How Democracy Dies: Lessons from a Master

How Democracy Dies: Lessons from a Master



By Chris Hedges



October 11, 2010 "Truthdig" -- The ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes
spent his life battling the assault on democracy by tyrants. It is
disheartening to be reminded that he lost. But he understood that the
hardest struggle for humankind is often stating and understanding the
obvious. Aristophanes, who had the temerity to portray the ruling Greek
tyrant, Cleon, as a dog, is the perfect playwright to turn to in trying
to grasp the danger posed to us by movements from the tea party to
militias to the Christian right, as well as the bankrupt and corrupt
power elite that no longer concerns itself with the needs of its
citizens. He saw the same corruption 2,400 years ago. He feared
correctly that it would extinguish Athenian democracy. And he struggled
in vain to rouse Athenians from their slumber.

There
is a yearning by tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse
and fractious movement, to destroy the intellectual and scientific rigor
of the Enlightenment. They seek out of ignorance and desperation to
create a utopian society based on “biblical law.” They want to transform
America’s secular state into a tyrannical theocracy. These radicals,
rather than the terrorists who oppose us, are the gravest threat to our
open society. They have, with the backing of hundreds of millions of
dollars in corporate money, gained tremendous power. They peddle
pseudoscience such as “Intelligent Design” in our schools. They keep us
locked into endless and futile wars of imperialism. They mount bigoted
crusades against gays, immigrants, liberals and Muslims. They turn our
judiciary, in the name of conservative values, over to corporations.
They have transformed our liberal class into hand puppets for corporate
power. And we remain meek and supine.

The
huge amount of taxpayer money doled out to Wall Street, investment
banks, the oil and natural gas industry and the defense industry, along
with the dismantling of our manufacturing sector, is why we are
impoverished. It is why our houses are being foreclosed on. It is why
some 45 million Americans are denied medical care. It is why our
infrastructure, from public schools to bridges, is rotting. It is why
many of us cannot find jobs. We are being fleeced. The flagrant theft of
public funds and rise of an obscenely rich oligarchic class is masked
by the tough talk of demagogues, themselves millionaires, who use fear
and bombast to keep us afraid, confused and enslaved.

Aristophanes
saw the same psychological and political manipulation undermine the
democratic state in ancient Athens. He repeatedly warned Athenians in
plays such as “The Clouds,” “The Wasps,” “The Birds,” “The Frogs” and
“Lysistrata” that permitting political leaders who shout “I shall never
betray the Athenian!” or “I shall keep up the fight in defense of the
people forever!” to get their hands on state funds and power would end
with the citizens enslaved.

Our
democracy, through years of war, theft and corruption, is also being
diminished. But the example Aristophanes offers is not a hopeful one. He
held up the same corruption to his fellow Greeks. He repeatedly chided
them for not rising up and fighting back. He warned, ominously, that by
the time most citizens awoke it would be too late. And he was right. The
appearance of normality lulls us into a false hope and submission.
Those who shout most loudly in defense of the ideals of the founding
fathers, the sacredness of Constitution and the values of the Christian
religion are those who most actively seek to subvert the principles they
claim to champion. They hold up the icons and language of traditional
patriotism, the rule of law and Christian charity to demolish the belief
systems that give them cultural and political legitimacy. And those who
should defend these beliefs are cowed and silent.

“For
a considerable length of time the normality of the normal world is the
most efficient protection against disclosure of totalitarian mass
crimes,” Hannah Arendt
wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” “Normal men don’t know that
everything is possible, refuse to believe their eyes and ears in the
face of the monstrous. ... The reason why the totalitarian regimes can
get so far toward realizing a fictitious, topsy-turvy world is that the
outside non-totalitarian world, which always comprises a great part of
the population of the totalitarian country itself, indulges in wishful
thinking and shirks reality in the face of real insanity. ...”

All
ideological, theological and political debates with the representatives
of the corporate state, including the feckless and weak Barack Obama,
are useless. They cannot be reached. They do not want a dialogue. They
care nothing for real reform or participatory democracy. They use the
tricks and mirages of public relations to mask a steadily growing
assault on our civil liberties, our inability to make a living and the
loss of basic services from education to health care. Our gutless
liberal class placates the enemies of democracy, hoping desperately to
remain part of the ruling elite, rather than resist. And, in many ways,
liberals, because they serve as a cover for these corporate extremists,
are our greatest traitors.

Aristophanes
too lived in a time of endless war. He knew that war always empowered
anti-democratic forces. He saw how war ate away at the insides of a
democratic state until it was hollowed out. His play “Lysistrata,”
written after Athens had spent 21 years consumed by the Peloponnesian
War, is a satire in which the young women refuse to have sex with their
men until the war ends and the older women seize the Acropolis, where
the funds for war are stored. The play called on Athenians to consider
radical acts of civil disobedience to halt a war that was ravaging the
state. The play’s heroine, Lysistrata, whose name means “Disbander of
Armies,” was the playwright’s mouthpiece for the folly and
self-destructiveness of war. But Athens, which would lose the war, did
not listen.

The
tragedy is that liberals and secularists, like Obama, are not viewed as
competitors by the corporate forces that hold power, but as
contaminates that must be eliminated. They have sought to work with
forces that will never be placated. They have abandoned the most basic
values of the liberal class to play a game that in the end will mean
their political and cultural extinction. There will be no swastikas this
time but seas of red, white and blue flags and Christian crosses. There
will be no stiff-armed salutes, but recitations of the Pledge of
Allegiance. There will be no brown shirts but nocturnal visits from
Homeland Security. The fear, rage and hatred of our dispossessed and
confused working class are being channeled into currents that are
undermining the last vestiges of the democratic state. These dangerous
emotions, directed against a liberal class that as in ancient Athens
betrayed the population, have a strong appeal. And unless we adopt the
radicalism held by Aristophanes, unless we begin to hinder the
functioning of the corporate state through acts of civil disobedience,
we are finished.

Let
us not stand at the open gates of the city meekly waiting for the
barbarians. They are coming. They are slouching towards Bethlehem. Let
us, if nothing else, like Aristophanes, begin to call our tyranny by its
name.

Chris
Hedges spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin
America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He has written nine books,
includingEmpire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of
Spectacle (2009) and War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2003).



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