The Great Unraveling

(Photo: Gage Skidmore/flickr/cc)

by Chris HedgesMonday, August 31, 2015

The ideological and physical hold of American imperial power, buttressed by

the utopian ideology of neoliberalism and global capitalism, is unraveling.
Most, including many of those at the heart of the American empire,
recognize that every promise made by the proponents of neoliberalism is a
lie. Global wealth, rather than being spread equitably, as neoliberal
proponents promised, has been funneled upward into the hands of a
rapacious, oligarchic elite, creating vast economic inequality. The working
poor, whose unions and rights have been taken from them and whose

wages have stagnated or declined over the past 40 years, have been thrust
into chronic poverty and underemployment, making their lives one long,
stress-ridden emergency. The middle class is evaporating. Cities that once
manufactured products and offered factory jobs are boarded up-wastelands.
Prisons are overflowing. Corporations have orchestrated the destruction of
trade barriers, allowing them to stash $2.1 trillion in profits in overseas
banks to avoid paying taxes. And the neoliberal order, despite its promise
to build and spread democracy, has hollowed out democratic systems to
turn them into corporate leviathans.
Democracy, especially in the United States, is a farce, vomiting up rightwing demagogues such as Donald Trump, who has a chance to become the
Republican presidential nominee and perhaps even president, or slick,
dishonest corporate stooges such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and, if
he follows through on his promise to support the Democratic nominee, even
Bernie Sanders. The labels liberal and conservative are meaningless in
the neoliberal order. Political elites, Democrat or Republican, serve the
demands of corporations and empire. They are facilitators, along with most
of the media and most of academia, of what the political
philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of inverted totalitarianism.
The attraction of a Trump, like the attraction of Radovan
Karadzic or Slobodan Milosevicduring the breakdown of Yugoslavia, is that
his buffoonery, which is ultimately dangerous, mocks the bankruptcy of the
political charade. It lays bare the dissembling, the hypocrisy, the legalized
bribery. There is a perverted and, to many, refreshing honesty in this. The
Nazis used this tactic to take power during the Weimar Republic. The Nazis,
even in the eyes of their opponents, had the courage of their convictions,
however unsavory those convictions were. Those who believe something,
even something repugnant, are often given grudging respect.

These neoliberal forces are also rapidly destroying the ecosystem. The
Earth has not had this level of climate disruption since 250 million years
ago when it underwent the Permian-Triassic extinction, which wiped out
perhaps 90 percent of all species. This is a percentage we seem determined
to replicate. Global warming is unstoppable, with polar ice caps and glaciers
rapidly melting and sea levels certain to rise 10 or more feet within the next
few decades, flooding major coastal cities. Mega-droughts are leaving huge
patches of the Earth, including parts of Africa and Australia, the west coast
of the United States and Canada and the southwest United States, parched
and plagued by uncontrollable wildfires. We have lost 7.2 million acres to
wildfires nationwide this year, and the Forest Service has so far spent $800
million struggling to control conflagrations in California, Washington, Alaska
and other states. The very word drought is part of the deception, implying
this is somehow reversible. It isnt.
Migrants fleeing violence and hunger in countries such as Syria, Iraq,
Afghanistan, Libya and Eritrea are pouring into Europe. Two hundred
thousand of the roughly 300,000 migrants to Europe this year have landed
on the shores of Greece. Two thousand five hundred have died so far this
year in the sea, on overcrowded and dilapidated boats or in the backs of
trucks such as the one discovered last week in Austria that held 71 corpses,
including the bodies of children. This is the largest influx of refugees into
Europe since World War II, a 40 percent jump since last year. And the flood
will grow ever greater. By 2050, many climate scientists predict, between
50 million and 200 million climate refugees will have fled northward to
escape areas of the globe made uninhabitable by soaring temperatures,
droughts, famines, plagues, coastal flooding and the chaos of failed states.
The physical, environmental, social and political disintegration is reflected

in an upsurge of nihilistic violence driven by rage. Crazed gunmen carry out

massacres in shopping malls, movie theaters, churches and schools in the
United States. Boko Haram and Islamic State, or ISIS, are on killing
rampages. Suicide attackers methodically commit deadly mayhem in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, Algeria, Israel and the Palestinian
territories, Iran, Tunisia, Lebanon, Morocco, Turkey, Mauritania, Indonesia,
Sri Lanka, China, Nigeria, Russia, India and Pakistan. They struck the United
States on Sept. 11, 2001, and in 2010 when Andrew Joseph Stack III flew a
light plane into a building in Austin, Texas, that housed offices of the
Internal Revenue Service. Fanaticism is bred by hopelessness and despair. It
is not the product of religion, although religion often becomes the sacral
veneer for violence. The more desperate people become, the more this
nihilistic violence will spread.
The old is dying, the new struggles to be born, and in the interregnum
there are many morbid symptoms, the theorist Antonio Gramsci wrote.
These morbid symptoms will expand until we radically reconfigure how
we relate to each other and the ecosystem. But there is no guarantee such
a reconfiguration is possible, especially if the elites manage to cling to
power through their pervasive global security and surveillance apparatus
and heavily militarized police forces. If we do not overthrow this neoliberal
system, and overthrow it soon, we will unleash a Hobbesian nightmare of
escalating state violence and counterviolence. Masses of the poor will be
condemned to misery and death. Some will try to violently resist. A tiny
elite, living in a modern version of Versailles or the Forbidden City, will have
access to amenities denied to everyone else. Hatred will become the
primary ideology.
The attraction of Islamic State, which has up to 30,000 foreign fighters, is

that it articulates the rage felt by the wretched of the earth and has thrown
off the shackles of Western domination. It defies the neoliberal attempt to
turn the oppressed into human refuse. You can condemn the groups
medieval vision of a Muslim state and its campaigns of terror against
Shiites, Yazidis, Christians, women and homosexualswhich I dobut the
anguish that inspires this savagery is genuine; you can condemn the racism
of white supremacists who are flocking to Trumpas I dobut what they
are responding to is their similar frustration and despair. The neoliberal
order, by turning people into superfluous labor and by extension
superfluous human beings, orchestrated this anger. The only hope left is to
re-integrate the dispossessed into the global economy, to give them a
sense of possibility and hope, to give them a future. Short of that, nothing
will stem the fanaticism.
Islamic State, much like the Christian right in the U.S., seeks a return to an
unachievable purity and utopianism, a heaven on earth. It promises to
establish a version of the seventh-century caliphate. Twentieth-century
Zionists seeking to form Israel used the same playbook when they called for
the re-creation of the mythical Jewish nation of the Bible. ISIS, as the Jewish
fighters who founded Israel did, is attempting to build its state (now the size
of Texas) though ethnic cleansing, terrorism and the use of foreign fighters.
Its utopian cause, as was the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, is
attractive to tens of millions of youths, most of them Muslims cast aside by
the neoliberal order. Islamic State offers a vision of a broken society made
whole. It offers a place and sense of identitydenied by neoliberalismto
those who embrace this vision. It calls for a turning away from the
deadening cult of the self that lies at the core of neoliberal ideology. It holds
up the sanctity of self-sacrifice. And it offers an avenue for vengeance.
Until we dismantle the neoliberal order and recover the humanistic tradition

that rejects the view that human beings and the Earth are commodities to
exploit, our form of industrialized and economic barbarity will collide with
the barbarity of those who oppose us. The only choice offered by
bourgeois society, as Friedrich Engels knew, is socialism or regression
into barbarism. It is time we make this choice.
We in the United States are not morally superior to Islamic State. We are
responsible for over a million dead in Iraq and 4 million Iraqis who have
been displaced or forced to become refugees. We kill in greater numbers.
We kill more indiscriminately. Our drones, warplanes, heavy artillery, naval
bombardments, machine guns, missiles and so-called special forcesstaterun death squadshave decapitated far more people, including children,
than Islamic State has. When Islamic State burned a Jordanian pilot alive in
a cage it replicated what the United States does daily to families by
incinerating them in their homes in bombing strikes. It replicated what
Israeli warplanes do in Gaza. Yes, what Islamic State did was cruder. But
morally it was the same.
I once asked the co-founder of the militant group Hamas, Dr. Abdel Aziz alRantisi, why Hamas sanctioned suicide bombings, which left Israeli civilians
and children dead, when the Palestinians had the moral high ground as an
occupied people. We will stop killing their children and civilians as soon as
they stop killing our children and civilians, he told me. He noted that the
number of Israeli children who had been killed at that time was a couple of
dozen, as opposed to hundreds of Palestinian children. Since 2000, 133
Israeli and 2,061 Palestinian children have lost their lives. Suicide bombing
is an act of desperation. It is, like Israels saturation bombing of Gaza, a war
crime. But when seen as a response to unchecked state terror it is
understandable. Dr. Rantisi was assassinated in April 2004 by Israel when it
fired a Hellfire missile at his car in Gaza from an Apache attack helicopter.

His son Mohammed, in the vehicle with him, also died in the attack. The
downward spiral, more than a decade after these murders, continues.
Those who oppose us offer a vision of a new world. We offer nothing in
return. They offer a counterweight to the neoliberal lie. They speak for its
victims, trapped in squalid slums in the Middle East, Africa, Europe and
North America. They condemn the grotesque hedonism, the society of
spectacle, rejection of the sacred, profligate consumption, personal wealth
as the primary basis for respect and authority, blind celebration of the
technocrat, sexual commodificationincluding a culture dominated by
pornographyand the drug-induced lethargy that are used by all dying
regimes to keep the masses distracted and disempowered. Many jihadis,
before they became violent fundamentalists, fell victim to these forces.
There are hundreds of millions of people like them who have been betrayed
by the neoliberal order. They are a powder keg. And we offer them nothing.
The wretched of the earth increasingly do not believe in the efficacy of
nonviolence. They saw how nonviolence failed in Tunisia, which contributes
the largest number of jihadis to the fighting in Iraq and Syria, and how it
failed in Libya, Egypt and Iraq, a country where the U.S. puppet regime
gunned down nonviolent protesters in the streets. The wretched of the
earthincluding in the United States, where we are seeing a mounting
number of assassinations at the hands of police, 23 so far this yearintend
to counter state violence with insurrectional violence. They have learned to
speak in the language we taught them. Keep shooting unarmed black men
and women in the streets of American cities while ignoring the nonviolent
protests calling for an end to the state lynching and terror, and guess what
will happen?
Once their rage explodes, they recover their lost coherence, they

experience self-knowledge through reconstruction of themselves; from afar

we see their war as the triumph of barbarity, Frantz Fanon wrote in The
Wretched of the Earth, but it proceeds on its own to gradually emancipate
the fighter and progressively eliminates the colonial darkness inside and
out. As soon as it begins it is merciless. Either one must remain terrified or
become terrifyingwhich means surrendering to the dissociations of a
fabricated life or conquering the unity of ones native soil. When the
peasants lay hands on a gun, the old myths fade, and one by one the
taboos are overturned: a fighters weapon is his humanity. For in the first
phase of the revolt killing is a necessity: killing a European is killing two
birds with one stone, eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed:
leaving one man dead and the other man free.
Do those in power read history? Or maybe this is what they want. Once the
wretched of the earth morph into Islamic State, or adopt counterviolence,
the neoliberal order can lift the final fetters that are imposed upon it and
start to kill with impunity. Neoliberal ideologues, after all, are also utopian
fanatics. And they, too, know only how to speak in the language of force.
They are our version of Islamic State.
The binary world the neoliberals createda world of masters and serfs, a
world where the wretched of the earth are demonized and subdued by a
loss of freedom, by austerity and violence, a world where only the
powerful and the wealthy have privileges and rightswill condemn us to a
horrifying dystopia. The emerging revolt, inchoate, seemingly disconnected,
is rising up from the bowels of the earth. We see its flashes and spurts. We
see its ideology of rage and anguish. We see its utopianism and its corpses.
The more despair and desperation are manufactured by the neoliberal
order, whether in Athens, Baghdad or Ferguson, the more the forces of
state repression are used to quell unrest and extract the last drops of blood

from collapsing economies, the more violence will become the primary
language of resistance.
Those of us who seek to create a world that has hope of viability have little
time left.
The neoliberal order, despoiling the Earth and enslaving the vulnerable, has
to be eradicated. This will happen only when we place ourselves in direct
opposition to it, when we are willing to engage in the acts of self-sacrifice
and sustained revolt that allow us to obstruct and dismantle every aspect of
neoliberal machinery. I believe we can do this through nonviolence. But I
am not blind to the inevitable rise of counterviolence, caused by the myopia
and greed of the neoliberal mandarins. Peace and harmony may not engulf
the Earth if we succeed, but if we do not remove the ruling elites from
power, if we do not overthrow the neoliberal order, and if we do not do it
soon, we are doomed.
2015 TruthDig

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.

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