05/14/10 – Chris Hedges – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Now let me talk to you about a couple of extremely important books, okay?
You may have heard of this, but you may not have read it.
But that's not good enough.
You need to actually read this.
It's so important that you read this book.
It's called War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges.
And this is a man who, for the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor and various other newspapers, has covered wars around the world for decades.
He's a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, recipient of the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002.
On and on.
I couldn't even read you this guy's resume here.
It's all at truthdig.com.
You can read all about it.
He's written a lot of important books.
This one is the most important to me, and I really hope you read it.
War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.
And he also wrote a book, another extremely important book for you to read.
It's co-edited with Laila al-Aryan, and it's called Collateral Damage, America's War Against Iraqi Civilians.
And it's just first-person accounts from credible and verified American soldiers telling their stories of what they did to the Iraqi people during that war.
He's also the author of Empire of Illusion, The End of Literacy, and The Triumph of Spectacle, I Don't Believe in Atheists, and the best-selling American Fascists, The Christian Right and the War on America.
Welcome back to the show, Chris.
How are you doing?
I'm good, thanks.
Well, it's been a long time since we've talked.
I'm happy to have you back on the show here.
I've been reading some very important essays that you've written lately for truthdig.com.
First of all, I want to talk about No One Cares.
And, well, the edge of despair that you're entertaining here about the death of the American Peace Movement.
What happened?
Some Democrats got elected?
That's it?
A couple things happened.
I think the first mistake was for the anti-war movement in 2004 to call a moratorium on demonstrations because they wanted to support Kerry over Bush.
And Kerry ran a campaign where all he did was try to out-Bush Bush.
He talked about victory in Iraq.
He said he wouldn't have withdrawn troops from Fallujah.
People should have been back out on the street.
There have to be moral imperatives that supersede party loyalty.
That's the first mistake.
The second is we have allowed this government to create mercenary armies and mercenary intelligence entities that are hollowing out the role of traditional intelligence and traditional military forces because, of course, a draft becomes unpalatable.
That is done so that roughly 2-3 million families in this country bear the brunt of the war, primarily poor, lower class, and the middle class is able to pretend the war doesn't exist.
There are no tax increases.
Their children are not threatened with a draft.
And so there's a kind of passivity on the part of the liberal class that's not threatened.
And thirdly, I think the most disastrous element is that the working class in this country, and much of my family comes from the working class, has been destroyed by NAFTA, welfare reform, and the liberal class was silent while that happened.
1994, with the passage of NAFTA, thrust a knife into the back of the American working class, and the liberal elite continued to support a Democratic Party that, at that point, they should have walked out upon, so that the protests coming out of a liberal establishment against the war don't resonate with a working class that quite rightly feels betrayed by this liberal elite.
And I think that we have to, especially as we are barreling towards a system of neo-feudalism, an oligarchic state, we have to begin to talk again in the rhetoric of class.
We have to express that legitimate rage as our own rage, otherwise it's going to continue to be captured by these proto-fascist movements that we see leaping up around the fringes of American society.
Oath keepers, tea parties, all of this stuff.
I think there has to be a deep kind of self-reflection, self-criticism on the part of the liberal elite.
I think we have to realize that we have wasted a lot of time with boutique activism, while some very, very dark things have happened to this country.
We have to walk away from the Democratic Party.
It's utterly betrayed working men and women, as well as all of our own values.
I just heard you play Ron Paul's speech.
I mean, to get to a point not only where the Democratic Party has essentially codified the violations of domestic and international law put in place by the Bush administration is extremely frightening.
We've not restored habeas corpus.
The war in Afghanistan has been exponentially expanded.
Nobody's moving out of Iraq.
Warrantless wiretapping continues to be carried out illegally now against American citizens.
We still run our offshore penal colonies where we openly practice torture, and this has become a bipartisan enterprise.
And if we don't wake up, if we don't begin to respond, then this anger and rage on the part of the many dispossessed Americans, probably 20 percent permanent unemployment, will boomerang and be a very frightening right-wing rage that will snuff out what's left of our anemic democracy.
Well, you know, there's really a lot to go over just there, but I guess I want to start with the whole kind of populist right-wing out-of-power thing.
I know you're well aware the Ron Paul revolution was on while George Bush was still in power, and it was populated by people who never did like him and never were for the wars, the deficits, any of those things.
And it has, in fact, no one would argue otherwise, I don't think, that it has been to a great degree that movement co-opted by the sort of Sarah Palinites.
Yeah, that's what's so disturbing.
That's right.
Yeah, I mean, well, there was a study, though, that, well, I don't know if it was a study, some kind of survey at a big Tea Party rally in Washington, D.C., recently, where it was just a 50-50 split, where half of these people are classical, liberal, libertarian, Enlightenment people, and the other half are these Christian fascists that you talk about.
And there really is a major split there between the social conservatives and the libertarians.
I hate to hear, you know, Ron Paulians who care for nothing more than individual liberty lumped in with a bunch of ignorant Palin followers and war mongers.
Right, but I think it's probably fair to say, unfortunately, that the libertarian element within the Tea Party movement is being quite effectively pushed aside.
I think you're right.
But we have to make a distinction, because while the anger at what's being done to the American citizenry and, of course, the crimes that are being committed in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan in our name is a common element, what is not common is this kind of virulent racism and really desire or kind of yearning for fascism that we see.
And, unfortunately, these people have the money.
And they have the access to the media, outlets like Fox News.
So, you know, I'm no expert on the Tea Party movement.
But it does appear that initially this was a kind of grassroots response with a great deal of sympathy, if not outright support, for the libertarians.
But it doesn't appear to be that now.
The libertarians appear to be in the minority.
And, of course, you have, I mean, let's, you know, there are some very powerful interests behind the scenes who have no interest in allowing this to become a movement that's dominated by Ron Paul and the libertarians.
And I think they're doing a very effective job of sidelining.
Yeah, I mean, you know, from my own point of view, I've given up any hope, any childish hope I once had of, you know, democratic processes working or anything at all.
I look at Ron Paul's existence in Congress as the greatest speaking to her on behalf of the principles of individualism and freedom.
Well, let's throw in Dennis Kucinich, too.
Yeah, well, you know, Dennis is a pretty good guy.
He lets me down more than he comes through for me.
But then again, you know, I'm sure you could say the same thing about Ron.
And we're both pretty much in agreement.
But it's all about people.
It's all about ideas.
And I think, you know, the financial situation that we're in is only going to get worse.
And what we desperately need, Chris, is people like those two telling people that, look, we know you're afraid.
We know things are screwed up.
But we got to tell you, it was when we stopped doing what we were what we all know we're supposed to be doing.
When we quit being the America we all know that we're supposed to be.
That's where everything went wrong.
We don't need fascism.
What we need is, hell, you have an article here about secession and all this, which I'm for.
I'm an anarchist.
But, hell, if we just went by the Constitution of 1789 and actually by the words of the thing, we'd be 85 percent on the way to anarchy right there from where we are now.
It seems like the kind of thing that good liberals and good conservatives and people who care about peace and the Bill of Rights can agree on.
Let's just tear down Washington, D.C.
We don't need them.
They're the ones who've done this to us.
I think that what's happened is we have evolved into a system that the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls inverted totalitarianism.
And I think that's a correct term.
And he said it's inverted totalitarianism is distinct from classical forms of totalitarianism in that it finds its expression not in a particular demagogue, but in the anonymity of the corporate state, so that you have essentially revolutionary forces or reactionary forces that pay fealty or loyalty to the Constitution, electoral politics, the iconography and language of American patriotism, and yet have so corrupted the levers of power that the citizenry has become disempowered.
And I think that's right.
I think what we have undergone is a kind of coup d'etat in slow motion.
So that's why there is virtually no difference, with very minor exceptions, between the policies instituted by the Obama administration and those instituted by the Bush administration, whether that is the largest transference of wealth upwards in American history, the expansion of imperial wars, the constant erosion, continuing erosion of civil liberties, this horrible health care bill, which is essentially the equivalent of the bank bailout bill for pharmaceuticals and insurance companies, forcing American citizens to buy their defective product.
They can still ratchet up copayments and premiums, especially on the elderly people on fixed income.
I mean, it's just the list goes on and on and on.
And I think that what we're seeing on the part of many frustrated and disenfranchised members of the working class is that they may not use that vocabulary, but they understand that something is seriously broken.
Something is seriously wrong.
Unfortunately, their response is very primitive.
If you listen closely to the trash talk shows like Beck and others, what they're really saying and what resonates is that America used to be a great country.
And then the immigrants and the liberals and the gays, they came and took it away from you, and we're going to get it back.
And unfortunately, I think that that has a kind of appeal, because people certainly understand that two, three, four, or five decades ago, it was possible in this country to work in a blue-collar job in a steel mill, for instance, earn $50 an hour with a pension, with benefits, on one income to support a family, even buy a modest house, send your children to college, and all of that has been destroyed.
And I'm not sure that they understand the mechanisms by which it was destroyed, but they do understand a very clear truth, and that is that the liberal elite, which was embodied by liberal institutions, whether the press, labor unions, and certainly the Democratic Party, betrayed them.
That they continued to talk in the language whereby they expressed concern for the working class and the interest of the working class, and Clinton, I think, is the most egregious example of this, yet passed legislation after legislation that utterly disempowered and disenfranchised the working class.
So the anger towards the liberal elite is not misplaced.
It's not a matter of them voting against their own interests.
The liberal class in this country utterly betrayed the working class, and we are seeing a reaction of that.
And part of that reaction incorporates a rejection of traditional liberal values, tolerance and acceptance of different forms of lifestyle and sexual orientation, etc.
And we saw that on the mall, you know, after the passage of the so-called health care reform bill, when people shouted racial slurs at John Lewis or called Barney Frank a faggot.
I think that that's all woven into a kind of virulent reaction against a liberal democratic system that spoke one way and acted in another with a great deal of hypocrisy.
So I'm fully on board with the rage.
I think the rage is acceptable and understandable.
My frustration now is that those of us who do care about an open society and a society that respects democratic norms and civil liberties are dormant, are passive.
We're not responding.
And I think that we're really at a moment, and we are certainly barreling towards another economic meltdown.
We don't have much time left.
I think we have to begin to respond, because if we don't respond, then the worst elements of American society will harness, capture and channel this rage and head us in a very frightening direction.
Well, you know, for a long time I've been interested in this kind of thing.
And for the longest time I was able to just blame the state, the government itself and the people who control it for their own interests for being liars.
After all, the American people are decent people.
But the fact is that they're always at best informed with half-truths and deliberate omissions.
And it's really not their fault.
And yet, as this continues on, more and more of this has got to be blamed on the regular people who have decided that they would rather just let their head be crammed full of lies by people who quite clearly do not have their interests at heart and go along with it just because it's easier to go along with it.
Before I brought you on, I was talking with Matthew Harwood about the American torture state.
And part of that is how they got, I don't know, 30 or 40 percent of the American people to go, yeah, torture's great, in their defense of the president that they had been so psychologically invested in.
And so now, how many more miles down the slippery slope have we gone when such a giant portion of our society has actually not just defended but embraced torture as a cause and a creed?
Yeah.
Well, these people, you know, they know how to manipulate these emotions and this despair.
They're very good at it.
And, you know, the corporatized media knows how to divert us with trivia, gossip, and salacious garbage.
So that, you know, given all the things that are going on in this country, I mean, let's not even mention the environmental destruction that's happening in the Gulf of Mexico or the melting of the polar ice caps and everything else, all we're doing is talking about Tiger Woods or John Edwards or, before that, Michael Jackson.
I mean, it's just inane.
And that consumes our emotional and intellectual energy and has quite consciously done so, so that we are utterly disconnected from what's happening around us.
Information systems, especially electronic commercial systems of information, have turned news into a form of entertainment.
And so I think that the less a public is aware of how systems of power work and what's happening both within the United States and beyond our borders, the more easily they're manipulated by demagogues who pitch emotionally appealing slogans that, in essence, promise revenge, you know, moral renewal and new glory.
It's an old, old story.
I watched it in Yugoslavia.
It's what Slobodan Milosevic did.
You can go back and see how the breakdown of Weimar Germany, which vomited up figures like Adolf Hitler, used precisely the same game plan.
Or, you know, the breakdown of Tsarist Russia that opened the door for Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
It's a classic scenario, and one that is fueled by economic dislocation, which people forget.
Unfettered capitalism, unchecked capitalism, as Lenin said correctly, is a revolutionary force.
It will cannibalize your society.
It turns everything, whether the natural world or human beings, into commodities that unchecked corporate interests are allowed to exploit until exhaustion or collapse, which is why the environmental crisis is intimately linked to the economic crisis.
And we live in a commodity culture where human beings, human life, no longer has any intrinsic value beyond its ability to generate profit.
And if you can't generate profit for these corporations, then you are crumpled up and thrown away like a piece of human refuse.
And once you create that kind of a society, you're essentially tearing apart its fabric, the possibility of immunity.
In your article here about secession, I forget if you addressed this point specifically, but it seems to at least implicitly accept the premise that it's Washington, D.C.
And they're the giant gun in their hand, whether they're dictating the interest rates or they're dictating who gets bailed out and who does not and whatever.
They're really the blunt instrument in the hand of these corporations.
And if you support secession and the breakup of the United States into smaller units, you're basically, I think, acknowledging, aren't you, that this would not empower the corporations over the people of America?
This would disempower them.
It would take away their ability to use the national government as their instrument against us.
Yes, and I think that electoral politics at this point are not going to work.
So any form of resistance, if we want to break the back of the corporate state, and I, of course, in the end am non-violent.
I look at the secessionist movements as a good vehicle to do that.
The problem for me is that the southern secessionist movements are neo-confederate.
They begin by singing Dixie, they wave the Confederate flag, they're not in any way hospitable to African Americans.
So the Vermont secessionist movement, the Texas secessionist movement are pretty good.
Some of the legal south and others are pretty unpalatable.
But I do look at secession as one vehicle by which people can non-violently try and disengage from the corporate state.
Yeah, I mean, Washington is, I think you used the word vehicle, that's the right word.
It is the instrument by which the corporations are now grinding us all into the dirt.
And we have to begin to, in every way possible, break the grip of these corporations.
Otherwise, they are going to destroy the country.
It's going to be a world of masters and serfs.
We're already very far along that route.
And any kind of legitimate resistance will be met with draconian force on the part of the corporate state, which will do everything to keep its control and its power.
And they certainly have both the legal and the physical instruments to do that.
And that's one of the reasons why Ron Paul's denunciation of this legitimizing of the assassination of an American citizen is important.
Because once we create that as a precedent, we're finished.
And I just want, in defense of my friend Dennis Kucinich, who also was the only other member of the House, along with Ron Paul, to publicly denounce the administration's policy of calling for allowing the assassination.
And what a statement that is itself.
These two wingnuts on the right and the left are the only two out of 335 House members.
Isn't that amazing?
It is.
It is absolutely amazing.
I'm standing here beside myself.
And this gets right back to the point where we started.
War is a force that gives us meaning.
War is also a force that destroys our liberty.
And the James Madison speech about war is the germ of every other thing terrible that governments do.
The standing armies, the corruptions, all the honors and offices of all the new bureaucrats that rise up.
And boy, here we are, huh?
Talking about the assassination of American citizens by the hope and change new face of peace that we elected here.
Yeah, well, I didn't vote for him.
Yeah, well, me either.
All right, well, listen, Chris, I really appreciate your time on the show.
I want to recommend to everyone again, we all get books recommended to us and we can't read them all.
And you have your list of books you heard of and the list of books you actually read.
You've got to really read this.
It's so important that you read this.
War is a force that gives us meaning by Chris Hedges and a bunch of other extremely important ones, too.
You can read his essays at truthdig.com and we very often link to them from antiwar.com as well.
Thanks again, Chris.
Really appreciate it.
Yeah, thanks for having me.