Saturday’s Oakland Occupy events and arrests point are written up as violence, on both sides. True? If so, who was doing the violence? Provocateurs?
Meanwhile, Chris Hedges reminds us to keep the eye on the prize, the dismantling of the corporatized stateless global empire, and to do so we need to let go of anything that smacks of nationalism and remember that though our brothers and sisters may seem foreign, they are not.
In other words, in the struggle to occupy, national identity is a distraction. As corporations are stateless, so must we be, in order to resist and ultimately, dissolve the global corporatocracy.
What happened to Canada? It used to be the country we would flee to if life in the United States became unpalatable. No nuclear weapons. No huge military-industrial complex. Universal health care. Funding for the arts. A good record on the environment.
But that was the old Canada. I was in Montreal on Friday and Saturday and saw the familiar and disturbing tentacles of the security and surveillance state. Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords so it can dig up the Alberta tar sands in an orgy of environmental degradation. It carried out the largest mass arrests of demonstrators in Canadian history at 2010’s G-8 and G-20 meetings, rounding up more than 1,000 people. It sends undercover police into indigenous communities and activist groups and is handing out stiff prison terms to dissenters. And Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a diminished version of George W. Bush. He champions the rabid right wing in Israel, bows to the whims of global financiers and is a Christian fundamentalist.
“Our solidarity should be with activists who march on Tahrir Square in Cairo or set up encampamentos in Madrid. These are our true compatriots.” (photo: Pascal Marchand)
The voices of dissent sound like our own. And the forms of persecution are familiar. This is not an accident. We are fighting the same corporate leviathan.
“I want to tell you that I was arrested because I am seen as a threat,” Canadian activist Leah Henderson wrote to fellow dissidents before being sent to Vanier prison in Milton, Ontario, to serve a 10-month sentence. “I want to tell you that you might be too. I want to tell you that this is something we need to prepare for. I want to tell you that the risk of incarceration alone should not determine our organizing.”
“My skills and experience—as a facilitator, as a trainer, as a legal professional and as someone linking different communities and movements—were all targeted in this case, with the state trying to depict me as a ‘brainwasher’ and as a mastermind of mayhem, violence and destruction,” she went on. “During the week of the G8 & G20 summits, the police targeted legal observers, street medics and independent media. It is clear that the skills that make us strong, the alternatives that reduce our reliance on their systems and prefigure a new world, are the very things that they are most afraid of.”
The decay of Canada illustrates two things. Corporate power is global, and resistance to it cannot be restricted by national boundaries. Corporations have no regard for nation-states. They assert their power to exploit the land and the people everywhere. They play worker off of worker and nation off of nation. They control the political elites in Ottawa as they do in London, Paris and Washington. This, I suspect, is why the tactics to crush the Occupy movement around the globe have an eerie similarity—infiltrations, surveillance, the denial of public assembly, physical attempts to eradicate encampments, the use of propaganda and the press to demonize the movement, new draconian laws stripping citizens of basic rights, and increasingly harsh terms of incarceration.
Our solidarity should be with activists who march on Tahrir Square in Cairo or set upencampamentos in Madrid. These are our true compatriots. The more we shed ourselves of national identity in this fight, the more we grasp that our true allies may not speak our language or embrace our religious and cultural traditions, the more powerful we will become.
Those who seek to discredit this movement employ the language of nationalism and attempt to make us fearful of the other. Wave the flag. Sing the national anthem. Swell with national hubris. Be vigilant of the hidden terrorist. Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver, responding to the growing opposition to the Keystone XL and the Northern Gatewaypipelines, wrote in an open letter that “environmental and other radical groups” were trying to “hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.” He accused pipeline opponents of receiving funding from foreign special interest groups and said that “if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach: sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further.”
No matter that in both Canada and the United States suing the government to seek redress is the right of every citizen. No matter that the opposition to the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines has its roots in Canada. No matter that the effort by citizens in the U.S. and in Canada to fight climate change is about self-preservation. The minister, in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry like the energy czars in most of the other industrialized nations, seeks to pit “loyal” Canadians against “disloyal” Canadians. Those with whom we will build this movement of resistance will not in some cases be our own. They may speak Arabic, pray five times a day toward Mecca and be holding off the police thugs in the center of Cairo. Or they may be generously pierced and tattooed and speak Danish or they may be Mandarin-speaking workers battling China’s totalitarian capitalism. These are differences that make no difference.
“My country right or wrong,” G.K. Chesterton once wrote, is on the same level as “My mother, drunk or sober.”
Our most dangerous opponents, in fact, look and speak like us. They hijack familiar and comforting iconography and slogans to paint themselves as true patriots. They claim to love Jesus. But they cynically serve the function a native bureaucracy serves for any foreign colonizer. The British and the French, and earlier the Romans, were masters of this game. They recruited local quislings to carry out policies and repression that were determined in London or Paris or Rome. Popular anger was vented against these personages, and native group vied with native group in battles for scraps of influence. And when one native ruler was overthrown or, more rarely, voted out of power, these imperial machines recruited a new face. The actual centers of power did not change. The pillage continued. Global financiers are the new colonizers. They make the rules. They pull the strings. They offer the illusion of choice in our carnivals of political theater. But corporate power remains constant and unimpeded. Barack Obama serves the same role Herod did in imperial Rome.
This is why the Occupy Wall Street movement is important. It targets the center of power—global financial institutions. It deflects attention from the empty posturing in the legislative and executive offices in Washington or London or Paris. The Occupy movement reminds us that until the corporate superstructure is dismantled it does not matter which member of the native elite is elected or anointed to rule. The Canadian prime minister is as much a servant of corporate power as the American president. And replacing either will not alter corporate domination. As the corporate mechanisms of control become apparent to wider segments of the population, discontent will grow further. So will the force employed by our corporate overlords. It will be a long road for us. But we are not alone. There are struggles and brush fires everywhere. Leah Henderson is not only right. She is my compatriot.
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
1 thought on “Chris Hedges to Occupy: "The more we shed national identity, the more powerful we become."”
Second Draft:
My instincts on the strategic path the OWS movement should take, appear to differ greatly from what I think I know of Chris Hedge’s direction and path. My fear is Chris Hedge’s recommendation to globalize the movement does not upgrade the movement, but dilutes the focus instead.
When Mr. Hedges first covered OWS and offered us his worldly, emotionally moving interview, I was humbled by the man’s oratory. As the interview of this great man was drawn to a close, Hedges was even brought to choking tears in his expression of humble respect for the wisdom demonstrated by the OWS – New York Movement.
The wisdom of our “national” effort to ignite a charismatic fire in the hearts of OWS participants has been tempered in the calming waters of non-violence even as the concept is reported to be the extraordinary vision of an Egyptian. To drop our boarders on strategy is to drop our defenses against violence. Nationally we do not seek, preach or pursue vengeance or violence. I looked up Mr. Hedges’ reference to who he thought he would support for President, only to discover his candidate wants to criminally indict members of the Bush Administration as a key point of his campaign plank. Political violence on this level begets endless retributions and spurs survival instincts among the indicted increasing levels of physical violence.
Breaking a few eggs to make the omelet seems not to have elevated the great Islamic movement as it set in motion permanent symbols of discord that dominate political outcomes, regardless of merit. We are in need of a functional symbol that does not invite violence as Occupy Oakland invites:
http://tinyurl.com/7s42dca
The symbol would more likely be found associated with love, tolerance, and humility, than vengeance.
The world does not have a Constitution, but we have. Keep our US Western movement separate and keep it contained right here at home where we know the law, where we still have access to the courts, provide excellent (“Can you hear me now?”) cell phone coverage on every major event and are making and where we are building traction and inroads on overturning the pernicious NDAA among a new batch of political candidates.
Our victories here in the US will be magnified. Our currency is still the default currency for world trade. When we reform our currency, we reform the world. Ellen Brown is right when she writes “Return the Privilege of Creating the National Money Supply to the People.”
http://tinyurl.com/3fa94u8 Currency – Banking reform alone would justify the entire movement.
Or, when we legally redefine Corporate Personhood here in the US — a worthy outcome in itself — we neuter one leg of the triad of the military industrial complex and that alters the world landscape. Globalizing the sisterhood of reform may sound empowering because we know outreach eventually follows reform. But we only encounter the Gordian Knott distractions of multi-cultural moral equivalencies when the energies of reform must first alter the DNA of the Western War Machine, a mutation that even prophecy describes as “Coming from the West.”
Most of our churches have world missions but local leadership. It is absolutely essential to the success of OWS to defend in every possible way the infiltration of the movement from agents of chaos and violence. We gain no additional moral support by going global at this time that we can not better gain by retaining local focus. Our liberation is tied not to Europe as much as it is tied to removing the spiritual blinders imposed on each of us through closed-loop religious institutions that will never compromise. Mutually Assured Destruction is as much an aspect of mainstream religion as it is the governments from which the concept is born. We must win mainstream clergy into the movement on a much higher profile to move the center of society without violence.
Going international in scope now is a recipe to enter a vortex that Chris Hedges is expert and ultimate authority perhaps, but that’s the trouble, going global runs us deep into foreign entanglements when so much can be done, perhaps even more, working right here at home … for now.