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Sept. 21, 2024 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
57:41
Journalist Chris Hedges on Media, Terror, Gaza, and More

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Good evening.
It's Friday, September 20th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, as I often say on this show, one of the purposes of the twice-a-week aftershows that we do for our Locals community is to hear your suggestions from our viewers about future topics we should cover and future guests we should invite on, and without doubt, The person whom our viewers have most frequently and vocally demanded that we speak to is the former New York Times reporter-turned-independent media powerhouse, Chris Hedges.
Why haven't you put Chris Hedges on?
What is Chris Hedges coming on?
What can we do to help you get Chris Hedges on?
And we've been helpfully hectored for months this way by our loyal viewers.
Now, the reality is that I am a longtime fan of Chris Hedges' work.
I was reading it even before I entered journalism, and both he and we have been trying for months to find a time where he can come on.
The stars finally aligned this week, and we sat down with him for a full hour just a couple days ago in a wide-ranging discussion about wars past and present, bipartisan foreign policy dogma, corporate media repression, state propaganda, the 2024 election, and so much more.
There are really very few people in Western journalism who understand the Middle East better than he.
A fluent speaker of Arabic, he covered multiple wars and conflicts in that region for years for the New York Times, including spending months, if not years, in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Israel, as well as covering the wars in Kuwait and Yugoslavia.
In 2003, however, He was forced out of the New York Times because he revolted against their attempts to dilute his reporting, to make it align with the institutional ideology of the paper, and most of all to try and control what he could say.
And while that may seem a risky move for any reporter to leave the New York Times as an established war correspondent, especially back in 2003 before the advent of exploding and far-reaching independent media, it turned out to be, unsurprisingly, the best possible move for him since that departure from the New York Times.
Both on independent news outlets and on his outstanding Substack page, Chris has broken major stories, provided some of the most informed and developed knowledge of U.S.
policy in the Middle East, and, in general, is completely free to express himself however he wants without the slightest fear of consequences.
Now, independent media is not a panacea.
Earlier this year, Hedges was let go by the ostensibly independent left-wing site, The Real News Network, apparently as a result of its insistence on relentlessly and vocally and uncompromisingly criticizing Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Democrats in the lead-up to the election.
But we would be a lot less informed and challenged without Chris Hedges' ongoing ability to thrive thanks to independent media.
We are thrilled to show you our discussion with him, not only because it temporarily will put a stop to the hectoring from our audience that we have now that we've had him on, but really mostly of all because his perspectives are so worth hearing.
Here's the interview that we did with Chris on Wednesday.
Chris Hedges, it's so great to have you on the show.
I have to say that our audience has been hectoring us for months, if not longer, saying, why isn't Chris Hedges on the show?
Why isn't Chris Hedges coming on?
And I kept saying, it's not for lack of effort.
We just haven't been able to align our schedules.
And I'm so glad that finally we were able to do so.
And I'm thrilled to have you on.
Well, thanks Glenn.
I'm happy to be here.
Absolutely.
So I want to begin by, obviously there's a lot of substantive issues about US foreign policy and domestic politics that I want to talk to you about.
But before I get to that, I want to talk about media and how media has changed and how it's enabled people like you to find an audience without being constrained by corporate media.
Because if people would ask me, who are the journalists who have become most influential in independent media, you're definitely one of the three or four people I would instantly say is among the top.
And the irony of that is that when I first got to know you and know your work, you were not in independent media.
You were in the very opposite, sort of the belly of the beast at the New York Times back in right after the immediate aftermath of 9-11.
For those people who don't know the story, because I think it's such a revealing story about how corporate media works and how it worked back then, talk about the reasons why you're not any longer with the New York Times. - I would say there were two major reasons.
I spent seven years in the Middle East, much of that time covering Gaza.
I was based in Cairo.
The Jerusalem Bureau for the New York Times did not really cover Gaza.
They made very little effort to cover Gaza.
So I would be sent from Cairo and live in Gaza for weeks at a time.
I was very frustrated with the way the New York Times covered Palestine and the way they did it, which was different.
I went on to cover the war in Yugoslavia, for instance, and it wasn't like this at all.
So if I was reporting on, let's say, an airstrike on a refugee camp in Jabalia or somewhere else, they would pepper the article with, you know, I may have been interviewing an eyewitness, but then immediately would be followed with a different account coming from but then immediately would be followed with a different account coming from the IDF out of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv It had the effect of essentially neutralizing the story.
By the end of the story, you could believe whatever you wanted to believe.
And that was very difficult Finally, in frustration, I used my vacation time to go to Gaza to write an article called A Gaza Diary, where I spent 10 days living in the refugee camp of Hani Yunus with a great cartoonist, Joe Sacco, who wrote Palestine footnotes in Gaza.
And I said, I'm not going to interview any official.
I'm not going to interview any PLO official.
I'm not going to interview Hamas officials.
I'm just going to write day by day what it's like in this refugee camp.
And that was an eruption at the Times when it was printed and I was told, although I'm an Arabic speaker, I think they only had two or three at the paper at the time, that I would never cover the Middle East again.
So that was the first blow.
The second blow was the call to invade Iraq.
I had spent a lot of time in Iraq.
I had not only had gone into Kuwait in the first Gulf War, I was not embedded.
I was what they called a unilateral, which meant that I wasn't part of any military pool, but I had grafted onto a Marine Corps unit, gone into Kuwait with them, And then stayed on in the Middle East for the New York Times covering the destruction of the stockpiles and Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical weapons, mostly in artillery shells.
So I covered all of that.
I knew he might have had a tiny residue, but I knew he didn't have weapons of mass destruction.
I knew it was a lie.
I knew The whole premise of invading Iraq, which of course had nothing to do with 9-11, was the fiasco it became, certainly up until Gaza, you know, the greatest war crime.
I mean, you have to go back to Vietnam or something.
And I couldn't keep quiet about that.
So I spoke very publicly on big media programs, and that angered the New York Times, especially after I was booed off of commencement stage.
And I was given a formal written reprimand from the paper.
Under Guild rules, you get the reprimand in writing.
I was called into the office of an assistant managing editor, Bill Schmidt, and given the reprimand, presented with the reprimand, and then if I violated that reprimand, i.e.
I continued to speak about the war, then I, under Guild rules, could be fired, and I wasn't going to stop speaking about the war, and that ended my career at the New York Times.
The debate that is just eternal that people on the left and right have is over the bias of the New York Times.
What is the ideological posture of the New York Times?
Conservatives eternally insist that it's some left liberal bias or whatever.
And then you have people on the left or even liberals who insist that it has this kind of institutional conservative bias.
And, you know, for me, I've always thought that the ideology of the New York Times is kind of allegiance to the foreign policy community, the U.S.
security state, and it's hard to, especially these days, place that on the left or the right.
But I'm wondering, and I think there's a lot of people who haven't lived through that history of 9-11, post-9-11, the Iraq War, or people who just did but decided to forget about it.
But in those instances where the New York Times was diluting your stories, basically negating the things you were reporting with IDF statements, giving them equal weight, and then especially with this idea that you somehow couldn't speak out against the Iraq war, even though many, many New York Times journalists and then especially with this idea that you somehow couldn't speak out against the Iraq war, even though many, many New York Times journalists were free to speak out in favor of it and were absolutely doing that, would you say
Would you say that the reason was that the Salzberger family or the New York Times just institutionally has this ideological bias, say, in favor of Israel, in favor of wars?
Or was it more just the kind of post 9-11 uber jingoism that prevailed where, you know, pretty much a lot of people, I would say the majority of people in corporate media decided that their patriotic duty was to align with the war on terror post 9-11 policies of the U.S. government?
All right.
I would say it's both.
The New York Times, think of the New York Times as the ideology of the New York Times as being Cold War liberalism, which is different from traditional liberalism, which used to be, if you go back to Henry Wallace or maybe the last figure being George McGovern, was confronted the military establishment and
military adventurism and the arms industry and uh the cold so it's they're always a cheerleader for war whatever war it is um of course as you know after 9-11 uh the uh entire country drank that very dark elixir of nationalism and revenge so that my outspokenness against the war led to repeated death threats.
I would come into my desk at the New York Times and the message bank on the phone was completely full of death threats, and the only reason there weren't more is because they ran out of space.
I also got written death threats, bomb threats, all this kind of stuff.
So you know very well that that was a very difficult time to speak out against the war.
I just want to say that if this wasn't an opinion, I spent seven years in the Middle East I had detailed knowledge of what had happened in the aftermath of the first Gulf War in Iraq.
I understood that Iraq was not only no longer a threat to its neighbors, it certainly wasn't a threat to us.
I had covered 9-11 and knew that Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11, so all of this essentially You know, these kinds of facts, you know, fact-based statements became an anathema.
I would also say that my colleagues who covered the Middle East, their opinion was no different from mine, but they were careerists.
And I think many, many, many people, George Packer, all these kinds of figures, became cheerleaders for the war, and they don't know anything about the Middle East.
But it doesn't matter.
They know what's good for their career.
Careerism is the primary disease at a place like the New York Times.
There's nothing written on the wall that you can't say this or you can't say that, but you intuit.
You understand very quickly the kinds of things that will advance your career in terms of what you report on and how you report it, and the kinds of things that won't.
And I would cite the coverage of the student protests across the country against the genocide in Gaza.
It was appalling.
I mean, they painted these students, and I spent time at the encampment in Columbia and Princeton.
I mean, these students were not any Semitic.
A fairly significant percentage of them were Jewish.
You would have these very moving moments on Friday nights where they would have Muslim prayers, and then on the same tarp they would have Shabbat.
But the New York Times, I think, was guilty essentially by seeking out Zionist students and mischaracterizing the movement.
I mean, the coverage was appalling.
But that caters to the establishment.
The reporters who go are sent up there.
They know what the editors want.
They don't want to be a management headache.
So, yeah, I think it's Cold War, liberalism, and then it's a pretty knee-jerk response in terms of its support of Israel.
Yeah, I'm sure.
to write any kind of fact-based narrative out of the West Bank.
Or guys, I speak as someone who did it for seven years.
It was a constant battle.
I'm sure.
So this aspect of careerism that you're describing, I think, is often a very understated factor in why corporate media is so often homogenized, doesn't question anything.
It's not a very sexy complaint.
It's much kind of more passion-provoking to say, ah, they're right-wing, or they're on the left, or they're pro-war, or whatever.
But this careers aspect, though, maybe a little more banal, I think is so crucial.
And I have to say, even though I've known this for a long time, the one time I really saw it most vividly is when I began very aggressively and vocally dissenting on the Russiagate narrative, both because I thought it was journalistically baseless, but also because I thought it was so dangerous to play this game of creating this kind of sinister ethos around any communications with Russia.
And I would hear from all the time people inside large media corporations, not entry-level journalists, but sort of mid-career, writing to me and saying, oh, I'm so glad you're expressing these doubts.
And of course, the subtext was, I can't.
And part of me would always say, Why can't you?
Why don't you?
But I know why.
It's because the minute they stick their head up with a kind of consolidated media, layoffs, and they're one day yelled at by liberal Twitter or the establishment media of Twitter, they're put first on the list of layoffs and last on the list to hire.
It's just very easy to get rid of them for that reason alone.
So for me, Knowing all this about corporate media, I've always had kind of one foot for a long time in corporate media.
Now I'm very much independent media.
I always felt like I was a very big booster of independent media.
This idea that oh independent media is kind of sort of the solution because with technology it gives a lot of other voices, the ability to have a show like this where ordinarily you would have to have a major television network or a printing press to reach a lot of people.
The internet lets you increasingly with a lot of ease reach people in similar ways to the corporate media.
Not necessarily the same extent, but in a very influential way.
You have, once you got the New York Times, thrived in independent media And I think there, as enthusiastic as I am, there's still some flaws in it.
I know you recently had a situation with your own work, and I want to get to that in a second.
But generally speaking, have you seen independent media, meaning journalists and people who work without corporate support, and therefore without corporate constraints, as a very promising alternative to or weapon against corporate media?
And is that something that you still believe?
I think, you know, there's always been alternative media.
We used to have, and I write for Bob Scheer's website, Scheer Post.
He used to be the editor of Ramparts.
So the role of alternative media is that it always shamed the traditional press into doing their job.
That's what Julian Assange and WikiLeaks did, which is why after they had to run his stuff, they turned on him.
to destroy him, especially The Guardian, Bill Keller at The New York Times, all these kind of figures.
If they didn't print the Iraqi war logs, they would have been exposed for who they are.
But immediately, once they did publish that material, they were part of that massive effort to the character assassination against Julian, the demonization of Julian.
So that's a good example of the role of the alternative media.
For instance, Ramparts published that iconic photo of the little girl running down the road in Vietnam who was being burned by napalm.
That was Ramparts.
Cointelpro, that all came out in the alternative.
Cy Hirsch, My Lai, So, the role that you play, Matt Taibbi, others play, is that they do real journalism.
And you have this dynamic where the traditional or the commercial press, which posits itself as objective and fair and unbiased and all this kind of stuff, on the one hand, they have to respond to alternative media, and on the other hand, they loathe it.
because it exposes much of their moral bankruptcy.
I think that has always been true.
Going back to Ida B.
Wells, the great journalist had a newspaper in Memphis 'til the mob burned it down.
But she exposed the reality of lynching, which was not that black men were preying on white women.
Of course, the irony is that rape was the national sport of white men in the South.
Mary Chestnut writes about going to plantations and seeing two dozen mulatto children, which then their biological father would sell.
And she exposed that it was the black bourgeoisie, it was the doctors, the businessmen, those were the ones that the white business class saw as a threat, and they were the ones who were largely lynched.
And so it's always been those gadflies That have essentially created some kind of pressure on the mainstream media, and that's what I think we're part of a very long and honored tradition.
I.F.
Stone, who ran I.F.
Stone's Weekly in his basement, I know that's what you tried to do with The Intercept until it got hijacked.
You had a wonderful quote I knew those three people who were running The Intercept.
And I saw a quote or a tweet or something that I read that said they all wanted to be invited to the dinners at the New York Times in New York.
And that is exactly it.
And I know them as you know them.
And that's about the disease of careerism.
Absolutely.
Because institutions like the New York Times are powerful.
They're powerful.
Yeah, and they're prestigious, and they open doors that otherwise aren't open to you, and for people who crave that being let in.
And I know it can be intoxicating.
You know, when the Snowden story happened, there was an attempt to kind of demonize me, but then once we sort of won and won all these awards, it was kind of like, OK, come in and we'll give you all these rewards.
And it can be tempting.
You have to very vigilantly guard against and almost reject it aggressively or can commandeer you in ways that I saw.
So I understand why that's enticing for people.
I guess the question, though, is, and you're absolutely right, there's this long tradition, even going back to, like, you know, Teddy Roosevelt and the progressive era.
A lot of those were just, like, muckraking journalists who were putting pressure on big corporations and monopolies, exposing all kinds of fraud and the, like, political fraud.
But I guess the idea that I have, and maybe it's just we always think whatever is more recent is more impactful, but the technology, I think, now allows...
These alternative media to be not just on the outside with a small audience able to influence and invade the discourse periodically, but you look at some of these independent platforms on YouTube, on Substack, on Rumble, on anywhere, and a lot of them have very large audiences that compete with and sometimes even exceed, say, cable programs and primetime that are backed by major corporations.
And I guess for me, I think what always happens is when there's some new kind of counterforce in the incipient stages, people get very excited by it, glamorize it, it's sort of this revolutionary force, and then it has growing pains and it starts to have its own kind of problems.
And for me, the two threats I see to independent media are number one, the increasing ability to censor the internet, to kind of suppress alternative ideas on the grounds that they're disinformation or hate speech.
And number two, the sort of self-imposed censorship that a lot of independent media outlets impose on themselves out of fear that they're going to be stigmatized, the kind of desire to remain, you know, within whatever circles they're in.
And I know you had a recent incident where you were working with Real Clear Network, which is a Real News.
The Real News Network.
Yeah, exactly.
Which is an independent media platform and you basically, they separated from you and you wrote a long article about why you think that was.
So talk a little bit about that and how that relates to these broader themes of the challenges that independent media might face.
Let me first just go back historically, because on the eve of World War I, we had powerful socialist movements in this country, including powerful media organizations like Appeal to Reason and the masses.
And when Wilson brought us into the war in 1917, when we saw the Sedition Act and the Espionage Act, they turned on those.
I think Appeal to Reason was the fourth largest circulation in the country.
I think the masses were was also very big, you saw very similar phenomena where they shut them down.
I mean, they literally shut them down.
And you're seeing that kind of pressure now through algorithms, through de-platforming.
So it does, again, replicate a certain historical period.
In terms of the power of the alternative media, I think you're right, and I think this is also something that you and Matt and others have pointed out, is that it also works in tandem with a loss of credibility by the traditional.
The traditional media, MSNBC, CNN, all these shows have completely lost their credibility, and that has created more pressure on alternative media as well.
So yes, the technology is different, but the phenomena is much the same, and the animosity that is directed against us just doesn't come from the state.
I want to ask you, because anyone covering foreign policy and covering wars, as you did for so long, obviously has to deal with, in all sorts of ways, the U.S.
security state, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, and sort of how it influences a lot of these policies.
There's no way to understand one without the other.
After 9-11, we saw this series of whistleblowers from within the U.S.
security state, people like William Binney and Thomas Drake, and of course culminating with Edward Snowden, who all had the same grievance, namely that You know, the whole foundation of this secret part of our government that would act without democratic accountability and outside of any transparency would be that the one taboo would ever be turning their power inward to manipulate the American population and domestic population.
And a lot of them came forward primarily based on their grievance that that was the thing that they thought would never happen.
And they were seeing that.
More and more and more and more that almost as much as these agencies were focused on foreign governments, they were focused in our domestic politics as well.
I know there's been a lot of that since the creation of the U.S.
security state, but do you agree that that has gotten worse and more evident, the idea that the U.S.
security state now plays a bigger role than ever before in our domestic politics?
Yeah, it's completely unaccountable, and you can't control it.
That's the problem.
And Arnold Toneby, when he writes about the decline of empire, he talks about these rogue intelligence military complexes, institutions that essentially can no longer be regulated, can no longer be constrained.
You know, all of the people who led us into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya, you know, there should be accountability.
Not only is there not accountability, but the same people who are leading us into the disasters in Ukraine and funneling weapons to sustain the genocide in Gaza.
And that's very dangerous because at the beginning of an empire, empires are very judicious usually about the use of force.
What characterizes declining, dying empires is military adventurism, where they seek to gain a diminishing or a lost hegemony through military.
military fiasco and I think we can start with Vietnam and go basically right through of just one military debacle after another.
What we've done in the Middle East is probably the greatest strategic blunder, you know, in American history.
You're talking about Iraq.
Iraq.
I'm talking about Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yeah, right, exactly.
And Syria and Libya, but that has had, you know, ramifications not only throughout the Muslim world, but through the global South.
the global south is reacting the way it is to what's happening in Gaza, because they understand that countries like Israel or countries like the United States, there's, you know, are perfectly happy, especially as we talk about mass migration and failed states from climate, the climate crisis and everything especially as we talk about mass migration and failed states from climate, the climate crisis and everything So yeah, that, you know, there was a moment, I'm sure you remember when Feinstein did the torture report,
Not my favorite, you know, senator, but nevertheless, and then she came out ashen and the CIA had like hacked the computers and she gave this very chilling press conference that basically said, you can't confront these people or they'll destroy you.
And that's where we are.
And that is, you know, these people perpetuate, they perpetuate war, they perpetuate surveillance.
I mean, I cover the Stasi state In East Germany at the end, I covered the collapse, and it got into, you know, it got into this absurdist point where they, the Stasi, were sending informants into retirees' stamp clubs to see if somebody ever made a joke about the dictator Erich Honecker.
I mean, that's the point that you get, but it calcifies the entire country.
It atrophies the entire country.
Not just the press, but any form of freedom of expression, any capacity for Democratic, you know, participation.
We don't have Democratic participation.
Look at the DNC.
I mean, it was, you know, a choreographed burlesque show.
So it's a symptom of late empire, and it's very, very dangerous.
And I think, of course, you have done a pretty good job of calling these people out.
You know, it's funny, I remember, and this left a lasting impression on me, when we first started doing the Snowden reporting, early on there was a report about how the NSA was spying on even allied world leaders.
We did reporting on how they were spying on the then-president, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, but the biggest splash was made when there was a report that actually didn't come from the Snowden reporting, but it came out at the same time, that the NSA was spying on the personal telephone devices of Angela Merkel, the then-Chancellor of Germany.
of Germany, supposedly a great ally of the United States.
And in a call she made to President Obama, she expressed indignation, the Germans leaked this, and made clear that a lot of her indignation came from the fact that she grew up in East Germany under the Stasi, and this kind of was redolent of what she thought she had escaped.
And I remember very well that they had interviewed Stasi operatives and intelligence officials after that conversation happened, And they said, we could never have dreamed of having the kind of, you know, ubiquitous surveillance that the NSA has developed as a result of the Internet.
We were able to maybe intercept 20 percent of conversations if we're being aggressive at the peak.
And here you're talking about essentially gathering everything.
Let me shift gears a little bit because you referenced before the kind of group of people responsible for all those war and terror abuses, not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but Guantanamo, the whole system of detaining people with no due process, torturing them, kidnapping off the streets of Europe and sending them to Syria and Egypt to be tortured, putting them in CIA black sites to purposely keep them away from human rights organizations, the atrocities of which we're only now hearing about.
And as you said, a lot of those people, most of them, in fact, didn't suffer any consequences from any of that.
In fact, they're thriving most.
And we used to call them neocons.
You could almost call them Kamala surrogates at this point.
I mean, the vast majority of them are now actively on the side of the Democratic Party.
And sort of the, you know, final expression of that was when Dick Cheney, who just 20 years ago liberals routinely described as this Hitler figure, this grave threat to democracy, war criminal, came out and said that he was endorsing Kamala Harris.
And when asked about why, Liz Cheney said, oh, it's not just because we hate Trump, it's because we actually feel like the Democrats and Kamala's foreign policy align more closely with our foreign policy worldview than a Trump-led GOP.
Personally, I think that she has a good point.
If I were a neocon who never changed my worldview, I think I would feel very comfortable as well in the modern-day Democratic Party.
What is your view about what this reflects, the fact that just 20 years later, after depicting all these people as bloodthirsty monsters and war criminals and accusing them of having stolen the 2000 election, We now have no memory of that, no history prior to Trump, and it's not only that Democrats are eager to accept their support, but that they feel so comfortable, more comfortable in the Democratic Party.
Well, let's be clear, the Democratic Party in Europe would be a far-right party.
What's happened in the United States is that, and this was largely done by Clinton and Biden, is they transformed the Democratic Party into the traditional Republican Party.
And they pushed the Republican Party so far to the right it became insane.
And what you've seen with the rise of a figure like Trump, and there's a cultish quality, obviously, to the Republican Party around Trump, is that that ruling establishment party has become one party.
And that's why they embrace figures like Dick Cheney I mean, Dick Cheney should be in prison, of course.
If Dick Cheney endorses anyone, that's a good reason not to vote for them.
So what you've seen is the establishment turn on Trump.
Why?
Well, it's not because he isn't going to give Goldman Sachs everything they want.
You know, we have this insane system, both under Biden and Trump, where the Pentagon submits a budget and then they give the Pentagon even more than the they ask for, nothing's going to—but he's impulsive, he's ignorant, he doesn't play the game, he's an embarrassment.
And so that's why.
They know under a figure like— Let me just interject there a little bit, because I remember the first time neocons really turned against Trump.
It was in 2015.
At the beginning of his campaign, he gave an interview where he said, I think the U.S.
is too pro-Israel.
In order to make a deal, we need to have more credibility as an even-handed player.
Two months later, he was at AIPAC giving the standard or even more radical pro-Israel speech, but that was his instinct.
He does things like question the ongoing value or viability of NATO, argues that we shouldn't be engaged in regime change wars in Syria and Libya and those kinds of things, that we should try and get along with the countries that are authoritarian.
And to me it seems like whether he intends to do that or not, and there was a lot of stuff in that first administration that misaligned radically with what he said in the 2016 campaign, but I feel like Leaving aside all of Trump's personal attributes and the things he says and does, there does seem to be more trust and faith in the reliability of people like Kamala Harris and Joe Biden and the Democratic Party to protect these kind of establishment orthodoxies than they trust Donald Trump to do so.
Do you think that's part of it as well?
No, absolutely.
His ideology is skin deep.
I mean, he ended up moving to recognize the Golan Heights as part of Israel.
He moved the embassy to Jerusalem.
But yeah, he's impulsive, and he says things.
I remember when he first debated, I think he was sitting with Jeb Bush, said that what everybody knew but nobody in the political class would say was that Iraq was a big mistake.
I can't remember the exact words he used or was disaster or something like that, which it was.
So there's an impulsiveness and they feel they can't control him.
So yes, I think that's exactly right.
I think, you know, we've seen Trump.
He kind of shifts with the winds.
But yes, I think that's that's exactly why the establishment is determined and as united.
I mean, the whole kind of palace coup itself was, first of all, they wouldn't let anyone run against Biden in the primaries.
And then why did Biden step down?
Because the billionaire class pulled the plug.
And then as soon as Kamala Harris, who nobody voted for, became the presumptive nominee, you saw a situation where every week she was getting another $200 billion or something.
So that's just a small window into how decayed the system is.
But yeah, I think you're right.
I think that's right.
Yeah, and by the way, that same party, the Democratic Party, is the party which they will tell you is the only salvation for American democracy, is the only way that if you believe in democratic values, you can preserve it.
All right.
I want to get to the substance of Israel-Gaza, Israel-Lebanon, and Hezbollah.
But before I do, one of the things that really irritates me is this kind of lack of historical knowledge.
I don't mean like history from the 1600s and the Enlightenment.
I mean like very recent political history.
Maybe that's just a natural part of getting older.
You know, these young people don't understand what we live through.
Maybe it's part of that.
But I do think there's been this kind of accelerated attempt to make people forget about history, because as soon as Trump appeared, the only relevant metric became, oh, forget about what people like Bill Kristol or Dick Cheney and Nicole Wallace, all those people did.
The only metric that matters now is, is someone single-mindedly devoted to destroying Trump and that's it?
Or is somebody Someone who doesn't think that that's where all political salvation lies, and it's just erased all of pre-2016 history, the financial crisis, and especially the mindset of the war on terror.
I think, and I could see this starting with October 7th, we talked about this very early on, that what was likely to happen was this war on terror mentality was going to return, where, in other words, no matter what the U.S.
government did after 9-11, no matter what it did, No strategical, no overall benefit to the United States, in fact, often a lot of harms.
As long as you were saying you were killing terrorists, it kind of satiated the quest for vengeance.
It made people think, OK, well, if it's being done to terrorists, I'm fine with it, even though that label was applied to so many people with no basis whatsoever, totally arbitrary.
We know a lot of people were killed and detained in Guantanamo and et cetera, who were completely innocent, had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or any other terrorist group.
I think what we're seeing now in Israel is pretty much exactly the same thing, that after October 7th it became very apparent, not just in Israel but the United States, that there was going to be this sort of mentality that said, anything goes.
As long as you're claiming that you're targeting and trying to kill terrorists, no matter how many civilians you kill, no matter how immoral or criminal your actions are, it becomes justified.
It reminds me a lot of those years after 9-11.
Can you You having not just lived through it, but like been deeply involved in reporting on it.
As you said, you are an expert in that region that was targeted primarily.
You're an Arabic speaker.
Talk about the sort of climate that did prevail when it came to trying to induce successfully inducing Americans to support a whole range of things that they would never have otherwise supported.
You mean after October 7th or after 9-11?
Well, after 9-11 and how that might relate to the prevailing mindset now because of October 7th.
Yeah, well, I mean, you saw this... Islamophobia has always been part of American culture.
We've always kind of demonized Muslims as, you know, barbarians.
That goes back to Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, this kind of stuff.
So that's always been part of the rubric of the American ideology.
But of course it got turbocharged after 9-11.
And then you began not only a persecution of Muslims in terms of invasive stops and searches and everything else, you saw the state go after all the Palestinian leadership, Samuel Harian, the Holy Land Foundation, All these kinds of figures, obviously, at the behest of Israel, of Fahd Hashmi, all these others.
And these were all Palestinian or outspoken leaders for Palestine.
And you began to descend into this world.
You saw figures like Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and others use really just racist rhetoric.
These people don't know anything about The Middle East, they don't know anything about Islam, they don't speak Arabic, and that poisoned the discourse, which of course has fed the response since October 7th, although I think with this live-streamed genocide and the kind of images, and now I think what's the apparent
What's readily apparent, the lies that Israel tells like they breathe, it's become harder for the Zionist state to sustain this fiction.
But yeah, the demonization of Muslims.
And in terms of history, you know, somehow it's a race that the 2.3 million Palestinians were living in the world's largest concentration camp.
open-air prison, completely under siege for 17 years, being periodically bombed.
Remember the Palestinians in Gaza don't have an air force, they don't have armored units, they don't have a navy, they don't have artillery units.
It's not a war, it's just periodic slaughter, what the Israelis would call mowing the lawn.
And so they broke out of their concentration camp, filled with a very understandable rage, and I'm not defending, there were clearly atrocities that were Committed, but and and you know to understand is not to condone, but we don't even make the effort to understand We would not have reacted frankly and any differently And and now we're on the cusp of a potential war with with Hezbollah in Lebanon
So, and this is also a failure on the part of the United States.
Look, the genocide in Gaza would be halted tomorrow if we imposed an arms embargo.
I think it's 68 percent, roughly, of the munitions that Israel uses now comes from the United States.
We have the power to do it, but we don't have the political will to do it because AIPAC owns the U.S. Constitutional.
Congress.
These Congress people couldn't leap to their feet fast enough to cheer somebody who's being investigated as a war criminal, I think is a war criminal, and is carrying out actively in real time a genocide.
So, yeah, it's convenient to forget history.
It's convenient to forget context.
Because if there is no context, then when we see an event like October 7th, it's incomprehensible.
Without context, it's incomprehensible.
And then it's a very short step to making the people who carry out those attacks incomprehensible as human beings.
Yeah, I think this issue, probably more than anything else, does illustrate the power of independent media when it's free, which is, as you all know, and you just recounted in the very first question, 20 years ago, the corporate media had a monopoly on what we knew about what the Israelis were doing in West Bank and what they were doing in Gaza.
And now everybody, much of the world, including Gazans, who are blockaded for decades and subject to all sorts of deprivation, have telephones and social media accounts, and they can just upload firsthand what it is that they're actually seeing and what it is that's actually happening.
And it's kind of taken away the power of the corporate media, which hasn't even been able to get into Gaza, except with the very strict controls of Israel anyway.
I think you clearly change, see the changes in the at least the younger generation who hasn't been fully indoctrinated yet about what Israel is and how they're supposed to think about it.
Let me just shift gears a little bit, because in the time we have left, I definitely want to ask you about the war in Ukraine, which is now about to conclude its second full year.
Actually, its third full year, which will be in February of 2025, just a few months, and then into its fourth year.
Before we get to the U.S.
policy part of it, or just the kind of strategic issues that the West has embarked on, what do you make of the war itself?
I've had all kinds of foreign policy experts on, mostly ones who used to be on mainstream media shows who are now excluded because of it, who have been saying all along,
It may take a while, it may take some Russian losses, but there's no possibility that the Ukrainians can win in the sense that the West has defined victory, namely expelling all Russian troops from every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea, in so many reasons, if nothing just else because of the difference in population and the availability of soldiers to keep fighting on front lines.
And we're now sort of seeing that.
Where do you think this war is going, given that the West did define victory in a maximalist way, almost in a way that the Russians would rather use nuclear weapons than accept, certainly when it came to Crimea.
How is the West going to get out of this box that it's painted itself in, where they either achieve impossible goals or suffer, by their own definition, a loss and a humiliation?
So the West goals were, they always understood the military, U.S.
military and European military, always understood that Russia would win a war of attrition.
That was never in doubt.
The goals were very different from the goals that are embraced by Ukrainian nationalists.
This is a proxy war.
I covered proxy wars all over the globe.
The aims of this proxy war were to degrade the Russian military and isolate Putin, especially from Europe.
And that has largely succeeded.
Proxy wars are very cynical.
They will use the aspirations of a nationalist or an insurgent movement to further their own interest.
I used to cover the Kurds, which, you know, would be useful for a time in putting pressure on Saddam Hussein.
And then this was Kissinger.
They pulled the plug.
And next thing you know, the Kurds were massacred and on fall 180,000 Kurds and their villages dynamited and everything else.
So this is a proxy war.
And it was always understood.
I mean, I've been around, I was in the last tank battle of the first Gulf War.
M1 Abrams tanks are extremely temperamental, very difficult to navigate and control and maneuver.
And it takes a very long time to know how to use them.
They're throwing these sophisticated equipment at the Ukrainians, and they know full well that they're not capable of actually using it or that it won't make a difference, a significant difference.
So, that's the goal.
Those were the two goals.
Those two goals have largely been achieved.
We will end with a negotiated settlement, which we could have had before the war began, Even though, you know, repugnant Henry Kissinger initially made this point, there will be an exchange for land for peace.
But the goals of the United States and of those who have provided the weapons and backing for this proxy war will be achieved.
And, of course, you know, tens of thousands of Ukrainian dead, hundreds of thousands maimed, villages destroyed.
You know, we did the same thing in Afghanistan.
So I think we have to separate the actual goals from the rhetorical goals, which are not the same.
Which is good advice for pretty much every American war.
But let me just ask you, I know like the Western policy planners can very cleverly adopt goals that aren't necessarily matching with or sometimes are even the opposite of the rhetorical package in which it's sold.
I go where there is save democracy and save Ukrainian sovereignty as if that's the reason we fight wars.
But at the same time, these wars do have the potential, especially when you're talking about major nuclear powers on one side and the largest nuclear power in Russia on the other, at least the country with the largest nuclear stockpile.
to spin out of control pretty quickly.
That's been a concern for a long time.
And each time Russia advances and the Ukrainians look further and further away from what the West described as victory, you've seen the U.S., Germany, NATO as a whole crossing lines that they kept saying they would never previously cross.
And it seems like the most dangerous one now is on the table, which is allowing Not just NATO to send long-range missiles to Ukraine with the green light to use them to strike deep inside Russia, but it would entail, as President Putin said correctly, some kind of technical assistance by NATO, which would make, by every metric, NATO a direct belligerent in the war in Ukraine against Russia.
Not just a proxy war, but an actual war between the two sides.
Thankfully, there seems to be at least someone somewhere pushing back on that crossing that line because Keir Starmer and the French are desperate to do it and the U.S.
is at least a little resistant.
Who knows where that will go?
But how do you assess the magnitude or the reality of out-of-control escalation risks from misperception, miscommunication, poor intentions or whatever from this war?
Well, that's how massive conflagrations begin.
You know, go back and read Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower.
Once you open that Pandora's box of war, it controls you.
You don't control it.
Which is why what we're seeing right now between Hezbollah and Israel is so dangerous, especially if it brings in Iran.
So, yeah.
And you're right.
You know, if you go back at the beginning of this conflict, there were all these U.S.
imposed red lines in terms of weapons systems that would not be granted.
And every one of those red lines was crossed.
And now, of course, they're giving potentially Ukraine the ability to strike deep with inside Russia itself.
And I would go back to 1989.
1989, I was there and covered the agreement to create a unified Germany, which, we forget, had to have the acquiescence of the Soviet government, the then Soviet government under Gorbachev.
And the deal was, I was in the room, I saw it, the deal Hans Dietrich Genscher, the German foreign minister, James Baker, our secretary of state, promised that NATO would not be expand beyond the borders of a unified Germany.
That was the deal.
That was the promise.
It was a promise that was almost immediately broken.
Why?
I think one because of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
So there was kind of hubris of a unipolar world, but also because billions of dollars of money were made by Raytheon.
I was in Poland a while ago and there's billboards from Raytheon all over the place.
There was billions of dollars to be made by reconfiguring these former Warsaw Pact countries to make their military equipment compatible with NATO.
In many ways, Ukraine had already become a de facto NATO country.
We had advisors in there.
We were giving them equipment.
So I would say that there's a good example of—and you had a cable released by WikiLeaks by William Burns, now the head of the CIA, who was the ambassador, who said that across the political spectrum, I would say that there's a good example of, and you had a cable released by WikiLeaks, by William Burns, now the head of the CIA, who was the ambassador, who said that across the political spectrum, Ukraine is unacceptable for NATO to build, or Ukraine to be Ukraine is unacceptable for NATO to build, or Ukraine to be incorporated into NATO by anybody in
And we forget that historical trauma, both in World War I and World War II, you saw an invasion of Russia, you go back to the Napoleonic invasion in the early 1800s, it all came through So, yeah, there's, you know, the consequences of this are not, you know, you can't control them.
When you keep pushing and pushing and pushing, as we have seen now with these attacks in Lebanon, thousands of people have been wounded.
And, you know, there was two days of attacks.
Of course, Hezbollah, Israel has now moved forces up to the border with Lebanon.
I think that, you know, there's now apparently, according to the Israeli press, a dispute between the defense minister, Galant and Yov Galant and Netanyahu about whether they will invade, although it appears they may invade.
I mean, this can just go terribly, terribly, terribly wrong.
And I think history has pointed out that once you begin these kinds of tit-for-tat escalations, it's very easy, whatever the intentions of both sides, to lose control.
Because I think if you look closely at what has happened in the Middle East since October 7th, both Hezbollah and Iran have shown incredible restraint because they don't want a war.
Absolutely, even though we keep hearing that they're an apocalyptic regime who is irresponsible with every weapon.
Certainly, if anything, they, from the perspective of people who think Israel is the aggressor, have shown a frustrating level of restraint in terms of retaliating.
All right, let me just ask you this last question.
And by the way, just on that issue of kind of the importance of history that we were kind of in a curmudgeonly way talking about earlier.
On a couple of occasions we've interviewed Sarah Vognikanishvili, who is a very prominent longtime left-wing politician in Germany who's started to break with the left on a lot of different issues, including Ukraine.
One of the very few sort of non-populist right or AFD type figures who has.
And one of the things she said the very first time I interviewed her that really put things into perspective for me was she was saying how insane it is That Germany would be sending tanks, once again, eastward to the Russian border with their Russian leaders, screaming in German about the gories of war and the necessity to defeat Mother Russia, given the history of World War II.
Imagine how threatening and traumatizing that is, and that's the kind of thing you can only understand from that historical perspective.
The last question on Lebanon, which you just referenced.
One of the things that, from the beginning of October 7th and the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, that I've heard a lot of people on my show talk about, is that there's a danger that Netanyahu and the Netanyahu government might want to open up a new front against Hezbollah.
Netanyahu needs war in order to stay in office, to avoid prison.
He is surrounded by people who have this fanatical, highly militarized view.
If anything is an apocalyptic, you know, religious cult, it's becoming that dominant faction in Israel, and that he may want to war with Hezbollah and drag the United States into it, and then suddenly you have the U.S. and Israel fighting all of Israel's enemies in the Middle East.
Do you think this attack that they just carried out, these two attacks now today as well, as well as the yesterday one with the Pagers, is designed to kind of provoke a conflict with Hezbollah and then maybe even with Iran, which they link to Hezbollah in a way that could drag the United States which they link to Hezbollah in a way that could drag How concerning is that to you?
I think it's very likely, because if you look at the pattern in Gaza, the They'll negotiate, usually through Egypt, a kind of tenuous ceasefire with Hamas, and then Israel will provoke, carry out airstrikes, killings, to provoke a response from Hamas.
This is the way the ceasefires always break down in Gaza, and then they use that as a pretext to, in their parlance, mow the lawn, to go in there and use industrial weapons to kill large numbers of Palestinians, destroy infrastructure.
Water purification plants, etc.
Power plants, all that kind of stuff.
So yes, this fits the pattern.
The Israelis have to know that there will be a response.
I was just reading a report in the Israeli press that said that they are preparing for potential attacks on Ben Gurion Airport and the port in Haifa.
Those are the kinds of targets Hezbollah has not hit in the past.
Netanyahu has been trying to get the United States to go to war with Iran for a very, very, very long time, going all the way back to the Bush administration.
And I had lunch in that interim before Obama came into power and with the Iranian ambassador at the UN.
And he said, don't worry, you know, they won't go to war.
And I said, why?
He said, because we have told them that if any attack, even if it's just an Israeli attack in Iran, the green zone will no longer exist.
exist, along with all the other U.S. bases in Iraq.
So it's not new.
And Netanyahu has been quite public about it.
So yes, he would like to create a conflagration that brings in Iran, and then because of the power of the Israel lobby, you will get congressional approval.
I mean, it would be just, it's nightmarish.
I mean, it's just, I don't want to use the word apocalyptic, but as somebody who spent seven years in the Middle East, it's absolutely terrifying.
But I think that's a good thing.
But yes, that's his intention.
That has been his intention for a very long time.
They know very well that after what they have done over the last two days in Lebanon that there will be a response.
That response will not be restrained.
And I would argue that the Hezbollah response, although it's true 80,000 to 100,000 Israelis have had to evacuate the north, Hezbollah's potential to create damage in Israel is far, far greater than anything it has done.
But that may, we may now see, I mean, I think it's more likely than unlikely that we will see a huge upsurge in terms of military activity and probably a cross-border incursion into I think it's more likely than unlikely that we will see a huge
Chris, for reasons I think are very obvious to anyone who just watched us speak for the last hour or so, there are very, very few people, if there are any, from whom I learn more and who I value reading as much as your work just steeped in fervently.
Firsthand reporting and an in-depth knowledge of the region and a willingness to say what You actually see without any concern or fear.
So I know there's been some changes in where you are now.
So just update everybody Who I hope will do so about where they can follow your work It's chrishedges.substack.com, and my show was terminated on the Real News after I kept going after Biden for the genocide and holding Biden accountable for the genocide.
So yeah, everything comes out on Substack, and there's also a Chris Hedges YouTube channel that runs the shows.
And I just want to say, Glenn, the admiration is mutual.
I've long followed your work for many, many, many years.
Yeah, you're one of the beacons among us.
Really appreciate it, Chris.
I feel obviously the same way.
I'm so glad we were able to work out with both of our schedules, getting us together.
I very much would love to do so again.
I actually had a lot more things that I was hoping to ask you about, but time limits are time limits.
So it was great to finally talk to you on our show.
I've been on your show before, and we should definitely try and do this more often.
Great.
Thanks, Glenn.
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