Chris Hedges: A Message From the Dispossessed
"The
terrorist attack in France that took place at the satirical newspaper
Charlie Hebdo was not about free speech. It was not about radical Islam.
It did not illustrate the fictitious clash of civilizations. It was a
harbinger of an emerging dystopia where the wretched of the earth,
deprived of resources to survive, devoid of hope, brutally controlled,
belittled and mocked by the privileged who live in the splendor and
indolence of the industrial West, lash out in nihilistic fury.
We
have engineered the rage of the dispossessed. The evil of predatory
global capitalism and empire has spawned the evil of terrorism. And
rather than understand the roots of that rage and attempt to ameliorate
it, we have built sophisticated mechanisms of security and surveillance,
passed laws that permit the targeted assassinations and torture of the
weak, and amassed modern armies and the machines of industrial warfare
to dominate the world by force. This is not about justice. It is not
about the war on terror. It is not about liberty or democracy. It is not
about the freedom of expression. It is about the mad scramble by the
privileged to survive at the expense of the poor. And the poor know it."
