Chris Hedges - The politics of cultural despair: That's what's killing us, not Donald Trump

By Dilip -

NB: Chris Hedges is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Presbyterian minister, and TV host. He is also one of the most perceptive commentators on contemporary politics. The only caveat I would place on his title is that 'us' is not just America. The entire global population is and has been placed at risk by the arrogance, militarism and perpetually strife-ridden politics of the USA. We have now arrived at a situation where the Republican Party which under Abraham Lincoln, defeated the Confederacy, is now (virtually) flying the flag of racism; and the fate of the world's environment depends upon the blinkered vision of some ideologically inclined Supreme Court justices. Is America any longer a democracy? Or is it a plutocracy that after invading and interfering in the affairs of numerous countries is now imploding, and invading itself? Whatever the future brings will be bitter fruit, unless we make fresh beginning. DS

The physical and moral decay of the United States and the malaise it has spawned have predictable results. We have seen in varying forms the consequences of social and political collapse during the twilight of the Greek and Roman empires, the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires, Tsarist Russia, Weimar Germany and the former Yugoslavia. Voices from the past, Aristotle, Cicero, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Roth and Milovan Djilas, warned us. But blinded by self-delusion and hubris, as if we are somehow exempt from human experience and human nature, we refuse to listen. 

The United States is a shadow of itself. It squanders its resources in futile military adventurism, a symptom of all empires in decay as they attempt to restore a lost hegemony by force. Vietnam. Afghanistan. Iraq. Syria. Libya. Tens of millions of lives wrecked. Failed states. Enraged fanatics. There are 1.8 billion Muslims in the world, 24 percent of the global population, and we have turned virtually all of them into our enemies. 

We are piling up massive deficits and neglecting our basic infrastructure, including electrical grids, roads, bridges and public transportation, to spend more on our military that all the other major powers on Earth combined. We are the world's largest producer and exporter of arms and munitions. The virtues we argue we have a right to impose by force on others — human rights, democracy, the free market, the rule of law and personal freedoms — are mocked at home where grotesque levels of social inequality and austerity programs have impoverished most of the public, destroyed democratic institutions, including Congress, the courts and the press, and created militarized forces of internal occupation that carry out wholesale surveillance of the public, run the largest prison system in the world and gun down unarmed citizens in the streets with impunity. 

The American burlesque, darkly humorous with its absurdities of Donald Trump, fake ballot boxes, conspiracy theorists who believe the deep state and Hollywood run a massive child sex-trafficking ring, Christian fascists who place their faith in magic Jesus and teach creationism as science in our schools, 10-hour-long voting lines in states such as Georgia, militia members planning to kidnap the governors of Michigan and Virginia and start a civil war, is also ominous, especially as we ignore the accelerating ecocide….

https://www.salon.com/2020/11/01/the-politics-of-cultural-despair-thats-whats-killing-us-not-donald-trump/

HARRY BLAIN: America’s Wars always Come Home

Noam Chomsky: Internationalism or Extinction (Universalizing Resistance)

George Monbiot: Ayn Rand - A Manifesto for Psychopaths

Tom McTague: The Decline of the American World

Donald Trump: Democracy’s mirror image? By Philip Manow / David A. Bell - Fascism or Caesarism?

Jonathan Freedland - Donald Trump's plot against democracy could break America apart

Debt: The first five thousand years. By DAVID GRAEBER

Jill Lepore  A History of America’s military spending

Jonathan Freedland: Trump is destroying democracy in broad daylight // Chauncey DeVega: Vigilantes are preparing ‘to launch a coup’

America isn't breaking. It was already broken. By Andrew Gawthorpe // Why This Time Is Different. By Dahlia Lithwick

Black and Unarmed and Killed by the Police…an incomplete list…This is America….

Houston Police chief to Trump: Please, keep your mouth shut if you can't be constructive

Donald Trump and American carnage // Will Urban Uprisings Help Trump?

May 1968 - June 1989. It's been five decades since 1968, and things are somehow worse

Justice in America: Authorities are Cracking down Hard on Black Protesters while Treating White Supremacist Reopeners with Kid Gloves

Protests in USA over the death of unarmed black man George Floyd at the hands of police - 25 cities have imposed curfews

Mukul Kesavan - Donald Trump and the global equalization of awfulness

Karl Marx: Letter to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America; 1865

President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Speech on the American Military Industrial Complex, January 17, 1961

Simi Mehta - Martin Luther King: Changing The World With Love

Adam Lusher - Story of the last survivor of the last slave ship to travel from Africa to US is published after 87 years



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