I Cogitate

"War and conflict have marked most of adult life. I began covering insurgencies in El Salvador, where I spent five years, then on to Guatemala and Nicaragua and Colombia, through the first intifada in the West Bank and Gaza, the civil war in the Sudan and Yemen, the uprisings in Algeria and the Punjab, the fall of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, the Gulf War, the Kurdish rebellion in southeast Turkey and northern Iraq, the war in Bosnia, and finally Kosovo. I have been in ambushes on desolate stretches of Central American roads, shot at in the marshes of southern Iraq, imprisoned in the Sudan, beaten by Saudi military police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held for a week by the Iraqi Republican Guard during the Shiite rebellion following the Gulf War, strafed by Russian MIG-21s in Bosnia, fired upon by Serb snipers, and shelled for days in Sarajevo with deafening rounds of heavy artillery that threw out thousands of deadly bits of iron fragments. I have seen too much of violent death. I have tasted too much of my own fear. I have painful memories that lie buried and untouched most of the time. It is never easy when they surface."

He talked about the need to re-institute a reality-based viewpoint in our government rather than the binary, black-and-white present one.

He talked about the neecssity of challengingwhat we presently face with truth but that doing such requires tremendous presenters in order to overcome the appeal to baseness, and he lamented an absent committment to social justice.

He questioned if there was enough organized power today to 'win' in the case of a national disaster and that conditions were 'better' in the 1930s because of at least some elements of a progressive press.

He warned about the taking over of the chaplaincies in the military by the evangelical far right, of the anti-science bent of present government officials and an ideological judiciary making judgments based on religious preferences.

What is probably most controversial was Hedges' comparisons of these dominionists in some way to Nazis. He said the Nazis employed such 'fluid' concepts as liberty, honor and patriotism in many of the same ways as George Bush and his ilk have done and continue to do. The Nazis used values to attack others, employing the 'enemy' label. The idea today, just as in the past is to divide and separate.

According to Hedges, this movement controls the Republican Party, through such avenues of The Family Resource Council, Eagle Forum, Christian Coalition and others and that there is an authoritarian bent where the norm is leaders scrutinize--they aren't scrutinized. 

Hedges also sees the corporatists as dangerous in the creation of a Weirmaric economic division in the country.

Interestingly, he compared the rise of the mercenary organizations like Blackwater to the long ago Roman Praetorian Guards.

Most refeshing was Hedges' take on many in the left. He says the left remains too soft and complacent. He said dialogue is not possible with the venomous and the intolerent and that true dialogue includes respect and tolerance or it becomes an actual fight for survival. He labeled the incitement of intolerence as criminal and that the intolerent simply cannot be tolerated.

On one particular note, he concluded tolerence is a virtue but tolerence, combined with passivity is a vice. 

The Greatest Threat to Choice
Chris Hedges
Truthdig
May 7, 2007

Jeniece Learned stood amid a crowd of earnest-looking men and women, many with small gold crosses in their lapels or around their necks, in a hotel lobby in Valley Forge, Pa.  She had an easy smile and a thick mane of black, shoulder-length hair.  She was carrying a booklet called “Ringing In a Culture of Life,” which was the schedule of the two-day event she was attending, organized by the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation.  The event was “dedicated to the 46 million children who have died from legal abortions since 1973 and the mothers and fathers who mourn their loss...”

...Learned runs a small pregnancy counseling clinic called Pregnancy Services of Western Pennsylvania, in Sharon, where she tries to talk young girls and women, most of them poor, out of having abortions.  She speaks in local public schools, promoting sexual abstinence as the only acceptable form of contraception.  And she has found in the fight against abortion, and in her conversion, a structure, purpose and meaning that previously eluded her...

...The leaders of this movement understand that the only emotion that cannot be subsumed into communal life, which they seek to dominate and control, is love.  They fear the power of love, especially when magnified and expressed through tender, sexual relationships, which remove couples from their control.  Sex, when not a utilitarian form of procreation, is dangerous.

They seek to fashion a world where good and evil are clearly defined and upheld by the nation’s judicial system.  The battle against abortion is a battle to build a society where pleasure and freedom, where the capacity of the individual and especially women to make choices, and indeed even love itself, are banished.  And this is why pro-life groups oppose contraception­even for those who are married.  The fight against abortion is the facade for a wider fight against the right of an individual in a democracy.

Army of God, a pro-life organization that holds up as Christian “heroes” those who murder abortion providers, defines birth control as another form of abortion, as do many other pro-life groups.  In the “Birth Control Is Evil” section of their website it reads:  “Birth control is evil and a sin. Birth control is anti-baby and anti-child. ...Why would you stop your own child from being conceived or born? What kind of human being are you...?”  

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