Chris Hedges: How Power Works - Chris Hedges - Truthdig
Whole
areas of American history have been erased from public consciousness.
Certainly most foreigners have never heard, for example, of the Ludlow
massacre of 1914, when industrialist John D Rockefeller sent in hundreds
of state troopers to slaughter the families of striking miners in
Colorado; or the Palmer raids of 1919, when the US attorney general and a
young J Edgar Hoover ordered the round-up of thousands of organised
labour activists for deportation under the pretence that they were
dangerous anarchists. I suspect most Americans don't know about this
history either.
Here Chris Hedges talks about even more recent
events that few are encouraged to remember. The Attica prison uprisings
of 1971 were crushed brutally to preserve America's industrialised
prison system, designed to keep vast swaths of the black population
disenfranchised and working in slavery conditions in these new concrete
plantations. The goal was to maintain the power of a white elite by
fostering among the wider white population a "fear of blackness".
As Hedges notes, this is how power preserves itself - then and now.
