This is a re-posting of an article posted on Truthdig last Monday entitled, "Colonized by Corporations". While it offers some useful perspectives on revolutions, it appears to me to be primarily a more sophisticated version of his February article entitled, "The Cancer in Occupy", in which he rather hysterically trashed the Oakland Black Bloc anarchists for smashing a few windows. That article has already been sufficiently critiqued--see this, this, and this.
His most useful contribution in this essay is to highlight the growing status of American citizens as colonial subjects in this globalized New World Order. Hedges is very well educated (Harvard) and well read. He borrows the following insight from Robert E. Gamer’s book The Developing Nations:
We have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized. We are controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty to the nation. They strip us of our resources, keep us politically passive and enrich themselves at our expense. The mechanisms of control are familiar to those whom the Martinique-born French psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” including African-Americans. The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well as criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and instability—keenly felt this past weekend by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment benefits—ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward survival.However, the rest of the essay is filled with a very selective reading of revolutions in history carefully laced with his theme of non-violence to prove the alternative argument: non-violence must be the only method of confronting the Empire. His constant harping on this theme might suggest that activists were attacking police with knives and guns rather than vandalizing property.
I hesitated to post this article at all, but I thought it useful as an example of a carefully crafted piece that makes essentially the same argument as his February article, and for the same purpose--to discourage any application of more militant tactics beyond complete passive resistance.
I also dislike the pretentious title of this article, but I doubt that Hedges is responsible for that. What is more worrying is the framing of the article this way, and the possible consequences. Whether consciously entitled this way or not, it serves the purpose of helping to drive a wedge through the US Occupy movement. Strategy and tactics can only be decided by the Occupiers themselves through their experience, not by intellectual elites.
