ROOTS of RAGE IN FRANCE TERROR ATTACK = ROOTED IN ABJECT POVERTY AND OPPRESSION — CHRIS HEDGES

“A Message From the Dispossessed” by Chris Hedges, TruthDig, Jan 11, 2014

Click for Source Article by Chris Hedges on TruthDig

FRANCE Terrorist Attack = Nothing to do with free speech or Islam

FRANCE Terrorist Attack = A harbinger of a dystopia for the wretched of the earth = Deprived of Basic Needs + NO HOPE + Belittled + Mocked + Controlled

 

FRANCE Terrorist Attack = About those Deprived of privileges of super-rich splendor or even decent substance = The Massive Inequality GAP!

FRANCE Terrorist Attack = About lashing out in nihilistic fury.

FRANCE Terrorist Attack = About the West engineering the rage of the dispossessed

FRANCE Terrorist Attack = About the Evil of predatory global capitalism, colonialism, and empire = Spawned the ANGER that lashes out in terrorism.

ROOTS of RAGE = IGNORED with NO effort to Soften it or Ameliorate it.

WEST’S SOLUTION TO RAGE OF TERROR = Sophisticated security/surveillance + Higher Walls + More laws that permit targeted assassinations and torture

WEST’S SOLUTION TO RAGE OF TERROR = Amassed Ever More Armies + Machinery of WAR = Domination of the world by force.

WEST’S SOLUTION TO RAGE OF TERROR = NOT about justice or liberty or democracy or freedom of expression.

WEST’S SOLUTION TO RAGE OF TERROR = About protecting the privileged at the expense of the poor. = The poor know it.

FACT: Gaza + Iraq + Yemen + Algeria + Egypt + Sudan = Live on $2.50 or less per day = Deprived + Hopelessly exploited by colonialism and extractive capitalism

FACT: Paris + London + Many Western Cities = Depressing + Segregated Housing Projects that ring cities = Warehousing the impoverished immigrants

ROOTS of RAGE = Seeing Impoverished Conditions you see the motivation of the Kouachi brothers who in RAGE stooped to MURDER and were Killed

ROOTS of RAGE = Little employment in these pockets of hopeless squalor.

ROOTS of RAGE = They suffer Overt Racism + Rampant Despair of men with NO purpose + Frequent Harassment by police doing frequent identity checks

ROOTS of RAGE = Police will pull immigrants off to the side and mercilessly beat them. + Brown skin makes up much of the prison population.

ROOTS of RAGE = With no hope Drugs and Alcohol are the sirens to blunt the pain + drift aimlessness into petty crime and then worse.

ROOTS of RAGE = Millions of Brown people are not considered French by the French. Same is true in other western nations.

FRANCE Terrorist Attack = Finally these lost become holy warriors seeking the rebirth that brings a sense of power and importance = Like the old fascists = Converts to any absolute ideal that promises a utopia and adopt – good vs evil

FRANCE Terrorist Attack = They become their own champions of good and pure and demonize all nonbelievers and anointed to change history + Embrace a hypermasculine violence to cleanse the world’s contaminants.

ROOTS of RAGE = When you sink into despair living trapped in Gaza’s open-air prison, sleeping 10 to a concrete hovel, walking through muddy streets to get a bottle of water because your water is toxic + line up at UN office for a bit of food

ROOTS of RAGE = There is no work and your family is hungry, suffering the periodic aerial bombardments by Israel that leaves hundreds of dead.

ROOTS of RAGE = Your religion is all you have left. Muslim prayer five times a day, gives you your only sense of structure and self-worth.

ROOTS of RAGE = When the privileged of the world ridicule the one thing that provides you with dignity, you react with Uncontrollable Fury exacerbated by community-wide feeling of powerless to respond.

ROOTS of RAGE = The cartoons of the Prophet in the Paris-based satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo are offensive and juvenile — NOT funny but grotesque double standard when it comes to Muslims.

ROOTS of RAGE = In France a Holocaust denier can be imprisoned for a year and forced to pay a $60,000 fine + It is a criminal act in to mock the Holocaust the way Charlie Hebdo mocked Islam. Charlie Hebdo fired an artist in 2008 for being anti-Semitic.

FACT: France’s far right, organized around Marine Le Pen, the leader of the anti-immigrant Front National, has so much in common with the jihadists whom Le Pen says she wants to annihilate.

FACT: France high school students must learn of Nazi persecution of the Jews, but nothing about the widespread French atrocities including death of 1+ Million Algerians during colonial war.

FACT: French law bans the public wearing of the burqa or niqab, a full veil = Can be arrested and fined about $200 + France banned rallies in support of the Palestinians last summer.

ROOTS of RAGE = French message to Muslims is clear: Your traditions, history and suffering do not matter. Your story will not be heard. If we cannot hear their stories we will endlessly trade state terror for terror.

ROOTS of RAGE = When Liberty means the freedom to insult, demean and mock people’s most sacred concepts — Mock what they honor most. Muslim countries are still mostly governed by shame and honor codes.

CHRIS HEDGES DEFINES THE ROOTS of RAGE IN PARIS = Shortly after 9/ll he worked in Paris as NYT reporter. He went to La Cité des 4,000, a gray housing project where North African immigrants lived in apartments with bricked-up windows. Trash littered the stairwells. Spray-painted slogans denounced the French government as fascist. Members of the three major gangs sold cocaine and hashish in the parking lots amid the burned-out hulks of several cars. A few young men threw stones at me. Osama bin Laden was a hero. — “We want more Americans to die so they can begin to see what it feels like.”

FACT: America declared war on Muslims a long time ago. This is just the response.

ROOTS of RAGE = It is extraordinarily dangerous to ignore this rage and even more dangerous to refuse to examine and understand its origins.

ROOTS of RAGE = NOT from the Quran or Islam, but from mass despair, from palpable conditions of poverty, along with the West’s imperial violence and capitalist exploitation.

FUTURE DANGER: Not solved by Security systems or wars.

FUTURE DANGER: The world’s resources diminish, especially with climate change. Privileged send message that the unfortunate of the earth “We have everything and if you try to take anything away from us we will kill you. The message the dispossessed send back is also stark and unequivocal. It was delivered in Paris.”