Stay Free - Russel Brand - Chris Hedges (They’re Destroying The Country!)

00:00:00.000 Hello there you Awakening Wonders, thanks for joining me for Stay Free with Russell Brand.

00:00:04.000 Wherever you're watching this you can only see the whole show exclusively on Rumble.

00:00:08.000 After 10 minutes we click over exclusive so that free speech can flow because today we're talking to Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges.

00:00:17.000 Chris spent nearly two decades as a correspondent reporting in over 50 countries, 15 years at the New York Times, in the good old days of journalism.

00:00:25.000 He has personally been subject to censorship with YouTube wiping out an entire series of his shows, I believe because it was on Russia Today, but included conversations with such Right-wing fascists as Edward Snowden and Slavoj Žižek.

00:00:39.000 Today we're going to be talking about the perpetual state of war, the conflict between Ukraine and, is it a proxy war?

00:00:46.000 When did it actually begin?

00:00:47.000 We'll be talking about the escalation of conflict between Western nations and China, the impossibility of alliances outside of centralised establishment politics, and when the Liberal-Left went wrong.

00:01:01.000 Stay free with Russell Brand.

00:01:03.000 See it first on Rumble.

00:01:05.000 Thanks for joining us, Chris.

00:01:07.000 It's lovely to talk to you again.

00:01:08.000 Thanks, Russell.

00:01:09.000 Chris, we get straight into this new permanent war state that we appear to be living in.

00:01:15.000 It felt like during the 60s, when there was the Vietnam conflict and the Korea Wars, that this was a period that had been committed to history, that there was no appetite To see American bodies returning home posthumously.

00:01:32.000 But since then it seems that, you know, America has been continually engaged in conflict and it's the repackaging of these conflicts that has changed the marketing of these wars.

00:01:43.000 Why is it that there is a necessity, whether it's Afghanistan, Ukraine or a potential forthcoming Taiwan-oriented conflict between the US and China, that there appears to be a necessity for ongoing conflicts?

00:01:54.000 Is it built into the American economic model?

00:01:57.000 Why is it necessary and why is it so difficult to get balanced reporting around this subject, Chris?

00:02:02.000 Yes, it's completely built into the American economic model, as Seymour Mellman, the scholar at Columbia, pointed out in books like The Permanent War Economy.

00:02:11.000 So after World War II, you had a perpetuation of the military, what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex, and it justified itself through the Cold War, although it created nuclear arsenals that could wipe out Soviet cities ten times over.

00:02:29.000 And then, of course, it fed the proxy wars that were very much part of the Cold War.

00:02:36.000 I spent five years covering the war in El Salvador, for instance, in the early 1980s.

00:02:41.000 But Vietnam was a very seminal point because, you're right, the American middle class did not want their kids coming home in body bags.

00:02:54.000 And so there were two things that happened after Vietnam.

00:02:57.000 One, there was a kind of reckoning that the country asked questions about themselves, or we did as Americans, that we hadn't asked before.

00:03:08.000 There was a very kind of let's call it a period of 10 or 15 years of anti-militarism

00:03:14.000 because of the Vietnam War, which then Ronald Reagan attempted to, I think,

00:03:19.000 successfully restore the quote-unquote good name of war. The other thing is that the military or the militarists

00:03:28.000 realized that they had to abolish the draft. That if they were going to continue the policy

00:03:33.000 of permanent war, they were going to have to fight it with poor kids who didn't have any options

00:03:40.000 and comprised a small, largely powerless demographic within the country in the single digits in

00:03:48.000 terms of percentages.

00:03:50.000 Much of my own family on my mother's side I'm talking about my own family.

00:03:54.000 But that's another issue.

00:03:54.000 are the classic cannon fodder for the military.

00:03:59.000 Unfortunately, I would also add they're quite susceptible to the propaganda, the flag-waving,

00:04:05.000 gun-toting.

00:04:06.000 I'm talking about my own family, but that's another issue.

00:04:10.000 So those two things happened and that allowed them to continue with war.

00:04:16.000 Now, I covered the revolutions in Eastern Europe.

00:04:19.000 I was in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania in 1989.

00:04:24.000 So I was there with the collapse of the Soviet Union and acutely aware of the promises that have been made to Gorbachev not to expand NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany.

00:04:36.000 In fact, we were all talking about the peace dividend, which shows you how naive we all

00:04:40.000 were, believing that there would not be this necessity to commit such large quantities

00:04:46.000 of money, material, research, and human capital into the war industry.

00:04:51.000 Well, the war industry had no intention of going away.

00:04:54.000 That's why it pushed the expansion of NATO, although, of course, as I think you've mentioned

00:05:00.000 on your show, the promises were made not to do those, a violation of the promises made

00:05:04.000 to Moscow and I think that expansion of NATO was pushed for two reasons.

00:05:09.000 One, it made the arms industry billions in profits because countries, Poland, etc., had to reconfigure their militaries to be compatible with NATO equipment, but also hubris.

00:05:22.000 That's when the United States began to talk about the unipolar world, which is just a fancy way of saying we dominate.

00:05:30.000 Whatever we do, we can do anything we want and nobody Can get in our way those two things led to the conflict with Ukraine And just to close the the I think that there's a Deep understanding now within certainly within the US military that they cannot win a war of attrition Against Russia Russia has bled and bled profusely no question, but a war of attrition Ukraine can't win and

00:05:57.000 And I was in the first Gulf War.

00:05:59.000 I was in southern Iraq.

00:06:01.000 After the war, I was in the Shiite uprising in Basra, and then I was taken prisoner by the Iraqi Republican Guard.

00:06:07.000 But being there, we had no clean water.

00:06:10.000 We had no electricity.

00:06:12.000 The schools were bombed, were destroyed.

00:06:14.000 The hospitals were destroyed.

00:06:15.000 That is a classic tactic that the U.S. 0.80

00:06:18.000 military uses.

00:06:19.000 It's what the Russians are using. 0.99

00:06:21.000 And that's why you see this panic and sending M1 Abrams tanks, we can talk about that later,

00:06:26.000 which will be largely useless, talking about uranium depleted weapons.

00:06:31.000 Now you have through Poland lobbying to send F-15, F-16 fighter jets.

00:06:37.000 Very, very dangerous.

00:06:40.000 But of course, as we saw with Afghanistan, it doesn't matter whether they can win. 0.99

00:06:44.000 The Washington Post published the Afghan papers, which illustrated that the military and political leadership in the United States knew, at best, Afghanistan would be a stalemate.

00:06:55.000 But the war went on for many years, which was also true in Vietnam, because war is a business. 0.98

00:07:00.000 Very lucrative, Raytheon, Halliburton, Northrop Grumman, etc.

00:07:05.000 And we just have been unable to push back against this Military.

00:07:12.000 There's militarism that is disemboweling the country.

00:07:15.000 If you drive across the United States, our cities and towns and communities are just desolate.

00:07:21.000 Thank you.

00:07:22.000 On our Locals Community chat, which you can join, there's a button here if you want to become a member of our Locals Community, and I tend to follow their comments.

00:07:31.000 Joe's Dog says, after the 9-11 attack, my grandfather quietly said, poor kids die first.

00:07:37.000 Then he went into the garden.

00:07:38.000 he knew the pattern of profit.

00:07:40.000 If you're watching us on YouTube now, we are only going to be with you there

00:07:44.000 for another couple of minutes before we click over to being exclusively on Rumble,

00:07:48.000 because I'm going to be asking Chris about the reconstruction of Ukraine,

00:07:51.000 in particular the role of BlackRock and JP Morgan, and the Ukraine as investment opportunity narrative.

00:07:59.000 Also, we'll be talking about how the left has become irrelevant in Chris Hedges' own words.

00:08:04.000 So do remember to click the link in the description, join us on Rumble, even better, join us on Locals,

00:08:09.000 you'll get all sorts of extra content.

00:08:11.000 [BLANK_AUDIO]

00:08:13.000 The military method as a sort of raison d'etre and determining ideology of establishment power means that in spite of apparent bipartisan politics, essentially what you have is a uniparty state with perhaps Particular biases towards escalating conflict with China or escalating conflict with Russia.

00:08:36.000 And would you say, Chris, that this shows that the directing power is beyond the state?

00:08:44.000 Organisations like JPMorgan BlackRock and some of the military industrial complex organisations that you've listed are one way or another able to assert pressure or at least meet their agenda regardless of what political party Where does that leave ordinary people when it comes to organising ourselves politically?

00:09:03.000 Where does it leave our conventional affiliations?

00:09:05.000 How do you challenge power that seems to be beyond the reach of democracy?

00:09:11.000 Well, it is beyond the reach of democracy.

00:09:12.000 There's no way to vote against the interests of Raytheon or Goldman Sachs or Citibank.

00:09:19.000 They're protean.

00:09:20.000 They dominate Republican administrations and Democratic administrations.

00:09:27.000 Both parties slavishly give the war industry not only everything it wants, I mean, and Pentagon budget has gone up successively for what the last eight years, but they give them more so that in this latest Pentagon budget

00:09:44.000 Proposal for fiscal 2023, the Congress gave them $48 billion more than the Biden administration asked for.

00:09:54.000 And this is how empires die, as Arnold Toynbee and other historians have pointed out.

00:10:01.000 Toynbee said they're not murdered, they commit suicide.

00:10:04.000 That you have a rapacious, unchecked, unregulated, out of control military machine that engages in military adventurism in a kind of futile attempt

00:10:19.000 to regain a lost global hegemony or dominance.

00:10:24.000 That's really when you look closely what the war in Ukraine is about, what the expansion 0.99

00:10:28.000 of NATO was about, what the 20 years of debacles were about in the Middle East.

00:10:34.000 And it's led by these, the same people, these pimps of war. 0.54

00:10:38.000 I go all the way back to the war in El Salvador, they're the same figures. 0.98

00:10:43.000 I was dealing with Robert Kagan.

00:10:46.000 and Elliott Abrams, who were both working in the Reagan administration in the State

00:10:50.000 Department and whose job, in essence, was to discredit everything I and other reporters

00:10:55.000 and camera people were reporting off the ground in places like Nicaragua or El Salvador or

00:11:00.000 Guatemala or anywhere else.

00:11:02.000 They don't go away.

00:11:03.000 It doesn't matter how wrong they are.

00:11:06.000 It doesn't matter how many fiascos they lead the country into.

00:11:10.000 It doesn't matter how many trillions of dollars they waste. 0.89

00:11:14.000 It doesn't matter how many hundreds of thousands, ultimately millions of lives they destroy.

00:11:21.000 They are the mouthpiece of the war industry, which funds their think tanks, Atlantic Council, Brookings Institute, American Enterprise Institute, etc.

00:11:32.000 Uh, and, uh, and those of us who actually come out of war.

00:11:37.000 I mean, I'm not, I'm not an activist in that sense.

00:11:40.000 I spent two decades reporting on wars all over the globe.

00:11:45.000 Six years in Latin America, seven years in the Middle East, covered the war in the former Yugoslavia.

00:11:50.000 Um, and, uh, but our voices are shut out because, uh, you cannot challenge at this point, uh, the war industry that not only has bought up the two

00:12:00.000 parties, but of course dominates or controls the media.

00:12:05.000 So all of their own puppets are the ones who are either selected from the military or from

00:12:13.000 the intelligence community, Clapper, Brennan, all these kinds of people, Petraeus and others,

00:12:19.000 to essentially function as shills or pimps of war.

00:12:25.000 And they're never held accountable, and that's what's so dangerous.

00:12:27.000 So Carl Leibniz.

00:12:29.000 And I studied classics.

00:12:30.000 I'm acutely aware of how the Roman Empire fell, how the Athenian Empire fell.

00:12:34.000 militarism or military machine, the enemy within.

00:12:38.000 And that's what they've become.

00:12:39.000 And I studied classics.

00:12:41.000 I'm acutely aware of how the Roman Empire fell, how the Athenian Empire fell.

00:12:49.000 These rapacious military machines impoverish and impoverish the country, disenfranchise

00:12:57.000 the working class.

00:12:59.000 And then in order to keep control of the nation-state, they bring back the very effective mechanisms

00:13:07.000 of repression that they used on the outer reaches of empire.

00:13:11.000 Wholesale surveillance, militarized police that function as internal armies of occupation, militarized drones, suspension of basic civil liberties.

00:13:22.000 This comes right out of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War where he writes the tyranny the Athenian Empire imposed on others it finally imposed on itself and that's where we are so you are right that that there is now nothing within the system there is no mechanism within the system by which it can reform itself the courts the systems of information the media even Hollywood

00:13:48.000 They're completely controlled by this military machine, the war industry, that is why Ralph Nader calls them traitors, that are destroying the country.

00:14:01.000 And now they are flirting with this disastrous war in Ukraine.

00:14:05.000 I mean, I think we have to point out that, as in the Middle East, there is no rational goal. 1.00

00:14:10.000 What is the goal of the war in Ukraine?

00:14:13.000 It's industrial warfare for its own sake.

00:14:17.000 I think we've given $113 billion.

00:14:20.000 That's almost twice the budget of the State Department, which is $60 billion a year.

00:14:25.000 But what's the goal?

00:14:26.000 The goal is to destroy Putin.

00:14:28.000 that's not working very well.

00:14:30.000 And even the New York Times a few months ago ran an editorial saying these people calling

00:14:35.000 for the complete recapturing of all Ukrainian territory, including in the eastern part of

00:14:42.000 Ukraine where you have ethnic Russians that have been ethnic Russians for two centuries,

00:14:46.000 is a fantasy.

00:14:47.000 But these people are self-delusional.

00:14:49.000 I mean, I've not only as a reporter had to deal with them for many decades, but I also

00:14:55.000 know some of them.

00:14:57.000 And they're either incredible mediocrities draped in this kind of cloying Ivy League

00:15:02.000 snobbery or they're certifiably insane, which would be figures like John Bolton or Elliott

00:15:10.000 Abrams.

00:15:11.000 And you don't want these people.

00:15:13.000 flirting with a nuclear confrontation with Russia and of course China.

00:15:18.000 I mean, you can't sustain this kind of militarism unless you have an enemy.

00:15:25.000 And this goes back to 1989 and the tragedy of what we're facing because Gorbachev and

00:15:32.000 then later Yeltsin and people forget in the early years Putin, they wanted to build both

00:15:37.000 a security and economic alliance with Europe and the United States.

00:15:41.000 But you couldn't expand NATO, you couldn't get Central and Eastern European countries to fork over, usually through loans, billions of dollars for their military unless Russia was the enemy.

00:15:54.000 So if Russia wasn't willing to be the enemy, then they would make Russia the enemy, and that's what they did. 0.76

00:15:59.000 I mean, there is a Wikileaks dump that has, from the cables, from the Wikileaks cables, diplomatic cables, that has William Burns, the ambassador of Russia at the time, now the head of the CIA, talking about keep your hands off of Ukraine.

00:16:14.000 That across the political spectrum, this is interfering with what Russia considers its vital security interest.

00:16:23.000 And let's just Never forget that twice in the last century, both in World War I and World War II, the Russian Empire was invaded through Ukraine by the Nazis in World War II, by the monarchy Kaiser Wilhelm in World War I, and then of course the century before that Napoleon did the same thing.

00:16:42.000 So there is real historical trauma there.

00:16:45.000 There was an understanding by diplomats like Burns.

00:16:48.000 Even Barack Obama made a statement that Ukraine was essentially a no-go area because to move into Ukraine would be considered threatening by Moscow, and legitimately so. 1.00

00:17:06.000 But yes, this kind of constant aggression, and part of the problem with the press is that it's not reported.

00:17:12.000 Um, so we are, uh, carrying out manoeuvres in the South China Sea, uh, but it, it, we don't hear or we don't understand what that means for Beijing.

00:17:22.000 I mean, it would be the equivalent of Chinese naval manoeuvres off the coast of California.

00:17:26.000 Imagine how we would react.

00:17:28.000 I mean, we, we couldn't even handle a balloon.

00:17:30.000 Chris, before you leap into China and the balloons, I've got, uh, there's a few things that I've got to unpack there.

00:17:35.000 Now I'm going to, this pen, this is going to be our little signal, Chris, because you give such hearty, rich data that I need to be able to occasionally

00:17:44.000 stop you to unpick it.

00:17:46.000 And here are a few of the points that I'd really like to follow up on.

00:17:50.000 You seem to be saying that not only is Ukraine identifiably a repeat of conflicts that are

00:17:57.000 within living memory, like Iraq. 0.82

00:17:59.000 Take for example the exaggeration of the requirement for a conflict, the illegitimacy of the inciting incident in both cases, not acknowledging the historical complexity of the conflicts in both instances.

00:18:15.000 Beyond that, that this is a historical paradigm that precedes the American empire specifically and can be accorded to empire more broadly.

00:18:26.000 And interestingly, Chris, you seem to be saying something that gets said conversationally rather a lot, that we're experiencing the end of empire.

00:18:34.000 You know, the end of the American Empire and what we're experiencing, witnessing, is their attempts to prevent this inevitable entropy from taking place.

00:18:44.000 But elsewhere you'll hear that America spends more on military budgets than any other country in the world, that their arsenals and artillery are better equipped than any comparable nation.

00:18:57.000 I want to sort of follow up on that idea that, you know, Are we witnessing the end of an American empire or are we beginning to see the conjugating of American empire with a new type of unipolar globalism as exerted through organizations like World Bank,

00:19:15.000 NATO, obviously, WEF, WHO.

00:19:18.000 These organizations that are to some degree funded by American taxpayers, but also funded by private organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, do have the ability to transcend national democracy and implement law.

00:19:31.000 We're seeing that sort of, you know, throughout the pandemic.

00:19:33.000 We're seeing examples of that.

00:19:34.000 And there's currently a treaty being debated that might demonstrate it even more clearly.

00:19:39.000 So I suppose what I'm asking you is this.

00:19:41.000 It sounds like one of the things you were saying is that nations like China and Russia, while they are clearly militaristic nations with great interest in empire, with their own transgressions and genocides even as part of their past, and persecution as part of their present, Are at least willing to contend with the idea of a multipolar world in a way that the unipolar, globalist, expansionist, current American military hegemonic idea is not accepting as a possibility, that they want global dominance.

00:20:18.000 Because when you said that thing, mate, that there is no, you can't conceive of what would be the objective in Ukraine.

00:20:24.000 That's why it has to be presented in simplistic terms.

00:20:27.000 It's a humanitarian disaster.

00:20:28.000 We've got to present Ukrainian people.

00:20:29.000 Zelensky's a hero. 0.98

00:20:31.000 Putin's a monster. 0.77

00:20:32.000 It doesn't take into account the obvious truth that Russia is an enormous, powerful country with a rich history. 0.98

00:20:41.000 This is not something that can just be wiped off the map with no disrespect to a country like Iraq and its previous historical incarnations.

00:20:49.000 That was a country that, you know, there was such an obvious distinction in the scale and size and the difference between the capacities of both nations.

00:20:58.000 And we've seen the horrible consequences of that botched war.

00:21:02.000 So the consequences of this one could be immeasurable.

00:21:04.000 So a few things I want to touch on.

00:21:06.000 Unipolarism, American expansionism, the true agenda. 0.99

00:21:10.000 Fucking hell, you're going to be talking for the rest of your life. 0.99

00:21:11.000 China and Russia. 0.99

00:21:13.000 And also, I really like the way you keep referring to class throughout this.

00:21:17.000 I know that some of that's because of your personal and familial history, but I guess when we get to the crunch of all this, we see which people are expendable.

00:21:26.000 We get into that Foucauldian idea of Who is it okay to kill?

00:21:30.000 Whose lives can we dispense with?

00:21:33.000 And it seems now we're saying, once again, American lives.

00:21:36.000 There are certain American lives that can be traded.

00:21:38.000 So I'd love to pass the ball back over to you.

00:21:40.000 Now, Chris, I'll only hold this up in the case of what I would call an emergency, which we could call, for example, Ukraine attempting to take Crimea, or me attempting to get another question in.

00:21:51.000 Over to you, Chris.

00:21:53.000 Well, you're right.

00:21:54.000 What they are seeking is A unipolar world, but that's been slipping away from them very quickly with the industrial might of China. 0.72

00:22:07.000 I mean, what happens in war is that once you open that Pandora's box, it just goes in all sorts of directions you can't predict.

00:22:16.000 So, for instance, somebody in Washington gets this loony idea that they're going to arm the moderate rebels.

00:22:23.000 And just I want to remind viewers that I spent seven years in the Middle East.

00:22:27.000 There's an area I know well.

00:22:29.000 So they pump in half a billion dollars worth of weaponry.

00:22:33.000 Well, of course, all the jihadists from Iraq cross the border and are rearmed.

00:22:39.000 And then Washington freaks out and starts bombing the very people they armed and acting, in essence, as Assad's de facto air force.

00:22:49.000 And we should note that thousands of Hezbollah fighters from southern Lebanon are also fighting on behalf of Assad.

00:22:56.000 So we're acting as Hezbollah's Air Force.

00:22:59.000 I mean, this is what happens in war.

00:23:02.000 And so with the conflict in Ukraine and the staggering and obscene amounts of money, and I was at the February 19th rally in Washington with this left-right alliance that denounced permanent war.

00:23:20.000 Ron Paul was there and Jimmy Dore and a bunch of other people.

00:23:25.000 But what happens with that is that they pushed Moscow into the arms of Beijing.

00:23:34.000 Now, a whole Cold War policy was to make sure that Beijing and Moscow were closer to Washington than they were to each other.

00:23:44.000 This was a fundamental tenet of Cold War policy that you did not want a strong alliance between Russia and China, which I think is probably one of the reasons that Henry Kissinger, a man I loathe, of course, but he correctly spoke out against the perpetuation of the war in Ukraine.

00:24:04.000 And Kissinger said again correctly that you don't want to attempt to humiliate Russia, a nuclear-armed Russia.

00:24:15.000 And the constant escalation, which to be clear is being driven by NATO countries, is essentially

00:24:23.000 panic.

00:24:24.000 It is an understanding that however much Russia bleeds, and Russia clearly bled a lot, the 0.93

00:24:30.000 longer this goes on, the longer the infrastructure of Ukraine is degraded.

00:24:35.000 I think roughly 50% of Ukrainians do not have access, or at least permanent access to electricity,

00:24:46.000 that they're finished.

00:24:48.000 And so that's why you're seeing...

00:24:49.000 [BLANK_AUDIO]

00:24:50.000 weapons being sent to Ukraine that they're not going to be able to even effectively use.

00:24:54.000 They're just throwing everything they have at it. And the idea, of course, with the sanctions was

00:25:01.000 to destroy the Russian economy. Well, the economies that got destroyed are the German economy.

00:25:06.000 What's UK inflation? It's almost 10 percent, isn't it? I mean, your energy bills have

00:25:12.000 gone through the roof, putting even more pressure on a distressed working class.

00:25:18.000 I mean, this is a very cynical war, because it is not being fought for Ukraine.

00:25:24.000 It's being fought partly to enrich the arms industry, but also it's being fought to degrade

00:25:30.000 the Russian military.

00:25:31.000 That's really why it's being fought with Ukrainian bodies. 0.53

00:25:36.000 But the economic price, of course, the price in terms of devastation and loss of life is

00:25:43.000 being paid by Ukrainians and Russians, but the economic cost is being borne by Europe,

00:25:47.000 not so much by the United States, which is fine with the United States because it forces 0.78

00:25:52.000 Germany to buy their natural gas, which was probably part of the plan all along.

00:25:57.000 There was an old saying, which I think is true, you can't talk about war if you don't talk about markets.

00:26:02.000 So the breakdown of the unipolar world, especially with the rise of China, is what, and you mentioned the IMF and the World Bank, and these are institutions that cemented that dominance, American dominance, for decades around the globe, and of course destroyed local

00:26:21.000 economies so that corporations could come in and seize them, which by the way they did in

00:26:27.000 Russia under Yeltsin.

00:26:28.000 That's why the IMF gave Yeltsin a $10 billion loan, of which an estimated $1.5 billion was

00:26:33.000 of which an estimated $1.5 billion was spent to make sure he was re-elected because he

00:26:36.000 spent to make sure he was reelected, because he did Washington's bidding, which in the

00:26:39.000 did Washington's bidding, which in the end gave rise to the nationalists around Putin

00:26:41.000 end gave rise to the nationalists around Putin, because we turned, through Yeltsin, who was

00:26:45.000 because we turned, through Yeltsin, who was a fall-down drunk, we were turning Russia

00:26:47.000 a fall-down drunk, we were turning Russia into a client state. 0.65

00:26:50.000 into a client state with devastating impact for Russian people.

00:26:55.000 I mean, bread lines and hunger and everything else.

00:26:59.000 So yes, what they're seeking is, historians call it micro-militarism.

00:27:03.000 It's where late empire engages in military adventurism in a desperate bid to reclaim 0.93

00:27:11.000 a past dominance, and that's what we're seeing.

00:27:15.000 I mean, anybody, even from the outside, can see the social unraveling in the United States,

00:27:22.000 the mass shootings, the opioid crisis that takes 100,000 lives a year, but that doesn't

00:27:28.000 count the millions of people who are addicted, the fact that half the country doesn't even

00:27:34.000 have $400 in their bank account to handle an emergency expense, the collapse of our

00:27:40.000 health care system, of all the industrialized worlds.

00:27:44.000 We did the worst job of handling the pandemic.

00:27:48.000 I think we had 16% of the global deaths and we're less than 5% of the world's Population, the incursion of the Capitol on January 6th.

00:27:59.000 You can see the social disintegration and the very rapacious and lethal force of, as I mentioned before, these militarized police that function as internal armies of occupation.

00:28:12.000 The stripping away of, I mean, we are the most spied upon, watched, monitored, photographed population in human history.

00:28:20.000 And I was in East Germany. I covered the Stasi state. So the unraveling

00:28:27.000 internally and the increasing loss of global hegemony is, you are right, is what they are

00:28:37.000 attempting to do is use this massive military machine to reclaim it. But look at what happened in Iraq.

00:28:45.000 We lost the Taliban. We lost the word of the Taliban. Everything we touched, Libya, Syria.

00:28:53.000 Pakistan, Somalia has been a disaster. 1.00

00:28:57.000 And I, the longer this war goes on, the more it's assured that Ukraine will be a disaster too. 0.98

00:29:04.000 And then of course they'll turn to China.

00:29:06.000 Chris, I just want to draw your attention to some of the messages in our chat over on locals.

00:29:11.000 You can join that by pressing the red button.

00:29:13.000 Greer2 says, Bingo!

00:29:14.000 The primary purpose of this war is to grade Russian military capability and expectation of a US-China war over Taiwan.

00:29:21.000 The military-industrial complex enriching itself is a political constant here.

00:29:25.000 PeaceLoveLight says, I'll be watching this again.

00:29:27.000 He's a gold mine of information.

00:29:29.000 I think PeaceLoveLight is referring to you, although my contributions have also been quite valuable, I think.

00:29:35.000 Someone says, that's Joe's dog again, I stopped learning the piano to listen.

00:29:39.000 Smart, condensed truth.

00:29:40.000 So, people are enjoying this content.

00:29:44.000 When you talk, as you are Chris, about these endeavors are being undertaken in order to mitigate empirical decline, Is there not a grave risk that these conflicts could in fact expediate and exacerbate that very decline?

00:30:05.000 Who will feel that first?

00:30:07.000 Will it be ordinary people because of the energy crisis that you've already described?

00:30:10.000 Will it lead to covert operations like the blowing up of the Nord Stream gas pipeline which your fellow Pulitzer Prize winning conspiracy theory expert Expert and fellow right-wing fascist Seymour Hersh came on the show and talked very articulately about how that entire operation was carried out.

00:30:30.000 Will it mean that the indication that the end of empire will be felt first by domestic populations and is there a likelihood in your view that in the next 10 to 20 years we'll see Radical change.

00:30:42.000 And is that likely to mean that the other aspect of this that you've started to refer to, Chris, the increased surveillance, the increased push for further methods of control, i.e.

00:30:53.000 through social credit scores, many of the ideas introduced in the pandemic legitimised and normalised throughout the pandemic will be exerted due to the despondency, dismay and loss of faith that this declining empire is likely to engender?

00:31:11.000 So Alfred McCoy, a very fine historian, argues, I think with some validity, that the death blow of the American empire will come when the dollar is no longer the world's reserve currency.

00:31:27.000 Because then our debt is no longer attractive, people won't buy it up, and the value of the dollar itself will plummet just as the pound sterling did in the 1950s when the pound sterling was dropped as the world's reserve currency.

00:31:42.000 So at that point, and we fund much of our military adventurism through debt, At that point, the empire is physically unsustainable.

00:31:52.000 We have 800 bases around the globe.

00:31:55.000 There has to be a massive retraction.

00:31:58.000 And the social decay, which is already pretty pronounced in the United States, will become magnified, creating even more upheaval.

00:32:09.000 One of the problems in the In the United States, and this isn't true, of course, in the UK, is that we're a country awash in automatic weapons.

00:32:19.000 Anyone can go into a Walmart and buy a military-grade rifle.

00:32:24.000 I don't hunt.

00:32:25.000 I'm actually a vegan, but I did.

00:32:28.000 I grew up, as I said, in Maine.

00:32:30.000 My relatives were all veterans.

00:32:32.000 My grandfather was a master sergeant in the Army.

00:32:35.000 My father was drafted and fought in World War II.

00:32:38.000 in North Africa and became a pacifist afterwards.

00:32:40.000 But anyway, you go out and hunt, the caliber of those automatic, those AR-15s, they're useless to take down a large animal like a deer unless you want to put 20 bullets in them.

00:32:53.000 You use much heavier caliber. 0.69

00:32:55.000 Those weapons are designed solely to shoot human beings.

00:32:59.000 And it doesn't even make the news anymore, virtually.

00:33:04.000 I mean, we have more mass shootings, I think, this year than there are days.

00:33:11.000 So that kind of social upheaval will become more pronounced with an economic collapse. I think McCoy argues that that's

00:33:24.000 where we're headed. He actually gives a date for it, 2030. I'm very brave of him. I wouldn't do

00:33:29.000 that. But it's clear that we're headed for a cliff. And those who are attempting to regain

00:33:36.000 that lost hegemony are seeking to do so only through military adventurism, not dealing with the

00:33:44.000 kind of social inequality that is the most pronounced in American history, with our billionaire

00:33:52.000 class worth, what, $180 billion.

00:33:54.000 Go back and look at the old oligarchs, the Rockefellers.

00:34:00.000 they were worth a few billion, three, four, five billion.

00:34:03.000 We haven't seen any kind of disparity in terms of wealth like this. I mean, I don't know, you

00:34:09.000 have to go back to what, pharaonic Egypt or something. So the internal decay coupled

00:34:17.000 with the fact that the military machine is in the hands of idiots who don't understand the 1.00

00:34:22.000 world. 1.00

00:34:23.000 I mean, remember, these people live in their own echo chamber in Washington, the people pulling the strings.

00:34:28.000 They haven't, as I have.

00:34:30.000 I spent 20 years outside the United States.

00:34:32.000 They don't understand.

00:34:33.000 They're historically, culturally, linguistically, religiously Illiterate. 0.75

00:34:39.000 And so I, who spent months of my life in Iraq, and again, seven years in the Middle East, and I speak Arabic, you know, are listening to them talking about implanting, in the inception of the Iraq War, implanting democracy in Baghdad and how the oil Revenues are going to pay for the reconstruction and democracy is going to emanate outwards across the Middle East.

00:35:02.000 And this is just fantasy.

00:35:04.000 It's a non-reality based belief system.

00:35:07.000 And the same people that got us into that mess are the people now getting us into the mess in Ukraine, stoking a conflict with Russia and baiting China. 0.57

00:35:20.000 And, you know, Victoria Nuland, who's one of the architects of all this, when Cheney was vice president, she was in charge of his foreign policy.

00:35:30.000 It doesn't matter what administration.

00:35:32.000 Now she's stoking the conflict in Ukraine. 1.00

00:35:35.000 Of course, she was very involved in the 2014 coup, which provoked Russia unnecessarily.

00:35:44.000 Yeah, these people are very, very limited and very, very dangerous, and there's no internal check on them at all.

00:35:53.000 And you're right, what they are doing vainly is to recapture a lost hegemony, a lost dominance, one that had been very effectively put in place by the IMF, the World Bank.

00:36:07.000 I mean, don't get me started on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

00:36:12.000 But yes, all of these forces, Soros, that is at their core what it's about.

00:36:19.000 But it's not working, and it's not going to work.

00:36:22.000 And unfortunately, the more it fails, the more rapacious, bloody, and aggressive they become.

00:36:32.000 And that is a characteristic of late empire.

00:36:35.000 So at the end of the Roman Empire, you have a one million man army that is just almost cannibalizing Rome, especially when they cut off the wheat shipments from North Africa.

00:36:50.000 And at the end, they're auctioning off the seat of the emperorship.

00:36:53.000 That's kind of where we're headed.

00:36:56.000 When there are literally individuals that were operating within the Bush-Cheney administration still making policy decision in the Ukraine war, it's easy to identify that there is a continuity that transcends the electoral cycle of American politics.

00:37:14.000 It seems that domestically and of course globally a seismic moment was the 2008 crash and that since then perhaps American economics and the financial world more broadly has been artificially revivified, defibrillated into a new zombie life.

00:37:30.000 And when you talk about this hollowed out state of America and the loss of faith and hope in American institutions, when you talk about the rise of populism and the changing cultural rhetoric that we're experiencing on both sides of the political conversation.

00:37:48.000 It's easy to see how this militaristic adventurism coupled with financial impropriety might lead to more marginal ideas migrating to the center of politics.

00:38:01.000 Certain parts of the media infatuated with the rise of a figure like Donald Trump or the The extraordinary anomaly, as it was seen then, of Brexit.

00:38:13.000 But I know that you are also interested in the other aspect of this debate for which you use, and I don't know if it's a term you coined, woke imperialism.

00:38:23.000 I wonder if you could talk to us, Chris, about the relationship between woke imperialism and the ideological hollowing out of the left Um, we did a sort of an article the other day where, um, the new, uh, what was her name?

00:38:36.000 Nikki Haley, the first Republican presidential candidate talked about, you know, the sort of the left-wing establishment and the figures that she listed, Pelosi and et cetera, they're all Multi-millionaires, even Bernie Sanders is a pretty wealthy dude.

00:38:50.000 We don't have a kind of left in terms of left-wing populism, socially minded, legitimate representation of the people anymore.

00:38:59.000 It seems to me that what we have are two corporatized parties.

00:39:02.000 What then becomes the role of the kind of rhetoric around wokeism?

00:39:07.000 And just to be explicit, I'm in support of of individual freedom, whether that's the freedom to express yourself in a traditional orthodox way or a progressive way, as the culture would term it.

00:39:19.000 You know, that's sort of where I stand on it.

00:39:21.000 I believe in individual freedom.

00:39:22.000 I believe in democracy.

00:39:24.000 What do you think is the function of woke imperialism?

00:39:26.000 What is its impact on the culture?

00:39:28.000 How is it being used to create division and facilitate further oppression?

00:39:34.000 Right, so you're referring to this article I wrote called Woke Imperialism, which is on my Substack, chrishedges.substack.com, which was widely disseminated.

00:39:44.000 And I began with the murder of Tyree Nichols by the five black Memphis police officers as an example of the failure of woke politics, because not only, of course, were the five officers who killed him African American, but the city's police department is headed by a black woman. 0.60

00:40:06.000 and none of it helped Nichols, who was just another victim of a modern-day police lynching.

00:40:12.000 That's one example of how the militarists, the corporatists, the oligarchs, academia, media

00:40:19.000 have essentially twisted identity politics and diversity and used it as a mask for systems of

00:40:30.000 oppression and of course white supremacy. It's become a very effective gimmick that unfortunately

00:40:38.000 has lured many people on the left into little more than a boutique activism.

00:40:46.000 I mean, you mentioned Victoria Nuland.

00:40:49.000 Are we somehow safer?

00:40:50.000 Is the country saner?

00:40:52.000 She's a woman and she's in the State Department, or Lloyd Austin, who's black, as the Secretary of Defense, or the fact that the Pentagon is now allowing transgender people to serve as soldiers.

00:41:08.000 You know, the head of the, the secretary of the treasury, Janet Yeltsin, who promotes

00:41:14.000 openly job insecurity and unemployment as a way to fight inflation.

00:41:20.000 Is she good for working men and women? 0.98

00:41:24.000 And this is a very kind of classic technique used by colonial powers who put their front

00:41:30.000 person willing to do their bidding, whether it's Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti or Anastasio

00:41:35.000 Samosa in Nicaragua or Mobutu Sese Soko in the Congo.

00:41:39.000 I mean, there's a long list.

00:41:41.000 They'll do the dirty work on the part of the colonializers. 0.90

00:41:44.000 I mean, I point out in the article that the great, one of the greatest resistance leaders

00:41:50.000 in American history, Sitting Bull, was assassinated by members of his own tribe who served in

00:41:55.000 the Lakota, in the reservations police force at Standing Rock.

00:42:00.000 So.

00:42:02.000 [BLANK_AUDIO]

00:42:03.000 You know, diversity is extremely important when it is part of the opposition.

00:42:11.000 You want all of those voices and ethnicities and genders and everything else.

00:42:16.000 But when it is seized upon by the ruling elites, and your sole question is, is this person a person of color?

00:42:24.000 Is this person a woman? 1.00

00:42:26.000 Whatever it is, without looking at what it is they stand for.

00:42:30.000 I mean, are we better off Because Clarence Thomas, who is black, who opposes affirmative action, is on the Supreme Court. 0.78

00:42:36.000 It's almost childish, but it's become a very effective, and it's created this obsession with kind of moral purity or moral absolutism, which is why you mentioned the Rage Against the War Machine rally on February 19th, where we were with libertarians, and we were, I personally was quite viciously attacked, but were never, and I wrote another column called There Are No Permanent There's only permanent power.

00:43:02.000 We do have to coalesce with groups that may think differently than we do to confront permanent war, because it's only that organized power from below that's all we have left to stop this suicidal folly of empire.

00:43:19.000 So yeah, I mean, Glenn Ford, who died but headed the Black Agenda Report, a great friend of mine, he called it representationalism.

00:43:29.000 and that you take a woman or a person of color and you put them within a system of oppression.

00:43:37.000 But as he points out, of course, they're not the ones who write the script.

00:43:46.000 They don't write the drama.

00:43:47.000 They're just chosen as the actors.

00:43:52.000 And we gotta get over that.

00:43:55.000 We also have to get over this kind of moral purity where somebody who doesn't agree with us

00:44:00.000 on COVID vaccines or whatever it is, we'd never talk to again

00:44:04.000 and we won't be in the same room with.

00:44:06.000 I mean, libertarians, I...

00:44:08.000 Libertarians have been very good on war, on empire, and very good on civil liberties, but they also want to abolish the minimum wage and Social Security, and none of which I support.

00:44:18.000 But this rally that we had in Washington was about the permanent war machine, and we united on that.

00:44:25.000 On other issues, we'll be on opposite sides.

00:44:28.000 But that's called political maturity, which unfortunately many in the left lack.

00:44:34.000 Chris, what strikes me over the course of this conversation is the wealth of knowledge that you've accrued over a lifetime of reporting.

00:44:44.000 Last time we communicated I said I was struck by how you could have someone who 10, 15 years ago was a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist with the New York Times Now somewhat confined to the margins of the journalistic space, a comparable thing has happened with Greenwald and other, you know, Seymour Hersh, you know, like it feels now like journalistic integrity has been all but lost and the function of media has become overtly explicitly and identifiably to carry the messaging of the centralised establishment and somehow underwrite it ideologically using the

00:45:21.000 Many of the tropes that we have just listed which are valuable in themselves but are often exploited or used as a veneer to avoid confronting the kind of issues that would meaningfully impact and change the lives of ordinary people and impede the progress and agenda of powerful institutions.

00:45:39.000 I get the sense that you have not been treated correctly at a point in your life where it feels that your experience And knowledge could be benefiting a great many people coming into the journalistic profession, learning how to tell stories about complex ideas, learning how to interpret other cultures for, you know, I'm speaking from the position of a Western person, I guess.

00:46:05.000 In a way that is relevant and making the kind of historical comparisons that you've done conversationally today all the way from the Roman Empire or making comparisons between the various wars that have taken place within our lifetime.

00:46:16.000 What do you feel about this kind of almost patricidal inability to revere elders and to incorporate experience Into our ongoing conversation, does that tell you indicate a kind of nihilism, a loss of morals, a loss of virtue?

00:46:33.000 What do you think it is and how does it personally affect you as a man who obviously has a great deal to offer that the sort of kind of spaces that you once operated within are somehow verboden now?

00:46:44.000 Does it matter to you?

00:46:45.000 Do you think new spaces are emerging?

00:46:46.000 How has it affected you emotionally and why do you think it's happened?

00:46:50.000 Well, I was pushed out of the New York Times because I denounced the calls to invade Iraq for all of the reasons which are now self-evident.

00:46:59.000 That was personal in the sense that I knew that people that I cared about would die, and some of them did, and that I had a kind of You know, responsibility given the platform I had not to remain silent.

00:47:16.000 It's why I'm very outspoken for Palestinians and against Israeli war crimes in the apartheid state because I spent months of my life in Gaza, including when it was being Hit with Israeli warplanes bombed refugee camps bombed by Israeli warplanes is bad And it was horrible as the South African apartheid state was I don't believe they ever sent fighter jets to bomb the townships And I think it what drives me is those relationships and a feeling that whatever I pay is nothing Which is true compared to what they pay and

00:47:55.000 I write books, which several have ended up on the New York Times bestseller list, so I still have a voice, but I have a voice, importantly, that's not allowed me to compromise my own.

00:48:09.000 Integrity, so I feel fine.

00:48:13.000 You ask about why the media is the way it is and that really is driven by the decline in revenue.

00:48:20.000 So the first hit on newsprint were classified ads.

00:48:24.000 40% of newspapers or 40% of revenue for newspapers came from classified ads.

00:48:30.000 Well that went on to the internet.

00:48:32.000 Then with the rise of digital media you saw the steep decline both in advertising revenue and in

00:48:40.000 circulation, and that created a new media model. It destroyed major city papers, which were once

00:48:51.000 quite robust, so that economic assault had an effect within the newsroom, whereby newspapers began

00:48:59.000 to cater even more obsequiously to those on whom they depended for influence and money or

00:49:07.000 access and money, because they didn't want to lose, they didn't want to bleed

00:49:12.000 any more than they've already bled.

00:49:15.000 Uh, and so at the beginning of the Iraq War, I was pushed out.

00:49:19.000 Robert Scheer, uh, was pushed out of the Los Angeles Times.

00:49:24.000 Rihanna Column, he now runs Scheer Post.

00:49:26.000 Um, Phil Donahue, which was the most watched show at MSNBC, was pushed out.

00:49:32.000 Jesse Ventura, which had just signed a contract, was never allowed to go on the air because, uh, he was anti-war.

00:49:39.000 Uh, and so that is why.

00:49:41.000 They've become more, uh, beholden.

00:49:44.000 to those commercial centers of power and to actual centers of political power because they've become so anemic.

00:49:52.000 That has also created a new model in journalism.

00:49:55.000 Matt Taibbi has written quite well about this in his book Hate, Inc., where the old media model was to reach a broad demographic.

00:50:03.000 Now you're trying to reach a particular demographic. You've siloed these demographics,

00:50:08.000 you feed that demographic what it wants to hear, and the flip side of that is of course

00:50:13.000 you're demonizing the other demographic.

00:50:16.000 Fox News does it on one side, CNN, MSNBC, I would argue the New York Times does it on the other.

00:50:22.000 They slogged two years of the Russiagate fantasy.

00:50:26.000 Why?

00:50:26.000 Because they got 500,000 new digital subscribers and when they did their polls they found that those subscribers who signed up during the Trump presidency did so because they hated Trump.

00:50:37.000 So they catered to that.

00:50:39.000 It turns out that it was not just the Mueller report, but now Matt's reporting out of Twitter, and Jeff Gerth, the great investigative reporter, did a four-part series for Columbia Journalism Review, which 24,000 words, which destroys the whole idea that somehow Trump had ties with Russia.

00:50:58.000 But they don't pay a price for it.

00:50:59.000 They haven't even responded They don't feel a need for any accountability because their demographic isn't going to hold them accountable.

00:51:10.000 So the media landscape has, which was always problematic.

00:51:13.000 I mean, I worked for a major publication that was written, is written largely for the elite.

00:51:22.000 But that degradation within the media has really been quite, for old journalists like

00:51:28.000 myself, quite frightening.

00:51:30.000 You know, because I had built a reputation and a career, I haven't really suffered in

00:51:36.000 a way.

00:51:37.000 My books sell, my columns are widely disseminated and read.

00:51:43.000 But what it's really hurt are these young journalists with integrity who don't want

00:51:48.000 to be puppets of the media.

00:51:51.000 Goldman Sachs or the war industry, and they're really suffering because they haven't built

00:51:56.000 up a reputation.

00:51:57.000 So they're not known figures.

00:51:59.000 And yet they are, of course, fighting to maintain their own integrity.

00:52:02.000 And that breaks my heart because what we're really doing is this system, this media system

00:52:08.000 is destroying those we need most.

00:52:11.000 Chris, thank you so much for joining us again.

00:52:14.000 Thank you for taking us on an incredible journey through the war machine and what it functions, the challenges that we face when trying to create new alliances, the economic necessity for ongoing war as empire declines, and the reasons that domestically the United States has changed so radically, observably, in the last 20 years or so.

00:52:36.000 It's also as a person interested in telling stories with integrity, dealing with complexity, looking to create alliances rather than enemies.

00:52:46.000 It's a great education for me personally to have the privilege of your company and your experience.

00:52:52.000 So thank you very much for joining us today.

00:52:54.000 Thanks for doing it, Russell.

00:52:55.000 You can read Chris's work on his Substack and there's a link in the chat right now telling you where you can acquire many of his fantastic books.

00:53:03.000 On tomorrow's show, I'll be talking to Jeremy Corbell about UFOs, spy balloons, the deep state.

00:53:09.000 Why are UFOs being ruined now?

00:53:10.000 Why are they talking about UFOs on the mainstream media?

00:53:13.000 Are these legit UFOs?

00:53:14.000 Also, I am coming to your country.

00:53:16.000 I'm going to be in the United States doing a short stand-up comedy tour.

00:53:20.000 There are tickets on sale now.

00:53:22.000 If you're anywhere in California, you can see me in the Vermont Theatre Los Angeles on March the 2nd, and you can see me on the 6th of March in Florida at the Clearwater... in Clearwater at the Bill... at the Bilheimer Capital Theatre.

00:53:34.000 For tickets, go to RussellBrand.com right now.

00:53:37.000 And if you want your comments read during the show, sign up to my locals community.

00:53:41.000 Look, I'm looking at people now.

00:53:42.000 Claude says, beautiful conversation, Russell.

00:53:44.000 Some people saying they're going to come see me do stand-up.

00:53:46.000 A lot of people saying they're not coming.

00:53:47.000 Chris has beautiful energy, says Thomas Beard.

00:53:50.000 Peace, love, light, talking about morality.

00:53:52.000 Becca D, simply thanking us all.

00:53:55.000 You can join us here.

00:53:56.000 Press that button, you can join us.

00:53:58.000 Not only can you comment on our shows, you get a weekly additional show called Stay Connected, where we show you how we make this show and we respond directly to your questions.

00:54:06.000 Also, I do a weekly meditation with members of this community responding directly to the challenges you have with your spirituality, your emotional life in this crazy world, and my stand-up special will be exclusively available on Locals when it drops in a couple of weeks' time, so you can pre-order that soon as well.

00:54:23.000 Join us tomorrow, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - February 23, 2023

Chris Hedges (They’re Destroying The Country!)

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