Memorial art for the 2010 anniversary of the murder of Rachel. Rachel Corrie was rebelling against a Zionist soldier in a Caterpillar tank/tractor the size of the one pictured, simply by standing between him and a home.
Rachel paid a high price for her "rebellion" but became an inspiration to millions in the process. She is an international hero revered and remembered annually because she gave her life for Palestine.The reason I am posting this article from Truthdig is because I am astonished. HOW LONG does it take to wake people up to the truth? This journalist, Chris Hedges, is a smart man. Truthdig is supposed to be an alternative paper that "digs deep for the truth." So why is there only a smidgen of truth and a lot ignored in his article?
Mordechai Vanunu, reluctant hero, former Israeli nuclear technician, is the longest serving prisoner of conscience in the world, 'the preeminent hero of the nuclear age." Amnesty International described the conditions of his ordeal as "cruel, inhuman, and degrading." Vanunu never wavered from his principles.
Student Natalia Garcia protests last week on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley during a day of nationwide demonstrations against cuts in education funding.By Chris Hedges
March 10, 2010
There are no constraints left to halt America’s slide into a totalitarian capitalism.
Electoral politics are a sham.
The media have been debased and defanged by corporate owners.
The working class has been impoverished and is now being plunged into profound despair.
The legal system has been corrupted to serve corporate interests.
Popular institutions, from labor unions to political parties, have been destroyed or emasculated by corporate power.
And any form of protest, no matter how tepid, is blocked by an internal security apparatus that is starting to rival that of the East German secret police.
The mounting anger and hatred, coursing through the bloodstream of the body politic, make violence and counter-violence inevitable.
Brace yourself.
The American empire is over.
And the descent is going to be horrifying.
Not a single word of the above can be disputed. Not mentioned are the millions of homeless and unemployed, the hundreds of thousands of sick Veterans who will need care when they return, IF they are not just killed off over there by more and more fighting.
Jew Benjamin H. Freedman, Hero, rebelled against the Zionists at great risk to himself. By his actions in words, he turned his back on the Jewish race, and exposed their agenda to the rest of the world.
Those singled out as internal enemies will include people of color, immigrants, gays, intellectuals, feminists, Jews, Muslims, union leaders and those defined as “liberals.” They will be condemned as anti-American and blamed for our decline.
Here I disagree. It is my feeling that feminism is just fine where it is as far as the lawmakers are concerned. It is one of the basic tenets of Communism, and there is a reason that homosexuality is being shoved forward as part of an agenda perhaps Mr. Hedges just avoids thinking about.
The economic collapse, which remains mysterious and enigmatic to most Americans, will be pinned by demagogues and hate-mongers on these hapless scapegoats. And the random acts of violence, which are already leaping up around the fringes of American society, will justify harsh measures of internal control that will snuff out the final vestiges of our democracy.
He has it right here. "Mysterious and enigmatic"? try unheard of, ignored, head in the sand, and not to be noticed until it hurts them itself. The scapegoats will be more the corporate ceo's and the bankers, because the American people have seen those huge bailouts and, although they are not too involved on the whole, when it hits them personally, they will remember.
The corporate forces that destroyed the country will use the information systems they control to mask their culpability. The old game of blaming the weak and the marginal, a staple of despotic regimes, will empower the dark undercurrents of sadism and violence within American society and deflect attention from the corporate vampires that have drained the blood of the country.
I doubt this. Perhaps for the wealthy or the better off, but for the average person, they will remember who sent those notices to evict, or of repossession.
“We are going to be poorer,” David Cay Johnston told me.
Tell them! America is going through the withdrawal process from which she will emerge as a brand new third world country as the shift of international power transits to China and others.
Ernst Zundel is another international hero. This vicious looking man has just been released after spending 8 years in solitary confinement in Germany and been harassed all of his adult life for simply questioning aspects of the Holocaust as the Zionists insist it happened which involves truths they cannot afford to have disclosed. They hold zero tolerance but Mr. Zundel put himself and his principles on the line, another reluctant hero.
Johnston was the tax reporter of The New York Times for 13 years and has written on how the corporate state rigged the system against us. He is the author of “Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You With the Bill,” a book about hidden subsidies, rigged markets and corporate socialism.
“Health care is going to eat up more and more of our income. We are going to have less and less for other things. We are going to have some huge disasters sooner or later caused by our failure to invest.
Dams and bridges will break. Buildings will collapse. There are water mains that are 25 to 50 feet wide. There will be huge infrastructure disasters.
Our intellectual resources are in decline. We are failing to educate young people and instill in them rigor. We are going to continue to pour money into the military.
I think it is possible, I do not say it is probable, that we will have a revolution, a civil war that will see the end of the United States of America.”
America is being turned into a country that supplies fodder for the war machine in the form of young males. Increasingly as jobs disappear, the ranks are filled with disenfranchised angry young men with no other options in life. If they stood united and refused to serve, overflowing the jails with their refusals, things might change. As for the crumbling infrastructure, the layout of America is in a state of flux and nothing will move a populace so swiftly and a well placed flood or "assisted" act of nature.
Dr. Jeff Halper, is co-founder and Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD).Over the years he has been repeatedly arrested and used his imprisonment time to pen his moving books. Halper has created a new mode of Israeli peace activity based on nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience to the Occupied Territories.\
These things are NOT accidental as it seems to be indicated in this last passage. They have been planned this way. Aware people have been telling you about these things for decades but only now is it being noticed. The American eduction system has been being hacked away at for a hundred years and it is just now beginning to be obvious what is being done, by those who still can read of have the power of independent thought and reasoning! This subject is clarified in the three following quotes:
Only twenty-nine percent of Americans have basic reading and computing skills. One out of every twenty Americans lacks the ability to understand what is going on in the world or to develop an informed opinion for voting. With an illiterate, uneducated American citizenry, unable to understand what's happening in the world, it's no wonder that a fascist cabal has been able to take over the United States." "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. " ~ Thomas Jefferson, January 6, 1816"Some thirty million adults in the U.S. do not have the skills to perform even the most basic tasks such as adding numbers on a bank slip, identifying a place on a map, or reading directions for taking a medication.
Eleven million Americans are totally illiterate in English.
"America today is a combat zone where the War Against Intelligence is constantly being waged. Unfortunately, the rulers are currently winning: Americans are progressively losing their ability to understand what is happening in the world around them.Americans are unable to see that the cabal is using the pretext of the war against terrorism to destroy essential constitutional liberties. Billions of dollars have been stolen by the wealthy in the bailout scam, while the working class is devastated through unemployment and home foreclosures.A poor person is jailed for a $20 theft, but a plutocrat is allowed to steal the pension fund of thousands of workers without penalty."
THE DESTRUCTION OF AMERICAN EDUCATION
THE DELIBERATE DUMBING DOWN OF AMERICA
“If we see the end of this country it will come from the right and our failure to provide people with the basic necessities of life,” said Johnston.
This is already happening to millions
“Revolutions occur when young men see the present as worse than the unknown future. We are not there. But it will not take a lot to get there.
The politicians running for office who are denigrating the government, who are saying there are traitors in Congress, who say we do not need the IRS, this when no government in the history of the world has existed without a tax enforcement agency, are sowing the seeds for the destruction of the country.
A lot of the people on the right hate the United States of America. They would say they hate the people they are arrayed against. But the whole idea of the United States is that we criticize the government. We remake it to serve our interests. They do not want that kind of society.
William Cooper, assassinated in broad daylight by the CIA who just left him to rot. Cooper had the chutzpah to be not only a brilliant researcher and rebel, but to have a radio station to tell the world the doings of the secret societies. He is much missed but left behind a wealth of material.
They reject, as Aristotle said, the idea that democracy is to rule and to be ruled in turns. They see a world where they are right and that is it. If we do not want to do it their way we should be vanquished. This is not the idea on which the United States was founded.”
It is hard to see how this can be prevented. The engines of social reform are dead. Liberal apologists, who long ago should have abandoned the Democratic Party, continue to make pathetic appeals to a tone-deaf corporate state and Barack Obama while the working and middle class are ruthlessly stripped of rights, income and jobs.
Mr. Hedges, have you not figured out that both parties are owned by the same people, that a two party system is next to useless? That there is a difference between Liberal and Republican is a farce that the American people should be told about. Instead you perpetrate the myth.
The two party system as it stands today should be tossed to the proverbial political scrap heap. Republicans and Democrats no longer have any clue what their respective parties even stand for anymore. The entire process has become a wild farce, a horse race in which the bets are rigged and nobody wins. This is because the leadership of both major parties follows the same globalist agenda.
A Democratic president like Obama claim to be humanitarian "defenders of personal liberty" while supporting the same exact "Big Brother" bills as Bush, and expanding government even further, leading to historical deficits. A Republican like Bush claims to be conservative while implementing enormous government expansion projects, and instituting laws that lead to police state conditions, such as the Patriot Act, or the FISA domestic spying bill.
Liberals self-righteously condemn imperial wars and the looting of the U.S. Treasury by Wall Street but not the Democrats who are responsible. And the longer the liberal class dithers and speaks in the bloodless language of policies and programs, the more hated and irrelevant it becomes. No one has discredited American liberalism more than liberals themselves. And I do not hold out any hope for their reform.
Tristan Anderson, another rebel who paid a price for putting his money where his mouth is, was shot by a Zionist soldier for simply standing in support of a peaceful action in Palestine.
We have entered an age in which, as William Butler Yeats wrote, “the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
How do we resist?
How, if this descent is inevitable,
as I believe it is, do we fight back?
Why should we resist at all?
Why not give in to cynicism and despair?
Why not carve out as comfortable a niche as possible within the embrace of the corporate state and spend our lives attempting to satiate our private needs?
The power elite, including most of those who graduate from our top universities and our liberal and intellectual classes, have sold out for personal comfort.
Why not us?
Rebels are not always what they seem, alas. The enemy, ever vigilant, can twist our feelings and intentions against us if we are not watchful. The two women above, Gloria Steinam and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, leaders of the feminist movement, were both hired by the CIA for the Rockefellers to usher in a wave of feminism that was one of the cornerstones of destroying Western society. To any who deny this truth, notice that their pose attests to their allegiance ~ not to the women of the West but to the Communist party. Hughes' specialty was creating daycares to get the children into state control at an every younger age for earlier indoctrination.The French moral philosopher Albert Camus argued that we are separated from each other. Our lives are meaningless. We cannot influence fate. We will all die and our individual being will be obliterated. And yet Camus wrote that “one of the only coherent philosophical positions is revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his obscurity. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.”
“A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object,” Camus warned. “But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.”
The rebel, for Camus, stands with the oppressed ~ the unemployed workers being thrust into impoverishment and misery by the corporate state, the Palestinians in Gaza, the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the disappeared who are held in our global black sites, the poor in our inner cities and depressed rural communities, immigrants and those locked away in our prison system.
This Palestinian child, the result of 4 generations of suppression, learns to resist and rebel from a very early age. He already knows this is the only hope of freedom some day.
At last, Mr. Hedges and I begin to agree on something. Camus speaks only the truths here.
To stand with them does not mean to collaborate with parties, such as the Democrats, who can mouth the words of justice while carrying out acts of oppression. It means open and direct defiance.
Yes, truly it stands with defiance, but NOT RIOTING. The NWO WANTS rioting in order to justify martial law and our further loss of freedoms.
The power structure and its liberal apologists dismiss the rebel as impractical and see the rebel’s outsider stance as counterproductive.
They condemn the rebel for expressing anger at injustice.
The elites and their apologists call for calm and patience.
They use the hypocritical language of spirituality, compromise, generosity and compassion to argue that the only alternative is to accept and work with the systems of power.
To think I once actually BELIEVED that BS!
The rebel, however, is beholden to a moral commitment that makes it impossible to stand with the power elite.
The rebel refuses to be bought off with foundation grants, invitations to the White House, television appearances, book contracts, academic appointments or empty rhetoric.
The rebel is not concerned with self-promotion or public opinion.
The rebel knows that, as Augustine wrote, hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage ~ anger at the way things are and the courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.
The rebel is aware that virtue is not rewarded.
The act of rebellion defines itself.
Prague, 18 August 1990 ~ Prague Castle, Václav Havel receives the Rolling Stones on the day of their legendary appearance at Strahov Stadium, the first concert by in Czechoslovakia after the collapse of the Communist régime
“You do not become a ‘dissident’ just because you decide
one day to take up this most unusual career.
You are thrown into it by your
personal sense of responsibility, combined
with a complex set of external circumstances.
You are cast out of the existing structures
and placed in a position of conflict with them.
It begins as an attempt to do your work well,
and ends with being branded an enemy of society.
The dissident does not operate in
the realm of genuine power at all.
He is not seeking power.
He has no desire for office and does not gather votes.
He does not attempt to charm the public.He offers nothing and promises nothing.
He can offer, if anything, only his own skin ~
and he offers it solely because he has no other way
of affirming the truth he stands for.
His actions simply articulate his dignity
as a citizen, regardless of the cost.”
Those in power have disarmed the liberal class. They do not argue that the current system is just or good, because they cannot, but they have convinced liberals that there is no alternative.
But we are not slaves.
We have a choice.
We can refuse to be either
a victim or an executioner.
We have the moral capacity to say no,
to refuse to cooperate.
Any boycott or demonstration, any occupation or sit-in, any strike, any act of obstruction or sabotage, any refusal to pay taxes, any fast, any popular movement and any act of civil disobedience ignites the soul of the rebel and exposes the dead hand of authority.
This Vietnamese Buddhist monk sits impassively in the central market square, he has set himself on fire performing a ritual suicide in protest against governmental anti-Buddhist policies.
“There is a time when
the operation of the machine
becomes so odious,
makes you so sick at heart,
that you can’t take part;
you can’t even passively take part,
and you’ve got to put your bodies
upon the gears and upon the wheels,
upon the levers, upon all the apparatus,
and you’ve got to make it stop,”
Mario Savio said in 1964.
YES, YES, YES!
This is commonly known as
"putting your money where your mouth is".
“And you’ve got to indicate
to the people who run it,
to the people who own it,
that unless you’re free,
the machine will be prevented
from working at all.”
the capacity to refuse to cooperate,
offers us the only route left to personal freedom
and a life with meaning.
Rebellion is its own justification.
The student placing flowers in the muzzles of rifles at Kent State U in 1970 was killed along with 3 others within moments of the snapping of this famous photo. The students were protesting the war. In this case, peaceful protest and rebellion became the first time that the militia turned on American citizens. Those of us who come out of the religious left have no quarrel with Camus. Camus is right about the absurdity of existence, right about finding worth in the act of rebellion rather than some bizarre dream of an afterlife or Sunday School fantasy that God rewards the just and the good.
“Oh my soul,” the ancient Greek poet Pindar wrote, “do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.”
We differ with Camus only in that we have faith that rebellion is not ultimately meaningless.
to be an assassination from ambush.
It will be a slow extinction from
apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
Rebellion allows us to be free and independent human beings, but rebellion also chips away, however imperceptibly, at the edifice of the oppressor and sustains the dim flames of hope and love.
And in moments of profound human despair these flames are never insignificant.
They keep alive the capacity to be human.
We must become, as Camus said, so absolutely free that “existence is an act of rebellion.”
Your voice and actions MUST be heard!How will you be able to tell your children you did nothing?
HUGO CHAVEZ GIVES US TIP #1 FOR WAGING SUCCESSFUL REBELLION:
The first principal of nonviolent action
is that of noncooperation
with everything humiliating.
Bravo, Noor, my friend....
ReplyDeleteThis is exactly why I too am a rebel and very proud of it!