Anyone who regularly follows this blog will know how much I love Chris Hedges. He's not always right though. He wrote a book a few years back called "I Don't Believe in Atheists," where he compares the "new atheists" to the religious fundamentalists they claim to oppose. Because being annoying and disrespectful on the internet is no different from driving homosexuals to suicide and flying planes into buildings. (Hedges himself is the son of a minister and graduated from a seminary. Nothing wrong with that, just giving his perspective a little context.)
He wrote an article this week called "The Cancer in Occupy," and it's sort of gone viral. I think he's wrong about much of it. Go ahead and read it if you want, because I'm going to deconstruct it. It's an attack on the black bloc anarchists. The black bloc has been showing up to Occupy movements and generally annoying the hell out of the peaceful hippies that make up most of the movement. They don't want to be associated with each other.
Hedges didn't seem to do a lot research on this.
"The real enemies, they argue, are not the corporate capitalists, but their collaborators among the unions, workers’ movements, radical intellectuals, environmental activists and populist movements such as the Zapatistas."
This confused the hell out of me, because most anarchists and marxists seem to do nothing but fetishize and romanticize the Zapatistas. I sure as hell do. Hedges then claims that anarchists call Noam Chomsky a "sellout," which doesn't make a lot of sense either, since Chomsky himself is an anarchist.
Hedges took the time to interview activists who oppose the black bloc, which is fair, but then he doesn't bother to interview anyone who supports it.
"I don’t have a problem with escalating tactics to some sort of militant resistance if it is appropriate morally, strategically and tactically,” Jensen continued. “This is true if one is going to pick up a sign, a rock or a gun. But you need to have thought it through. The Black Bloc spends more time attempting to destroy movements than they do attacking those in power. They hate the left more than they hate capitalists."
You're god damn right. First of all, the mainstream left are still capitalists. They are part of the problem. And second of all, appropriate Chomsky quote:
"I don’t bother writing about Fox News. It is too easy. What I talk about are the liberal intellectuals, the ones who portray themselves and perceive themselves as challenging power, as courageous, as standing up for truth and justice. They are basically the guardians of the faith. They set the limits. They tell us how far we can go. They say, ‘Look how courageous I am.’ But do not go one millimeter beyond that. At least for the educated sectors, they are the most dangerous in supporting power."
The mainstream left need to be criticized because they still have faith in America's state-capitalist system. This system does not work, and any attempts to work within it to achieve change, at best, will accomplish extremely little, and at worst, will absorb and indoctrinate you, like what happened to the current president. Apologizing for this system is a very convenient position to take for the privileged liberals who are supported by it, but it doesn't do a whole lot for the minorities we confine to the hell of America's prisons and ghettos in our version of apartheid; or for the innocent people we torture in secret blacksites; or for the 8 million people we have slaughtered in the third world since the end of the second world war. That's about on par with the Nazi holocaust. For the life of me, I cannot comprehend why the American left is not filled with boiling rage. Because, you know, peace and love and nonviolence worked great for the Jews.
And I can't understand why Chris Hedges isn't at least sympathetic to what the black bloc does. In "Death of the Liberal Class," he writes about how America is run by a system called "participatory fascism." In "Empire of Illusion," he writes extensively about how if things don't change drastically, and soon, we're going to see a collapse that makes the Great Depression look like peanuts. He's not a dumb person, he knows what's going on, and he knows what's at stake. You'd think he might be little more open to tactics that go beyond pleading with our oppressors for mercy.
"The Black Bloc movement is infected with a deeply disturbing hypermasculinity. This hypermasculinity, I expect, is its primary appeal."
Anger is not solely a "masculine" trait. The black bloc has many women and homosexual members, not to mention it's fiercely feminist. Hedges goes on though:
"[Hypermasculinity] taps into the lust that lurks within us to destroy, not only things but human beings. It offers the godlike power that comes with mob violence. Marching as a uniformed mass, all dressed in black to become part of an anonymous bloc, faces covered, temporarily overcomes alienation, feelings of inadequacy, powerlessness and loneliness. It imparts to those in the mob a sense of comradeship. It permits an inchoate rage to be unleashed on any target. Pity, compassion and tenderness are banished for the intoxication of power. It is the same sickness that fuels the swarms of police who pepper-spray and beat peaceful demonstrators. It is the sickness of soldiers in war. It turns human beings into beasts."
Whatever he meant by "hypermasculinity," I really do think he has a point here. Extreme leftists (like extremists of any ideology) tend to be absolutists. They have to constantly beat the hell out of "no true Scotsman." A friend of mine who's in a socialist club at her school complains to me sometimes about that culture. If you're not "pure," if you don't agree with everything Marx ever said, you're a godamm capitalist pig. The thought never occurs to them that Karl Marx was only a man, and we're allowed to disagree with him when we want to.
I could go on about this piece, but I'm sure I'd just be repeating myself. He makes a few more points, you can read it yourself and disagree with me if you want, I could be wrong, who knows. But his lack of research really pisses me off. He just generalizes and points fingers -- a stark contrast to this piece from the Nation, of all places, called "Thank You, Anarchists." Shame on Hedges for not trying to get any other side of the story. Here's an actual interview with a black bloc anarchist from London. How "hypermasculine."
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