Margin Notes: Wages of Rebellion and the Inversion Perversion in the Pig Empire

NinaIllingworth May 31, 2019November 5, 2022 anticommunism, antifascism, austerity, Books, CA4, Canada, capitalism, Chris Hedges, Citizen's United, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, class war, climate catastrophe, COINTELPRO, cold war, corruption, Deep Dives, democratic rights, Essays, FA1, fascism, FBI, Glenn Greenwald, Greece, Ibram X Kendi, inverted totalitarianism, Jane Mayer, Jim Crow, lobbying, Margin Notes, mass surveillance, Media, Michelle Alexander, Naomi Klein, neoliberalism, Nina Illingworth, Noam Chomsky, Owen Jones, plutocrats, quotations, Quotes, Red Scare, Socialism, ST2, Stamped From the Beginning, the Palmer Raids, UK, Wages of Rebellion, War on Terror, Yanis Varoufakis

Editor’s note: when I originally began this piece about six months ago, I intended it to be the first edition of a new feature called “Margin Notes” here on ninaillingworth.com. As it turns out, real life got in the way and by the time I got back to writing, I’d already decided to move these types of articles to my “Can’t You Read” blog on Tumblr. Frankly however, I think the essay is still fire and remains supremely relevant so I’ve decided to finish it up and share it with you today.

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Author’s note: in this article we’ll be looking at perhaps my favorite passage from “Wages of Rebellion” by Chris Hedges; a 2015 book that I personally believe presages a coming (and perhaps already occurring) revolution in the so-called “western” world.

Before we get started however, please note that I didn’t want to start this series with a Chris Hedges quote and while I do in fact agree with this author on a great number of issues, a great number is certainly not “all” issues. In particular I find Hedges recent, objectively offensive attempts to conflate anti-fascist action with actual fascists to be at best short-sighted and at worst, grounds to question his purpose and loyalties; the fact that he comes off as a preachy missionary at times, isn’t exactly helping this situation either. Despite these and other problems, Hedges remains an important writer because of his expert dissection of corporate totalitarianism and his own lived experiences with censorship – even if his solutions, or lack thereof, to brownshirts in the streets, leave much to be desired.

Hedges on Inversion

Perhaps the most striking thing about this passage is that at the time Chris Hedges published “Wages of Rebellion” in 2015, it was likely regarded as alarmist nonsense from a past-his-prime, disgraced pinko conspiracy theorist, by a western “liberal” establishment that had no understanding of the fascist shitstorm they were about to pilot the Pig Empire into; both in the United States and Europe. This doesn’t mean that Hedges was exaggerating, or that this same establishment is now any more prepared to accept their obvious culpability in the wake of an ongoing reactionary coup; these are after all the same “thought leaders” who want to collaborate with a fascist President, despite spending two years and change declaring that he’s a Russian puppet while blaming our current situation on Vladimir Putin. As has now become predictable, the lackeys, pundits and handsomely remunerated “experts” were simply wrong, and ultimately complicit, which calls to mind the increasingly relevant Upton Sinclair quotation – “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

As students of civil liberties, the war on terror, mass incarceration, campaign finance regulations or America’s intricate network of political lobbyists already know, everything Hedges wrote in this quote was true at the time he wrote it and remains true today. Nor is Hedges alone in these observations, as noteworthy scholars and observers like Glenn Greenwald, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Michelle Alexander and Jane Mayer have demonstrated in their own published materials. Whether you want to call it a “corporate oligarchy,” a concealed “police state” or “inverted totalitarianism” as the author has in the past, there is little reason to dispute the argument that the intersection of money in politics, the rise of the national security state and the global dominance of corporate-backed, deregulated capitalism have drastically eroded the rights, including democratic rights, of common people throughout what we call the Western world. Indeed, in light of mounting evidence that this same toxic brew of money, power and repression is rapidly driving us towards an ecological holocaust, these facts would appear to be self evident today in 2019. As I have noted in the past however, being vaguely aware of injustice is not the same as knowing it in your bones, so let’s stop to take a meticulous look at how the ideological underpinnings of our rights in the Pig Empire are indeed routinely inverted to support the erosion or denial of those very same rights – if you haven’t been clicking on the links I’ve provided as we go, you’ll probably want to start doing so now:

Inverticus Amerika

While Hedges himself will admit that his broad stroke observations about the rise of western capitalist totalitarianism are hardly prescient or unique, what personally fascinates me about the quoted passage above is the author’s direct mention of the concept of routine “inversion” while examining the legal and political logic used to justify this Orwellian state of modern affairs. In my own writing, I have repeatedly observed that we live in a backwards or even dystopian political-economic order; a global, militant, capitalist-controlled gestalt where wrong is right, greed is good and “justice” exists at the tyrannical whims of malevolent men; a world made possible by the very same inversion Hedges invokes here. More than mere hypocrisy, this inversion twists the foundational ideas, moral norms and legal arguments underpinning the fundamental rights of the common people, particularly the poor and marginalized, to instead support their exploitation by the wealthy, influential and powerful – in other words, the very forces these legally enshrined rights and regulations were purportedly designed to protect us from in western “liberal” democracies.

When I started turning this idea over in my mind after reading “Wages of Rebellion,” I quickly realized that this very same inversion of justice has spread beyond the courtrooms, think tanks and halls of power into seemingly every aspect of the American public life and rational consensus. It’s in the way esteemed corpse merchants in our publications of record insist we must give weapons contractors and corrupt logistics corporations trillions of dollars to help turn foreign countries into devastated, post-apocalyptic hellscapes and thereby “save those poor people” from tyranny. It’s in describing terrified migrants running from the fallout of Pig Empire foreign policy and American corporate greed as an “invading army” to justify even more violent (and profitable) repression against impoverished brown people. It’s in arguments against the legalization of marijuana and in arguments for the unrestricted right to bear arms.* Inversion can be found in a New York Times Op-Ed about the need to give federal regulators carte blanche to funnel public money to obscenely wealthy bankers during the next financial crisis; an Op-Ed written by the very same men who decided to bail out corrupt banks instead of desperate American homeowners less than a decade ago. It’s in the gender pay gap. It’s in bootstrap mythology. This same inversion is baked into the structure of the US privatization debate. It’s in the idea that minuscule voter fraud is a serious threat to our democracy but widespread voter suppression is a result of lazy minorities simply refusing to obtain proper ID.

(*Author’s note: recently Joe Kennedy has flopped his position on marijuana, which doesn’t make his arguments any less venal, then or now.)

Naturally, the primary drivers of this American inversion infestation are the corporate media, politicians and a sprawling US lobbying industry; these are after all the bought-and-paid-for, non-threatening faces of modern plutocratic rule. What few seem to realize however is that after thirty years of deregulation, media consolidation and legalized bribery, these communication instruments are now entirely under the control of a limited number of monstrously rich people who, by virtue of their wealth and station in society, typically share the same hyper-capitalist, anti-democratic and socially revanchist political positions. This has created a sort of “perpetual inversion machine” in America, where inverted logic is employed by the rich to seize power over the national discourse, which in turn allows and even encourages the uber-wealthy establishment to push more inversion arguments into the public sphere to gain more influence, wealth and control; the cycle has become a perfect, self-propagating circle – is it really fair to call this a “conspiracy theory” when everything I’ve just described is both legal, and out in the open?

Inversion Across the Pig Empire

Frankly however, it would be difficult to argue that this twisted misappropriation of our fundamental rights to empower plutocracy and enable totalitarianism is merely a short-term symptom of Trump’s (increasingly fascist) America – not only does the problem precede the swine emperor, but this inversion has also taken on a decidedly international flavor. Although the author’s above quotation (and related essays) focus on the inversion of speech rights, democratic rights and civil liberties in the American legal system, the same backwards perversion by inversion of legally enshrined rights can be found empowering exploitation and hurtling us all towards destruction in places like Canada, the UK, Israel and among America’s Western European allies. Indeed, Hedges is only part of a growing chorus of global observers who are writing about these same kinds of inversions in foreign nations that are part of the US sphere of influence, some examples include:

In his 2014 bestseller “The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It” left wing media critic Owen Jones argues that in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, elitist British “politicians and media worked almost hand in glove to promote the myth that people who should be held responsible for the nation’s multiple social and economic ills are those at the bottom of the pecking order, rather than those at the top.” Jones also eviscerates secretive, far right, economic fundamentalist groups like the TaxPayers’ Alliance for pushing austerity and “Chicago School” economic reforms on Britain by employing a plutocrat-funded, AstroTurf campaign to demonize public spending and propagate the idea that unionized public sector workers were the root cause of the UK’s economic meltdown – as opposed to greedy, deregulated bankers lusting after greater and greater profits.

In 2014’s “This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs the Climate” Canadian author Naomi Klein has expertly documented how international trade agreements sold to the Canadian people on the false promise of communal prosperity through trickle down economics, have stalled (but not entirely halted) attempts by local governments to temporarily ban fracking in Quebec or subsidize solar power investment in Ontario. Klein also explores how corporate extraction agreements are used by the Canadian government to justify violating the enshrined rights of Indigenous Canadians to appease powerful energy corporations.

Former finance minister of Greece and economist Yanis Varoufakis devotes his 2017 autobiographical expose “Adults in the Room: My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment” to chronicling “a ferociously effective campaign” of “character assassination, truth reversal, loony economics and downright illiberalism” against the “democratically elected government of a small country in Europe” by the Western political and financial establishment. A campaign, Varoufakis testifies, that was conducted to protect the economics rights of powerful international creditors, bankers and trade organizations in Europe, at the clear expense of national sovereignty and the democratic rights of everyday people in Greece – who continue to suffer under the ravages of imposed austerity.

A Clear Pattern of Historical Inversion

Furthermore, while it is tempting to succumb to the idea that this backwards logic or “routine inversion” of rights purportedly designed to protect the powerless from the powerful can be correlated with specific events in America’s recent history, even a cursory examination of the evidence proves this false. Although it’s fair to point out that events like the “War on Terror,” the 2008 financial crisis and the rise of a new Americanized fascist movement in the West have greatly contributed to the erosion of civil liberties, economic protections and voting rights, the inverted logic used to justify these perverse abuses and misappropriations has a long and shameful legacy in Anglosphere political discourse. Seeking to also place these economic, legal and political or democratic inversions in a historical context sent me back to the reference library and into the twisted backstory of western elite revanchism.

Whereas in the West today, labor rights and economic protections are eroded with disingenuous “right to work” legislation and fact-free declarations that “raising the minimum wage actually hurts poor people” these same types of inversions have also been a hallmark of union-busting and violent labor suppression (particularly in the United States) for well over a hundred years. From the Haymarket massacre, through the First Red Scare and on to Reagan’s sacking of PATCO, the phrase “protecting the American people” has usually meant protecting them from labor rights:

The 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act was actively promoted to the public as a way to help workers and small business by encouraging competition; in practice however American courts primarily used it to legally attack organized labor unions until the passing of 1914’s Clayton Antitrust Act.

Between 1919 and 1923, J. Edgar Hoover, soon-to-be second in command of the US Bureau of Investigation, used false accusations of a plot to overthrow the government and the specter of Communism to justify a violent and blatantly unconstitutional war on labor leaders across the country; ultimately arresting, detaining and interrogating thousands of people in an ongoing series of dramatic police raids. In reality, these operations, now known as “the Palmer raids” were entirely political in nature: the earliest raids blatantly targeted immigrants in an attempt to boost the ultimately doomed Presidential campaign of then Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, while later operations would target organized labor and political opposition in general, on behalf of elite business interests connected to the crooked Harding administration and then Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty – a remarkably corrupt man even by the taxing standards of his day.

In 1932, some 17,000 impoverished US veterans and their families descended on Washington to demand timely payment of their rightful wages in an incident known as the “Bonus March.” This initially peaceful protest stretched on for months until a melee broke out when members of the Bonus Army refused to evacuate buildings scheduled for demolition. Seizing on the opportunity to rid himself of a nuisance, U.S. President Herbert Hoover sent Army Chief of Staff and Major General Douglas MacArthur to clear the area surrounding the melee. MacArthur however, had larger designs on his mind and in a move that would foreshadow the volatility of his later career, the General put on a show for the media; he assumed direct command of the government forces and against Hoover’s orders, proceeded to crush the protestors and their makeshift camp, using tanks and teargas – reportedly sending more than 1,000 veterans to area hospitals. Perhaps sensing trouble, MacArthur then called a bizarre press conference in which he congratulated himself (and Hoover) for halting a communist plot that threatened the safety of the president and was just about to break out into a revolution.

Turning our attention towards the erosion of legal rights and civil liberties in U.S. history, we see a mirror image of the same long term pattern of “inversion” we identified in the suppression of labor and economic rights. Before there was a racist “War on Terror” not-so-secretly designed to funnel trillions of dollars in public funds towards our own oppression, there was a racist “War on Drugs” conducted over the past forty-seven years that serves roughly the same purpose. Furthermore, the same inverted logic that was used to justify the drug war had itself been recycled from the fight for Prohibition, which due to highly selective enforcement was effectively a war on African Americans, immigrants and poor people. Before legalized NSA mass surveillance was justified to the public under the guise of counter-terrorism, these very same arguments were used to excuse exposed FBI COINTELPRO spying on anti-war and minority rights activists as well as opening and censoring public mail to root out German spies or fight anarchist plotters during the Great War period.

Frankly, government promises to protect a constantly shifting definition of “the public” from a constantly shifting cast of “internal enemies” or “foreign influences” have always functioned like a skeleton key to unlock public permission to erode rights and civil liberties in exchange for a false sense of “security.” Capitalizing on wartime xenophobia, Americans were easily convinced to support the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which in practice were really about waging a two front campaign to silence dissent from left wing activists and persecute marginalized immigrants. In the post-WWII era, calls to protect the American people from Soviet plots fueled the rabid Cold War McCarthyism that allowed a resurgent revanchist right to purge its political enemies from public life. It was US Attorney General Francis Biddle who wrote that “the Constitution has never greatly bothered any wartime president” while defending FDR’s unconscionable decision to relocate and incarcerate Japanese American (but not German American) citizens during World War II. Of course, what Biddle neglected to mention is that the American-controlled Pig Empire is always at war.

Which finally brings us to the long, dark and objectively white male supremacist history of using inverted and perverted logic to justify the erosion or outright denial of democratic rights in the United States of America:

Right from the very beginning of US history, disingenuous arguments about the need to “protect democracy” from unqualified voters were used to overwhelmingly restrict voting rights to white men who owned property – a group which represented roughly six percent of the population at the time.

The now universally reviled Three-Fifths Compromise was ludicrously promoted as a method of guaranteeing fair democracy even though it simultaneously awarded a disproportionately large number of representatives to Southern “slave states” while also denying enslaved African Americans any democratic rights at all.

Even after the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution officially ended chattel slavery and the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed universal male suffrage, it was largely more of the same for non-white men and all women at the ballot box. The sabotage and collapse of Reconstruction allowed for the institution of the infamous white supremacist “Jim Crow” laws in the American South and the widespread disenfranchisement of African American voters. As detailed in Professor Ibram X. Kendi’s exhaustive study “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America” these very same twisted, backwards arguments about the need to preserve the democratic rights of “the (presumably, white) people” were used to disqualify primarily non-white voters through literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses and other objectively discriminatory voter suppression practices.

As time rolled forward, our cherished democracy and moral fiber would further need to be protected from women voters (too emotional), Native American voters (too primitive) and Chinese American immigrants (too foreign and possibly disloyal.)

It is furthermore important to note that the weaponization of “opposite day” inverted arguments about protecting “our fragile democracy” are not just a relic of our national past; variations on these same arguments continue to provide the ideological underpinning for modern-day, racialized voter suppression in America, particularly in the form of discriminatory voter ID laws, felony disenfranchisement, and widespread racial gerrymandering. Although the techniques have undoubtedly changed, the unconscionable argument that the democratic rights of the strong majority must be defended by denying democratic rights to a weaker or marginalized minority has remained an election-warping universal constant in the US fight to prevent “the wrong kind of people” from voting.

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Of course, the underlying truth in all of this is that despite the towering mountain of disingenuous bullshit used to create and propagate our modern “inverted totalitarian” states in the Pig Empire, the reality remains that this horrifying “incorporation” of democracy to serve an obscenely rich, elite ruling class is ultimately a house of cards built on guns, lies and stacks of paper. This dystopian nightmare can be altered; eroded rights can be restored, unjust powers can be revoked and the machinery of state can be directed towards serving the mass of society, instead of only the very wealthy few.

We don’t have to tolerate a world where bribery walks in daylight as free speech. We don’t have to believe rich maggot profiteers when they tell us privatization is about the right to an education, that endless pseudo-colonial conquest furthers the cause of human rights or that burning fossil fuels sold by a handful of climate-destroying oil companies is a victory for “freedom.” We don’t have to pretend fighting abortion is about protecting the right to life. We don’t have to meekly accept a social order where calling out corrupt politicians and giving a damn about other people is falsely branded antisemitism while actual violent neo-nazis slaughter the innocent. We don’t have to roll over for imperialism or a new Cold War. We don’t have to accept the rise of a new Amerikkkanized fascism. We don’t have to pretend racism isn’t purposely propagated by capitalism. We don’t have to go quietly into that good night while a handful of greedy billionaires murder species after species and render our planet uninhabitable for our grandchildren.

There is no universal law that says we have to tolerate governments that reduce the rights of the many to an endless angle-shooting game of “Simon Says” with lawyerly fascists on behalf of an amoral at best ruling class. We don’t have to go on like this at all – but if we’re going to save a future for the labor class, then by the ballot or by way of the billet, those that have lead us into this neofeudalist nightmare must all go.