Guest Column: When Fear Comes

Timely observations on the end of freedom
By Chris Hedges [Excerpt: Read full column in OpEdNews.com here.]

“Right totalitarianism, left totalitarianism, any way you look at it you lose.” — Editor… from a really good song by Simon and Garfunkel

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn in “The Gulag Archipelago,” his profound meditation on the nature of oppression and resistance in the Soviet gulags, tells the story of a man who was among prisoners being moved in the spring of 1947. The former front-line soldier, whose name is lost to history, suddenly disarmed and killed the two guards. He announced to his fellow prisoners that they were free.

“But the prisoners were overwhelmed with horror; no one followed his lead, and they all sat down right there and waited for a new convoy,” Solzhenitsyn writes. The prisoner attempted in vain to shame them. “And then he took up the rifles (thirty-two cartridges, ‘thirty one for them!’) and left alone. He killed and wounded several pursuers and with his thirty-second cartridge he shot himself. The entire Archipelago might well have collapsed if all the former front-liners had behaved as he did.”

The more despotic a regime becomes, the more it creates a climate of fear that transforms into terror. At the same time, it invests tremendous energy and resources in censorship and propaganda to maintain the fiction of the just and free state.

Poor people of color know intimately how these twin mechanisms of fear and false hope function as effective forms of social control in the internal colonies of the United States. They have also grasped, as the rest of us soon will, the fiction of American democracy. Continue reading

Guest Column: Downsize DC vs. NDAA Detention

District court issues injunction against NDAA detention
by Jim Babka


Downsize DCCan you handle another victory? We’ve had a bunch this year. Now here’s one more:

We just won a big verdict in the Chris Hedges case against the legalized kidnapping provisions of the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

Remember, Hedges meets with and writes stories about terrorists. Continue reading

Guest Column: Colonized by Corporations

“Why men do not revolt”
by Chris Hedges

(excerpted from Common Dreams column 5/14/12)


Colonized by CorporationsIn Robert E. Gamer’s book The Developing Nations is a chapter called “Why Men Do Not Revolt.” In it Gamer notes that although the oppressed often do revolt, the object of their hostility is misplaced. They vent their fury on a political puppet, someone who masks colonial power, a despised racial or ethnic group or an apostate within their own political class. The useless battles serve as an effective mask for what Gamer calls the “patron-client” networks that are responsible for the continuity of colonial oppression. Continue reading