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Truthdig / Truthdig Op-Ed
Published: Tuesday 24 July 2012
“It was the careerists who made possible the genocides, from the extermination of Native Americans to the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians to the Nazi Holocaust to Stalin’s liquidations.”
The Careerists
The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality. They collect and read the personal data gathered on tens of millions of us by the security and surveillance state. They keep the accounts of ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They build or pilot aerial drones. They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps to some and unemployment benefits or medical coverage to others. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions.
Good. Evil. These words do not mean anything to them. They are beyond morality. They are there to make corporate systems function. If insurance companies abandon tens of millions of sick to suffer and die, so be it. If banks and sheriff departments toss families out of their homes, so be it. If financial firms rob citizens of their savings, so be it. If the government shuts down schools and libraries, so be it. If the military murders children in Pakistan or Afghanistan, so be it. If commodity speculators drive up the cost of rice and corn and wheat so that they are unaffordable for hundreds of millions of poor across the planet, so be it. If Congress and the courts strip citizens of basic civil liberties, so be it. If the fossil fuel industry turns the earth into a broiler of greenhouse gases that doom us, so be it. They serve the system. The god of profit and exploitation. The most dangerous force in the industrialized world does not come from those who wield radical creeds, whether Islamic radicalism or Christian fundamentalism, but from legions of faceless bureaucrats who claw their way up layered corporate and governmental machines. They serve any system that meets their pathetic quota of needs.
These systems managers believe nothing. They have no loyalty. They are rootless. They do not think beyond their tiny, insignificant roles. They are blind and deaf. They are, at least regarding the great ideas and patterns of human civilization and history, utterly illiterate. And we churn them out of universities. Lawyers. Technocrats. Business majors. Financial managers. IT specialists. Consultants. Petroleum engineers. “Positive psychologists.” Communications majors. Cadets. Sales representatives. Computer programmers. Men and women who know no history, know no ideas. They live and think in an intellectual vacuum, a world of stultifying minutia. They are T.S. Eliot’s “the hollow men,” “the stuffed men.” “Shape without form, shade without colour,” the poet wrote. “Paralysed force, gesture without motion.”
It was the careerists who made possible the genocides, from the extermination of Native Americans to the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians to the Nazi Holocaust to Stalin’s liquidations. They were the ones who kept the trains running. They filled out the forms and presided over the property confiscations. They rationed the food while children starved. They manufactured the guns. They ran the prisons. They enforced travel bans, confiscated passports, seized bank accounts and carried out segregation. They enforced the law. They did their jobs.
Political and military careerists, backed by war profiteers, have led us into useless wars, including World War I, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. And millions followed them. Duty. Honor. Country. Carnivals of death. They sacrifice us all. In the futile battles of Verdun and the Somme in World War I, 1.8 million on both sides were killed, wounded or never found. In July of 1917 British Field Marshal Douglas Haig, despite the seas of dead, doomed even more in the mud of Passchendaele. By November, when it was clear his promised breakthrough at Passchendaele had failed, he jettisoned the initial goal—as we did in Iraq when it turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction and in Afghanistan when al-Qaida left the country—and opted for a simple war of attrition. Haig “won” if more Germans than allied troops died. Death as score card. Passchendaele took 600,000 more lives on both sides of the line before it ended. It is not a new story. Generals are almost always buffoons. Soldiers followed John the Blind, who had lost his eyesight a decade earlier, to resounding defeat at the Battle of Crécy in 1337 during the Hundred Years War. We discover that leaders are mediocrities only when it is too late.
David Lloyd George, who was the British prime minister during the Passchendaele campaign, wrote in his memoirs: “[Before the battle of Passchendaele] the Tanks Corps Staff prepared maps to show how a bombardment which obliterated the drainage would inevitably lead to a series of pools, and they located the exact spots where the waters would gather. The only reply was a peremptory order that they were to ‘Send no more of these ridiculous maps.’ Maps must conform to plans and not plans to maps. Facts that interfered with plans were impertinencies.”
Here you have the explanation of why our ruling elites do nothing about climate change, refuse to respond rationally to economic meltdown and are incapable of coping with the collapse of globalization and empire. These are circumstances that interfere with the very viability and sustainability of the system. And bureaucrats know only how to serve the system. They know only the managerial skills they ingested at West Point or Harvard Business School. They cannot think on their own. They cannot challenge assumptions or structures. They cannot intellectually or emotionally recognize that the system might implode. And so they do what Napoleon warned was the worst mistake a general could make—paint an imaginary picture of a situation and accept it as real. But we blithely ignore reality along with them. The mania for a happy ending blinds us. We do not want to believe what we see. It is too depressing. So we all retreat into collective self-delusion.
In Claude Lanzmann’s monumental documentary film “Shoah,” on the Holocaust, he interviews Filip Müller, a Czech Jew who survived the liquidations in Auschwitz as a member of the “special detail.” Müller relates this story:
“One day in 1943 when I was already in Crematorium 5, a train from Bialystok arrived. A prisoner on the ‘special detail’ saw a woman in the ‘undressing room’ who was the wife of a friend of his. He came right out and told her: ‘You are going to be exterminated. In three hours you’ll be ashes.’ The woman believed him because she knew him. She ran all over and warned to the other women. ‘We’re going to be killed. We’re going to be gassed.’ Mothers carrying their children on their shoulders didn’t want to hear that. They decided the woman was crazy. They chased her away. So she went to the men. To no avail. Not that they didn’t believe her. They’d heard rumors in the Bialystok ghetto, or in Grodno, and elsewhere. But who wanted to hear that? When she saw that no one would listen, she scratched her whole face. Out of despair. In shock. And she started to scream.”
Blaise Pascal wrote in “Pensées,” “We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us from seeing it.”
Hannah Arendt, in writing “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” noted that Adolf Eichmann was primarily motivated by “an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement.” He joined the Nazi Party because it was a good career move. “The trouble with Eichmann,” she wrote, “was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”
“The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else,” Arendt wrote. “No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”
Gitta Sereny makes the same point in her book “Into That Darkness,” about Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka. The assignment to the SS was a promotion for the Austrian policeman. Stangl was not a sadist. He was soft-spoken and polite. He loved his wife and children very much. Unlike most Nazi camp officers, he did not take Jewish women as concubines. He was efficient and highly organized. He took pride in having received an official commendation as the “best camp commander in Poland.” Prisoners were simply objects. Goods. “That was my profession,” he said. “I enjoyed it. It fulfilled me. And yes, I was ambitious about that, I won’t deny it.” When Sereny asked Stangl how as a father he could kill children, he answered that he “rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass. … [T]hey were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips. …” He later told Sereny that when he read about lemmings it reminded him of Treblinka.
Christopher Browning’s collection of essays, “The Path to Genocide,” notes that it was the “moderate,” “normal” bureaucrats, not the zealots, who made the Holocaust possible. Germaine Tillion pointed out “the tragic easiness [during the Holocaust] with which ‘decent’ people could become the most callous executioners without seeming to notice what was happening to them.” The Russian novelist Vasily Grossman in his book “Forever Flowing” observed that “the new state did not require holy apostles, fanatic, inspired builders, faithful, devout disciples. The new state did not even require servants—just clerks.”
“The most nauseating type of S.S. were to me personally the cynics who no longer genuinely believed in their cause, but went on collecting blood guilt for its own sake,” wrote Dr. Ella Lingens-Reiner in “Prisoners of Fear,” her searing memoir of Auschwitz. “Those cynics were not always brutal to the prisoners, their behavior changed with their mood. They took nothing seriously—neither themselves nor their cause, neither us nor our situation. One of the worst among them was Dr. Mengele, the Camp Doctor I have mentioned before. When a batch of newly arrived Jews was being classified into those fit for work and those fit for death, he would whistle a melody and rhythmically jerk his thumb over his right or his left shoulder—which meant ‘gas’ or ‘work.’ He thought conditions in the camp rotten, and even did a few things to improve them, but at the same time he committed murder callously, without any qualms.”
These armies of bureaucrats serve a corporate system that will quite literally kill us. They are as cold and disconnected as Mengele. They carry out minute tasks. They are docile. Compliant. They obey. They find their self-worth in the prestige and power of the corporation, in the status of their positions and in their career promotions. They assure themselves of their own goodness through their private acts as husbands, wives, mothers and fathers. They sit on school boards. They go to Rotary. They attend church. It is moral schizophrenia. They erect walls to create an isolated consciousness. They make the lethal goals of ExxonMobil or Goldman Sachs or Raytheon or insurance companies possible. They destroy the ecosystem, the economy and the body politic and turn workingmen and -women into impoverished serfs. They feel nothing. Metaphysical naiveté always ends in murder. It fragments the world. Little acts of kindness and charity mask the monstrous evil they abet. And the system rolls forward. The polar ice caps melt. The droughts rage over cropland. The drones deliver death from the sky. The state moves inexorably forward to place us in chains. The sick die. The poor starve. The prisons fill. And the careerist, plodding forward, does his or her job.
This article was originally posted on Truthdig.
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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.”
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17 comments on "The Careerists"
July 26, 2012 3:13am
It's not careerists that decided to kill millions in the gas chambers and the gulags, it's altruistsl All the abuses this article lists were enabled, initiated and justified by people who acted on perverted ideals, who denied reality so that their chosen brand of "sacrifice for the greater good" could triumph. The careerists are not the problem, the problem is those, like most of the writers at Nation of Change, who want to use force to achieve their goals because their goals serve some mythical greater good and the individual doesn't matter.
July 25, 2012 11:18am
OK, I get it--but what do you suggest we DO?
How do we mere drones all turn into "revolutionaries" and still make money to have shelter/food/clothing--when A) the mindset is so engrained B) most folks don't see a problem as long as they are "comfortable" and C) our systems are so interconnected.
...I don't see "going off the grid" as a realistic option.
I'd like to see you offer up and IDEA FOR HOW TO CHANGE THINGS rather than leaving this as a very well researched and convincing critique.
August 10, 2012 2:38am
What do we do???? You have read the conspiracy of the banking institutions over the rate setting ? As if the collusion of Wall Street the major banks and the real estate industry to defraud the American dream of home ownership. These buffoons are guilty of organized crime tactics, just the reason for the rico act. If we had any attorneys general that had a pair, or the intestinal fortitude if they happen to be women to take these monsters to task, we would be a step in the right direction....
Failing that several dozen of them swinging from the lampposts on wall street would be acceptable collateral damage,,,the Republic or the terrorist, traitors along with their politician and lobbyist buddies hanging with their eyes plucked out by the crows....would be a nice start. It worked well in the "Burning Times". After all we had no problem with the "strange fruit" Billie Holiday sang of... or the hillbillies who wrapped a log chain around a brothers neck and drug him to death behind their pick up....You want more of the same or you want the country back on track?
"What are you prepared to do" Sean Connery in The Untouchables, "They put one of yours in the hospital you put one of them in the morgue"....
That concept seemed to work fine for organized crime,,,and what are wall street, the big banks and their cronies, chopped liver???
We murdered millions to get where we are today and did it in a relatively short time, a few hundred years, ya die of starvation or for lack of health care, or you want your children to grow up with no future, and the planet devoid of human life altogether, sacrifices must be made, people have to step up and believe, if you do you will be shot down for doing so, such is the way of change and the introduction of new ideas, ask Che Gureverra, Dr. King, The Kennedy's, Malcolm X and countless others, did they make the ultimate sacrifice so that we can sit back and ask what do we do, have their sacrifices not been enough examples of what it takes???
"Power concedes nothing without a demand" Jim Morrison of the Doors said it nicely, " you are all a bunch of fucking sheep"...
If you do not know what to do I suggest reading the Constitution where it describes in no uncertain terms that it is the citizens responsibility to right the wrongs and get the train back on track, or are you comfortable with shooting Buffalo from the comfort of your coach seat?
If we all just stayed home for a month, used no electricity, candles, turned off the utilities and played or read to our children , grand children I believe within a week they would be on their knees, in two weeks they would be jumping out of skyscraper windows, by the third week it would be utter chaos, at the end of the month the virus unable to feed would expire...That's the peaceful method...
Or you can continue down the path we are on and put our futures in the likes of Romney, Palin, Obama, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Giethner, the Supreme(ly) defunct Court....and continue doing the same thing hoping for different results....
Welcome to the monkey house...
all the options are scary and are undertaken at great cost, even the coast of one's life, is it a worthwhile undertaking for your kids and g kids to have some hope of a decent world to live in? I attended every major protest beginning with the one in San Fransisco and about a half dozen in and around LA, did it make a difference, it did to me because I knew I did what I could. I am a veteran from a military family, dad was on Iwo at seventeen , his brothers flew over Europe, and this is not the country they fought were injured and one even died post WWII flying new jets.
So I would ask of you what are you prepared to do?
July 25, 2012 7:59am
Thank you Chris, I take it this is our warning once again that we are in one big concentration camp comprised of 'careerists' worker-debt slaves and indentured servants. Will that be fracking gas, nuclear power, 'clean coal' or a slower decaying and disease caused by contaminated food, water and air ? There are too many more to mention. Technological and neuro-psychology. Maybe that rf chip. Frankly everyone carrying a cell phone or at a computer is lined up to the showers through technological detonation. Think !
Blaise Pascal wrote in “Pensées,” “We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us from seeing it.”
July 25, 2012 4:00pm
@No Dough
ca·reer·ism (k-rîrzm)
n.
Pursuit of professional advancement as one's chief or sole aim: "Rampant careerism, which makes many a work place a joyless site, was in check" (Mary McGrory).
Not sure what the hell else you are talking about, but feel free to elaborate - it might be interesting.
July 24, 2012 9:41pm
What a valuable essay this was for those who are seized by perplexity and fear when contemplating the drastic turn of events they've witnessed since "the defeat of Communism" twenty-odd years ago. Many believed then with Francis Fukuyama that liberal capitalist democracy had proved to be, pragmatically and morally, the superior system for ordering society, and that it had irrevocably superseded all competing systems.
However, there were more things than were dreamt of in his philosophy, to coin a phrase.
I share with Chris Hedges a palpable unease when I reflect on the succession of Americas he and I have lived in (particularly since 1970). Victory in WWII. Generalized postwar prosperity and an expanding middle class. Global superpower. Cultural tastemaker. But subsequently or simultaneously: long economic stagnation. Growing political antagonism and sectionalist estrangement. And in this new century, military adventurism. Severe economic contraction. Politics as civil war by other means (to stand Clausewitz on his head). And, yes! Proletarianization.
Why is the much put-upon working American susceptible to the sententious analyses of our predicament put forth by the moneyed elites and their dogsbodies? Well, everybody's happy to have a promotion. When working people began to be flattered by politicians and the media as "middle class," even as their prospects eroded, they responded humanly enough by identifying their interests with those of their fellows who enjoyed a higher status and income. Reinforcing that behavior was the folklore of America as a land of opportunity, the world's richest country, etc. In short, it is an article of faith with many ambitious American that they are, by virtue of : nationality alone, or contrived appearance, or killing themselves striving to be, or going seriously into debt to simulate being, *prosperous,* lest they be condemned to suffer a drastic loss of face and a kind of civic death. (A billionaire like Warren Buffet is exempt. He is so rich that he may without risk to his reputation drive an old car and live in a modest house. Would that he had the power to convey the dispensation granted him and the values that attend on it to the rest of us.)
An important question raised by this essay is the validity of the American variant of capitalism. Money is fiction, says the sage. Silver certificate? History. Redeemable in gold? File under joke: bad. There are not enough of these precious metals in the vaults or in the ground to underpin the major currencies anyway, even if the metals themselves had an absolute, unchanging value, which plainly they don't. So, just as with the peer-driven obligation to prosper, or at least to present a simulacrum of same, money has been revealed, for your and my brief moment in the cosmos anyway, to be just one more dodgy, reified abstraction.
(But of course these delusions will reassert themselves. They have to.)
It seems capitalism is inherently inflationary, and never more so than when an economy is white-hot. (Ask the Chinese, or a Norwegian trying to buy an airshaft "condominium" for two million kroner.) In many respects this is explicable. Years ago a housing contractor said to me, "They're not making any more land." So a diminishing vital commodity is sure to get pricey. But in other respects the genesis of inflation is much ... less ... explicable. For example, the recent news that college graduates owe a trillion dollars in student loans. The debased economics revealed to be at work here should at the least, if reality should be chance prevail, create a few heretics in the Church of Higher Education, which preaches that a degree is a meal ticket engraved on sheepskin.
When the postwar boom ended in the 1970s, owing in part to our seriously underfunded spasm of bloodlust in Southeast Asia, and in part to the Arab oil boycotts, the Republicans had already settled on a strategy to counter the electoral advantage of the Democratic Party. They had a ready-made constituency among the eternally disaffected denizens of our lower latitudes (and their Copperhead brethren elsewhere), who'd been recently outraged by the Johnson administration's initiatives on civil rights. Just as appealing, from our plutocrats' point of view, was the region's long, long history of economic feudalism (free or nearly free labor, all profits to Massa). Since our moneyed elites suspected what we did not : that postwar prosperity was at an end, and that to preserve their advantages the elites had to nudge the U.S. in the direction of Latin America (a tiny middle class, lots of campesinos, and latifundistas ventriloquizing behind the scenes), what more valuable ally could they cultivate than a folk who seemed to accept that the latter-day planter class ruled by right of God's preferment, and that the lower orders derived their circumstances from the just workings of Predestination? (You could pay King Richard's Faire a visit to watch a re-enactment of this system, but it's more useful to head down-country, where the quaint workings of the l'Ancien régime de l'Angleterre are still operative.)
Since this subculture's belief system is in so many ways at variance with small-d democratic norms, how could this alliance prove to be so competitive? I think that as general anger mounted over the insults and setbacks suffered by average Americans saddled with joblessness, a wayward government and a failing economy, the VULGAR ENERGY that is the perverse strength of a subculture born irascible, contrary, and disputatious began to attract adherents. Predictably, as in 1930s Europe, partisans of scapegoating and uncompromising doctrinal rigidity began to drown out voices calling for a more measured discourse. (To be progressive is mostly to want to be reasonable, which confers no advantage in 2012.)
It pleases us to think that the kind of democracy we've historically championed is the default form of government in this new century. And in fact, every day brings fresh evidence that a zeal for democratic governance is driving people in the unlikeliest places to risk their lives in the streets in protest against authoritarianism. Their courage should hearten us. But these rebellions are unpredictable as to their outcome. Revolutionaries always invoke freedom, but are sometimes chary about granting it.
Seen in this light, it's clear that democracy is ONE IDEOLOGY AMONG MANY, and far from being prevalent in the world at large, as a few minutes of the daily news grimly demonstrate. A yearning for liberty is surely in the aspirational nature of man; but there are countervailing forces too in the human heart, like brutishness and sadism, and the most enlightened civilizations have not wholly extinguished them. Not for nothing did the Founders invoke the warning that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. (They were not being alarmist. They were, as so often, prescient.)
Chris Hedges clearly believes in values that I want to see upheld. But we're past the time for waiting for moderation to reassert itself. We have a fight on our hands. Small-d democratic values are not merely desiderata. Insist on them. Ideologize and internalize them. Proselytize for them. Adopt democratic nominism as your personal credo, and measure opposing views against it. The price of our liberty is not just the vigilance of a watchman, but the ardor and courage of a patriot.
July 25, 2012 7:21am
This goes out to all who have sworn an oath to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States. To everyone who believes we are a Nation of laws based on the truths we hold to be self evident.
"I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter."
This is an oath we take that has no expiration date, it does not relieve us of our obligation to up hold and support the premise of the principals to which we freely swore. I write this out of my frustration due to my apparent inability to discharge my duties and the disparity I see in the behaviors of the Nation, compared to the principals outlined in the Constitution I swore to defend.
Beginning with the preamble and concentrating on the ideals expressed there in.
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense,[note 1] promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." Wikipedia et al.
This is not an exercise in law, or a foray in political Science, it deals with the ideas expressed and how these ideas are portrayed, especially in the language of the document that is the foundation of this Nation. It is not a judgment, more of a reflection on the disparity of the actions of our Nation compared to the ideals expressed in our foundation.
We are a Nation of diverse inhabitants, cultures, values, mores, ethnicity, religions and all these aspects and so many more define the People. This Nation had a beginning some two hundred plus years ago, culminating in the proclamation of the establishment of this Republic in the year 1776.
One version of our history claims one Columbus "discovered" these lands and claimed them for Spain. That is all well and good except for the fact that these lands were inhabited by Peoples for thousands of years who had a right to the lands they had lived on for time out of mind. Of course those who discovered these lands and all their riches enslaved the Natives to do their new masters bidding. For some two hundred years, 1492 until 1776 every European nation who had the where with all to mount an expedition to the new world came and took what they wanted, when they wanted and from whom that wanted it, even claiming vast land parcels for their home country. It was a veritable free for all in the rape, pillage and plunder arena.
Eventually the visionaries who wrote the Constitution had the notion that a greater portion of North America would become a sovereign Nation. With this notion came a document and a specific point in time. With the proclamation of sovereignty came the basis for this, the foundation if you will, The United States of America. A new Nation conceived in Liberty and began with the writing of "We the People of the United States".
Of all the driving forces of the day that conspired to forge a new nation one of the most dramatic and successful was the idea of Manifest Destiny.
"Manifest Destiny was the 19th century American belief that the United States (often in the ethnically specific form of the "Anglo-Saxon race")[1] was destined to expand across the continent. It was used by Democrats in the 1840s to justify the war with Mexico; the concept was denounced by Whigs, and fell into disuse after the mid-19th century.
Historian William E. Weeks has noted that three key themes were usually touched upon by advocates of Manifest Destiny:
1. the virtue of the American people and their institutions;
2. the mission to spread these institutions, thereby redeeming and remaking the world in the image of the U.S.; and
3. the destiny under God to do this work.[17]
The origin of the first theme, later known as American Exceptionalism, was often traced to America's Puritan heritage, particularly John Winthrop's famous "City upon a Hill" sermon of 1630, in which he called for the establishment of a virtuous community that would be a shining example to the Old World. In his influential 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, Thomas Paine echoed this notion, arguing that the American Revolution provided an opportunity to create a new, better society:
We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand..." Wikipedia et al.
This doctrine of Manifest Destiny is in direct opposition to the Constitution of the United States and provides insight as to how the foundation and principals of the Constitution were interpreted, this idea that the free for all and self interest of Manifest Destiny trumped the foundation of this Nation of “We the People”. The painting below gives one an idea of the mindset of the times.
"This painting (circa 1872) by John Gast called American Progress, is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west. Here Columbia, a personification of the United States, leads civilization westward with American settlers, stringing telegraph wire as she sweeps west; she holds a school book. The different stages of economic activity of the pioneers are highlighted and, especially, the changing forms of transportation. Native Americans and animals flee into darkness." Wikipedia et al.
Looking back at the oath I took and the document I swore to defend, I find history and our founding document at odds. This is purely observation and abstinence from judgment.
The first few words of the preamble, "WE the People of the United States…" sets the tone of the Constitution and begs the question, “Who are the WE?”
(In the beginning before the Europeans arrived there are conflicting estimates as to the numbers of Natives.)
"The population figures for Indigenous peoples in the Americas before the 1492 voyage of Christopher Columbus have proven difficult to establish and rely on archaeological data and written records from European settlers. Most scholars writing at the end of the 19th century estimated the pre-Columbian population at about 10 million; by the end of the 20th century the scholarly consensus had shifted to about 50 million, with some arguing for 100 million or more.[1] Contact with the New World led to the European colonization of the Americas, in which millions of immigrants from the "Old World" eventually settled in the New.
The population of African and Eurasian peoples in the Americas grew steadily, while the number of the indigenous people plummeted. Eurasian diseases such as smallpox, influenza, bubonic plague and pneumonic plagues devastated the Native Americans who did not have immunity. Conflict and outright warfare with European newcomers and other American tribes reduced populations and disrupted traditional society. The extent and causes of the decline have long been a subject of academic debate, along with its characterization as a genocide.” Wikipedia at al.
The numbers while have importance and are subject to much debate are irrelevant. What is not debatable is that after 1776 and creation of this nation and the principals upon which it was founded the ideal of "We the People..." did not apply to those who had lived on this continent for thousands of years before 1492, this premise is not debatable for the history of the Country says all that is needed to be said. Does it matter if there were 10 million, or if they are off an order of magnitude, making it only 1 million, or if it were only twenty thousand, or five thousand? I took the "WE the People" out of context for the sake of expressing an idea of what people are the WE.
Looking at the entire preamble it goes on to express how We are establishing Justice and promoting the general welfare. How does one defend the Constitution and it's lofty ideals when our history clearly shows that we have acted contrary to our very foundation? What was done and is still being done, there are still reservations, Concentration Camps, in existence today? If the numbers of how many Natives were here pre Columbus are anywhere close to the reality of it, are we not guilty of performing genocide on the People? If not out and out killing, we have surly decimated their cultures, destroyed their way of life and forced them to adopt our ways, the Indian boarding schools are a testament to that fact. A place where native children were sent where they were forbidden to speak their native tongue, where traditional clothes, practice their religion and then returned to the reservation stripped of their culture and customs, where they could enjoy the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity.
For seventy some years we have repeatedly heard about the atrocities and genocide committed during the second world war but the same behaviors were what enabled and are the foundation of this Country. We are knee deep in the blood of the Natives, their blood is literally the mortar that holds the corner stone of our Nation together.
Benjamin Franklin an author and signer of the Declaration of Independence was enamored with the League of five Nations and some of their philosophy became the basis for our form of government.
"The Iroquois ( /ˈɪrəkwɔɪ/ or /ˈɪrəkwɑː/), also known as the Haudenosaunee or the "People of the Longhouse",[1] are a league of several nations and tribes of indigenous people of North America. After the Iroquoian-speaking peoples of present-day central and upstate New York coalesced as distinct tribes, by the 16th century or earlier, they came together in an association known today as the Iroquois League, or the "League of Peace and Power". The original Iroquois League was often known as the Five Nations, as it was composed of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca nations. After the Tuscarora nation joined the League in 1722, the Iroquois became known as the Six Nations. The League is embodied in the Grand Council, an assembly of fifty hereditary sachems.[2] Other Iroquian peoples lived along the St. Lawrence River, around the Great Lakes and in the American Southeast, but they were not part of the Haudenosaunee and often competed and warred with these tribes.
When Europeans first arrived in North America, the Haudenosaunee were based in what is now the northeastern United States, primarily in what is referred to today as upstate New York west of the Hudson River and through the Finger Lakes region.[3] Today, the Iroquois live primarily in New York, Quebec, and Ontario.
The Iroquois League has also been known as the Iroquois Confederacy. Some modern scholars distinguish between the League and the Confederacy.[4][5][6] According to this interpretation, the Iroquois League refers to the ceremonial and cultural institution embodied in the Grand Council, while the Iroquois Confederacy was the decentralized political and diplomatic entity that emerged in response to European colonization. The League still exists. The Confederacy dissolved after the defeat of the British and allied Iroquois nations in the American Revolutionary War.[4]"Wikipedia et al.
As an aside the belief systems of the Natives offered the Europeans as easy way to take what was not even considered possible by the Natives as they believed they were stewards of the land and ownership was impossible. The natives all the while they were being decimated believed that We are all one, is that not an amazing concept?
The Natives had a clearer understanding of We the People than we had then or now, as evidenced by the fact that the first pilgrims would have perished their first winter in the new land, if it had not been for the Natives showing them how to survive and yet there is so little animosity from the Natives about how they have been treated by their white fathers in Washington.
I chose the Native American experience as a jump off point particularly since it is the oath I took to defend our Constitution and history has shown we as a Nation began with lofty ideals and in the words of Bono "stooped so low to reach so high". This country's behavior is not unique the behavior has decimated so many cultures and societies, the number of which is like the stars in the sky. Nero played his music while Rome burned, no doubt one of the great civilizations, it fell none the less. Socrates drank the hemlock as he asked too many of the questions that disturbed the powers that be.
We have failed to live up to our oaths, and self interest has turned to unmitigated greed. Do you not see that in failing to keep our oaths, our pacts, our agreements that we allow those who would corrupt in the name of greed and self interest destroy the very fabric our framers knit so loosely together.
Since we have assumed ownership of North America look what we have done to the land, the oceans and seas, the rivers and trees, the very air we breathe. We deposed the stewards and set a course with doom as the destination, surly you see that? ninety nine percent of all the life that has existed on this planet over the four billion years it has existed is gone, extinct. We are part of the last one percent and in your children's lifetime, the dolphin, whales, tigers, and so many others will be gone on our current trajectory. Is it so difficult to see where we are going just based on where we've been since the industrial revolution?
The mindset, the collective conscience, the mores, the values we have adopted and reflected in the behaviors of this country are self centered, self serving and have little or no concept of tomorrow. One of the concepts of the system of government the Iroquois League of nations developed was in matters concerning the welfare of the tribe, important matters were decided upon by reflecting on the consequence of that decision on the next seven generations, seven can you fathom seven generations from now? Can you even trace your linage back seven generations? How small our mindset has gotten, so small that we do things that almost immediately have dire consequences, the bp oil drilling debacle, war with Iraq, Afghanistan, now Iran is in our sights, and once we make these knee jerk reactions, not responses, we suffer dire consequences. How many more chances do we have to honor our oaths? Or do we just let it go and sit back and watch humanity drive insanely of the cliff...We seem to stand for nothing...Wall street has decimated the world economy, perhaps it is just Manifest Destiny coming around one last time to claim the rest of us.
July 24, 2012 6:29pm
This is exactly how I think of the current state of affairs. I went to University and studied History, English, and Philosophy and received a bachelors in Philosophy with honors. And people laughed at me. The financial people driving their Mercedes Benz', the Financial friends who felt "pity" for me, the "self made man" who saw me as "misled," and the "honors student" who once told my philosophy major classmate that he "thought too much."
And I used to think to myself, "I'm witnessing the beginning of historic repetition right before my eyes, developing in the mindless brains of the fatuous."
I've long since dropped out of society, choosing to live a life outside the realm of conformity, and thus isolation, because I see no way to address mass psychosis on a global scale, an event that seems to repeat itself every millennium or so.
I can say authoritatively that I am completely disillusioned. And what I see comes nearer and nearer to what Schopenhauer said about life itself, "It will generally be found that, as soon as the terrors of life reach the point at which they outweigh the terrors of death, a man will put an end to his life...."
I'm quite positive careerists today, like those of history, will find "much ado" in the repeating of future holocausts, and find equal pleasure in the machinery of those goals.
But I'll not play any part in their new holocaust for any reason because I will violate neither my moral principles nor my ethical duty to humanity.
July 24, 2012 5:41pm
It is not so much careerists, as persons who have a mental condition of absence of empathy. Read the book "The Science of Evil: on Empathy ad the Origins of Cruelty" by Simon Baron-Cohen. There are 3 qualities in the brain which show a range of empathy potential zero to 6 or zero to 10. Persons who empathy scale is zero or 1, in 3 categories, do and can do such things- like the guy who recently shot so many people in Colorado. You could see it on his emotionaless face. The quality of empathy is about 70% inherited and 30% from upbringing and environment.
August 09, 2012 7:28pm
If you took the same guy from Colorado and dropped him in Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria or you name it , would his behavior not merit a medal? Do you not realize that same scenario was repeated over and over by military when they cleansed this country of the Natives? SO what did we/he learn from eradicating the indigenous peoples of North America? Did the Colorado guy inherit his behavior from the US history of annihilating our enemies, Hiroshima , Nagasaki for instance, small pox infected blankets for the Natives, bounties from the federal government on ears of the Natives, and the other thirty percent from the programming of the media about who our enemies are? Evil, Cruelty it seems the US is a master at both...
For instance the preamble to our Constitution begins with WE, but strangely enough did not include the original inhabitants of North America, Slaves, many of the drafters and signers held slaves and of course women were not counted...they were chattel owned...with the first word of the preamble so loosely interpreted it is no wonder WE as a nation perpetrate the most monstrous and hideous acts on humanity and the planet...
One guy in Colorado learned his history lesson well, if you want something go and take it. It is what this country has done beginning with the country, moving on to wherever our interests take us, even ripping our own citizens off and of course turning the planet into a toxic waste dump...The numbers this country has eradicated makes Colorado a little irrelevant doesn't it? Oh wait that happened to Americans on American soil, not somewhere else to someone else...so it matters...The turkey has come home to roost...Now I would imagine you feel a bit like all those families of those we offed feel...
July 24, 2012 5:06pm
This is way too doom laden for me. I get the idea - clearly. I understand the lemming construct. But I refuse to beleive there is no hope.
July 24, 2012 3:59pm
It is very important that we have individuals, brave individuals, like Chris Hedges, who will point to the signs of the erosion of democracy and the inexorable destruction of our world. It is also important that we have - or perhaps more to the point "become" - individuals, brave individuals who are willing to do something about it. And there is where despair too often sits waiting for us. It is too great; it is too hard. The dilemma of opposing values (feeding my kids vs. preserving a world they can live in) overwhelms us. Help us out here, Chris. Point us toward those who can inspire and lead us through that despair and into the place of our deep, human potential where the challenges can be met and not overwhelm us. If we cannot find our way there on our own, we will continue to turn to false gods (religious or otherwise) and the too-easily manipulable promise they wield.
July 25, 2012 4:02pm
Moreover, tell us where to get work and individual liberty without a serious bloodletting.
July 24, 2012 1:20pm
I am resonating with this potent truth-telling. A thinking person cannot help but see we are in the early stages of a developing holocaust that will dwarf that of WWII in magnitude and duration, and that it has many abettors. But thinking people are not of one mind as to what to do to mitigate against it, and some are convinced mitigation impossible. I am not optimistic, but feel morally obliged to the attempt. I have the impression that most who follow Chris Hedges
advocate entirely peaceful forms of resistance. While torn, I am inclined to believe it is a matter of choosing sides in a class war, whether as combatant, chaplain or nurse.
July 24, 2012 11:07pm
Greg,
I am in complete agreement with you (you don't know me, but that is an almost unbelievably rare occurrence) - I rail against the betrayal of my country by the reactionary right wing (I refer to them as Teanderthals) who have successfully thrown sand in the gears of the machinery of state wherever it does not serve the ends of their corporate masters, and I am saddened by the number of actively ignorant people (as in ignoring what is in front of their own eyes, as opposed to simply not knowing) who will inevitably leap over the coming precipice. Count me as a combatant; I am to the stage of "any means necessary" to preserve what freedoms we have left.
July 24, 2012 1:08pm
And throughout history when a society finally collapses and a stronger less corrupted society takes what is theirs the mass trials and perhaps mass graves to receive them wait at their feet they ask "why us--we only followed orders?"
July 24, 2012 1:07pm
And throughout history when a society finally collapses and a stronger less corrupted society takes what is theirs the mass trials and perhaps mass graves to receive them wait at their feet they ask "why us--we only followed orders?"