Rob Kall: And are
there details, is there a website, is there an organization, are there
foundations, you know, there are only supposedly progressively left-leaning
foundations--are any of them supporting the kind of ideas that you're talking
about?
Chris Hedges: No. Most
of the foundations, again, are hostage to the demands of their donors, and who
is it who has money. So yeah, no. I
think that's part of the problem you see with Moveon.org, in that
they have just been co-opted by the Democratic establishment, because their
donors in essence support that establishment, and that has rendered them not
only worse than impotent--they have essentially become a tool to propagandize
the Democratic party, and, I think, undercut those of us who care about defying
the corporate state. You saw that on the issue of the public option; Moveon.org was a force
that, in essence, because it had been co-opted, was used to fight back against
those of us who were battling for the public option. So, I'm afraid we are going to have to accept
that the Revolution is not going to get funded!
I mean, we're just going to have to do it on our own.
Rob Kall: Now, yeah,
we've been having conversations for the last couple years, and I've thrown at
you my theory that we're moving toward a bottom up revolution, and I really
believe that Occupy was a bottom up movement (along with "horizontalism"). You
were kind of resistant to that at first.
Has that changed at all for you, here? What do you think about the role
of bottom up approaches to making this all happen now?
Chris Hedges: I don't
know if I was resistant. I think that
there are serious problems, and I think the people in Occupy (certainly in
Zuccotti) would admit it, in terms of how they were organized. I mean, general
assemblies work really well for small groups: they don't work well when you
have four thousand [4,000] people. Keeping Zuccotti a kind of "open space"
worked well when you had a few hundred people. It didn't work well when the New
York City Police were delivering the homeless population to the park, and
because in the end this is a political movement, I mean, you know, essentially
the infrastructure or the capacity of Zuccotti to sustain itself collapsed,
especially when the individual tents went up. And you had Activists staying up
all night in de-escalation teams. You
know, we're just not prepared to cope with the ills of society; we can't do it.
And we have to make very hard decisions on what we can do and what we can't
do. And I think that there was a kind of
maturation process that took place in the Occupation. So, it's not that I was resistant, but I
think that these are all issues that have to worked out, as well as a kind of
discipline. I mean, I think the organizers in Zuccotti did realize from the
beginning: NO drugs or alcohol in the park. And of course that was a part of
what brought the park down: once the tents went up, the drugs came in.
Rob Kall: Okay, so there were definitely problems. How do you see the big picture evolving then, with resistance, with civil disobedience? What are the next steps?
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