from Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Op-Ed truth-out.org
'. . .All we have, as Vaclav Havel writes, is our own powerlessness. And
that powerlessness is our strength. The survival of the movement depends
on embracing this powerlessness. It depends on two of our most
important assets—utter and complete transparency and a rigid adherence
to nonviolence, including respect for private property. This permits us,
as Havel puts it in his 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” to live in truth. And
by living in truth we expose a corrupt corporate state that perpetrates
lies and lives in deceit. Havel, who would later become the first president of the Czech
Republic, in the essay writes a reflection on the mind of a
greengrocer who, as instructed, puts up a poster “among the onions and
carrots” that reads: “Workers of the World Unite!” The poster is
displayed partly out of habit, partly because everyone else does it, and
partly out of fear of the consequences for not following the rules. The
greengrocer would not, Havel writes, display a poster saying: “I am
afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient.” And here is the
difference between the terror of a Josef Stalin or an Adolf Hitler and
the collective charade between the rulers and the ruled that by the
1970s had gripped Czechoslovakia.
Those who do not carve out spaces separate from the state and its
systems of power, those who cannot find room to become autonomous, or
who do not “live in truth,” inevitably become compromised. In Havel’s
words, they “are the system.” The Occupy movement, by naming corporate
power and refusing to compromise with it, by forming alternative systems
of community and society, embodies Havel’s call to “live in truth.” It
does not appeal to the systems of control, and for this reason it is a
genuine threat to the corporate state.
Occupy’s most powerful asset is that it articulates this truth. And this
truth is understood by the mainstream, the 99 percent. . . "
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