Free Wages of Rebellion by Chris Hedges Page B

to physically eradicate the insurgents’ logistical base of operations, disrupt their communication, and shatter their organization. Counterrevolutionaries seek to dry up popular, financial, and material support for the revolutionaries. They hunt down and decapitate leaders. Counterrevolutionaries create rival organizations to discredit and purge the rebel leadership and infiltrate the movement to foster internal divisions and rivalries. They provoke the movement by forming front groups that carry out repugnant acts toalienate the wider populace from the insurgency. Meanwhile, the counterrevolutionaries churn out shadowy propaganda that the mainstream press often runs uncritically. Finally, they offer a political alternative that appears reformist but is ultimately under the control of the state.
    The tools to break resistance are similar whether those movements are violent or nonviolent. The physical eradication of the Occupy encampments, the attempt to marginalize the protesters from the wider society, the use of figures such as Anthony Kapel “Van” Jones to co-opt the language of the Occupy movement and funnel energy into a dysfunctional electoral process—all these strategies fit the classic outline of a counterrevolutionary agenda.
    Counterinsurgency campaigns, although they involve arms and weapons, are primarily, as in the old cliché, about hearts and minds. The goal is to win back, or at least render passive, a disaffected population. And the tactics employed by our intelligence operatives abroad are not dissimilar from those employed by our intelligence operatives at home. In fact, these operatives are frequently the same people.
    But once violence is added to the mix, whether to defend the state or destroy it, something poisonous and insidious takes place. Violence is directed against society not to convert but to eradicate. All aspects of civic life are targeted—political, religious, educational, familial, economic, and traditional. The goal—as we see in Iraq and Afghanistan—is not to control territory but to control populations. Terror, assassination, imprisonment, and death become the glue that replaces the tissue of social cohesion. Society is mutilated. Civic life is destroyed. And in wartime each side uses violence to attempt to shape civil society to its own ends.
    We do not have the tools or the wealth of the state. We cannot beat it at its own game. We cannot ferret out infiltrators. The legal system is almost always on the state’s side. If we attempt to replicate the elaborate security apparatus of our oppressors, even on a small scale, we unleash paranoia and fracture those who build movements. If we retreat into anonymity, hiding behind masks, then we provide an opening for
agents provocateurs
who deny their identities while disrupting the movement. If we fight pitched battles in the streets, we give authorities an excuse to fire their weapons and demonize the movement to the public.
    All we have, as Vaclav Havel wrote, is our powerlessness. And that powerlessness is our strength. The ability of the movement to overthrow the corporate state depends on embracing this powerlessness. It depends on two of our most important assets—utter and complete transparency, and a rigid adherence to nonviolence, including respect for private property. These assets permit us, as Havel puts it in his classic 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” to live in truth. And by living in truth, we expose a corrupt corporate state that perpetrates lies and functions by deceit.
    Havel, who would become the first president of the Czech Republic in 1993, reflects in the essay on the mind of a greengrocer who, as instructed, puts up a poster “among the onions and carrots” that reads: “Workers of the World, Unite!” He displays the poster partly out of habit, partly because everyone else is doing it, and partly out of fear of the consequences for not following the rules. Havel notes that the greengrocer