Russell chats to Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, Chris Hedges. Chris spent nearly two decades as a correspondent reporting from more than 50 countries. He spent 15 years at the New York Times, before teaching in the New Jersey prison system. He's also had an entire series of work wiped from YouTube for his association with Russia Today.In this conversation Russell and Chris talk about the reasons behind why we always seem to be in a permanent state of war, the profiteering from the military war machine and censorship in todays' media. For access to watch guest interviews, join weekly meditations and see an exclusive show... become a member of the Stay Free Community: https://russellbrand.locals.com/Come to COMMUNITY Festival 2023 - https://www.russellbrand.com/community-2023/NEW MERCH! https://stuff.russellbrand.com/
Hello there you Awakening Wonders, thanks for joining me for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
Wherever you're watching this you can only see the whole show exclusively on Rumble.
After 10 minutes we click over exclusive so that free speech can flow because today we're talking to Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges.
Chris spent nearly two decades as a correspondent reporting in over 50 countries, 15 years at the New York Times, in the good old days of journalism.
He has personally been subject to censorship with YouTube wiping out an entire series of his shows, I believe because it was on Russia Today, but included conversations with such Right-wing fascists as Edward Snowden and Slavoj Žižek.
Today we're going to be talking about the perpetual state of war, the conflict between Ukraine and, is it a proxy war?
When did it actually begin?
We'll be talking about the escalation of conflict between Western nations and China, the impossibility of alliances outside of centralised establishment politics, and when the Liberal-Left went wrong.
Stay free with Russell Brand.
See it first on Rumble.
Thanks for joining us, Chris.
It's lovely to talk to you again.
Thanks, Russell.
Chris, we get straight into this new permanent war state that we appear to be living in.
It felt like during the 60s, when there was the Vietnam conflict and the Korea Wars, that this was a period that had been committed to history, that there was no appetite To see American bodies returning home posthumously.
But since then it seems that, you know, America has been continually engaged in conflict and it's the repackaging of these conflicts that has changed the marketing of these wars.
Why is it that there is a necessity, whether it's Afghanistan, Ukraine or a potential forthcoming Taiwan-oriented conflict between the US and China, that there appears to be a necessity for ongoing conflicts?
Is it built into the American economic model?
Why is it necessary and why is it so difficult to get balanced reporting around this subject, Chris?
Yes, it's completely built into the American economic model, as Seymour Mellman, the scholar at Columbia, pointed out in books like The Permanent War Economy.
So after World War II, you had a perpetuation of the military, what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex, and it justified itself through the Cold War, although it created nuclear arsenals that could wipe out Soviet cities ten times over.
And then, of course, it fed the proxy wars that were very much part of the Cold War.
I spent five years covering the war in El Salvador, for instance, in the early 1980s.
But Vietnam was a very seminal point because, you're right, the American middle class did not want their kids coming home in body bags.
And so there were two things that happened after Vietnam.
One, there was a kind of reckoning that the country asked questions about themselves, or we did as Americans, that we hadn't asked before.
There was a very kind of let's call it a period of 10 or 15 years of anti-militarism
because of the Vietnam War, which then Ronald Reagan attempted to, I think,
successfully restore the quote-unquote good name of war. The other thing is that the military or the militarists
realized that they had to abolish the draft. That if they were going to continue the policy
of permanent war, they were going to have to fight it with poor kids who didn't have any options
and comprised a small, largely powerless demographic within the country in the single digits in
terms of percentages.
Much of my own family on my mother's side I'm talking about my own family.
But that's another issue.
are the classic cannon fodder for the military.
Unfortunately, I would also add they're quite susceptible to the propaganda, the flag-waving,
gun-toting.
I'm talking about my own family, but that's another issue.
So those two things happened and that allowed them to continue with war.
Now, I covered the revolutions in Eastern Europe.
I was in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania in 1989.
So I was there with the collapse of the Soviet Union and acutely aware of the promises that have been made to Gorbachev not to expand NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany.
In fact, we were all talking about the peace dividend, which shows you how naive we all
were, believing that there would not be this necessity to commit such large quantities
of money, material, research, and human capital into the war industry.
Well, the war industry had no intention of going away.
That's why it pushed the expansion of NATO, although, of course, as I think you've mentioned
on your show, the promises were made not to do those, a violation of the promises made
to Moscow and I think that expansion of NATO was pushed for two reasons.
One, it made the arms industry billions in profits because countries, Poland, etc., had to reconfigure their militaries to be compatible with NATO equipment, but also hubris.
That's when the United States began to talk about the unipolar world, which is just a fancy way of saying we dominate.
Whatever we do, we can do anything we want and nobody Can get in our way those two things led to the conflict with Ukraine And just to close the the I think that there's a Deep understanding now within certainly within the US military that they cannot win a war of attrition Against Russia Russia has bled and bled profusely no question, but a war of attrition Ukraine can't win and
And I was in the first Gulf War.
I was in southern Iraq.
After the war, I was in the Shiite uprising in Basra, and then I was taken prisoner by the Iraqi Republican Guard.
But being there, we had no clean water.
We had no electricity.
The schools were bombed, were destroyed.
The hospitals were destroyed.
That is a classic tactic that the U.S.
military uses.
It's what the Russians are using.
And that's why you see this panic and sending M1 Abrams tanks, we can talk about that later,
which will be largely useless, talking about uranium depleted weapons.
Now you have through Poland lobbying to send F-15, F-16 fighter jets.
Very, very dangerous.
But of course, as we saw with Afghanistan, it doesn't matter whether they can win.
The Washington Post published the Afghan papers, which illustrated that the military and political leadership in the United States knew, at best, Afghanistan would be a stalemate.
But the war went on for many years, which was also true in Vietnam, because war is a business.
Very lucrative, Raytheon, Halliburton, Northrop Grumman, etc.
And we just have been unable to push back against this Military.
There's militarism that is disemboweling the country.
If you drive across the United States, our cities and towns and communities are just desolate.
Thank you.
On our Locals Community chat, which you can join, there's a button here if you want to become a member of our Locals Community, and I tend to follow their comments.
Joe's Dog says, after the 9-11 attack, my grandfather quietly said, poor kids die first.
Then he went into the garden.
he knew the pattern of profit.
If you're watching us on YouTube now, we are only going to be with you there
for another couple of minutes before we click over to being exclusively on Rumble,
because I'm going to be asking Chris about the reconstruction of Ukraine,
in particular the role of BlackRock and JP Morgan, and the Ukraine as investment opportunity narrative.
Also, we'll be talking about how the left has become irrelevant in Chris Hedges' own words.
So do remember to click the link in the description, join us on Rumble, even better, join us on Locals,
you'll get all sorts of extra content.
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The military method as a sort of raison d'etre and determining ideology of establishment power means that in spite of apparent bipartisan politics, essentially what you have is a uniparty state with perhaps Particular biases towards escalating conflict with China or escalating conflict with Russia.
And would you say, Chris, that this shows that the directing power is beyond the state?
Organisations like JPMorgan BlackRock and some of the military industrial complex organisations that you've listed are one way or another able to assert pressure or at least meet their agenda regardless of what political party Where does that leave ordinary people when it comes to organising ourselves politically?
Where does it leave our conventional affiliations?
How do you challenge power that seems to be beyond the reach of democracy?
Well, it is beyond the reach of democracy.
There's no way to vote against the interests of Raytheon or Goldman Sachs or Citibank.
They're protean.
They dominate Republican administrations and Democratic administrations.
Both parties slavishly give the war industry not only everything it wants, I mean, and Pentagon budget has gone up successively for what the last eight years, but they give them more so that in this latest Pentagon budget
Proposal for fiscal 2023, the Congress gave them $48 billion more than the Biden administration asked for.
And this is how empires die, as Arnold Toynbee and other historians have pointed out.
Toynbee said they're not murdered, they commit suicide.
That you have a rapacious, unchecked, unregulated, out of control military machine that engages in military adventurism in a kind of futile attempt
to regain a lost global hegemony or dominance.
That's really when you look closely what the war in Ukraine is about, what the expansion
of NATO was about, what the 20 years of debacles were about in the Middle East.
And it's led by these, the same people, these pimps of war.
I go all the way back to the war in El Salvador, they're the same figures.
I was dealing with Robert Kagan.
and Elliott Abrams, who were both working in the Reagan administration in the State
Department and whose job, in essence, was to discredit everything I and other reporters
and camera people were reporting off the ground in places like Nicaragua or El Salvador or
Guatemala or anywhere else.
They don't go away.
It doesn't matter how wrong they are.
It doesn't matter how many fiascos they lead the country into.
It doesn't matter how many trillions of dollars they waste.
It doesn't matter how many hundreds of thousands, ultimately millions of lives they destroy.
They are the mouthpiece of the war industry, which funds their think tanks, Atlantic Council, Brookings Institute, American Enterprise Institute, etc.
Uh, and, uh, and those of us who actually come out of war.
I mean, I'm not, I'm not an activist in that sense.
I spent two decades reporting on wars all over the globe.
Six years in Latin America, seven years in the Middle East, covered the war in the former Yugoslavia.
Um, and, uh, but our voices are shut out because, uh, you cannot challenge at this point, uh, the war industry that not only has bought up the two
parties, but of course dominates or controls the media.
So all of their own puppets are the ones who are either selected from the military or from
the intelligence community, Clapper, Brennan, all these kinds of people, Petraeus and others,
to essentially function as shills or pimps of war.
And they're never held accountable, and that's what's so dangerous.
So Carl Leibniz.
And I studied classics.
I'm acutely aware of how the Roman Empire fell, how the Athenian Empire fell.
militarism or military machine, the enemy within.
And that's what they've become.
And I studied classics.
I'm acutely aware of how the Roman Empire fell, how the Athenian Empire fell.
These rapacious military machines impoverish and impoverish the country, disenfranchise
the working class.
And then in order to keep control of the nation-state, they bring back the very effective mechanisms
of repression that they used on the outer reaches of empire.
Wholesale surveillance, militarized police that function as internal armies of occupation, militarized drones, suspension of basic civil liberties.
This comes right out of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War where he writes the tyranny the Athenian Empire imposed on others it finally imposed on itself and that's where we are so you are right that that there is now nothing within the system there is no mechanism within the system by which it can reform itself the courts the systems of information the media even Hollywood
They're completely controlled by this military machine, the war industry, that is why Ralph Nader calls them traitors, that are destroying the country.
And now they are flirting with this disastrous war in Ukraine.
I mean, I think we have to point out that, as in the Middle East, there is no rational goal.
What is the goal of the war in Ukraine?
It's industrial warfare for its own sake.
I think we've given $113 billion.
That's almost twice the budget of the State Department, which is $60 billion a year.
But what's the goal?
The goal is to destroy Putin.
that's not working very well.
And even the New York Times a few months ago ran an editorial saying these people calling
for the complete recapturing of all Ukrainian territory, including in the eastern part of
Ukraine where you have ethnic Russians that have been ethnic Russians for two centuries,
is a fantasy.
But these people are self-delusional.
I mean, I've not only as a reporter had to deal with them for many decades, but I also
know some of them.
And they're either incredible mediocrities draped in this kind of cloying Ivy League
snobbery or they're certifiably insane, which would be figures like John Bolton or Elliott
Abrams.
And you don't want these people.
flirting with a nuclear confrontation with Russia and of course China.
I mean, you can't sustain this kind of militarism unless you have an enemy.
And this goes back to 1989 and the tragedy of what we're facing because Gorbachev and
then later Yeltsin and people forget in the early years Putin, they wanted to build both
a security and economic alliance with Europe and the United States.
But you couldn't expand NATO, you couldn't get Central and Eastern European countries to fork over, usually through loans, billions of dollars for their military unless Russia was the enemy.
So if Russia wasn't willing to be the enemy, then they would make Russia the enemy, and that's what they did.
I mean, there is a Wikileaks dump that has, from the cables, from the Wikileaks cables, diplomatic cables, that has William Burns, the ambassador of Russia at the time, now the head of the CIA, talking about keep your hands off of Ukraine.
That across the political spectrum, this is interfering with what Russia considers its vital security interest.
And let's just Never forget that twice in the last century, both in World War I and World War II, the Russian Empire was invaded through Ukraine by the Nazis in World War II, by the monarchy Kaiser Wilhelm in World War I, and then of course the century before that Napoleon did the same thing.
So there is real historical trauma there.
There was an understanding by diplomats like Burns.
Even Barack Obama made a statement that Ukraine was essentially a no-go area because to move into Ukraine would be considered threatening by Moscow, and legitimately so.
But yes, this kind of constant aggression, and part of the problem with the press is that it's not reported.
Um, so we are, uh, carrying out manoeuvres in the South China Sea, uh, but it, it, we don't hear or we don't understand what that means for Beijing.
I mean, it would be the equivalent of Chinese naval manoeuvres off the coast of California.
Imagine how we would react.
I mean, we, we couldn't even handle a balloon.
Chris, before you leap into China and the balloons, I've got, uh, there's a few things that I've got to unpack there.
Now I'm going to, this pen, this is going to be our little signal, Chris, because you give such hearty, rich data that I need to be able to occasionally
stop you to unpick it.
And here are a few of the points that I'd really like to follow up on.
You seem to be saying that not only is Ukraine identifiably a repeat of conflicts that are
within living memory, like Iraq.
Take for example the exaggeration of the requirement for a conflict, the illegitimacy of the inciting incident in both cases, not acknowledging the historical complexity of the conflicts in both instances.
Beyond that, that this is a historical paradigm that precedes the American empire specifically and can be accorded to empire more broadly.
And interestingly, Chris, you seem to be saying something that gets said conversationally rather a lot, that we're experiencing the end of empire.
You know, the end of the American Empire and what we're experiencing, witnessing, is their attempts to prevent this inevitable entropy from taking place.
But elsewhere you'll hear that America spends more on military budgets than any other country in the world, that their arsenals and artillery are better equipped than any comparable nation.
I want to sort of follow up on that idea that, you know, Are we witnessing the end of an American empire or are we beginning to see the conjugating of American empire with a new type of unipolar globalism as exerted through organizations like World Bank,
NATO, obviously, WEF, WHO.
These organizations that are to some degree funded by American taxpayers, but also funded by private organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, do have the ability to transcend national democracy and implement law.
We're seeing that sort of, you know, throughout the pandemic.
We're seeing examples of that.
And there's currently a treaty being debated that might demonstrate it even more clearly.
So I suppose what I'm asking you is this.
It sounds like one of the things you were saying is that nations like China and Russia, while they are clearly militaristic nations with great interest in empire, with their own transgressions and genocides even as part of their past, and persecution as part of their present, Are at least willing to contend with the idea of a multipolar world in a way that the unipolar, globalist, expansionist, current American military hegemonic idea is not accepting as a possibility, that they want global dominance.
Because when you said that thing, mate, that there is no, you can't conceive of what would be the objective in Ukraine.
That's why it has to be presented in simplistic terms.
It's a humanitarian disaster.
We've got to present Ukrainian people.
Zelensky's a hero.
Putin's a monster.
It doesn't take into account the obvious truth that Russia is an enormous, powerful country with a rich history.
This is not something that can just be wiped off the map with no disrespect to a country like Iraq and its previous historical incarnations.
That was a country that, you know, there was such an obvious distinction in the scale and size and the difference between the capacities of both nations.
And we've seen the horrible consequences of that botched war.
So the consequences of this one could be immeasurable.
So a few things I want to touch on.
Unipolarism, American expansionism, the true agenda.
Fucking hell, you're going to be talking for the rest of your life.
China and Russia.
And also, I really like the way you keep referring to class throughout this.
I know that some of that's because of your personal and familial history, but I guess when we get to the crunch of all this, we see which people are expendable.
We get into that Foucauldian idea of Who is it okay to kill?
Whose lives can we dispense with?
And it seems now we're saying, once again, American lives.
There are certain American lives that can be traded.
So I'd love to pass the ball back over to you.
Now, Chris, I'll only hold this up in the case of what I would call an emergency, which we could call, for example, Ukraine attempting to take Crimea, or me attempting to get another question in.
Over to you, Chris.
Well, you're right.
What they are seeking is A unipolar world, but that's been slipping away from them very quickly with the industrial might of China.
I mean, what happens in war is that once you open that Pandora's box, it just goes in all sorts of directions you can't predict.
So, for instance, somebody in Washington gets this loony idea that they're going to arm the moderate rebels.
And just I want to remind viewers that I spent seven years in the Middle East.
There's an area I know well.
So they pump in half a billion dollars worth of weaponry.
Well, of course, all the jihadists from Iraq cross the border and are rearmed.
And then Washington freaks out and starts bombing the very people they armed and acting, in essence, as Assad's de facto air force.
And we should note that thousands of Hezbollah fighters from southern Lebanon are also fighting on behalf of Assad.
So we're acting as Hezbollah's Air Force.
I mean, this is what happens in war.
And so with the conflict in Ukraine and the staggering and obscene amounts of money, and I was at the February 19th rally in Washington with this left-right alliance that denounced permanent war.
Ron Paul was there and Jimmy Dore and a bunch of other people.
But what happens with that is that they pushed Moscow into the arms of Beijing.
Now, a whole Cold War policy was to make sure that Beijing and Moscow were closer to Washington than they were to each other.
This was a fundamental tenet of Cold War policy that you did not want a strong alliance between Russia and China, which I think is probably one of the reasons that Henry Kissinger, a man I loathe, of course, but he correctly spoke out against the perpetuation of the war in Ukraine.
And Kissinger said again correctly that you don't want to attempt to humiliate Russia, a nuclear-armed Russia.
And the constant escalation, which to be clear is being driven by NATO countries, is essentially
panic.
It is an understanding that however much Russia bleeds, and Russia clearly bled a lot, the
longer this goes on, the longer the infrastructure of Ukraine is degraded.
I think roughly 50% of Ukrainians do not have access, or at least permanent access to electricity,
that they're finished.
And so that's why you're seeing...
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weapons being sent to Ukraine that they're not going to be able to even effectively use.
They're just throwing everything they have at it. And the idea, of course, with the sanctions was
to destroy the Russian economy. Well, the economies that got destroyed are the German economy.
What's UK inflation? It's almost 10 percent, isn't it? I mean, your energy bills have
gone through the roof, putting even more pressure on a distressed working class.
I mean, this is a very cynical war, because it is not being fought for Ukraine.
It's being fought partly to enrich the arms industry, but also it's being fought to degrade
the Russian military.
That's really why it's being fought with Ukrainian bodies.
But the economic price, of course, the price in terms of devastation and loss of life is
being paid by Ukrainians and Russians, but the economic cost is being borne by Europe,
not so much by the United States, which is fine with the United States because it forces
Germany to buy their natural gas, which was probably part of the plan all along.
There was an old saying, which I think is true, you can't talk about war if you don't talk about markets.
So the breakdown of the unipolar world, especially with the rise of China, is what, and you mentioned the IMF and the World Bank, and these are institutions that cemented that dominance, American dominance, for decades around the globe, and of course destroyed local
economies so that corporations could come in and seize them, which by the way they did in
Russia under Yeltsin.
That's why the IMF gave Yeltsin a $10 billion loan, of which an estimated $1.5 billion was
of which an estimated $1.5 billion was spent to make sure he was re-elected because he
spent to make sure he was reelected, because he did Washington's bidding, which in the
did Washington's bidding, which in the end gave rise to the nationalists around Putin
end gave rise to the nationalists around Putin, because we turned, through Yeltsin, who was
because we turned, through Yeltsin, who was a fall-down drunk, we were turning Russia
a fall-down drunk, we were turning Russia into a client state.
into a client state with devastating impact for Russian people.
I mean, bread lines and hunger and everything else.
So yes, what they're seeking is, historians call it micro-militarism.
It's where late empire engages in military adventurism in a desperate bid to reclaim
a past dominance, and that's what we're seeing.
I mean, anybody, even from the outside, can see the social unraveling in the United States,
the mass shootings, the opioid crisis that takes 100,000 lives a year, but that doesn't
count the millions of people who are addicted, the fact that half the country doesn't even
have $400 in their bank account to handle an emergency expense, the collapse of our
health care system, of all the industrialized worlds.
We did the worst job of handling the pandemic.
I think we had 16% of the global deaths and we're less than 5% of the world's Population, the incursion of the Capitol on January 6th.
You can see the social disintegration and the very rapacious and lethal force of, as I mentioned before, these militarized police that function as internal armies of occupation.
The stripping away of, I mean, we are the most spied upon, watched, monitored, photographed population in human history.
And I was in East Germany. I covered the Stasi state. So the unraveling
internally and the increasing loss of global hegemony is, you are right, is what they are
attempting to do is use this massive military machine to reclaim it. But look at what happened in Iraq.
We lost the Taliban. We lost the word of the Taliban. Everything we touched, Libya, Syria.
Pakistan, Somalia has been a disaster.
And I, the longer this war goes on, the more it's assured that Ukraine will be a disaster too.
And then of course they'll turn to China.
Chris, I just want to draw your attention to some of the messages in our chat over on locals.
You can join that by pressing the red button.
Greer2 says, Bingo!
The primary purpose of this war is to grade Russian military capability and expectation of a US-China war over Taiwan.
The military-industrial complex enriching itself is a political constant here.
PeaceLoveLight says, I'll be watching this again.
He's a gold mine of information.
I think PeaceLoveLight is referring to you, although my contributions have also been quite valuable, I think.
Someone says, that's Joe's dog again, I stopped learning the piano to listen.
Smart, condensed truth.
So, people are enjoying this content.
When you talk, as you are Chris, about these endeavors are being undertaken in order to mitigate empirical decline, Is there not a grave risk that these conflicts could in fact expediate and exacerbate that very decline?
Who will feel that first?
Will it be ordinary people because of the energy crisis that you've already described?
Will it lead to covert operations like the blowing up of the Nord Stream gas pipeline which your fellow Pulitzer Prize winning conspiracy theory expert Expert and fellow right-wing fascist Seymour Hersh came on the show and talked very articulately about how that entire operation was carried out.
Will it mean that the indication that the end of empire will be felt first by domestic populations and is there a likelihood in your view that in the next 10 to 20 years we'll see Radical change.
And is that likely to mean that the other aspect of this that you've started to refer to, Chris, the increased surveillance, the increased push for further methods of control, i.e.
through social credit scores, many of the ideas introduced in the pandemic legitimised and normalised throughout the pandemic will be exerted due to the despondency, dismay and loss of faith that this declining empire is likely to engender?
So Alfred McCoy, a very fine historian, argues, I think with some validity, that the death blow of the American empire will come when the dollar is no longer the world's reserve currency.
Because then our debt is no longer attractive, people won't buy it up, and the value of the dollar itself will plummet just as the pound sterling did in the 1950s when the pound sterling was dropped as the world's reserve currency.
So at that point, and we fund much of our military adventurism through debt, At that point, the empire is physically unsustainable.
We have 800 bases around the globe.
There has to be a massive retraction.
And the social decay, which is already pretty pronounced in the United States, will become magnified, creating even more upheaval.
One of the problems in the In the United States, and this isn't true, of course, in the UK, is that we're a country awash in automatic weapons.
Anyone can go into a Walmart and buy a military-grade rifle.
I don't hunt.
I'm actually a vegan, but I did.
I grew up, as I said, in Maine.
My relatives were all veterans.
My grandfather was a master sergeant in the Army.
My father was drafted and fought in World War II.
in North Africa and became a pacifist afterwards.
But anyway, you go out and hunt, the caliber of those automatic, those AR-15s, they're useless to take down a large animal like a deer unless you want to put 20 bullets in them.
You use much heavier caliber.
Those weapons are designed solely to shoot human beings.
And it doesn't even make the news anymore, virtually.
I mean, we have more mass shootings, I think, this year than there are days.
So that kind of social upheaval will become more pronounced with an economic collapse. I think McCoy argues that that's
where we're headed. He actually gives a date for it, 2030. I'm very brave of him. I wouldn't do
that. But it's clear that we're headed for a cliff. And those who are attempting to regain
that lost hegemony are seeking to do so only through military adventurism, not dealing with the
kind of social inequality that is the most pronounced in American history, with our billionaire
class worth, what, $180 billion.
Go back and look at the old oligarchs, the Rockefellers.
they were worth a few billion, three, four, five billion.
We haven't seen any kind of disparity in terms of wealth like this. I mean, I don't know, you
have to go back to what, pharaonic Egypt or something. So the internal decay coupled
with the fact that the military machine is in the hands of idiots who don't understand the
world.
I mean, remember, these people live in their own echo chamber in Washington, the people pulling the strings.
And so I, who spent months of my life in Iraq, and again, seven years in the Middle East, and I speak Arabic, you know, are listening to them talking about implanting, in the inception of the Iraq War, implanting democracy in Baghdad and how the oil Revenues are going to pay for the reconstruction and democracy is going to emanate outwards across the Middle East.
And this is just fantasy.
It's a non-reality based belief system.
And the same people that got us into that mess are the people now getting us into the mess in Ukraine, stoking a conflict with Russia and baiting China.
And, you know, Victoria Nuland, who's one of the architects of all this, when Cheney was vice president, she was in charge of his foreign policy.
It doesn't matter what administration.
Now she's stoking the conflict in Ukraine.
Of course, she was very involved in the 2014 coup, which provoked Russia unnecessarily.
Yeah, these people are very, very limited and very, very dangerous, and there's no internal check on them at all.
And you're right, what they are doing vainly is to recapture a lost hegemony, a lost dominance, one that had been very effectively put in place by the IMF, the World Bank.
I mean, don't get me started on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
But yes, all of these forces, Soros, that is at their core what it's about.
But it's not working, and it's not going to work.
And unfortunately, the more it fails, the more rapacious, bloody, and aggressive they become.
And that is a characteristic of late empire.
So at the end of the Roman Empire, you have a one million man army that is just almost cannibalizing Rome, especially when they cut off the wheat shipments from North Africa.
And at the end, they're auctioning off the seat of the emperorship.
That's kind of where we're headed.
When there are literally individuals that were operating within the Bush-Cheney administration still making policy decision in the Ukraine war, it's easy to identify that there is a continuity that transcends the electoral cycle of American politics.
It seems that domestically and of course globally a seismic moment was the 2008 crash and that since then perhaps American economics and the financial world more broadly has been artificially revivified, defibrillated into a new zombie life.
And when you talk about this hollowed out state of America and the loss of faith and hope in American institutions, when you talk about the rise of populism and the changing cultural rhetoric that we're experiencing on both sides of the political conversation.
It's easy to see how this militaristic adventurism coupled with financial impropriety might lead to more marginal ideas migrating to the center of politics.
Certain parts of the media infatuated with the rise of a figure like Donald Trump or the The extraordinary anomaly, as it was seen then, of Brexit.
But I know that you are also interested in the other aspect of this debate for which you use, and I don't know if it's a term you coined, woke imperialism.
I wonder if you could talk to us, Chris, about the relationship between woke imperialism and the ideological hollowing out of the left Um, we did a sort of an article the other day where, um, the new, uh, what was her name?
Nikki Haley, the first Republican presidential candidate talked about, you know, the sort of the left-wing establishment and the figures that she listed, Pelosi and et cetera, they're all Multi-millionaires, even Bernie Sanders is a pretty wealthy dude.
We don't have a kind of left in terms of left-wing populism, socially minded, legitimate representation of the people anymore.
It seems to me that what we have are two corporatized parties.
What then becomes the role of the kind of rhetoric around wokeism?
And just to be explicit, I'm in support of of individual freedom, whether that's the freedom to express yourself in a traditional orthodox way or a progressive way, as the culture would term it.
You know, that's sort of where I stand on it.
I believe in individual freedom.
I believe in democracy.
What do you think is the function of woke imperialism?
What is its impact on the culture?
How is it being used to create division and facilitate further oppression?
Right, so you're referring to this article I wrote called Woke Imperialism, which is on my Substack, chrishedges.substack.com, which was widely disseminated.
And I began with the murder of Tyree Nichols by the five black Memphis police officers as an example of the failure of woke politics, because not only, of course, were the five officers who killed him African American, but the city's police department is headed by a black woman.
and none of it helped Nichols, who was just another victim of a modern-day police lynching.
That's one example of how the militarists, the corporatists, the oligarchs, academia, media
have essentially twisted identity politics and diversity and used it as a mask for systems of
oppression and of course white supremacy. It's become a very effective gimmick that unfortunately
has lured many people on the left into little more than a boutique activism.
I mean, you mentioned Victoria Nuland.
Are we somehow safer?
Is the country saner?
She's a woman and she's in the State Department, or Lloyd Austin, who's black, as the Secretary of Defense, or the fact that the Pentagon is now allowing transgender people to serve as soldiers.
You know, the head of the, the secretary of the treasury, Janet Yeltsin, who promotes
openly job insecurity and unemployment as a way to fight inflation.
Is she good for working men and women?
And this is a very kind of classic technique used by colonial powers who put their front
person willing to do their bidding, whether it's Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti or Anastasio
Samosa in Nicaragua or Mobutu Sese Soko in the Congo.
I mean, there's a long list.
They'll do the dirty work on the part of the colonializers.
I mean, I point out in the article that the great, one of the greatest resistance leaders
in American history, Sitting Bull, was assassinated by members of his own tribe who served in
the Lakota, in the reservations police force at Standing Rock.
So.
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You know, diversity is extremely important when it is part of the opposition.
You want all of those voices and ethnicities and genders and everything else.
But when it is seized upon by the ruling elites, and your sole question is, is this person a person of color?
Is this person a woman?
Whatever it is, without looking at what it is they stand for.
I mean, are we better off Because Clarence Thomas, who is black, who opposes affirmative action, is on the Supreme Court.
It's almost childish, but it's become a very effective, and it's created this obsession with kind of moral purity or moral absolutism, which is why you mentioned the Rage Against the War Machine rally on February 19th, where we were with libertarians, and we were, I personally was quite viciously attacked, but were never, and I wrote another column called There Are No Permanent There's only permanent power.
We do have to coalesce with groups that may think differently than we do to confront permanent war, because it's only that organized power from below that's all we have left to stop this suicidal folly of empire.
So yeah, I mean, Glenn Ford, who died but headed the Black Agenda Report, a great friend of mine, he called it representationalism.
and that you take a woman or a person of color and you put them within a system of oppression.
But as he points out, of course, they're not the ones who write the script.
They don't write the drama.
They're just chosen as the actors.
And we gotta get over that.
We also have to get over this kind of moral purity where somebody who doesn't agree with us
on COVID vaccines or whatever it is, we'd never talk to again
and we won't be in the same room with.
I mean, libertarians, I...
Libertarians have been very good on war, on empire, and very good on civil liberties, but they also want to abolish the minimum wage and Social Security, and none of which I support.
But this rally that we had in Washington was about the permanent war machine, and we united on that.
On other issues, we'll be on opposite sides.
But that's called political maturity, which unfortunately many in the left lack.
Chris, what strikes me over the course of this conversation is the wealth of knowledge that you've accrued over a lifetime of reporting.
Last time we communicated I said I was struck by how you could have someone who 10, 15 years ago was a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist with the New York Times Now somewhat confined to the margins of the journalistic space, a comparable thing has happened with Greenwald and other, you know, Seymour Hersh, you know, like it feels now like journalistic integrity has been all but lost and the function of media has become overtly explicitly and identifiably to carry the messaging of the centralised establishment and somehow underwrite it ideologically using the
Many of the tropes that we have just listed which are valuable in themselves but are often exploited or used as a veneer to avoid confronting the kind of issues that would meaningfully impact and change the lives of ordinary people and impede the progress and agenda of powerful institutions.
I get the sense that you have not been treated correctly at a point in your life where it feels that your experience And knowledge could be benefiting a great many people coming into the journalistic profession, learning how to tell stories about complex ideas, learning how to interpret other cultures for, you know, I'm speaking from the position of a Western person, I guess.
In a way that is relevant and making the kind of historical comparisons that you've done conversationally today all the way from the Roman Empire or making comparisons between the various wars that have taken place within our lifetime.
What do you feel about this kind of almost patricidal inability to revere elders and to incorporate experience Into our ongoing conversation, does that tell you indicate a kind of nihilism, a loss of morals, a loss of virtue?
What do you think it is and how does it personally affect you as a man who obviously has a great deal to offer that the sort of kind of spaces that you once operated within are somehow verboden now?
Does it matter to you?
Do you think new spaces are emerging?
How has it affected you emotionally and why do you think it's happened?
Well, I was pushed out of the New York Times because I denounced the calls to invade Iraq for all of the reasons which are now self-evident.
That was personal in the sense that I knew that people that I cared about would die, and some of them did, and that I had a kind of You know, responsibility given the platform I had not to remain silent.
It's why I'm very outspoken for Palestinians and against Israeli war crimes in the apartheid state because I spent months of my life in Gaza, including when it was being Hit with Israeli warplanes bombed refugee camps bombed by Israeli warplanes is bad And it was horrible as the South African apartheid state was I don't believe they ever sent fighter jets to bomb the townships And I think it what drives me is those relationships and a feeling that whatever I pay is nothing Which is true compared to what they pay and
I write books, which several have ended up on the New York Times bestseller list, so I still have a voice, but I have a voice, importantly, that's not allowed me to compromise my own.
Integrity, so I feel fine.
You ask about why the media is the way it is and that really is driven by the decline in revenue.
So the first hit on newsprint were classified ads.
40% of newspapers or 40% of revenue for newspapers came from classified ads.
Well that went on to the internet.
Then with the rise of digital media you saw the steep decline both in advertising revenue and in
circulation, and that created a new media model. It destroyed major city papers, which were once
quite robust, so that economic assault had an effect within the newsroom, whereby newspapers began
to cater even more obsequiously to those on whom they depended for influence and money or
access and money, because they didn't want to lose, they didn't want to bleed
any more than they've already bled.
Uh, and so at the beginning of the Iraq War, I was pushed out.
Robert Scheer, uh, was pushed out of the Los Angeles Times.
Rihanna Column, he now runs Scheer Post.
Um, Phil Donahue, which was the most watched show at MSNBC, was pushed out.
Jesse Ventura, which had just signed a contract, was never allowed to go on the air because, uh, he was anti-war.
Uh, and so that is why.
They've become more, uh, beholden.
to those commercial centers of power and to actual centers of political power because they've become so anemic.
That has also created a new model in journalism.
Matt Taibbi has written quite well about this in his book Hate, Inc., where the old media model was to reach a broad demographic.
Now you're trying to reach a particular demographic. You've siloed these demographics,
you feed that demographic what it wants to hear, and the flip side of that is of course
you're demonizing the other demographic.
Fox News does it on one side, CNN, MSNBC, I would argue the New York Times does it on the other.
They slogged two years of the Russiagate fantasy.
Why?
Because they got 500,000 new digital subscribers and when they did their polls they found that those subscribers who signed up during the Trump presidency did so because they hated Trump.
So they catered to that.
It turns out that it was not just the Mueller report, but now Matt's reporting out of Twitter, and Jeff Gerth, the great investigative reporter, did a four-part series for Columbia Journalism Review, which 24,000 words, which destroys the whole idea that somehow Trump had ties with Russia.
But they don't pay a price for it.
They haven't even responded They don't feel a need for any accountability because their demographic isn't going to hold them accountable.
So the media landscape has, which was always problematic.
I mean, I worked for a major publication that was written, is written largely for the elite.
But that degradation within the media has really been quite, for old journalists like
myself, quite frightening.
You know, because I had built a reputation and a career, I haven't really suffered in
a way.
My books sell, my columns are widely disseminated and read.
But what it's really hurt are these young journalists with integrity who don't want
to be puppets of the media.
Goldman Sachs or the war industry, and they're really suffering because they haven't built
up a reputation.
So they're not known figures.
And yet they are, of course, fighting to maintain their own integrity.
And that breaks my heart because what we're really doing is this system, this media system
is destroying those we need most.
Chris, thank you so much for joining us again.
Thank you for taking us on an incredible journey through the war machine and what it functions, the challenges that we face when trying to create new alliances, the economic necessity for ongoing war as empire declines, and the reasons that domestically the United States has changed so radically, observably, in the last 20 years or so.
It's also as a person interested in telling stories with integrity, dealing with complexity, looking to create alliances rather than enemies.
It's a great education for me personally to have the privilege of your company and your experience.
So thank you very much for joining us today.
Thanks for doing it, Russell.
You can read Chris's work on his Substack and there's a link in the chat right now telling you where you can acquire many of his fantastic books.
On tomorrow's show, I'll be talking to Jeremy Corbell about UFOs, spy balloons, the deep state.
Why are UFOs being ruined now?
Why are they talking about UFOs on the mainstream media?
Are these legit UFOs?
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