BP and the ‘Little Eichmanns’ by Chris Hedges
Pepe Silvia
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BP and the ‘Little Eichmanns’ by Chris Hedges
Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction. The oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, estimated to be perhaps as much as 100,000 barrels a day, is part of our foolish death march. It is one more blow delivered by the corporate state, the trade of life for gold. But this time collapse, when it comes, will not be confined to the geography of a decayed civilization. It will be global.
Those who carry out this global genocide—men like BP’s Chief Executive Tony Hayward, who assures us that “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume’’—are, to steal a line from Ward Churchill, “little Eichmanns.” They serve Thanatos, the forces of death, the dark instinct Sigmund Freud identified within human beings that propels us to annihilate all living things, including ourselves. These deformed individuals lack the capacity for empathy. They are at once banal and dangerous. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast, destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications. The death they dispense, whether in the pollutants and carcinogens that have made cancer an epidemic, the dead zone rapidly being created in the Gulf of Mexico, the melting polar ice caps or the deaths last year of 45,000 Americans who could not afford proper medical care, is part of the cold and rational exchange of life for money.
The corporations, and those who run them, consume, pollute, oppress and kill. The little Eichmanns who manage them reside in a parallel universe of staggering wealth, luxury and splendid isolation that rivals that of the closed court of Versailles. The elite, sheltered and enriched, continue to prosper even as the rest of us and the natural world start to die. They are numb. They will drain the last drop of profit from us until there is nothing left. And our business schools and elite universities churn out tens of thousands of these deaf, dumb and blind systems managers who are endowed with sophisticated skills of management and the incapacity for common sense, compassion or remorse. These technocrats mistake the art of manipulation with knowledge.
“The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else,” Hannah Arendt wrote of “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” “No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”
Our ruling class of technocrats, as John Ralston Saul points out, is effectively illiterate. “One of the reasons that he is unable to recognize the necessary relationship between power and morality is that moral traditions are the product of civilization and he has little knowledge of his own civilization,” Saul writes of the technocrat. Saul calls these technocrats “hedonists of power,” and warns that their “obsession with structures and their inability or unwillingness to link these to the public good make this power an abstract force—a force that works, more often than not, at cross-purposes to the real needs of a painfully real world.”
BP, which made $6.1 billion in profits in the first quarter of this year, never obtained permits from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The protection of the ecosystem did not matter. But BP is hardly alone. Drilling with utter disregard to the ecosystem is common practice among oil companies, according to a report in The New York Times. Our corporate state has gutted environmental regulation as tenaciously as it has gutted financial regulation and habeas corpus. Corporations make no distinction between our personal impoverishment and the impoverishment of the ecosystem that sustains the human species. And the abuse, of us and the natural world, is as rampant under Barack Obama as it was under George W. Bush. The branded figure who sits in the White House is a puppet, a face used to mask an insidious system under which we as citizens have been disempowered and under which we become, along with the natural world, collateral damage. As Karl Marx understood, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force. And this force is consuming us.
Karl Polanyi in his book “The Great Transformation,” written in 1944, laid out the devastating consequences—the depressions, wars and totalitarianism—that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that “fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function.” He warned that a financial system always devolved, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism—and a Mafia political system—which is a good description of our corporate government. Polanyi warned that when nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market, then human beings and nature are destroyed. Speculative excesses and growing inequality, he wrote, always dynamite the foundation for a continued prosperity and ensure “the demolition of society.”
“In disposing of a man’s labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man’ attached to that tag,” Polanyi wrote. “Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society. Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well as its business organizations was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill.”
The corporate state is a runaway freight train. It shreds the Kyoto Accords in Copenhagen. It plunders the U.S. Treasury so speculators can continue to gamble with billions in taxpayer subsidies in our perverted system of casino capitalism. It disenfranchises our working class, decimates our manufacturing sector and denies us funds to sustain our infrastructure, our public schools and our social services. It poisons the planet. We are losing, every year across the globe, an area of farmland greater than Scotland to erosion and urban sprawl. There are an estimated 25,000 people who die every day somewhere in the world because of contaminated water. And some 20 million children are mentally impaired each year by malnourishment.
America is dying in the manner in which all imperial projects die. Joseph Tainter, in his book “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” argues that the costs of running and defending an empire eventually become so burdensome, and the elite becomes so calcified, that it becomes more efficient to dismantle the imperial superstructures and return to local forms of organization. At that point the great monuments to empire, from the Sumer and Mayan temples to the Roman bath complexes, are abandoned, fall into disuse and are overgrown. But this time around, Tainter warns, because we have nowhere left to migrate and expand, “world civilization will disintegrate as a whole.” This time around we will take the planet down with us.
“We in the lucky countries of the West now regard our two-century bubble of freedom and affluence as normal and inevitable; it has even been called the ‘end’ of history, in both a temporal and teleological sense,” writes Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress.” “Yet this new order is an anomaly: the opposite of what usually happens as civilizations grow. Our age was bankrolled by the seizing of half the planet, extended by taking over most of the remaining half, and has been sustained by spending down new forms of natural capital, especially fossil fuels. In the New World, the West hit the biggest bonanza of all time. And there won’t be another like it—not unless we find the civilized Martians of H.G. Wells, complete with the vulnerability to our germs that undid them in his War of the Worlds.”
The moral and physical contamination is matched by a cultural contamination. Our political and civil discourse has become gibberish. It is dominated by elaborate spectacles, celebrity gossip, the lies of advertising and scandal. The tawdry and the salacious occupy our time and energy. We do not see the walls falling around us. We invest our intellectual and emotional energy in the inane and the absurd, the empty amusements that preoccupy a degenerate culture, so that when the final collapse arrives we can be herded, uncomprehending and fearful, into the inferno.
Copyright © 2010 Truthdig
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, including Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009) and War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2003).
Buzz it up so it goes to their published page, please.
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/201 ... is-hedges/
BP and the ‘Little Eichmanns’ by Chris Hedges
Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction. The oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, estimated to be perhaps as much as 100,000 barrels a day, is part of our foolish death march. It is one more blow delivered by the corporate state, the trade of life for gold. But this time collapse, when it comes, will not be confined to the geography of a decayed civilization. It will be global.
Those who carry out this global genocide—men like BP’s Chief Executive Tony Hayward, who assures us that “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume’’—are, to steal a line from Ward Churchill, “little Eichmanns.” They serve Thanatos, the forces of death, the dark instinct Sigmund Freud identified within human beings that propels us to annihilate all living things, including ourselves. These deformed individuals lack the capacity for empathy. They are at once banal and dangerous. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast, destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications. The death they dispense, whether in the pollutants and carcinogens that have made cancer an epidemic, the dead zone rapidly being created in the Gulf of Mexico, the melting polar ice caps or the deaths last year of 45,000 Americans who could not afford proper medical care, is part of the cold and rational exchange of life for money.
The corporations, and those who run them, consume, pollute, oppress and kill. The little Eichmanns who manage them reside in a parallel universe of staggering wealth, luxury and splendid isolation that rivals that of the closed court of Versailles. The elite, sheltered and enriched, continue to prosper even as the rest of us and the natural world start to die. They are numb. They will drain the last drop of profit from us until there is nothing left. And our business schools and elite universities churn out tens of thousands of these deaf, dumb and blind systems managers who are endowed with sophisticated skills of management and the incapacity for common sense, compassion or remorse. These technocrats mistake the art of manipulation with knowledge.
“The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else,” Hannah Arendt wrote of “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” “No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”
Our ruling class of technocrats, as John Ralston Saul points out, is effectively illiterate. “One of the reasons that he is unable to recognize the necessary relationship between power and morality is that moral traditions are the product of civilization and he has little knowledge of his own civilization,” Saul writes of the technocrat. Saul calls these technocrats “hedonists of power,” and warns that their “obsession with structures and their inability or unwillingness to link these to the public good make this power an abstract force—a force that works, more often than not, at cross-purposes to the real needs of a painfully real world.”
BP, which made $6.1 billion in profits in the first quarter of this year, never obtained permits from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The protection of the ecosystem did not matter. But BP is hardly alone. Drilling with utter disregard to the ecosystem is common practice among oil companies, according to a report in The New York Times. Our corporate state has gutted environmental regulation as tenaciously as it has gutted financial regulation and habeas corpus. Corporations make no distinction between our personal impoverishment and the impoverishment of the ecosystem that sustains the human species. And the abuse, of us and the natural world, is as rampant under Barack Obama as it was under George W. Bush. The branded figure who sits in the White House is a puppet, a face used to mask an insidious system under which we as citizens have been disempowered and under which we become, along with the natural world, collateral damage. As Karl Marx understood, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force. And this force is consuming us.
Karl Polanyi in his book “The Great Transformation,” written in 1944, laid out the devastating consequences—the depressions, wars and totalitarianism—that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that “fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function.” He warned that a financial system always devolved, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism—and a Mafia political system—which is a good description of our corporate government. Polanyi warned that when nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market, then human beings and nature are destroyed. Speculative excesses and growing inequality, he wrote, always dynamite the foundation for a continued prosperity and ensure “the demolition of society.”
“In disposing of a man’s labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man’ attached to that tag,” Polanyi wrote. “Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society. Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well as its business organizations was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill.”
The corporate state is a runaway freight train. It shreds the Kyoto Accords in Copenhagen. It plunders the U.S. Treasury so speculators can continue to gamble with billions in taxpayer subsidies in our perverted system of casino capitalism. It disenfranchises our working class, decimates our manufacturing sector and denies us funds to sustain our infrastructure, our public schools and our social services. It poisons the planet. We are losing, every year across the globe, an area of farmland greater than Scotland to erosion and urban sprawl. There are an estimated 25,000 people who die every day somewhere in the world because of contaminated water. And some 20 million children are mentally impaired each year by malnourishment.
America is dying in the manner in which all imperial projects die. Joseph Tainter, in his book “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” argues that the costs of running and defending an empire eventually become so burdensome, and the elite becomes so calcified, that it becomes more efficient to dismantle the imperial superstructures and return to local forms of organization. At that point the great monuments to empire, from the Sumer and Mayan temples to the Roman bath complexes, are abandoned, fall into disuse and are overgrown. But this time around, Tainter warns, because we have nowhere left to migrate and expand, “world civilization will disintegrate as a whole.” This time around we will take the planet down with us.
“We in the lucky countries of the West now regard our two-century bubble of freedom and affluence as normal and inevitable; it has even been called the ‘end’ of history, in both a temporal and teleological sense,” writes Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress.” “Yet this new order is an anomaly: the opposite of what usually happens as civilizations grow. Our age was bankrolled by the seizing of half the planet, extended by taking over most of the remaining half, and has been sustained by spending down new forms of natural capital, especially fossil fuels. In the New World, the West hit the biggest bonanza of all time. And there won’t be another like it—not unless we find the civilized Martians of H.G. Wells, complete with the vulnerability to our germs that undid them in his War of the Worlds.”
The moral and physical contamination is matched by a cultural contamination. Our political and civil discourse has become gibberish. It is dominated by elaborate spectacles, celebrity gossip, the lies of advertising and scandal. The tawdry and the salacious occupy our time and energy. We do not see the walls falling around us. We invest our intellectual and emotional energy in the inane and the absurd, the empty amusements that preoccupy a degenerate culture, so that when the final collapse arrives we can be herded, uncomprehending and fearful, into the inferno.
Copyright © 2010 Truthdig
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, including Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009) and War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2003).
don't compete; coexist
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
I just wrote a paper very similar to this.
If anyone digs Hedges' article, you may want to check out Harold Fromm's "From Transcendence to Obsolescence."
It seems that American society, from what I have seen and studied, has a severe (and disastrous) problem of detachment: detachment from the natural world, from society, from the Wars, from the American soldier, from happiness. And, it seems that the trend is now to attach ourselves to material goods and the accumulation of "wealth"; in other words, "things" make us happy. There is no substance in society or in people; our happiness stems from what we own, as does our identity.
I have a friend who had to move out of his house and move in with a family member because he and his wife couldn't make the mortgage payments anymore. Then he tells me he got a small raise from work and, instead of being "smart" with the extra money, he decides to trade in his old BMW for a new one. Obviously he can do what he wants, but does this make sense? To me it doesn't, but it is a sign of the times. Why a BMW when you can get a more affordable Honda Civic or a Kia or Hyundai?
There is so much more that is going on in society, so much more that is leading us down a dangerous path, than Obama being a "socialist." And, in my opinion it falls on every individual in this country. It is up to everyone, not just the president or the government to make things better. Obama will not bring hope and change to the country, its citizens will. However, I don't see this happening - there are more important things to do with our lives, such as watching Dancing with the Stars, making friends and having our social lives trapped in a virtual universe, and going to the mall to buy a new pair of shoes for $300 that were likely made by a 12 year old girl in a Malaysian sweatshop. Thank God, Allah, Yahweh, jehovah that my girlfriend hates shopping.
A little long. My apologies.
i know peeps will take offense but it really is brainwashing ... people don't realize how influenced they are with propaganda ...
they used to do this to convince us communists were bad but now its to sell you the latest inefficient car and what shit to buy ... as soon as we went to a consumer-based economy ... it was all over ...
Thanks, polaris.
It seems today many people don't know their history or are simply uneducated. What matters most to people is what they can own. All the other "stuff", which I consider to be the real world - social issues, environmental issues, politics (or how we need to dispose of all politicians), culture, etc. - has become superfluous in this consumer society. Unfortunately, this is capitalism, and consumerism and materialism are the grease that drives the capitalist machine.
So, I guess we can just live our lives as non-consumers and proud minimalists!!
Hey there... long time no see, so I take this line to come back here...
I am thinking about a post since a few days because the oil drama really gets me deep.
Furthermore, here in Germany the media/ BP is indeed brainwashing us and I became very suspicious.
First, shortly after the accident our news was full of various reports. Then, when BP started the first try to stop the oil spreading into the ocean, we did not hear anything for 2 weeks (not on the telly news nor in the most common papers!) I had to gather my information over the internet!
Now all news channels report on a very short basis, but they even dare to say that the oil that has now reached the coastline has its origin probably from somewhere else.
Another paper wrote about 6 dolphins found dead but headlined that it is likely that this has nothing to do with the oil drama.
And nobody explained ever the effects/impact of all the chemicals thrown into the ocean.
What I try to say here is that the German media just does not report properly in this matter. No pictures broadcast, no longer explanations, no interviews, none, just one headline per news, shortly, and nothing more.
It scares me and I wonder how the media report is in the US.
What it is shown here is that Europe is still infected by propaganda and the oil lobby and it deeply scares me.
So thank you very much for the inspiring read. I am glad the MT is still an alternative media source I always appreciate.
And on a side note: how is the media report in your country regarding this horrible drama in the ocean?
nicki
...the world is come undone, I like to change it everyday but change don't come at once, it's a wave, building before it breaks.
hey ... it has been a while ... i hope you are well! ...
to be quite honest - pepe is my media source for the BP story ...
i am surprised what is going on over there ... you really think it's a corporate agenda playing out? ... BP is british but I guess that's irrelevant in the grand scheme of things ...
I am fine, dear polaris... thanks for asking. And of course I wish you are too!!!
Well, I am not sure if it is indeed a corporate agenda playing out, but I became suspicious somehow.
Yesterday it was the same: on each channel there was only one short line about it, no insights, no detail information, no pictures again. They just mentioned that a big amount of oil has reached the coast now. Period, next subject.
And I just do not understand why they don't inform us properly about this big problem!
It might be because all the news is about the Euro and its decline, so maybe there is no broadcast space, but also papers hardly report about the oil accident.
I do not understand it. So that is why I asked you here what is going on in your country.
I know BP is British, so maybe they indeed try to influence the European media broadcast. Because I guess it is not irrelevant in the grand scheme ... (Europe has not too many oil companies; there is Total - France, Shell - Netherlands and BP - GB, right?)
Either way, fact is that news about human problems affecting only humans are big, but news that affect the whole globe and all living are not worth to report, it seems.
And that makes me really wondering !!!
...the world is come undone, I like to change it everyday but change don't come at once, it's a wave, building before it breaks.
i would suspect that it really isn't that big a news topic in europe ... news focuses locally, then regionally then globally ... to me what is going on in thailand should be one of the major headlines but we hardly hear about it ... i guess that is what is the deal with the oil spill ... plus, like i alluded to in the other threads ... no one really cares except the people affected ...
Maybe I am so worried about the accident and care too much, so I just want to hear news about it urgently, but as you said: news focuses locally and maybe regionally, but seldom globally.
However, we get full reports each day about Thailand... interviews, insights, pictures, long background stories... mhmmm, so would it weaken your point?
So another reason could be that no humans were hurt or injured, so it is not big news out of their view?
Well, guess I keep on wondering but thanks for the good impulses
...the world is come undone, I like to change it everyday but change don't come at once, it's a wave, building before it breaks.
oh? cool! starting when??? they haven't done shit but sit back and let BP fail time and again while they try to save the oil instead of stopping the leak. obama needs to stand up and be a leader and take it out of BPs hands. we are basically letting BP run the show here, we even accept that they refuse to allow anyone near the leak to measure the rate it's coming out, we just need to stand by the figure they gave us. BULLSHIT!
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
As for the execs at BP, I am for a public hanging. 99% of the people reading/seeing the media about this tragedy have no real clue as to how devastating it is to an already damaged, once incredibly beautiful ecosystem. If you've never admired the beauty and grace in some of the waterfowl found in this area, or the awesome presence that is a pod of Dolphin swimming just offshore, I don't think you can fully appreciate what we're losing from as a result of BP's mis-management and greed. The only thing the Bastards of Petroleum are concerned about is how this is going to hurt their bottom line. They are criminals, pure and simple. They've raped nature and robbed it of its future. And there they sit with their thumbs up their asses.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
~I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulette I could have worn.~
Henry David Thoreau
Thank you for this perfect sum up of the situation!!!
It is exactly how you pointed out, thanks.
However, yesterday our news report changed. They showed pictures of oil covered coasts, of dead birds and fishes, they named the chemical BP spread over the ocean and finally explained the horrible impact those chemicals will have on ocean life, they informed us about the intense impact the oil itself has on this area.
We heard interviews of environmental activists that pointed out that the demage done will affect at least 3 generations.
They also pointed out that now the US govm. has taken over the situation, but missed for too long any action.
So, BP has lost all trust and finally European media is reporting appropriate again!
To me this oil drama is one of the worst damages done to nature, and as we know there is not much nature left... it really gets me deep and worries me badly.
so thanks again weenie to bring it to the point.
..
...the world is come undone, I like to change it everyday but change don't come at once, it's a wave, building before it breaks.