All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Wharton, and our next guest is Chris Hedges.
He's a journalist, author, war correspondent, specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies.
His most recent book is Death of the Liberal Class.
And he also wrote, War is a force that gives us meaning.
And you know what, I want to mention collateral damage as well, co-edited, I believe, with Leila al-Aryan.
That and War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning are such very important books.
I really hope, in fact, I was kind of making an Orwell joke in the break, because the subject today is the language of empire.
But I always think of 1984 as one of those books that everybody gets recommended.
You've got to read that.
And it's one of those that you actually do read.
You need to read, not just so you get recommended.
It goes on a piece of paper, and you never do get it.
That's one that you really got to read.
And right there at the top of that list is War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.
It's such an important book.
I could not possibly overstate it.
Chris Hedges now writes for truthdig.com.
Welcome back to the show, Chris.
How are you?
Thank you.
I'm good.
And the reason that I think that 1984 is so important is because right there at the heart of it is the manipulation of language by the state.
One of Winston Smith, our protagonist's neighbors or co-workers at the Ministry of Truth, is very excited at lunchtime and says, hey, guess what, guys?
The new edition of the 11th edition of the Newspeak Dictionary is coming out.
And it's got fewer words than ever before.
We're marching forward.
And that's what you're talking about here, recognizing the language of tyranny.
As George Carlin put it, the worse we get, the more we soften our language to describe how it is that we live and what it is that we do.
That's correct.
And I think we used to have this debate between George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
And I think what we've seen is that, in essence, we got both.
First, we got Huxley, a society entrenched by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology, seduced by wasteful consumption, and in essence, a necessity in a population as they embrace their own oppression.
Once they were stripped, once credit dried up, once jobs dried up, once those cheap manufactured goods were no longer affordable, we get Orwell.
So they're both right.
We start out with Huxley, and we end with Orwell.
Right, in fact, that's what Huxley wrote in Brave New World Revisited, too, was that, oh, yeah, here, we can compare and contrast these two models for ruling a society from the top down, one by distraction and eat your pills and be happy and watch TV, and the other by the threat that your card could get pulled and you could get taken to the torture room.
And we have the perfect mix in American society, which is there's plenty of distraction, and if that's not good enough for you, there's plenty of threats of coercion in the waiting, too.
Well, as you reconfigure society along the forms of neo-feudalism and an oligarchic elite, as you solidify this permanent underclass, 40 million Americans living in poverty, tens of millions of Americans living in a category called near poverty, then you need the more overt forms of control because the softer forms of seducement, which Huxley wrote about, are no longer available.
And I think that we're already beginning to see that shift put into place.
Instead of being seduced into submission, as Huxley warned, we are now, as Orwell foresaw, being frightened into submission.
And I think they're both really important writers, but I think Huxley, in the end, was a kind of prelude to the big brother state that is now being visited upon us in a myriad of ways, including every time we go to the airport.
Well, you know, I'm not much of an economist, but I like the Austrian school guys, and they have this term called Mao investment.
And they talk about how easy money policy will lead businessmen to make really bad decisions, believing that more capital is available for certain projects than there really is.
It becomes an illusion, then the bubble pops, and a lot of people are hurt, that kind of thing.
But it seems like that same kind of thing applies in so many ways, and even to language.
So like, for example, I grew up in the Reagan and Bush years, and they were completely full of it, but that's nothing compared to the George W. Bush years, where every single premise of every argument coming from the right, from the radio and the Republican Party and everything else, was complete fantasy.
You know, Islamofascist caliphate, and homosexuals are destroying the society.
No, wait, it's the Mexicans.
No, wait, it's the Islamo mosque builders in New York.
They have created this giant bubble of kind of this alternate reality that right-wingers believe in.
I disagree.
I'm a libertarian and disagree with liberals and leftists on a great many things, but at least I think they live in the same world as me.
Whereas it seems like the kind of the Palin lovers out there, you know, if I can be so cruel with a broad brush, they really live in complete la-la land.
They're like beyond relate-to-able, and it seems like that in itself is a bubble and is going to crash at some point.
The rapture ain't coming, and then what are we going to do?
You know?
Well, it won't necessarily crash.
I mean, I think people transfer their allegiance to non-reality-based belief systems.
And remember, tens of millions of people embrace the Christian right, which is a form of magical thinking, the idea that God has a plan for us and Jesus intercedes to protect and promote not only our spiritual but our material welfare.
I mean, this is all self-delusion.
And I think, as you point out, the Tea Party movement is also built around self-delusion.
They talk about getting government off our backs, and yet at the same time, they all want Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and extension of unemployment benefits, and they don't want to touch the military, as if somehow the military isn't part of government.
Well, it consumes, of course, half of all discretionary spending.
So you have a political agenda that doesn't make any sense.
It's irrational.
But these movements provide an emotional consistency.
They provide a vent for the kind of rage, a legitimate rage, that is being expressed by our dispossessed working class.
And when you fall to that level of despair, when you cannot find a job that gives you benefits or a decent standard of living, when you realize that your children are not going to have that job, when it's your house that's foreclosed or repossessed, when you go into bankruptcy because you can't pay your medical bills, when your community begins to disintegrate physically and psychologically, then that temptation to retreat.
Of course, into magical thinking becomes very pronounced, especially as people struggle through this despair by trying to cope through substance abuse.
And then there's a rise of the usual attendant problems when communities break down, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, all the usual crap that disintegrates families.
That attraction to just retreat into a world of fantasy is very powerful.
But it's very dangerous.
I mean, we see it with the whole issue of global warming.
Through the 50 new members of the House all saying they don't believe in global warming, where we're literally watching the death rattle of the planet.
Commodity prices are skyrocketing.
Droughts are ripping up Australia, China, the southwestern United States.
The weather patterns are all whacked out.
Here in Princeton, we've got Arctic-like banks of snow.
And there's no snow in Calgary.
Canada.
So as things get worse and worse, and as people fall into deeper and deeper levels of despair, unfortunately, and this has just played out throughout human history, the attraction of fantasy becomes even stronger because reality is so difficult to ingest.
Well, here's the thing, though, too, if I could pretend to be optimistic for a minute.
You know, in a bad time, whether it's Rahm Emanuel or Condoleezza Rice or you and me, when there's a crisis and people are paying attention, they want to know what the truth is, it seems like truth has a chance to win out, too, right?
Like what we need to do if we got a demagogue, if we have to pick out an enemy in our society, it's the political class.
It's the Republicans and the Democrats and their friends in the media and on Wall Street and the biggest corporations, the people with billions of dollars in their portfolio.
They're the ones who've done this to us.
Not weak minorities without power, not simple excuses, but yeah, it is simple.
It's the obvious excuse.
Anyway, we'll get back to that after this break.
Sorry, hard break's built in here.
We'll be right back.
Chris Hedges after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and on the line is Chris Hedges from truthdig.com, author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.
And we're talking about the language of tyranny.
And I'm sorry about the break coming in and interrupting everything like that.
All I was trying to say there was I think it ought to be in these bad times, and I think economically they're going to get worse with the QE2 and on and on like that.
But it seems to me like it's pretty obvious who's to blame, the political class rather than the liberals or the conservative Tea Party people or the Mexicans or the gays or whatever group people want to point their fingers at.
It's obviously the people with the power who are the ones responsible.
And then it ought to really be, I think, pretty easy to say, look, instead of everyone lashing out at someone, let's just get our principles straight.
And if we insist on basic principles like, say, peace, the Bill of Rights, and end of corporate welfare, that kind of thing, we can still be the USA and everything can be fine, you know?
Well, I think there's been a steady assault against the institutions that once protected the rights of citizens, beginning probably with World War I. And this is the old thesis or the central thesis of my book Death of the Liberal Class, where I talk about how these powerful progressive and populist movements, anarchists, socialists, communists, militant labor unions, threaten the power elite on the eve of the war, and how they were dismantled during the war and attacked in the Red Scare after the war.
And that assault was also carried out against the pillars of the liberal establishment, the press, liberal religious institutions, culture, public education, which we've destroyed, labor unions, and the Democratic Party.
All of these traditional liberal groups have sold out to corporate interests.
They've become dominated by corporations and subservient to corporations, or in the case of labor unions, destroyed.
So there is no protection.
The citizenry has laxed both the vocabulary and the mechanisms by which to fight back.
And to be fair, at the best, these liberal institutions only made piecemeal or incremental reform possible.
They were never radical movements.
The radical movements were what kept them honest.
But with the decimation of those movements and with the witch hunts and purges inside liberal organizations like the ACLU, labor unions, universities where thousands of professors, as well as high school teachers, social workers, I'm going back to the 1950s, all lost their jobs.
With the rise of the corporate state, we lack both the language and the mechanisms by which to respond.
And that becomes very dangerous.
Because the liberal class functions as a kind of safety valve.
As you saw during the breakdown of capitalism and the Depression and the New Deal, it makes it possible to use formal mechanisms of power to redress the grievances and injustices that are being committed against American citizens.
Now that safety valve doesn't work.
And we are getting resistance expressed in these very frightening proto-fascist movements.
Liberals have nothing to say in the society.
They speak, continue to speak, in the kind of dead language of policies and issues.
And yet, of course, betraying the very core values that they purport to defend.
Barack Obama is a perfect example of this, as is Clinton, as is the entire Democratic Party, as is the corporatized media and everything else.
And so what happens, inevitably, and I saw this with the breakdown of Yugoslavia, is that you get demagogic figures who point out weak groups within the society.
In the case of Yugoslavia, it would have been ethnic Croats by the Serbs or Muslims.
Here, of course, it becomes undocumented workers, homosexuals, Muslims.
And they vent that rage.
And it is a legitimate rage, not only at these scapegoated groups, but at a bankrupt liberal class.
And I would argue that the anger and rage towards the liberal class is justified.
They have a reason to be angry.
But it discredits the core liberal values.
I'm talking liberal with a sort of small l, the core liberal values that make a civil and democratic society possible.
And I think that our situation is extremely dire because of that.
Yeah, well, and the problem, most of all, is just blind partisanship.
It's so easy to keep people divided by R's and D's, even when most Americans don't even particularly identify with the R's and D's.
We're still just sort of stuck with this.
So half the people are mad half the time.
And then they switch off again.
And Obama ratifies Cheney's policies.
And on down the chain we go.
Nothing stops.
Well, labels become an effective way to ghettoize people whose interests are the same.
And I'm quite close to Ralph Nader, who argues, look, I mean, walk into a Walmart.
And ask them if they would like a living wage with benefits.
Who's going to argue with you?
We have to begin to talk about those kinds of issues.
And we have to begin to confront corporate power.
And you do see, and of course, you know, Nader just met with Ron Paul on this issue.
You do see among the libertarian movement, which I think quite interestingly has been pushed, quite consciously pushed out of the Tea Party movement, because they spoke in that language.
And you've watched the Koch brothers and others deflect the anger away from Wall Street towards government.
Yeah, I don't know if you saw, but recently Nader interviewed Judge Napolitano from Fox News about his book on C-SPAN.
And they had a really great conversation.
And then the judge interviewed Nader and Ron Paul together.
And they talked about a progressive libertarian alliance on the most important issues, peace, the Bill of Rights, and corporate welfare.
It seems like that, to me, is a really great thing.
I'd like to see Ron and Ralph Nader run together.
Somebody like Ralph Nader.
That's what Nader has been arguing for the last few months, that whatever the differences, and there are differences, on many of the most fundamental issues that concern the welfare of the country, we're in total agreement.
And I think Nader is right.
Yeah, well, and it's an emergency.
You know, I was just talking with Marcy Wheeler about how all these, there's a new AP story about all these torturers who got promoted inside the CIA, the individual torturers.
And, you know, John Brennan's running counterterrorism up there, or whatever.
These are, you know, the USA is pretty much gone.
This is the homeland now.
And I don't believe it's really too late.
But it seems like it almost is to escape the kind of country where, you know, General Petraeus is in charge, or something worse.
Well, you know, the big problems, the problem are the deficits, the bailouts.
I mean, you know, we're going to have to start servicing a debt of $12 trillion.
And the way we service our debt is the same way we fight our wars.
We sell debt to the Chinese to the tune of $2 billion a day.
Right, and provide more money.
By the time we have to service this, you know, all this stuff, we're talking about $96 billion a week.
It's not, you don't have to take Economics 101 to realize that over the long term, that is not a sustainable system.
And unfortunately, neither of the two main political parties are confronting that reality and figuring out a way to be physically responsible.
You know, they're just continuing the borrowing, as if that can go on forever.
And it can't.
And the moment that people don't want to buy our debt, the buyer of last resort becomes the Federal Reserve, which is going to see them print endless amounts of money.
Of course, they're already printing $600 billion to try and monetize the debt.
But they're going to have to print more.
And then you just become Weimar Germany.
They're playing an extremely dangerous game, extremely short-sighted.
And one doesn't have to have a PhD in economics to figure it out.
No, certainly not.
But you sure sound like an Austrian school economist right there in that part of your response.
I'll tell you that.
You might be surprised how much you have in common with some of us.
Well, I don't, I am not, I don't claim any kind of economic expertise, but I can read the Wall Street Journal.
Yeah, well, pretty much these days, it's that obvious, it ought to be.
Well, so, you know, here's hope for that realignment.
I'll talk with Kevin Zeese about his ComeHomeAmerica.us project to try to bring in as many groups and as many intellectuals and as many different everybody as possible into a big right-left coalition on those three issues, corporate welfare, the Bill of Rights, and peace.
And it seems like because it's so obvious that it's so right, it seems to me it's gotta be possible, Chris.
Well, sign me up.
All right, we'll do that.
It's ComeHomeAmerica.us, and there's a book, too.
It's got a bunch of great stuff.
Might be good for passing around.
But you think of all the public advocacy groups that sign on to this anti-torture petition or, you know, this thing in support of getting out of Iraq or whatever it is.
If we can really get everybody together in one big thing and have a giant conference and this kind of thing, Shades of America First from back in the day, which of course included a lot of liberals from the nation as well as conservatives of the time.
You know, it seems like maybe something could be done.
Is this still America after all?
Well, you know, I always think, you know, a perpetual state of antagonism to authority is extremely healthy and, you know, what the consequences or whatever happens in the long term is somehow irrelevant.
We have to all stand up for what we believe in.
Absolutely right on.
Well, thanks very much for your time.
I always appreciate it, Chris.
Not at all.
Thanks for having me.
Everybody, that's Chris Hedges.
He's got a new one at truthdig.org, recognizing the language of tyranny.
