and think again.
However, Chris Hedges gives me a lot to think about,
and allows thinkers to think outside the gilded cage
that has been set up around our political leaders.
Some ideas:
- Indians in America were killed as much for their
egalitarian political economics of subsistence
as they were for the land they were sitting on.IshitUnot: Truthdig
By Chris Hedges
Hedges: How Our Demented Capitalist System Made America Insane
Hedges: How Our Demented Capitalist System Made America Insane
When
civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic
melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let
the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after
another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left
without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes
through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets
unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial
that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the
Internet. Politicians, including presidents,
appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they campaign on issues such
as creating a moon colony. “At times when the page is turning,”
Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all
the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind!
Panties overboard!”
The
quest by a bankrupt elite
in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl
Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This
quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression,
increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective
death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political
elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to
question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as
exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization
calculates that one in four people in
the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which
seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. Welcome
to the asylum.
... The war on the Native Americans, like the wars waged by
colonialists around the globe, was waged to eradicate not only a people but a
competing ethic. The older form of human community was antithetical and
hostile to capitalism, the primacy of the technological state and the demands
of empire. This struggle between belief systems was not lost on Marx. “The
Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx” is a series of observations derived from
Marx’s reading of works by historians and anthropologists. He took notes about
the traditions, practices,
social structure, economic systems and beliefs of numerous indigenous cultures
targeted for destruction. Marx noted arcane details about the formation of
Native American society, but also that “lands [were] owned by the tribes in
common, while tenement-houses [were] owned jointly by their occupants.” He
wrote of the Aztecs, “Commune tenure of lands; Life in large households
composed of a number of related families.” He went on, “… reasons for believing
they practiced communism in living in the household.” Native Americans,
especially the Iroquois, provided the governing model for the union of the
American colonies, and also proved vital to Marx and Engel’s vision of
communism.
Marx,
though he placed a naive faith in the power of the state to create his workers’
utopia and discounted important social and cultural forces outside of
economics, was acutely aware that something essential to human dignity and independence had been lost
with the destruction of pre-modern societies. The Iroquois Council of
the Gens, where Indians came together to be heard as ancient Athenians did,
was, Marx noted, a “democratic assembly where every adult male and female
member had a voice upon all questions brought before it.” Marx lauded the
active participation of women in tribal affairs, writing, “The women [were]
allowed to express their wishes and opinions through an orator of their own
election. Decision given by the Council. Unanimity was a fundamental law of its
action among the Iroquois.” European women on the Continent and in the colonies
had no equivalent power.
Rebuilding
this older vision of community, one based on cooperation rather than
exploitation, will be as important to our survival as changing our patterns of
consumption, growing food locally and ending our dependence on fossil fuels.
The pre-modern societies of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse—although they were not
always idyllic and performed acts of cruelty including the mutilation, torture
and execution of captives—did not subordinate the sacred to the technical. The
deities they worshipped were not outside of or separate from nature.
... The demented project of
endless capitalist expansion, profligate consumption, senseless exploitation
and industrial growth is now imploding. Corporate hustlers are as blind to the
ramifications of their self-destructive fury as were Custer, the gold
speculators and the railroad magnates. They seized Indian land, killed off its
inhabitants, slaughtered the buffalo herds and cut down the forests. Their
heirs wage war throughout the Middle East,
pollute the seas and water systems, foul the air and soil and gamble with
commodities as half the globe sinks into abject poverty and misery. The Book of Revelation defines this
single-minded drive for profit as handing over authority to the “beast.”
... The Native Americans
understood there are powers and forces we can never control and must honor.
They knew, as did the ancient Greeks, that hubris is the deadliest curse of the
human race. This is a lesson that we will probably have to learn for ourselves
at the cost of tremendous suffering.
... “Ethnological Notebooks,”
Morgan’s insistence on the historical and social importance of “imagination,
that great faculty so largely contributing to the elevation of mankind.” Imagination, as the Shakespearean scholar
Harold C. Goddard pointed out, “is neither the language of nature nor the
language of man, but both at once, the medium of communion between the two.
... Imagination is the elemental speech in all senses, the first and the last,
of primitive man and of the poets.”
