Posted on Nov 7, 2011
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| AP / Bebeto Matthews |
Police arrest Occupy Wall Street protesters as they staged a sit-down at Goldman Sachs headquarters on Thursday in New York.
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By Chris Hedges
Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges,
an activist, an author and a member of a reporting team that won a 2002
Pulitzer Prize, wrote this article after he was released from custody
following his arrest last Thursday. He and about 15 other participants
in the Occupy Wall Street movement were detained as they protested
outside the global headquarters of Goldman Sachs in lower Manhattan.
Faces appeared to me moments before the New
York City police arrested us Thursday in front of Goldman Sachs. They
were not the faces of the smug Goldman Sachs employees, who peered at us
through the revolving glass doors and lobby windows, a pathetic
collection of middle-aged fraternity and sorority members. They were not
the faces of the blue-uniformed police with their dangling cords of
white and black plastic handcuffs, or the thuggish Goldman Sachs
security personnel, whose buzz cuts and dead eyes reminded me of the
East German secret police, the Stasi. They were not the faces of the
demonstrators around me, the ones with massive student debts and no
jobs, the ones whose broken dreams weigh them down like a cross, the
ones whose anger and betrayal triggered the street demonstrations and
occupations for justice. They were not the faces of the onlookers—the
construction workers, who seemed cheered by the march on Goldman Sachs,
or the suited businessmen who did not. They were faraway faces. They
were the faces of children dying. They were tiny, confused, bewildered
faces I had seen in the southern Sudan, Gaza and the slums of
Brazzaville, Nairobi, Cairo and Delhi and the wars I covered. They were
faces with large, glassy eyes, above bloated bellies. They were the
small faces of children convulsed by the ravages of starvation and
disease.
I carry these faces. They do not leave me. I
look at my own children and cannot forget them, these other children
who never had a chance. War brings with it a host of horrors, including
famine, but the worst is always the human detritus that war and famine
leave behind, the small, frail bodies whose tangled limbs and vacant
eyes condemn us all. The wealthy and the powerful, the ones behind the
glass at Goldman Sachs, laughed and snapped pictures of us as if we were
a brief and odd lunchtime diversion from commodities trading, from
hoarding and profit, from this collective sickness of money worship, as
if we were creatures in a cage, which in fact we soon were.
A glass tower filled with people carefully
selected for the polish and self-assurance that come with having been
formed in institutions of privilege, whose primary attributes are a lack
of consciousness, a penchant for deception and an incapacity for
empathy or remorse. The curious onlookers behind the windows and we,
arms locked in a circle on the concrete outside, did not speak the same
language. Profit. Globalization. War. National security. These are the
words they use to justify the snuffing out of tiny lives, acts of
radical evil. Goldman Sachs’ commodities index is the most heavily
traded in the world. Those who trade it have, by buying up and hoarding
commodities futures, doubled and tripled the costs of wheat, rice and
corn. Hundreds of millions of poor across the globe are going hungry to
feed this mania for profit. The technical jargon, learned in business
schools and on trading floors, effectively masks the reality of what is
happening—murder. These are words designed to make systems operate, even
systems of death, with a cold neutrality. Peace, love and all sane
affirmative speech in temples like Goldman Sachs are, as W.H. Auden understood, “soiled, profaned, debased to a horrid mechanical screech.”
We seemed to have lost, at least until the
advent of the Occupy Wall Street movement, not only all personal
responsibility but all capacity for personal judgment. Corporate culture
absolves all of responsibility. This is part of its appeal. It relieves
all from moral choice. There is an unequivocal acceptance of ruling
principles such as unregulated capitalism and globalization as a kind of
natural law. The steady march of corporate capitalism requires a
passive acceptance of new laws and demolished regulations, of bailouts
in the trillions of dollars and the systematic looting of public funds,
of lies and deceit. The corporate culture, epitomized by Goldman Sachs,
has seeped into our classrooms, our newsrooms, our entertainment systems
and our consciousness. This corporate culture has stripped us of the
right to express ourselves outside of the narrowly accepted confines of
the established political order. It has turned us into compliant
consumers. We are forced to surrender our voice. These corporate
machines, like fraternities and sororities, also haze new recruits in
company rituals, force them to adopt an unrelenting cheerfulness, a
childish optimism and obsequiousness to authority. These corporate
rituals, bolstered by retreats and training seminars, by grueling days
that sometimes end with initiates curled up under their desks to sleep,
ensure that only the most morally supine remain. The strong and
independent are weeded out early so only the unquestioning advance
upward. Corporate culture serves a faceless system. It is, as Hannah Arendt writes, “the rule of nobody and for this very reason perhaps the least human and most cruel form of rulership.”
Our political class, and its courtiers on
the airwaves, insists that if we refuse to comply, if we step outside of
the Democratic Party, if we rebel, we will make things worse. This game
of accepting the lesser evil enables the steady erosion of justice and
corporate plundering. It enables corporations to harvest the nation and
finally the global economy, reconfiguring the world into neofeudalism,
one of masters and serfs. This game goes on until there is hardly any
action carried out by the power elite that is not a crime. It goes on
until corporate predators, who long ago decided the nation and the
planet were not worth salvaging, seize the last drops of wealth. It goes
on until moral acts, such as calling for those inside the corporate
headquarters of Goldman Sachs to be tried, see you jailed, and the
crimes of financial fraud and perjury are upheld as lawful and rewarded
by the courts, the U.S. Treasury and the Congress. And all this is done
so a handful of rapacious, immoral plutocrats like Lloyd Blankfein, the
CEO of Goldman Sachs who sucks down about $250,000 a day and who lied to
the U.S. Congress as well as his investors and the public, can use
their dirty money to retreat into their own Forbidden City or Versailles
while their underlings, basking in the arrogance of power, snap amusing
photos of the rabble outside their gates being hauled away by the
police and company goons.
It is vital that the occupation movements
direct attention away from their encampments and tent cities, beset with
the usual problems of hastily formed open societies where no one is
turned away. Attention must be directed through street protests, civil
disobedience and occupations toward the institutions that are carrying
out the assaults against the 99 percent. Banks, insurance companies,
courts where families are being foreclosed from their homes, city
offices that put these homes up for auction, schools, libraries and
firehouses that are being closed, and corporations such as General
Electric that funnel taxpayer dollars into useless weapons systems and
do not pay taxes, as well as propaganda outlets such as the New York
Post and its evil twin, Fox News, which have unleashed a vicious
propaganda war against us, all need to be targeted, shut down and
occupied. Goldman Sachs is the poster child of all that is wrong with
global capitalism, but there are many other companies whose degradation
and destruction of human life are no less egregious.
It is always the respectable classes, the
polished Ivy League graduates, the prep school boys and girls who grew
up in Greenwich, Conn., or Short Hills, N.J., who are the most
susceptible to evil. To be intelligent, as many are at least in a
narrow, analytical way, is morally neutral. These respectable citizens
are inculcated in their elitist enclaves with “values” and “norms,”
including pious acts of charity used to justify their privilege, and a
belief in the innate goodness of American power. They are trained to pay
deference to systems of authority. They are taught to believe in their
own goodness, unable to see or comprehend—and are perhaps indifferent
to—the cruelty inflicted on others by the exclusive systems they serve.
And as norms mutate and change, as the world is steadily transformed by
corporate forces into one of a small cabal of predators and a vast herd
of human prey, these elites seamlessly replace one set of “values” with
another. These elites obey the rules. They make the system work. And
they are rewarded for this. In return, they do not question.
Those who resist—the doubters, outcasts,
renegades, skeptics and rebels—rarely come from the elite. They ask
different questions. They seek something else—a life of meaning. They
have grasped Immanuel Kant’s dictum, “If justice perishes, human life on
Earth has lost its meaning.” And in their search they come to the
conclusion that, as Socrates said, it is better to suffer wrong than to
do wrong. This conclusion is rational, yet cannot be rationally
defended. It makes a leap into the moral, which is beyond rational
thought. It refuses to place a monetary value on human life. It
acknowledges human life, indeed all life, as sacred. And this is why, as
Arendt points out, the only morally reliable people when the chips are
down are not those who say “this is wrong,” or “this should not be
done,” but those who say “I can’t.”
“The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have
never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can
hold them back,” Arendt writes. “For human beings, thinking of past
matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus
stabilizing ourselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may
occur—the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil
is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no
limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole
world.”
There are streaks in my lungs, traces of
the tuberculosis that I picked up around hundreds of dying Sudanese
during the famine I covered as a foreign correspondent. I was strong and
privileged and fought off the disease. They were not and did not. The
bodies, most of them children, were dumped into hastily dug mass graves.
The scars I carry within me are the whispers of these dead. They are
the faint marks of those who never had a chance to become men or women,
to fall in love and have children of their own. I carried these scars to
the doors of Goldman Sachs. I had returned to living. Those whose last
breaths had marked my lungs had not. I placed myself at the feet of
these commodity traders to call for justice because the dead, and those
who are dying in slums and refugee camps across the planet, could not
make this journey. I see their faces. They haunt me in the day and come
to me in the dark. They force me to remember. They make me choose sides.
As the metal handcuffs were fastened around my wrists I thought of
them, as I often think of them, and I said to myself: “Free at last.
Free at last. Thank God almighty, I am free at last.”
Chris Hedges is a weekly Truthdig columnist and a fellow at The Nation Institute. His newest book is “The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.”
