Today’s offering is a delightful interview featuring two intellectual heavyweights, Lawrence Lessig and Chris Hedges, discussing and analyzing the Occupy movement and how it stands to rival the rise of Corporatism across America and the world.
Some key points:
A fraction of 1% of the population own the political landscape in America
Corporate forces have gutted opposing institutions, like community, education, and unions
Politicians at the State and Federal level are wholly owned subsidiaries of the Corporate State
It is this underlying corruption which is stirring the people’s uprising, like Occupy
The system could be too broken to fix, and will likely need to be purged
This uprising, like a sleeping giant, is only just starting to awaken
The pending revolution is imperative for the people to undertake
A crucial factor for the revolution is to get the police on side with the protesters
“The incursion and bombardment of Gaza is not about destroying Hamas. It is not about stopping rocket fire into Israel, it is not about achieving peace. The Israeli decision to rain death and destruction on Gaza, to use lethal weapons of the modern battlefield on a largely defenseless civilian population, is the final phase in a decades-long campaign to ethnically-cleanse Palestinians.”
“The assault on Gaza is about creating squalid, lawless, and impoverished ghettos in the West Bank and Gaza, where life for Palestinians will be barely sustainable. It is about building a series of ringed Palestinian enclaves where the Israeli military will have the ability to instantly shut-off movement, food, medicine, and goods to perpetuate the misery.”
“Israel uses sophisticated attack jets and naval vessels to bomb densely-crowded refugee camps, schools, apartment blocks, mosques, and slums to attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanized armor, no command in control, no army… and calls it a war. It is not a war, it is murder.”
The preceding quotes came from Chris Hedges, espousing an oft unheard perspective about the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine – a viewpoint I happen to agree with.
Israel’s occupation and systematic degradation of the Palestinian people remains one of the gravest blights facing our world’s people. In terms of atrocities and abuse, it ranks up there with Apartheid in South Africa, or the genocides in Rwanda or Darfur.
And what’s even more shameful is just how oblivious most of us in the Western world remain to the reality and severity of the situation. Much of this is due to Israel’s reach around the globe. The State of Israel has a powerful public relations department along with feelers running deep into the minds of many of the world’s high level politicians and government employees.
The Palestinians, on the other hand, have no PR department, live in impoverished conditions, and are constantly under threat from the region’s largest army.
Yet, despite the lack of PR, the Palestinians have justice on their side, and will eventually triumph. Over the next few years, thanks to the spread of alternative media, the international community is likely to awaken to this decades-long injustice.
Once this happens, and Israel’s atrocities get reigned in by a world no longer willing to tolerate such inhumanity, historians and anthropologists can see how it came to be that the victims of heinous genocide went on to become perpetrators of the same crimes within just a few generations.
