{"id":168389,"date":"2020-09-14T12:01:10","date_gmt":"2020-09-14T11:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=168389"},"modified":"2020-09-13T09:36:06","modified_gmt":"2020-09-13T08:36:06","slug":"american-bloodlands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/09\/american-bloodlands\/","title":{"rendered":"American Bloodlands"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The enraged, polarized segments of the population are rapidly consolidating as the political center disintegrates.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
8 Sep 2020 – <\/em>The tinder that could soon ignite widespread violent conflagrations throughout the United States lies ominously stacked around us. Millions of disenfranchised white Americans, who see no way out of their economic and social misery, struggling with an emotional void, are seething with rage against a corrupt ruling class and bankrupt liberal elite that presides over political stagnation and grotesque, mounting social inequality. Millions more alienated young men and women, also locked out of the economy and with no realistic prospect for advancement or integration, gripped by the same emotional void, have harnessed their fury in the name of tearing down the governing structures and anti-fascism. The enraged, polarized segments of the population are rapidly consolidating as the political center disintegrates.<\/div>\n
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They stand poised to tear apart the United States, awash in military-grade weapons, unable to cope with the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout, cursed with militarized police forces that function as internal armies of occupation and de facto allies of the neofascists. The spark that usually sets such tinder ablaze is martyrdom. Aaron \u201cJay\u201d Danielson, a supporter of the right-wing group Patriot Prayer, was wearing a loaded Glock pistol in a holster and had bear spray and an expandable metal baton when he was shot dead on August 29, allegedly by Michael Forest Reinoehl, a supporter of antifa, in the streets of Portland. A woman in the crowd can be heard shouting after the shooting: \u201cI am not sad that a fucking fascist died tonight.\u201d On Thursday, Reinoehl, allegedly armed with a handgun, was shot and killed by federal agents in Washington state.<\/div>\n
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Once people start being sacrificed for the cause, it takes little for demagogues of the radical left and the radical right to insist that self-preservation necessitates violence and is a prerequisite for victory.<\/p>\n

Violence is a narcotic. It fills the emotional void. It imparts a feeling of God-like omnipotence to the powerless. It instills feelings of comradeship and belonging to the alienated. It gives to social outcasts, crippled by humiliation and rejection, a sense of meaning and higher purpose. It obliterates the despair that once defined their lives and replaces it with feelings of ecstatic self-importance and self-adulation, a state of being outside the self. The world suddenly becomes a Manichean battleground between them and us, the forces of dark and the forces of light.<\/p>\n

When I wrote War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>a reflection on the culture of war after two decades as a correspondent in Central America, Africa, The Middle East and the Balkans, I meant it. I have seen this dark elixir at work in other disintegrating societies. I know too intimately the rush that violence engenders, the overpowering lusts that seize a mob or armed unit when it destroys, even human beings, and the heady attraction of suspending all personal morality and individual responsibility for the wild intoxication of violence. It is the absence of empathy, perhaps the best definition of evil.<\/p>\n

The words left and right, once violence becomes the primary form of communication, are meaningless. These are death cults. They venerate and worship death. The martyrs justify the murder of the enemy, including the detested voices that call for understanding, reconciliation and nonviolence. To suggest anything other than the total annihilation of the enemy\u2014and the enemy includes all who do not fully and uncritically support the cause\u2014is apostasy. It is the dead who rule. Their voices cry out from beyond the grave demanding vengeance and new heroes and martyrs to take their place. There are constant and repeated acts of remembrance for the fallen.<\/p>\n

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The body of Michael Reinoehl is taken away early Friday morning, Sept. 4, 2020, in Lacey, WA. Reinoehl was killed Thursday night as investigators moved in to arrest him after he had been suspected of fatally shooting a supporter of a right-wing group in Portland, Oregon, last week after a caravan of Donald Trump backers rode through downtown Portland.
\n[AP Photo\/Ted S. Warren]<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This cult of the dead is integral to combat units in the military. Those who attend the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program, an 8-week course held at Fort Benning, Georgia, to become an Army Ranger must select a \u201cRanger in the sky\u201d who was killed in action. Recruits, who are warned not to pick Pat Tillman<\/a>, are required to know the details of the dead Ranger\u2019s personal life before enlistment and his military career. They must carry this information on a piece of paper with them at all times. It is an inspectable item. Idealists, seeking to lift themselves up from the depths of social obscurity and be f\u00eated as heroes, become, whether as Army Rangers or members of violent militias, willing sacrificial victims. But as deaths accumulate, these martyrs, once so important and precious, disappear into faceless, nameless piles of corpses.<\/p>\n

The Nazi Party in 1930 found its primary martyr in the 19-year-old brownshirt Horst Wessel who led a branch of the Nazi paramilitaries that attacked Communists, especially those who made up the rival Communist militia the Red Front-Fighters\u2019 League (RFB). Wessel was shot dead by Albrecht \u201cAli\u201d H\u00f6hler, a Communist militant and petty criminal \u2014 later assassinated by the Nazis \u2014 after a complaint was made to the party about Wessel by his Communist landlady. Wessel instantly became a \u201cmartyr for the Third Reich.\u201d The Horst Wessel song became the official anthem of the Nazi Party. Fascist and Communist violence, with deaths on both sides, exploded in the streets of Weimar Germany in the early 1930s. The mayhem, much of it instigated by the fascists, eventually exhausted the German public and made it susceptible to the right-wing and fascist promises to impose law and order.<\/p>\n

Martyrdom also played a central role in the eruption of the war in the former Yugoslavia. On March 1, 1992, a wedding procession of Bosnian Serbs in Sarajevo was attacked by Ramiz Delali\u0107<\/a>, a career criminal and a Muslim known by his nickname\u0106elo. The father of the groom, Nikola Gardovi\u0107, was killed. A Serbian Orthodox priest was wounded. The shooting of Gardovi\u0107, like that of Wessel, was used by Serb nationalists to whip up a blood fury. It saw Serbs erect armed barricades and roadblocks throughout the city, that led not long afterwards to a war in which most of Bosnia was destroyed, 2.2 million people were displaced from their homes and at least 100,000 died.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is the first death which infects everyone with the feeling of being threatened.\u201d — <\/strong><\/em>Elias Canetti<\/cite><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I watched many funerals in Gaza for Palestinian martyrs. They were little more than recruiting ceremonies for militants and suicide bombers. A truck with a generator in the back and huge loudspeakers on the cab would be at the head of the funeral procession. The speakers would blast out verses from the Koran, along with slogans calling on heroes to fight and die for Palestine and become a \u201cshaheed,\u201d or martyr. Young boys would run alongside or behind the truck. The funeral processions made their way slowly down the dusty, narrow streets of the refugee camps, past the concrete hovels, the walls decorated with pictures of the newest martyr or murals that depicted past attacks, such as a bus with the Israeli Star of David on it being consumed in a fiery explosion. \u201cDon\u2019t be merciful to those inside,\u201d the Arabic script read below the picture of the bus. \u201cBlow it up! Hit it!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is the first death which infects everyone with the feeling of being threatened,\u201d wrote Elias Canetti, a Bulgarian refugee from Nazi persecution, in \u201cCrowds and Power\u201d<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is impossible to overrate the part played by the first dead man in the kindling of wars. Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim. It need not be anyone of particular importance, and can even be someone quite unknown. Nothing matters except his death; and it must be believed that the enemy is responsible for this. Every possible cause of his death is suppressed except one: his membership of the group to which one belongs oneself.\u201d<\/p>\n

The flashing red lights are all around us. Joe Biden and the Democratic Party will do little to restore the social bonds or address the social inequality and disenfranchisement of tens of millions of Americans, now facing evictions and bankruptcy, which is fueling the social collapse. Donald Trump and the Republican Party, along with media outlets such as FOX News, in a bid to retain power, are fanning the flames of violence, seeing in the incitement of far-right mobs a route to a ruthless police state.<\/p>\n

In armed conflicts, facts and truth no longer matter. Lies become, if used to further the cause, righteous. Truth, if it hurts the cause, is blasphemy. If your side commits an atrocity, it\u2019s justified by an atrocity, real or invented, carried out by the enemy. The ends always justify the means. The moral universe is banished, replaced by a self-serving pseudo-morality.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the beginning war looks and feels like love,\u201d I wrote in War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning<\/em>. \u201cBut unlike love it gives nothing in return but an ever deepening dependence, like all narcotics, on the road to self-destruction. It does not affirm but places upon us greater and greater demands. It destroys the outside world until it is hard to live outside war\u2019s grip. It takes a higher and higher dose to achieve any thrill. Finally, one ingests war only to remain numb. The world outside becomes, as Freud wrote, \u2018uncanny.\u2019 The familiar becomes strangely unfamiliar \u2014 many who have been to war find this when they return home. The world we once understood and longed to return to stands before us as alien, strange, and beyond our grasp.\u201d<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for\u00a0<\/em>The New York Times,\u00a0where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for\u00a0<\/em>The Dallas Morning News,\u00a0The Christian Science Monitor, and<\/em> NPR. Until this month, he wrote a weekly column for the online magazine\u00a0<\/em>Truthdig. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated <\/em>RT America show\u00a0<\/em>On Contact.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – scheerpost.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

8 Sep 2020 – The tinder that could soon ignite widespread violent conflagrations throughout the United States lies ominously stacked around us. Millions of disenfranchised white Americans, who see no way out of their economic and social misery, struggling with an emotional void, are seething with rage against a corrupt ruling class and bankrupt liberal elite that presides over political stagnation and grotesque, mounting social inequality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":168165,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[867,491,1126,1050,545,2114,70],"class_list":["post-168389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-anglo-america","tag-empires","tag-hegemony","tag-imperialism","tag-neoliberalism","tag-pariah-state","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168389\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}