Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a correspondent reporting in over 50 countries, including 15 years at the New York Times. He has 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 Slavoj Zelizek. Today, we re talking to Chris about the perpetual state of war, the conflict between Ukraine and Taiwan, and when the Liberal Left went wrong.
00:00:00.000Hello there you Awakening Wonders, thanks for joining me for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:00:04.000Wherever you're watching this you can only see the whole show exclusively on Rumble.
00:00:08.000After 10 minutes we click over exclusive so that free speech can flow because today we're talking to Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges.
00:00:17.000Chris 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.
00:00:25.000He 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.
00:00:39.000Today we're going to be talking about the perpetual state of war, the conflict between Ukraine and, is it a proxy war?
00:00:47.000We'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.
00:01:09.000Chris, we get straight into this new permanent war state that we appear to be living in.
00:01:15.000It 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.
00:01:32.000But 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.
00:01:43.000Why 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?
00:01:54.000Is it built into the American economic model?
00:01:57.000Why is it necessary and why is it so difficult to get balanced reporting around this subject, Chris?
00:02:02.000Yes, 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.
00:02:11.000So 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.
00:02:29.000And then, of course, it fed the proxy wars that were very much part of the Cold War.
00:02:36.000I spent five years covering the war in El Salvador, for instance, in the early 1980s.
00:02:41.000But Vietnam was a very seminal point because, you're right, the American middle class did not want their kids coming home in body bags.
00:02:54.000And so there were two things that happened after Vietnam.
00:02:57.000One, there was a kind of reckoning that the country asked questions about themselves, or we did as Americans, that we hadn't asked before.
00:03:08.000There was a very kind of let's call it a period of 10 or 15 years of anti-militarism
00:03:14.000because of the Vietnam War, which then Ronald Reagan attempted to, I think,
00:03:19.000successfully restore the quote-unquote good name of war. The other thing is that the military or the militarists
00:03:28.000realized that they had to abolish the draft. That if they were going to continue the policy
00:03:33.000of permanent war, they were going to have to fight it with poor kids who didn't have any options
00:03:40.000and comprised a small, largely powerless demographic within the country in the single digits in
00:04:06.000I'm talking about my own family, but that's another issue.
00:04:10.000So those two things happened and that allowed them to continue with war.
00:04:16.000Now, I covered the revolutions in Eastern Europe.
00:04:19.000I was in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania in 1989.
00:04:24.000So 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.
00:04:36.000In fact, we were all talking about the peace dividend, which shows you how naive we all
00:04:40.000were, believing that there would not be this necessity to commit such large quantities
00:04:46.000of money, material, research, and human capital into the war industry.
00:04:51.000Well, the war industry had no intention of going away.
00:04:54.000That's why it pushed the expansion of NATO, although, of course, as I think you've mentioned
00:05:00.000on your show, the promises were made not to do those, a violation of the promises made
00:05:04.000to Moscow and I think that expansion of NATO was pushed for two reasons.
00:05:09.000One, 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.
00:05:22.000That's when the United States began to talk about the unipolar world, which is just a fancy way of saying we dominate.
00:05:30.000Whatever 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
00:06:40.000But of course, as we saw with Afghanistan, it doesn't matter whether they can win.
00:06:44.000The 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.
00:06:55.000But the war went on for many years, which was also true in Vietnam, because war is a business.
00:07:00.000Very lucrative, Raytheon, Halliburton, Northrop Grumman, etc.
00:07:05.000And we just have been unable to push back against this Military.
00:07:12.000There's militarism that is disemboweling the country.
00:07:15.000If you drive across the United States, our cities and towns and communities are just desolate.
00:07:22.000On 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.
00:07:31.000Joe's Dog says, after the 9-11 attack, my grandfather quietly said, poor kids die first.
00:08:13.000The 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.
00:08:36.000And would you say, Chris, that this shows that the directing power is beyond the state?
00:08:44.000Organisations 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?
00:09:03.000Where does it leave our conventional affiliations?
00:09:05.000How do you challenge power that seems to be beyond the reach of democracy?
00:09:11.000Well, it is beyond the reach of democracy.
00:09:12.000There's no way to vote against the interests of Raytheon or Goldman Sachs or Citibank.
00:09:20.000They dominate Republican administrations and Democratic administrations.
00:09:27.000Both 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
00:09:44.000Proposal for fiscal 2023, the Congress gave them $48 billion more than the Biden administration asked for.
00:09:54.000And this is how empires die, as Arnold Toynbee and other historians have pointed out.
00:10:01.000Toynbee said they're not murdered, they commit suicide.
00:10:04.000That you have a rapacious, unchecked, unregulated, out of control military machine that engages in military adventurism in a kind of futile attempt
00:10:19.000to regain a lost global hegemony or dominance.
00:10:24.000That's really when you look closely what the war in Ukraine is about, what the expansion
00:10:28.000of NATO was about, what the 20 years of debacles were about in the Middle East.
00:10:34.000And it's led by these, the same people, these pimps of war.
00:10:38.000I go all the way back to the war in El Salvador, they're the same figures.
00:11:06.000It doesn't matter how many fiascos they lead the country into.
00:11:10.000It doesn't matter how many trillions of dollars they waste.
00:11:14.000It doesn't matter how many hundreds of thousands, ultimately millions of lives they destroy.
00:11:21.000They are the mouthpiece of the war industry, which funds their think tanks, Atlantic Council, Brookings Institute, American Enterprise Institute, etc.
00:11:32.000Uh, and, uh, and those of us who actually come out of war.
00:11:37.000I mean, I'm not, I'm not an activist in that sense.
00:11:40.000I spent two decades reporting on wars all over the globe.
00:11:45.000Six years in Latin America, seven years in the Middle East, covered the war in the former Yugoslavia.
00:11:50.000Um, 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
00:12:00.000parties, but of course dominates or controls the media.
00:12:05.000So all of their own puppets are the ones who are either selected from the military or from
00:12:13.000the intelligence community, Clapper, Brennan, all these kinds of people, Petraeus and others,
00:12:19.000to essentially function as shills or pimps of war.
00:12:25.000And they're never held accountable, and that's what's so dangerous.
00:12:59.000And then in order to keep control of the nation-state, they bring back the very effective mechanisms
00:13:07.000of repression that they used on the outer reaches of empire.
00:13:11.000Wholesale surveillance, militarized police that function as internal armies of occupation, militarized drones, suspension of basic civil liberties.
00:13:22.000This 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
00:13:48.000They're completely controlled by this military machine, the war industry, that is why Ralph Nader calls them traitors, that are destroying the country.
00:14:01.000And now they are flirting with this disastrous war in Ukraine.
00:14:05.000I mean, I think we have to point out that, as in the Middle East, there is no rational goal.
00:14:10.000What is the goal of the war in Ukraine?
00:14:13.000It's industrial warfare for its own sake.
00:15:13.000flirting with a nuclear confrontation with Russia and of course China.
00:15:18.000I mean, you can't sustain this kind of militarism unless you have an enemy.
00:15:25.000And this goes back to 1989 and the tragedy of what we're facing because Gorbachev and
00:15:32.000then later Yeltsin and people forget in the early years Putin, they wanted to build both
00:15:37.000a security and economic alliance with Europe and the United States.
00:15:41.000But 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.
00:15:54.000So if Russia wasn't willing to be the enemy, then they would make Russia the enemy, and that's what they did.
00:15:59.000I 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.
00:16:14.000That across the political spectrum, this is interfering with what Russia considers its vital security interest.
00:16:23.000And 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.
00:16:42.000So there is real historical trauma there.
00:16:45.000There was an understanding by diplomats like Burns.
00:16:48.000Even 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.
00:17:06.000But yes, this kind of constant aggression, and part of the problem with the press is that it's not reported.
00:17:12.000Um, 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.
00:17:22.000I mean, it would be the equivalent of Chinese naval manoeuvres off the coast of California.
00:17:28.000I mean, we, we couldn't even handle a balloon.
00:17:30.000Chris, before you leap into China and the balloons, I've got, uh, there's a few things that I've got to unpack there.
00:17:35.000Now 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
00:17:59.000Take 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.
00:18:15.000Beyond that, that this is a historical paradigm that precedes the American empire specifically and can be accorded to empire more broadly.
00:18:26.000And interestingly, Chris, you seem to be saying something that gets said conversationally rather a lot, that we're experiencing the end of empire.
00:18:34.000You know, the end of the American Empire and what we're experiencing, witnessing, is their attempts to prevent this inevitable entropy from taking place.
00:18:44.000But 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.
00:18:57.000I 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,
00:19:18.000These 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.
00:19:31.000We're seeing that sort of, you know, throughout the pandemic.
00:19:34.000And there's currently a treaty being debated that might demonstrate it even more clearly.
00:19:39.000So I suppose what I'm asking you is this.
00:19:41.000It 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.
00:20:18.000Because when you said that thing, mate, that there is no, you can't conceive of what would be the objective in Ukraine.
00:20:24.000That's why it has to be presented in simplistic terms.
00:20:32.000It doesn't take into account the obvious truth that Russia is an enormous, powerful country with a rich history.
00:20:41.000This is not something that can just be wiped off the map with no disrespect to a country like Iraq and its previous historical incarnations.
00:20:49.000That 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.
00:20:58.000And we've seen the horrible consequences of that botched war.
00:21:02.000So the consequences of this one could be immeasurable.
00:21:13.000And also, I really like the way you keep referring to class throughout this.
00:21:17.000I 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.
00:21:26.000We get into that Foucauldian idea of Who is it okay to kill?
00:21:33.000And it seems now we're saying, once again, American lives.
00:21:36.000There are certain American lives that can be traded.
00:21:38.000So I'd love to pass the ball back over to you.
00:21:40.000Now, 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.
00:23:02.000And 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.
00:23:20.000Ron Paul was there and Jimmy Dore and a bunch of other people.
00:23:25.000But what happens with that is that they pushed Moscow into the arms of Beijing.
00:23:34.000Now, a whole Cold War policy was to make sure that Beijing and Moscow were closer to Washington than they were to each other.
00:23:44.000This 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.
00:24:04.000And Kissinger said again correctly that you don't want to attempt to humiliate Russia, a nuclear-armed Russia.
00:24:15.000And the constant escalation, which to be clear is being driven by NATO countries, is essentially
00:25:31.000That's really why it's being fought with Ukrainian bodies.
00:25:36.000But the economic price, of course, the price in terms of devastation and loss of life is
00:25:43.000being paid by Ukrainians and Russians, but the economic cost is being borne by Europe,
00:25:47.000not so much by the United States, which is fine with the United States because it forces
00:25:52.000Germany to buy their natural gas, which was probably part of the plan all along.
00:25:57.000There was an old saying, which I think is true, you can't talk about war if you don't talk about markets.
00:26:02.000So 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
00:26:21.000economies so that corporations could come in and seize them, which by the way they did in
00:26:28.000That's why the IMF gave Yeltsin a $10 billion loan, of which an estimated $1.5 billion was
00:26:33.000of which an estimated $1.5 billion was spent to make sure he was re-elected because he
00:26:36.000spent to make sure he was reelected, because he did Washington's bidding, which in the
00:26:39.000did Washington's bidding, which in the end gave rise to the nationalists around Putin
00:26:41.000end gave rise to the nationalists around Putin, because we turned, through Yeltsin, who was
00:26:45.000because we turned, through Yeltsin, who was a fall-down drunk, we were turning Russia
00:26:47.000a fall-down drunk, we were turning Russia into a client state.
00:26:50.000into a client state with devastating impact for Russian people.
00:26:55.000I mean, bread lines and hunger and everything else.
00:26:59.000So yes, what they're seeking is, historians call it micro-militarism.
00:27:03.000It's where late empire engages in military adventurism in a desperate bid to reclaim
00:27:11.000a past dominance, and that's what we're seeing.
00:27:15.000I mean, anybody, even from the outside, can see the social unraveling in the United States,
00:27:22.000the mass shootings, the opioid crisis that takes 100,000 lives a year, but that doesn't
00:27:28.000count the millions of people who are addicted, the fact that half the country doesn't even
00:27:34.000have $400 in their bank account to handle an emergency expense, the collapse of our
00:27:40.000health care system, of all the industrialized worlds.
00:27:44.000We did the worst job of handling the pandemic.
00:27:48.000I 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.
00:27:59.000You 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.
00:28:12.000The stripping away of, I mean, we are the most spied upon, watched, monitored, photographed population in human history.
00:28:20.000And I was in East Germany. I covered the Stasi state. So the unraveling
00:28:27.000internally and the increasing loss of global hegemony is, you are right, is what they are
00:28:37.000attempting to do is use this massive military machine to reclaim it. But look at what happened in Iraq.
00:28:45.000We lost the Taliban. We lost the word of the Taliban. Everything we touched, Libya, Syria.
00:28:53.000Pakistan, Somalia has been a disaster.
00:28:57.000And I, the longer this war goes on, the more it's assured that Ukraine will be a disaster too.
00:29:04.000And then of course they'll turn to China.
00:29:06.000Chris, I just want to draw your attention to some of the messages in our chat over on locals.
00:29:11.000You can join that by pressing the red button.
00:29:44.000When 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?
00:30:07.000Will it be ordinary people because of the energy crisis that you've already described?
00:30:10.000Will 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.
00:30:30.000Will 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.
00:30:42.000And 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.
00:30:53.000through 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?
00:31:11.000So 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.
00:31:27.000Because 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.
00:31:42.000So at that point, and we fund much of our military adventurism through debt, At that point, the empire is physically unsustainable.
00:31:58.000And the social decay, which is already pretty pronounced in the United States, will become magnified, creating even more upheaval.
00:32:09.000One 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.
00:32:19.000Anyone can go into a Walmart and buy a military-grade rifle.
00:32:32.000My grandfather was a master sergeant in the Army.
00:32:35.000My father was drafted and fought in World War II.
00:32:38.000in North Africa and became a pacifist afterwards.
00:32:40.000But 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.
00:34:39.000And 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.
00:35:04.000It's a non-reality based belief system.
00:35:07.000And 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.
00:35:20.000And, 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.
00:35:30.000It doesn't matter what administration.
00:35:32.000Now she's stoking the conflict in Ukraine.
00:35:35.000Of course, she was very involved in the 2014 coup, which provoked Russia unnecessarily.
00:35:44.000Yeah, these people are very, very limited and very, very dangerous, and there's no internal check on them at all.
00:35:53.000And 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.
00:36:07.000I mean, don't get me started on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
00:36:12.000But yes, all of these forces, Soros, that is at their core what it's about.
00:36:19.000But it's not working, and it's not going to work.
00:36:22.000And unfortunately, the more it fails, the more rapacious, bloody, and aggressive they become.
00:36:32.000And that is a characteristic of late empire.
00:36:35.000So 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.
00:36:50.000And at the end, they're auctioning off the seat of the emperorship.
00:36:56.000When 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.
00:37:14.000It 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.
00:37:30.000And 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.
00:37:48.000It's easy to see how this militaristic adventurism coupled with financial impropriety might lead to more marginal ideas migrating to the center of politics.
00:38:01.000Certain 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.
00:38:13.000But 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.
00:38:23.000I 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?
00:38:36.000Nikki 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.
00:38:50.000We don't have a kind of left in terms of left-wing populism, socially minded, legitimate representation of the people anymore.
00:38:59.000It seems to me that what we have are two corporatized parties.
00:39:02.000What then becomes the role of the kind of rhetoric around wokeism?
00:39:07.000And 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.
00:39:19.000You know, that's sort of where I stand on it.
00:39:28.000How is it being used to create division and facilitate further oppression?
00:39:34.000Right, so you're referring to this article I wrote called Woke Imperialism, which is on my Substack, chrishedges.substack.com, which was widely disseminated.
00:39:44.000And 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.
00:40:06.000and none of it helped Nichols, who was just another victim of a modern-day police lynching.
00:40:12.000That's one example of how the militarists, the corporatists, the oligarchs, academia, media
00:40:19.000have essentially twisted identity politics and diversity and used it as a mask for systems of
00:40:30.000oppression and of course white supremacy. It's become a very effective gimmick that unfortunately
00:40:38.000has lured many people on the left into little more than a boutique activism.
00:40:46.000I mean, you mentioned Victoria Nuland.
00:40:52.000She'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.
00:41:08.000You know, the head of the, the secretary of the treasury, Janet Yeltsin, who promotes
00:41:14.000openly job insecurity and unemployment as a way to fight inflation.
00:41:20.000Is she good for working men and women?
00:41:24.000And this is a very kind of classic technique used by colonial powers who put their front
00:41:30.000person willing to do their bidding, whether it's Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti or Anastasio
00:41:35.000Samosa in Nicaragua or Mobutu Sese Soko in the Congo.
00:42:26.000Whatever it is, without looking at what it is they stand for.
00:42:30.000I mean, are we better off Because Clarence Thomas, who is black, who opposes affirmative action, is on the Supreme Court.
00:42:36.000It'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.
00:43:02.000We 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.
00:43:19.000So yeah, I mean, Glenn Ford, who died but headed the Black Agenda Report, a great friend of mine, he called it representationalism.
00:43:29.000and that you take a woman or a person of color and you put them within a system of oppression.
00:43:37.000But as he points out, of course, they're not the ones who write the script.
00:44:08.000Libertarians 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.
00:44:18.000But this rally that we had in Washington was about the permanent war machine, and we united on that.
00:44:25.000On other issues, we'll be on opposite sides.
00:44:28.000But that's called political maturity, which unfortunately many in the left lack.
00:44:34.000Chris, what strikes me over the course of this conversation is the wealth of knowledge that you've accrued over a lifetime of reporting.
00:44:44.000Last 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
00:45:21.000Many 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.
00:45:39.000I 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.
00:46:05.000In 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.
00:46:16.000What 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?
00:46:33.000What 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?
00:46:46.000How has it affected you emotionally and why do you think it's happened?
00:46:50.000Well, 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.
00:46:59.000That 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.
00:47:16.000It'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
00:47:55.000I 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.
00:50:26.000Because 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.
00:50:39.000It 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.
00:52:11.000Chris, thank you so much for joining us again.
00:52:14.000Thank 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.
00:52:36.000It's also as a person interested in telling stories with integrity, dealing with complexity, looking to create alliances rather than enemies.
00:52:46.000It's a great education for me personally to have the privilege of your company and your experience.
00:52:52.000So thank you very much for joining us today.
00:52:55.000You 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.
00:53:03.000On tomorrow's show, I'll be talking to Jeremy Corbell about UFOs, spy balloons, the deep state.
00:53:22.000If 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.
00:53:34.000For tickets, go to RussellBrand.com right now.
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