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Recognizing the Language of Tyranny
by Chris Hedges
Truthdig
Empires communicate in two languages. One language is
expressed in imperatives. It is the language of command
and force. This militarized language disdains human life
and celebrates hypermasculinity. It demands. It makes no
attempt to justify the flagrant theft of natural resources
and wealth or the use of indiscriminate violence. When
families are gunned down at a checkpoint in Iraq they are
referred to as having been "lit up." So it goes. The other
language of empire is softer. It employs the vocabulary of
ideals and lofty goals and insists that the power of empire
is noble and benevolent. The language of beneficence is
used to speak to those outside the centers of death and
pillage, those who have not yet been totally broken, those
who still must be seduced to hand over power to predators.
The road traveled to total disempowerment, however, ends
at the same place. It is the language used to get there
that is different.
This language of blind obedience and retribution is used by
authority in our inner cities, from Detroit to Oakland, as
well as our prison systems. It is a language Iraqis and
Afghans know intimately. But to the members of our dwindl-
ing middle class?as well as those in the working class who
have yet to confront our new political and economic config-
uration?the powerful use phrases like the consent of the
governed and democracy that help lull us into complacency.
The longer we believe in the fiction that we are included
in the corporate power structure, the more easily corpor-
ations pillage the country without the threat of rebellion.
Those who know the truth are crushed. Those who do not are
lied to. Those who consume and perpetuate the lies?includ-
ing the liberal institutions of the press, the church,
education, culture, labor and the Democratic Party?abet
our disempowerment. No system of total control, including
corporate control, exhibits its extreme forms at the
beginning. These forms expand as they fail to encounter
resistance.
The tactic of speaking in two languages is as old as empire
itself. The ancient Greeks and the Romans did it. So did
the Spanish conquistadors, the Ottomans, the French and
later the British. Those who inhabit exploited zones on the
peripheries of empire see and hear the truth. But the cries
of those who are exploited are ignored or demonized. The
rage they express does not resonate with those trapped in
self-delusion, those who continue to trust in the ultimate
goodness of empire. This is the truth articulated in Joseph
Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and E.M. Forster's "A Passage
to India." These writers understood that empire is about
violence and theft. And the longer the theft continues, the
more brutal empire becomes. The tyranny empire imposes on
others it finally imposes on itself. The predatory forces
unleashed by empire consume the host. Look around you.
The narratives we hear are those fabricated for us by the
state, Hollywood and the press. These narratives are taught
in our schools, preached in our pulpits and celebrated in
war documentaries such as "Restrepo." These narratives
humanize and ennoble the enforcers of empire. The govern-
ment, the military, the police and our intelligence agents
are lionized. These control groups, we are assured, are
the guardians of our virtues and our protectors. They
produce our heroes. And those who challenge this narrative?
who denounce the lies?become the enemy.
Those who administer empire?elected officials, corporate
managers, generals and the celebrity courtiers who
disseminate the propaganda?become very wealthy. They make
immense fortunes whether they deliver the nightly news,
sit on the boards of corporations, or rise, lavished
with corporate endorsements, within the vast industry of
spectacle and entertainment. They all pay homage, even in
moments defined as criticism, to the essential goodness
of corporate power. They shut out all real debate. They
ignore flagrant injustices and abuse. They peddle the
illusions that keep us passive and amused. But as our
society is reconfigured into an oligarchic system, with a
permanent and vast underclass, along with a shrinking and
unstable middle class, these illusions lose their power.
The language of pleasant deception must be replaced with
the overt language of force. It is hard to continue to
live in a state of self-delusion once unemployment benefits
run out, once the only job available comes without benefits
or a living wage, once the future no longer conforms to
the happy talk that saturates our airwaves. At this point
rage becomes the engine of response, and whoever can
channel that rage inherits power. The manipulation of
that rage has become the newest task of the corporate
propagandists, and the failure of the liberal class to
defend core liberal values has left its members with
nothing to contribute to the debate.
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The Belgian King Leopold, promising to abolish slavery
and usher the Congolese into the "modern" era, was
permitted by his European allies to form the Congo Free
State in 1885. It was touted as a humanitarian gesture,
as was the Spanish conquest of the Americas, as was our
own occupation of Iraq. Leopold organized a ruthless
force of native and foreign overseers?not unlike our own
mercenary armies?to loot the Congo of ivory and rubber.
By the time the Belgian monarch was done, some 5 million
to 8 million Congolese had been slaughtered. It was the
largest act of genocide in the modern era until the Nazi
Holocaust. Leopold, even in the midst of his rampage,
was lionized in Europe for his virtue. He was loathed in
the periphery?as we are in Iraq and Afghanistan?where the
Congolese and others understood what he was about. But
these voices, like the voices of those we oppress, were
almost never heard.
The Nazis, for whom the Holocaust was as much a campaign
of plunder as it was a campaign to rid Europe of Jews,
had two methods for greeting arrivals at their four
extermination camps. If the transports came from Western
Europe, the savage Ukrainian and Lithuanian guards, with
their whips, dogs and clubs, were kept out of sight. The
wealthier European Jews were politely ushered into an
elaborate ruse, including fake railway stations complete
with flower beds, until once stripped naked they became
incapable of resistance and could be herded in rows of
five under whips into the gas chambers. The Nazis knew
that those who had not been broken, those who possessed
a belief in their own personal empowerment, would fight
back. When the transports came from the east, where Jews
had long lived in fear, tremendous poverty and terror,
there was no need for such theatrics. Mothers, fathers,
the elderly and children, accustomed to overt repression
and the language of command and retribution, were brutally
driven from the transports by sadistic guards. The object
was to create mass hysteria. The fate of the two groups
was the same. It was the tactic that differed.
All centralized power, once restraints and regulations are
abolished, once it is no longer accountable to citizens,
knows no limit to internal and external plunder. The
corporate state, which has emasculated our government,
is creating a new form of feudalism, a world of masters
and serfs. It speaks to those who remain in a state of
self-delusion in the comforting and familiar language of
liberty, freedom, prosperity and electoral democracy. It
speaks to the poor and the oppressed in the language of
naked coercion. But, here too, all will end up in the same
place.
Those trapped in the blighted inner cities that are our
internal colonies or brutalized in our prison system,
especially African-Americans, see what awaits us all. So
do the inhabitants in southern West Virginia, where coal
companies have turned hundreds of thousands of acres into
uninhabitable and poisoned wastelands. Poverty, repression
and despair in these peripheral parts of empire are as
common as drug addiction and cancer. Iraqis, Afghans,
Pakistanis and Palestinians can also tell us who we are.
They know that once self-delusion no longer works it is
the iron fist that speaks. The solitary and courageous
voices that rise up from these internal and external
colonies of devastation are silenced or discredited by
the courtiers who serve corporate power. And even those
who do hear these voices of dissent often cannot handle
the truth. They prefer the Potemkin facade. They recoil
at the "negativity." Reality, especially when you grasp
what corporations are doing in the name of profit to the
planet's ecosystem, is terrifying.
All tyrannies come endowed with their own peculiarities.
This makes it hard to say one form of totalitarianism is
like another. There are always enough differences to make
us unsure that history is repeating itself. The corporate
state does not have a Politburo. It does not dress its
Homeland Security agents in jackboots. There is no raving
dictator. American democracy?like the garishly painted
train station at the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka?
looks real even as the levers of power are in the hands of
corporations. But there is one aspect the corporate state
shares with despotic regimes and the collapsed empires
that have plagued human history. It too communicates in
two distinct languages, that is until it does not have to,
at which point it will be too late.
Copyright 2011 Truthdig
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Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign reporter cover-
ing wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle
East. He has written nine books, including Death of the
Liberal Class, Empire 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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