Hedges is a smart guy—he wrote American Fascists 20 years ago and Death of the Liberal Class 15 years ago—but he’s not smart enough to offer any solutions. AFAIK he still thinks Gulag Archipelago was a documentary.
Yeah, he’s in a similar category to people like Sachs. Does a great commentary on the problems, but lacks conviction and imagination to offer actual solutions.
That reminds me that I eventually sussed out that Adam Curtis’ documentary films are doomer porn. Some things he gets right, some things he gets very wrong, and he never offers solutions in the final analysis.
Really indicative of the American zeitgeist. Everyone knows there’s something wrong but they can’t really land on a solution, or simply cannot break through the immense propaganda to do so. Meanwhile the people existing on the very fringes of society are falling into the old lines (socialism VRs barbarism).
It’s the same thing with stuff like Don’t Look Up. Since any meaningful solution requires dismantling the current capitalist system, it becomes unthinkable.
Protesters clash with law enforcement after a federal agent shot and killed a man on Jan. 24 in Minneapolis (Photo by Arthur Maiorella/Anadolu via Getty Images) The murders of unarmed civilians on the streets of Minneapolis, including the killing today of the intensive-care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, would not come as a shock to Iraqis in Fallujah or Afghans in Helmand province. They were terrorized by heavily armed American execution squads for decades. It would not come as a shock to any of the students I teach in prison. Militarized police in poor urban neighborhoods kick down doors without warrants and kill with the same impunity and lack of accountability. What the rest of us are facing now, is what Aimé Césaire called imperial boomerang. Empires, when they decay, employ the savage forms of control on those they subjugate abroad, or those demonized by the wider society in the name of law and order, on the homeland. The tyranny Athens imposed on others, Thucydides noted, it finally, with the collapse of Athenian democracy, imposed on itself. But before we became the victims of state terror, we were accomplices.
