Chris Hedges’ Dark Vision
by: Dave Belden on September 15th, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Chris Hedges is a man who has seen, lived and reported on hell for much longer than any human being should do, and he knows that others have had it worse. I expressed my deep disagreement with the darkness of his vision here, but nonetheless I think that when he warns us about the prospects for American fascism, we should take him seriously. Of our returning vets, he says:
We risk creating a homegrown Freikorps, the demobilized German soldiers from World War I who violently tore down the edifice of the Weimar Republic and helped open the way to Nazism.
The Afghanistan and Iraq wars have unloaded hundreds of thousands of combat troops, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, back into society. According to a joint Veterans Affairs Department-University of San Francisco study published in July, 418,000 of the roughly 1.9 million service members who have fought in or supported the wars suffer from PTSD. As of August 2008, the latest data available, about a quarter-million military veterans were imprisoned on any given day-about 9.4 percent of the total daily imprisoned population, according to the National GAINS Center Forum on Combat Veterans, Trauma and the Justice System. There are 223,000 veterans in jail or prison cells on an average day, and an unknown number among the 4 million Americans on probation. They don’t have much to look forward to upon release. And if any of these incarcerated vets do not have PTSD when they are arrested, our corrections system will probably rectify the deficiency. Throw in the cocktail of unemployment, powerlessness, depression, alienation, anger, alcohol and drugs and you create thousands, if not tens of thousands, who will seek out violence the way an addict seeks out a bag of heroin.
Hedges titles his piece “Stop Begging Obama To Be Obama And Get Mad.” Though he doesn’t say so in the article, this is clearly a response to Michael Lerner’s refrain that we should continue to believe in Obama and pressure him to rise to his own best self, for example in his current editorial and in the name of the next spring’s NSP (Network of Spiritual Progressives) conference, “Support Obama to BE the Obama Progressives Voted For.” Michael invited Hedges to speak at that conference, and Hedges simultaneously agreed and used the idea to frame his vehement dismissal of the idea that Obama is anything but “a tool of the corporate state.” Michael posted the article on our site yesterday, where you can leave comments, and it is also at Common Dreams where it has garnered some 146 comments as of writing.
My own view, for what it’s worth, is that Hedges is a man to listen to very seriously, for circumstances could conspire to bring the darkest realities he fears to life. But I also think, on the basis of the seminar with him at Starr King Seminary in May, that he fails to understand how and why good has often prevailed enough to avert the worst. He approvingly quoted Paul Tillich to the effect that all institutions are demonic and Phil Berrigan’s “If voting was that effective it would be illegal.” I responded:
This was too much for me. Hedges had already spoken approvingly of habeas corpus, slavery abolition and something he called “functioning democracy.” But history teaches us that those were achieved by the exercise of power, by people who thought it worth acquiring power in order to hold the mediocrities in power to account. To say that institutions, which are ubiquitous in human society, are demonic, is too close to saying human beings are demonic, for me. There is a power dimension to everything we do, every penny we spend, every speech we give to students, every relationship in our lives: if we can’t have a theology or psychology of the good use of power, then we are lost as a social species.
It doesn’t seem right to portray vets with PTSD as seeking “violence the way an addict seeks out a bag of heroin,” as if they are all craving violence. The vet who spoke at the Netroots Nation PTSD panel that I attended talked about his PTSD as something that isolated him and made it hard to ease into normal social relations with others. For many PTSD is a source of isolation and depression but doesn’t necessarily lead to violence. That said, I think Hedges is totally right about the need for intensive mental health support and re-entry programs to help both vets and formerly incarcerated people heal from the traumas they have been through.
Personally, I am disappointed in Obama’s performance as of this date. We cannot heal as a nation unless we can diagnose our problem and determine the prognosis. Unless Obama joins the International Criminal Court at The Hague, Netherlands, we will never heal as a nation. Investigating only the lackies or cannon fodder in the military is not the answer to our healing process. Cannon fodder in the military is just cannon fodder. Cheney has openly confessed to his torture crimes and he must be tried for these crimes.
This beautiful commentary and perspective by Dave Belden both highlights with respect the views and articles by of Hedges and Lerner, and articulates a call to action rather than to despair. I hope that i can emulate Belden in my writing with his address of scope and content of people with whom i passionately disagree at elast in part, while learning from them. I try to do this but am sometimes unsuccessful and dispose of the person globally rather than examining them as a totality with insights which may be quite valuable despite our differences.
That doesn’t happen to me with Rabbi Michael Lerner, for his humanitarian love, his celebration of God, and his truthfulness cathects his work. But I have often scuttled the writings of Hedges becauseof his views about religion, not because of his philosphical bleakness…after all, the poor and the working class are the canaries in the coal mine and they have been degraded,desperate and dyingas individuals and as a class since social darwinism became entrenched in our society, its way of life, and permeated our “institutions”.
Once meant to help, systems like public assistance, foster care, special education (OMG–how we torture our children) now harm so greatly they make a mockery of the concept of public service.What i have seen in my 37 years of work in these institutions is demonic.
Lately i have realized that i am missing a lot by not reading more of hedges. His ruthless pursuit of the truth seems to be his religion ; that is very valuable in a society like ours in which blindness to evil like drug induced apathy is so crippling and mainstream.
i do not fear the fascism in the right so much as i fear the hypocricy, unwillingness to make eprsonal sacrifices, and blaming and shaming behaviors of the Left. If we fail as a nation and as a democracy it is because we have allowed the plutocrats and oligarchs to dominate our lives with rotten values of social darwinism, materialism gone wild, and hypersexualization so extreme it has polluted what little was left of childhood innocence for its market value.
Hedges has it exactly wrong because he simply doesn’t know the history of what happened.
When the First World War ended and the Italian army was demobilized, crowds of Italian communists and other leftists gathered at the train stations to spit on the returning soldiers as they got off the trains. They shouted slogans about imperialism and capitalism at boys who had been drafted or volunteered to fight for their country.
Mussolini was one of those soldiers who was spat on. And it was from among them that he recruited his first cadres of fascisti. They didn’t come home fascists. They were made fascists by their mistreatment by the Italian left.
The traditional view remains the correct one. If you disagree with a war, vote out those who caused it. Honor those who fought for their country whether the cause was just or not.
Violence is addictive, and often the question is not whether to be addicted, but from what position: as perpetrator, or from a passive-aggressive or purely passive observer of violence. PTSD involves a constant state of hyper-alert awareness of the possibility of danger and death, and for some, violence becomes a way of gaining power over what is draining power away. Whether a person cowers in a corner or acts aggressively, they’re just manifesting the same problem in different ways — society would, of course, prefer the cowering. But then again, I’m not so sure… do we all passively entertain ourselves with violence, even with outrage against violence?