesion. Divided we're easy to pick off. You wind up with a group on either side and a large group, a majority, of complacents in the middle.
Like Monbiot, Hedges is a powerful advocate for what must be done but his suggestions for achieving his goals are vague and unconvincing. There isn't going to be some giant Kumbaya moment. The forces of deceit, distraction and confusion are deeply embedded in our societies.
Those forces are firmly established, Mound. They have a plan to protect themselves. And our tribalism helps ensure their success.
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