Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges joins Russell Brand for a special edition of Stay Free with Russell Brand to discuss the new permanent state of war that the United States seems to be living in, and why it's so difficult to get balanced reporting on the subject. In this episode, Russell and Chris discuss what it means to live in a world where the U.S. has 800 bases around the globe, and what it really means to be a permanent war-producer. They discuss the role of the military-industrial complex in perpetuating a perpetual state of conflict, and the reasons why this is a necessary part of the American economic model. And, as always, there's a lot more to be said about the Ukraine crisis, but that's for another episode. Stay Free With Russell Brand is out now, and you can only watch the whole show on Rumble. See it first on Rumble, where you get access to the entire show on your favorite streaming platform. You won't want to miss it! You're going to see the future, and it's going to be better than the past, and better than what we thought it could possibly be. - Russell Brand See It First on Rumble Subscribe to Rumble on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe to stay free with Russiandrews Wake Me Up! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate, review and subscribe to our podcast! Subscribe on Podchaser.ee/AwakeningWondering what's good for you? Leave Us a review? Rate/subscribe to our new podcast on iTunes or wherever else you get your favourite podcast is listening to the latest episodes of Leave Me a podcast? Subscribe and review us a rating and review it? Leave us a star rating & review on iTunes Reviewed it on review on your favourite podcaster? And don't forget to leave us a review and review a review on the podcaster on iTunes? It's a big thanks, it means we'll be hearing about you'll be getting a chance to review it on the next episode of Leave Us That's new episodes next week! and we'll also be notified about it on your podcast, too good there's more of your favorite podcasting platform, and more like that's great reviews, too great reviews everywhere else on the webcasted by you'll get a whole lot more of that'll be featured on the world's best pod?
00:01:15.000Thanks for joining me for Stay Free with Russell Brand for our special edition.
00:01:19.000We always dedicate the whole show to a special guest and it's an exciting one today.
00:01:24.000Wherever you're watching this, you can only see the whole show exclusively on Rumble.
00:01:29.000After 10 minutes, we click over exclusive so that free speech can flow because today we're talking to Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges.
00:02:02.000The repackaging of these conflicts that has changed the marketing of these wars.
00:02:08.000After World War II, you had a perpetuation of what Eisenhower called the military-industrial Complex will be talking about the escalation of conflict between Western nations and China, the impossibility of alliances outside of centralized establishment politics, and when the liberal left went wrong.
00:02:37.000Chris, we get straight into this new permanent war state that we appear to be living in.
00:02:43.000It 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.
00:02:59.000But since then, it seems that America has been continually engaged in conflict, and it's the repackaging of these conflicts that has changed the marketing of these wars.
00:03:10.000Why 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 conflict?
00:03:21.000Is it built into the American economic model?
00:03:24.000Why is it necessary, and why is it so difficult to get balanced reporting around this subject, Chris?
00:03:30.000Yes, 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.
00:03:39.000So 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.
00:03:56.000I spent five years covering the war in El Salvador, for instance, in the early 1980s.
00:04:00.000that were very much part of the Cold War. I spent five years covering the war in
00:04:06.000El Salvador, for instance, in the early 1980s. But Vietnam was a very seminal
00:04:15.000The American middle class did not want their kids coming home in body bags.
00:04:21.000And so there were two things that happened after Vietnam.
00:04:25.000One, there was a kind of reckoning that the country asked questions about themselves, or we did as Americans, that we hadn't asked before.
00:04:35.000There was a very kind of Let's call it a period of 10 or 15 years of anti-militarism because of the Vietnam War, which then Ronald Reagan attempted to, I think, successfully restore the quote unquote good name of war.
00:04:51.000The other thing is that the military or the militarists realized They had to abolish the draft, that if they were going to continue the policy of permanent war, they were going to have to fight it with poor kids who didn't have any options and comprised a small, largely powerless demographic within the country in the single digits in terms of percentages.
00:05:17.000much of my own family on my mother's side comes from rural Maine and they are the classic
00:05:34.000I'm talking about my own family, but that's another issue.
00:05:38.000So those two things happened and that allowed them to continue with war.
00:05:44.000Now, I covered the revolutions in Eastern Europe.
00:05:47.000I was in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania in 1989.
00:05:51.000So 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.
00:06:03.000In fact, we were all talking about the peace dividend, which shows you how naive we all
00:06:08.000were, believing that there would not be this necessity to commit such large quantities
00:06:14.000of money, material, research, and human capital into the war industry.
00:06:18.000Well, the war industry had no intention of going away.
00:06:22.000That's why it pushed the expansion of NATO.
00:06:25.000Although, of course, as I think you've mentioned on your show, the promises were made not to do those, a violation of the promises made to Moscow.
00:06:33.000And I think that expansion of NATO was pushed for two reasons.
00:06:37.000One, it made the arms industry billions.
00:06:40.000in profits because countries, Poland, etc. had to reconfigure their militaries to be
00:06:45.000compatible with NATO equipment, but also hubris.
00:06:49.000That's when the United States began to talk about the unipolar world, which is just a
00:07:48.000And that's why you see this panic and sending M1 Abrams tanks, we can talk about that later, which will be largely useless, talking about uranium depleted weapons.
00:07:58.000Now you have through Poland lobbying to send F-15, F-16 fighter jets.
00:08:07.000But of course, As we saw with Afghanistan, it doesn't matter whether they can win.
00:08:12.000The 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.
00:08:22.000But the war went on for many years, which was also true in Vietnam, because war is a business.
00:08:27.000Very lucrative, Raytheon, Halliburton, Northrop Grumman, etc.
00:08:32.000And we just have been unable to push back against this Military... There's militarism that is disemboweling the country.
00:08:43.000If you drive across the United States, our cities and towns and communities are just desolate.
00:08:48.000If you're watching us on YouTube now, we are only going to be with you there for another couple of minutes before we click over to being exclusively on Rumble, because I'm going to be asking Chris about the reconstruction of Ukraine, in particular the role of BlackRock and JPMorgan, and the Ukraine as investment opportunity narrative. Also we'll be talking about how the left has
00:09:08.000become irrelevant in Chris Hedges' own words. So do remember to click the link in the
00:09:13.000description, join us on Rumble, even better join us on Locals, you'll get all sorts of extra
00:09:43.000And would you say, Chris, that this shows that the directing power is beyond the state.
00:09:51.000Organisations 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 is in office.
00:10:06.000Where does that leave ordinary people when it comes to organising ourselves politically?
00:10:10.000Where does it leave our conventional affiliations?
00:10:13.000How do you challenge power that seems to be beyond the reach of democracy?
00:10:19.000Well, it is beyond the reach of democracy.
00:10:21.000There's no way to vote against the interests of Raytheon or Goldman Sachs or Citibank.
00:10:29.000They dominate Republican administrations and Democratic administrations.
00:10:36.000Both parties slavishly give the war industry not only everything it wants, I mean, and the Pentagon budget has gone up successively for, what, the last eight years, but they give them more so that In this latest Pentagon budget proposal for fiscal 2023, the Congress gave them $48 billion more than the Biden administration asked for.
00:11:03.000And this is how empires die, as Arnold Toynbee and other historians have pointed out.
00:11:09.000Toynbee said they're not murdered, they commit suicide.
00:11:13.000That you have a rapacious, unchecked, unregulated, out-of-control military machine that engages in military adventurism in a kind of futile attempt to regain a lost global hegemony or dominance.
00:11:32.000That's really, when you look closely, what the war in Ukraine is about, what the expansion of NATO was about.
00:11:38.000But the 20 years of debacles were about in the Middle East and it's led by these, the same people, these pimps of war.
00:11:47.000I go all the way back to the war in El Salvador.
00:11:51.000I was dealing with Robert Kagan and Elliott Abrams.
00:11:56.000Who were both working in the Reagan administration in the State Department and whose job, in essence, was to discredit everything I and other reporters and camera people were reporting off the ground in places like Nicaragua or El Salvador or Guatemala or anywhere else.
00:12:53.000Six years in Latin America, seven years in the Middle East, covered the war in the former Yugoslavia.
00:12:59.000But our voices are shut out because you cannot challenge at this point the war industry that not only has bought up the two parties, but of course dominates or controls the media.
00:13:13.000So all of their own Puppets are the ones who are either selected from the military or from the intelligence community, Clapper, Brennan, all these kinds of people, Petraeus and others, to essentially function as shills or pimps of war.
00:13:33.000Uh, and they're never held accountable, and that's what's so dangerous.
00:13:36.000So Karl Leibniz, the great German socialist, at the inception of World War I, he called the German militarism or military machine, the enemy within.
00:13:50.000I'm acutely aware of how the Roman Empire fell, how the Athenian Empire fell.
00:13:57.000these rapacious military machines, impoverish the country, disenfranchise the working class,
00:14:07.000and then in order to keep control of the nation state, they bring back the very effective
00:14:15.000mechanisms of repression that they used on the outer reaches of empire.
00:14:19.000Wholesale surveillance, militarized police that function as internal armies of occupation,
00:14:26.000militarized drone suspension of basic civil liberties.
00:14:31.000This 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.
00:14:42.000So you are right that there is now nothing within the system.
00:14:46.000There is no mechanism within the system by which it can reform itself.
00:14:51.000The courts, the systems of information, the media, even Hollywood, they're completely controlled by This military machine, the war industry, that is why Ralph Nader calls them traitors, that is, they're destroying the country.
00:15:10.000And now they are flirting with this disastrous war in Ukraine.
00:15:13.000I mean, I think we have to point out that as in the Middle East, there is no rational goal.
00:15:19.000What is the goal of the war in Ukraine?
00:15:22.000It's industrial warfare for its own sake.
00:15:40.000Even the New York Times a few months ago ran an editorial saying these people calling for the complete recapturing of all Ukrainian territory including in the eastern part of Ukraine where you have ethnic Russians that have been ethnic Russians for two centuries.
00:15:54.000Is a fantasy, but these people are come are self delusional.
00:15:58.000I mean, I've not only as a reporter had to deal with them for many decades, but I also know some of them and they're either incredible mediocrities draped in this kind of cloying Ivy League snobbery.
00:16:13.000Or they're certifiably insane, which would be figures like John Bolton or Elliott Abrams.
00:16:19.000And you don't want these people flirting with a nuclear confrontation with Russia and, of course, China.
00:16:28.000You can't sustain this kind of militarism unless you have an enemy.
00:16:34.000And this goes back to 1989 and the tragedy.
00:16:38.000Of what we're facing because Gorbachev and then later Yeltsin and people forget in the early years Putin, they wanted to build both a security and economic alliance with Europe and the United States.
00:16:49.000But you couldn't expand NATO, you couldn't get Central and Eastern European countries.
00:16:56.000to fork over, usually through loans, billions of dollars for their military, unless Russia was the enemy.
00:17:02.000So if Russia wasn't willing to be the enemy, then they would make Russia the enemy, and that's what they did.
00:17:08.000I 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, that across the political spectrum, This is interfering with what Russia considers its vital security interest.
00:17:31.000And 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 One and then of course the century before that Napoleon did the same thing.
00:17:51.000So there is this real historical trauma there.
00:17:54.000There was an understanding by diplomats like Burns, even Barack Obama made a statement
00:17:59.000that Ukraine was essentially a no-go area because to move into Ukraine would be considered
00:18:10.000threatening by Moscow, and legitimately so.
00:18:15.000But yes, this kind of constant aggression, and part of the problem with the press is
00:19:08.000Take 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.
00:19:23.000But beyond that, that this is a historical paradigm that precedes the American empire
00:19:30.000specifically and can be accorded to empire more broadly.
00:19:35.000And interestingly, Chris, you seem to be saying something that gets said conversationally
00:19:39.000rather a lot, that we're experiencing the end of empire, you know, the end of the American
00:19:44.000empire and what we're experiencing, witnessing is their attempts to prevent this inevitable
00:19:52.000But 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.
00:20:05.000I want to sort of follow up on that idea that, you know, are we witnessing the end of 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, NATO obviously, WEF, WHO.
00:20:27.000These 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.
00:20:39.000We're seeing that sort of, you know, throughout the pandemic we're seeing examples of that and there's currently a treaty being debated that might demonstrate it even more clearly.
00:20:48.000So I suppose what I'm asking you is this.
00:20:50.000It 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
00:21:26.000Because when you said that thing, mate, that there is no, you can't conceive of what would be the objective in Ukraine, that's why it has to be presented in simplistic terms.
00:21:35.000Ah, it's a humanitarian disaster, we've got to present Ukrainian people, Zelensky's a hero, Putin's a monster.
00:21:40.000It doesn't take into account the obvious truth that Russia is an enormous, powerful country.
00:21:49.000This is not something that can just be wiped off the map with no disrespect to a country like Iraq and its previous historical incarnations.
00:21:57.000And 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.
00:22:07.000And we've seen the horrible consequences of that botched war.
00:22:10.000So the consequences of this one could be immeasurable.
00:22:15.000American expansionism, the true agenda, oh fucking hell you're going to be talking for the rest of your life, China and Russia, and also I really like the way you keep referring to class throughout this.
00:22:26.000I 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.
00:22:35.000We get into that Foucauldian idea of who is it okay to kill?
00:22:41.000And it seems now we're saying, once again, American lives.
00:22:44.000There are certain American lives that can be traded.
00:22:47.000So I'd love to pass the ball back over to you.
00:22:49.000Now, 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.
00:23:07.000A unipolar world, but that's been slipping away from them very quickly with the industrial might of China.
00:23:15.000I 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.
00:23:25.000So, for instance, somebody in Washington gets this loony idea that they're going to arm the moderate rebels.
00:23:31.000And just I want to remind viewers that I spent seven years in the Middle East is an area I know well.
00:23:37.000So they pump in half a billion dollars worth of weaponry.
00:23:41.000Well, of course, all the jihadists from Iraq cross the border and are rearmed.
00:23:48.000And then Washington freaks out and starts bombing the very people they armed and acting, in essence, as Assad's de facto And we should note that thousands of Hezbollah fighters from southern Lebanon are also fighting on behalf of Assad, so we're acting as Hezbollah's air force.
00:24:12.000With 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.
00:24:28.000Ron Paul was there and Jimmy Dore and a bunch of other people.
00:24:33.000But what happens with that is that they pushed Moscow into the arms of Beijing.
00:24:43.000Now, a whole Cold War policy was to make sure that Beijing and Moscow were closer to Washington than they were to each other.
00:24:52.000This 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.
00:25:13.000And Kissinger said again correctly that you don't want to attempt to humiliate Russia, a nuclear-armed Russia.
00:25:22.000And the constant escalation, which to be clear is being driven by NATO countries, is essentially panic.
00:25:33.000It is an understanding that however much Russia bleeds, and Russia clearly bled a lot, the longer this goes on, the longer the infrastructure of Ukraine is degraded.
00:25:43.000I think roughly 50% of Ukrainians do not have access, or at least permanent access to, excuse me, electricity, that they're finished.
00:25:56.000And so that's why you're seeing weapons being sent to Ukraine that they're not going to be
00:26:26.000I mean, this is a very cynical war, because it is not being fought for Ukraine.
00:26:32.000It's being fought partly to enrich the arms industry, but also it's being fought to degrade the Russian military.
00:26:40.000That's really why it's being fought with Ukrainian bodies.
00:26:45.000But the economic price, of course, the price in terms of Devastation and loss of life is being paid by Ukrainians and Russians, but the economic cost is being borne by Europe, not so much by the United States, which is fine with the United States because it forces Germany to buy their natural gas, which was probably part of the plan all along.
00:27:05.000There was an old saying, which I think is true, you can't talk about war if you don't talk about markets.
00:27:11.000So 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 economies so that corporations could come in and seize them, which, by the way, they did in Russia under Yeltsin.
00:27:37.000That's why the IMF gave Yeltsin a $10 billion loan Uh, which an estimated 1.5 billion was spent to make sure he was reelected because he did Washington's bidding, which in the end gave rise to the nationalists around Putin because that we turned through Yeltsin, who was a fall down drunk.
00:27:58.000We were turning Russia into a client state.
00:28:01.000with devastating impact for Russian people.
00:28:03.000I mean, bread lines and hunger and everything else.
00:28:07.000So yes, what they're seeking is, historians call it micro militarism.
00:28:12.000It's where late empire engages in military adventurism in a desperate bid to reclaim a past dominance and that's what we're seeing. I mean,
00:28:24.000anybody even from the outside can see the social unraveling in the United States, the mass shootings,
00:28:31.000the opioid crisis that takes a hundred thousand lives a year, but that doesn't count the
00:28:38.000millions of people who are addicted, the fact that half the country doesn't even have four
00:28:43.000hundred dollars in their bank account to handle an emergency expense, the collapse of our health
00:28:49.000care system, of all the industrialized worlds.
00:28:53.000We did the worst job of handling the pandemic.
00:28:56.000I think we had 16% of the global deaths and we're less than 5% of the world's population.
00:29:04.000The incursion of the capital on January 16th 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.
00:29:21.000The stripping away of... I mean, we are the most spied upon, watched, monitored, photographed population in human history.
00:29:35.000The unraveling internally and the increasing loss of global hegemony is, you are right, is what they are attempting to do is use this massive military machine to reclaim it.
00:30:52.000When 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?
00:31:50.000And 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.
00:32:02.000through 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?
00:32:25.000argues 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.
00:32:35.000Because 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 so at that point we fund much of our military adventurism through debt at that point the empire is physically.
00:33:00.000Unsustainable you we have eight hundred bases around the globe there has to be a massive retraction and the social decay which is already pretty pronounced in the united states.
00:33:12.000We'll become magnified, creating even more upheaval.
00:33:19.000One of the problems in the United States, and this isn't true of course in the UK, is that we're a country awash in automatic weapons.
00:33:28.000Anyone can go into a Walmart and buy a military-grade rifle.
00:33:52.000The caliber of those Uh, of those, uh, automatic, those AR-15s, they're useless to take down a large animal like a deer unless, like, you want to put 20 bullets in them.
00:34:38.000But it's clear that we're headed for a cliff.
00:34:42.000And those who are attempting to regain that lost hegemony are seeking to do so only through military adventurism, not dealing with the kind of social inequality that is the most pronounced in American history, with our billionaire class worth, what, $180 billion?
00:35:03.000I mean, go back and look at the old oligarchs, the Rockefellers, They were worth a few billion, three, four, five billion.
00:35:11.000We haven't seen any kind of disparity in terms of wealth like this.
00:35:16.000I mean, I don't know, you have to go back to what?
00:36:12.000It's a non-reality based belief system.
00:36:15.000And the same people that got us into that mess are the people now getting us into the
00:36:21.000mess in Ukraine, stoking a conflict with Russia and baiting China.
00:36:29.000And you know, Victoria Nuland, who's one of the architects of all this,
00:36:33.000She was in the she was Cheney when Cheney was vice president.
00:36:37.000She was in charge of his foreign policy.
00:36:39.000It doesn't matter what administration.
00:36:41.000Now she's stoking the conflict in Ukraine.
00:36:44.000Of course, she was very involved in the 2014 coup, which provoked Russia unnecessarily.
00:36:52.000So, yeah, these people are very, very limited and very, very dangerous.
00:36:58.000And there's no internal check on them at all.
00:37:02.000And 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.
00:37:16.000I mean, don't get me started on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
00:37:20.000But yes, all of these forces, Soros, that is at their core what it's about.
00:37:31.000And unfortunately, the more it fails, the more rapacious, bloody, and aggressive they become.
00:37:40.000And that is a characteristic of late empire.
00:37:44.000So 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.
00:37:58.000And at the end, they're auctioning off the seat of the emperorship.
00:38:04.000When there are literally individuals that were operating within the Bush-Cheney administration still making policy decisions in the Ukraine war, it's easy to identify that there is a continuity that transcends the electoral cycle of American politics.
00:38:23.000It 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.
00:38:39.000And 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.
00:38:57.000It's easy to see how this militaristic adventurism coupled with financial impropriety might lead to more marginal ideas migrating to the center of politics.
00:39:09.000Certain 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.
00:39:21.000But 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.
00:39:31.000I wonder if you could talk to us, Chris, about the relationship between woke imperialism and the ideological hollowing out of the left.
00:39:40.000We did a sort of an article the other day where the new, what was her name, 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 etc, they're all multi-millionaires, even Bernie Sanders is a pretty wealthy dude.
00:39:59.000We don't have a kind of left in terms of left-wing populism, socially minded legitimate representation of the people anymore.
00:40:08.000It seems to me that what we have are two corporatized parties.
00:40:11.000What then becomes the role of the kind of rhetoric around wokeism?
00:40:15.000And just to be explicit, I'm in support 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.
00:40:27.000You know, that's sort of where I stand on it.
00:40:37.000How is it being used to create division and facilitate further oppression?
00:40:43.000Right, so you're referring to this article I wrote called Woke Imperialism, which is on my Substack, chrishedges.substack.com, which was widely disseminated 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.
00:41:15.000And none of it helped Nichols, who was just another victim of a modern-day police lynching.
00:41:21.000That's one example of how the militarists, the corporatists, the oligarchs, academia, media, have essentially twisted identity politics and diversity and used it as a mask for systems of Oppression and, of course, white supremacy.
00:41:42.000It's become a very effective gimmick that unfortunately has lured many people on the left into a little more than a boutique activism.
00:42:00.000Because She's a woman and she's in the State Department, or Lloyd Austin, who's black, is the Secretary of Defense, or the fact that the Pentagon is now allowing transgender people to serve as soldiers.
00:42:16.000Uh, you know, the head of the Secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yeltsin, who promotes openly job insecurity and unemployment as a way to fight inflation.
00:42:29.000Is she good for working men and women?
00:42:32.000And this is a very kind of classic technique used by colonial There's a long list.
00:42:37.000their front person willing to do their bidding, whether it's Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti or
00:42:43.000Anastasios Samos in Nicaragua or Mobutu Sese Soko in the Congo.
00:43:35.000Whatever it is, without looking at what it is they stand for.
00:43:38.000I mean, are we better off because Clarence Thomas, who is black, who opposes affirmative action, is on the Supreme Court?
00:43:44.000It's almost childish, but it's become 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 we're never, and I wrote another column called There Are No Permanent Allies, There's Only Permanent Power.
00:44:11.000We 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.
00:44:28.000So yeah, I mean, Glenn Ford, who died, but headed the Black Agenda Report, a great friend of mine, he called it representationalism.
00:44:37.000And that you take a woman or a person of color, and you put them within a system of oppression.
00:44:46.000But as he points out, of course, they're not the ones who They don't write the script.
00:45:03.000We also have to get over this kind of moral purity where somebody who doesn't agree with us on COVID vaccines or whatever it is, we'd never talk to again and we won't be in the same room with.
00:45:14.000I mean, libertarians, 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.
00:45:26.000But this rally that we had in Washington was about the permanent war machine, and we united on that.
00:45:34.000On other issues, we'll be on opposite sides, but that's called political maturity, which unfortunately many in the left lack.
00:45:42.000Chris, what strikes me over the course of this conversation is the wealth of knowledge that you've accrued over a lifetime of reporting.
00:45:52.000Last 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 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
00:46:30.000Many 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.
00:46:47.000I 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,
00:47:14.000In 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.
00:47:24.000What do you feel about this kind of almost patricidal inability to revere elders and to incorporate experience into our ongoing conversation?
00:47:35.000Does that tell you, indicate a kind of nihilism, a loss of morals, a loss of Virtue.
00:47:41.000What 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 verboten now?
00:47:54.000How has it affected you emotionally and why do you think it's happened?
00:47:58.000Well, 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.
00:48:08.000That 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.
00:48:24.000It'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.
00:48:43.000And it was horrible, as the South African apartheid state was, I don't believe they ever sent fighter jets to bomb the townships.
00:48:51.000And 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.
00:49:02.000And 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.
00:49:15.000Uh, me to compromise my own integrity.
00:49:40.000Uh, then with the rise of digital media, you saw, The steep decline both in advertising revenue and in circulation, and that created a new media model.
00:49:55.000It destroyed major city papers, which were once quite robust.
00:50:01.000So that economic assault had an effect within the newsroom, whereby newspapers began to cater even more obsequiously to those on whom they depended for influence and money, or access and money.
00:50:20.000They didn't want to bleed any more than they've already bled.
00:50:24.000And so at the beginning of the Iraq war, I was pushed out.
00:50:27.000Robert Scheer was pushed out of the Los Angeles Times.
00:50:32.000Rihanna Column, he now runs Scheer Post.
00:50:36.000Phil Donahue, which was the most watched show at MSNBC, was pushed out.
00:50:40.000Jesse Ventura, which had just signed a contract, was never allowed to go on the air because he was anti-war.
00:50:48.000Uh, and so that is why they become more, uh, beholden to, uh, those commercial centers of power and to actual centers of political power because they've become so anemic.
00:51:01.000That has also created a new model in journalism.
00:51:04.000Matt Taibbi has written quite well about this in his book Hate, Inc., where the old media model was to reach a broad demographic.
00:51:11.000Now you're trying to reach a particular demographic.
00:51:34.000Because 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.
00:51:47.000It 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, but they don't pay a price for it.
00:52:08.000They haven't they haven't even responded.
00:52:11.000They don't feel a need for any accountability because their demographic isn't going to hold them accountable.
00:52:18.000So the media landscape has Which was always problematic.
00:52:22.000I mean, I worked for a major publication that is written largely for the elite.
00:52:31.000But that degradation within the media has really been quite, for old journalists like myself, quite frightening.
00:52:38.000You know, because I had built a reputation and a career, I haven't really suffered in a way.
00:52:47.000Columns are widely disseminated and read, but what it's really heard are these young journalists with integrity who don't want to be puppets of Goldman Sachs or the war industry, they're really suffering because they haven't built up a reputation.
00:53:07.000And yet they are, of course, fighting to maintain their own integrity.
00:53:10.000And that breaks my heart, because what we're really doing is this system, this media system is destroying those we need most.
00:53:21.000Chris, thank you so much for joining us again.
00:53:23.000Thank 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 is also as a person interested in telling
00:53:49.000stories with integrity, dealing with complexity, looking to create alliances rather than
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