De dystopische visioenen van Chris Hedges

Auteur CJ Werleman bevraagt prijswinnend journalist Chris Hedges over de staat van de Amerikaanse natie. Hedges is uitgesproken somber over de toekomst.

Volgens Hedges koersen de Verenigde Staten aan op een onvermijdelijke implosie, omdat haar wereldwijde hegemonie haar steeds verder in de schulden brengt, terwijl grote delen van de middenklasse langzaam maar zeker in armoede wegzakken. De politieke en economische elites zijn deels onwillig, en deels machteloos om het schip te keren.

As you hollow your country out from the inside – and anybody just has to look out a window wherever they are to see crumbling infrastructure and failing schools, closed libraries and chronic unemployment, underemployment and the slashing of most basic social services, whether it is Head Start or food stamps or anything else – in order to maintain control, you bring back these very brutal mechanisms of control, wholesale surveillance, militarized policing, drones, so that at this point a night raid in Oakland doesn’t look any different from a night raid in Fallujah, it’s the same, because it’s the same mechanism.

Het antwoord van de politieke en economische elites op deze verpaupering is volgens Hedges steeds draconischer vormen van overheidscontrole, en de uitholling van burgerrechten.

Een fraai voorbeeld hiervan, dat Hedges niet noemt, is het inhuren van vele tientallen politieagenten door banken op Wall Street, om de Occupy-demonstranten met geweld weg te jagen. Maar Hedges’ blik is nog veel dystopischer van aard:

The security and surveillance state is deeply troubling because they all know what’s coming. I mean, they have run scenario after scenario in the NSA and everywhere else on climate change, on inevitable financial collapse, and they are preparing, legally, by essentially stripping us of our most basic legal protection, whether it’s habeas corpus, the right to trial…

Als je wilt weten wat de brave burger te wachten staat, meent Hedges, moet je kijken naar hoe de staat de onderklasse behandelt. En die is middels de zogenaamde war-on-drugs grotendeels tot crimineel verklaard, aangezien men voor minimaal drugsbezit al draconische straffen opgelegd krijgt.

As the great writers on totalitarianism, like Hannah Arendt and others have pointed out: in a totalitarian system, you carry out wholesale surveillance not to find innocence or guilt – because in our species of corporate totalitarianism guilt and innocence don’t matter – but because as soon as you criminalize a certain person or category of people, you have all the files, you have everyting and you can always hang something on them and prosecute them; especially in a judicial system which has deteriorated as ours has into a kind of species of just show-trials, when we even have trials. Ninetyfour percent of those who are sitting in prison of course, never even get a trial.

Hedges ziet een aantal parallellen tussen de krachteloosheid van progressieven en liberalen in de VS en de marginalisering van de liberalen tsaristisch Rusland rond 1900, maar meer nog in de impotente democraten in de Weimar-republiek en voormalig Joegoslavië. En als de bom barst, zal dat onvermijdelijk leiden tot een revolutie, in de VS waarschijnlijk van een fascistische aard.

Dostoyevski, quite presciently, talked about the inevitable kind of violence – this is Raskolnikov’s dream, at the end of Crime and Punishment, the same kind of visions you saw at the end of The Brothers Karamazov, and that’s what happens when society essentially embraces political paralysis, which is what we’ve embraced.

So you have a self-identified liberal elite – so here it would be more like Weimar. Or the former Yugoslavia, before the war, where you have a self-identified liberal class that is in fact impotent, they can’t act.

So Obama can’t regulate Wall Street, Obama’s assault on civil liberties, his administration had been actually worse than under Bush, especially with the use of the espionage act, to shut down whistleblowers – Kiriakou, Snowden, Chelsea Manning and others – the expansion of imperial war through militarized drones, the inability to deal with the suffering of the underclass.

I mean, half of this country almost, is now in a category called poverty or near-poverty, so in essence, that’s paralysis, because every mechanism of state is used to enrich and empower a corporate olichargic elite at our expense.

And the danger is that when you get a crisis – and this would be very similar to Weimar, or Yugoslavia, where it came through hyperinflation – then you get a kind of enraged populus, that doesn’t understand what’s happened. And they turn on these ineffectual elites and embrace a kind of virulent right wing. That was of course the fascists in Germany but it would have been the ethnic nationalists – Slobodan Milošević and others, Franjo Tuđman – in Yugoslavia. And not only do they get rid of the liberal elites, but they have no time for “liberal values”. Those go right out the window.

Dat is wat allerlei elementen die nu worden aangebracht – van surveillance tot anti-terreurmaatregelen of de militarisering van het politieapparaat – zo gevaarlijk maken. Wetgeving en praktijken die nu worden ingevoerd als anti-terreurwetgeving of misdaadpreventie kunnen gemakkelijk ingezet worden tegen de eigen bevolking als de bom barst.

Having lived in disintegrating societies, I’ve seen it, I’ve seen what happens in places like Yugoslavia. At the moment that there’s a crisis, whether it’s caused by a collapsing economy, and even our most sober financial reporters like Gretchen Morgenson are now talking about another inevitable collapse, because there’s been no restraint on Wall Street, we’ve just flooded them with free money, or whether it’s caused by climate change or whatever, at that moment of collapse you have in place both the physical and the legal mechanisms to, with the flick of a lightswitch, to turn this country into basically a militarized state.

Wat nodig is, meent Hedges, is een brede links-progressieve, activistische beweging om een alternatief te bieden voor ultrarechts wanneer de crisis zich aandient, maar decennialange demonisering van dergelijke bewegingen als ‘communistisch’ maken het vrijwel onmogelijk om daar brede steun voor te krijgen.

U hoort het: America is doomed.

• Chris Hedges schreef onder andere Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2014) met prijswinnend tekenaar Joe Sacco, en Wages of Rebellion (2015).
• Meer podcasts van CJ Werleman met meer en minder bekende persoonlijkheden uit cultuur, media en politiek vindt u hier.