How democracy died out in the US. l'AntiDiplomatico interviews Chris Hedges

by Alessandro Bianchi

He is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), a bestseller that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has taught journalism at Columbia, New York, Princeton, and Toronto universities. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Central America, Africa and the Balkans. From 1990 to 2005, he worked for The New York Times, where he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002. Since 2005, he has continued to do real journalism every week in independent U.S. news outlets. He is the author we translate the most, so it is a great honor and emotion for the AntiDiplomat to have had the privilege of interviewing Chris Hedges. 

Mr Hedges, in a recent interview with Mr. Greenwald, you talked about your experience at the New York Times and you explained the reasons why you could no longer work for what is considered the world's "most trusted" newspaper here in Italy. If you had to briefly describe how information works at that paper, what words would you use?

ANSWER:

The New York Times prizes access to the powerful and the wealthy more than it does reporting. This has in recent years led it to print numerous stories that turned out to untrue. The editors at the paper were full-throated propagandists – Tony Judt called them “Bush’s useful idiots” – for the war in Iraq. They were true believers in the weapons of mass destruction. They suppressed, at the government’s request, an expose by James Risen about warrantless wiretapping of Americans by the National Security Agency until the paper found out it would appear in Risen’s book. They peddled for two years the fiction that Donald Trump was a Russian asset. They ignored the contents from Hunter Biden’s laptop that had evidence of multimillion dollar influence peddling and labeled it “Russian disinformation.” Bill Keller, who served as executive editor after Lelyveld, described Julian Assange, the most courageous journalist and publisher of our generation, as “a narcissistic dick, and nobody’s idea of a journalist.” The editors decided identity and race, rather than corporate pillage with its mass layoffs of 30 million workers, was the reason for Trump’s rise, leading them to deflect attention from the root cause of our economic, political and cultural morass. Of course, that deflection saved them from confronting corporations, such as Chevron, which are advertisers. They produced a podcast series called Caliphate, based on invented stories of a con artist. They most recently ran a story by three journalists — including one who had never before worked as a reporter and had ties with Israeli intelligence, Anat Schwartz, who was subsequently fired after it was disclosed that she “liked” genocidal posts against Palestinians on Twitter — on what they called “systematic” sexual abuse and rape by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance factions on Oct. 7. It also turned out to be unsubstantiated.  

In a recent video of yours, which we have subtitled in Italian and which we think perfectly illustrates the deep state in the United States, you say: ''Our political class does not govern. They entertain”. Who really has the power in the USA? And is there a balance of power today, or is it absolute power?

ANSWER:

The American burlesque, darkly humorous with its absurdities of Donald Trump, fake ballot boxes, conspiracy theorists who believe the deep state and Hollywood run a massive child sex trafficking ring, Christian fascists that place their faith in magic Jesus and teach creationism as science in our schools, ten hour long voting lines in states such as Georgia, militia members planning to kidnap the governors of Michigan and Virginia and start a civil war, is also ominous, especially as we ignore the accelerating ecocide.

Trump is the symptom, the result of, not the cause of this decay. Trump is gauche, vulgar and boorish. He is not part of the refined group of mandarins trained to become plutocrats in Ivy League universities and business schools. He never mastered the cloying patina of refinement and carefully calibrated rhetoric of our courtier class. But he expresses the legitimate rage of a dispossessed working class and promises a return to a golden era once the country is rid of immigrants, liberals, intellectuals and all those proto-fascists like Trump blame for our demise.

He is not a politician in the classical sense. He is a cult leader. Cult leaders arise from decayed communities and societies in which people have been shorn of political, social and economic power. The disempowered, infantilized by a world they cannot control, gravitate to cult leaders who appear omnipotent and promise a return to a mythical golden age. The cult leaders vow to crush the forces, embodied in demonized groups and individuals, that are blamed for their misery. The more outrageous the cult leaders become, the more they flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity. Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders demand a God-like power. Those who follow them grant them this power in the hope that the cult leaders will save them.

Trump and his coterie of half-wits, criminals, racists and deviants play the role of the Snopes clan in William Faulkner’s novels “The Hamlet,” “The Town” and “The Mansion.” The Snopeses rose up out of the power vacuum of the decayed South and ruthlessly seized control from the degenerated aristocratic elites. Flem Snopes and his extended family—which includes a killer, a pedophile, a bigamist, an arsonist, a mentally disabled man who copulates with a cow, and a relative who sells tickets to witness the bestiality—are fictional representations of the scum we have elevated to the highest level of the federal government. They embody the ethos of modern capitalism Faulkner warned us against.

“The usual reference to ‘amorality,’ while accurate, is not sufficiently distinctive and by itself does not allow us to place them, as they should be placed, in a historical moment,” the critic Irving Howe wrote of the Snopeses. “Perhaps the most important thing to be said is that they are what comes afterwards: the creatures that emerge from the devastation, with the slime still upon their lips.”

“Let a world collapse, in the South or Russia, and there appear figures of coarse ambition driving their way up from beneath the social bottom, men to whom moral claims are not so much absurd as incomprehensible, sons of bushwhackers or muzhiks drifting in from nowhere and taking over through the sheer outrageousness of their monolithic force,” Howe wrote. “They become presidents of local banks and chairmen of party regional committees, and later, a trifle slicked up, they muscle their way into Congress or the Politburo. Scavengers without inhibition, they need not believe in the crumbling official code of their society; they need only learn to mimic its sounds.”

How would you define the political system in the US today, and what would change if Donald Trump wins the upcoming elections in November?

ANSWER:

The United States, like many industrialized countries, has undergone a corporate coup d’état in slow motion, cementing into place a system of control the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism.” Inverted totalitarianism retains the institutions, symbols, iconography, and language of the old capitalist democracy, but internally corporations have seized all the levers of power to accrue ever greater profits and political control.

Decades in the making, this disconnect has extinguished American democracy. The steady stripping away of economic and political power was ignored by a hyperventilating press that thundered against the barbarians at the gate — Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, ISIS, Vladimir Putin — while ignoring the barbarians in our midst. The slow-motion coup is over. Corporations and the billionaire class have won. There are no institutions, including the press, an electoral system that is little more than legalized bribery, the imperial presidency, the courts or the penal system, that can be defined as democratic. Only the fiction of democracy remains.

The façade of democratic institutions and the rhetoric, symbols and iconography of state power have not changed. The Constitution remains a sacred document. The U.S. continues to posit itself as a champion of opportunity, freedom, human rights and civil liberties, even as half the country struggles at subsistence level, militarized police gun down and imprison the poor with impunity, and the primary business of the state is war. 

This collective self-delusion masks who we have become — a nation where the citizenry has been stripped of economic and political power and where the brutal militarism we practice overseas is practiced at home.

Coming to Europe and always examining who controls the power in West. How would you describe the attitude of the European leadership that has chosen the path of suicide in the proxy war in Ukraine? Why is there not the slightest national interest of the continent among the European leaders, to the extent that they decided not even to open an investigation into the act of terrorism against Nord Stream, the biggest attack on European logistical infrastructure since the Second World War?

ANSWER:

The arming of Ukraine is not missionary work. It has nothing to do with liberty or freedom. It is about weakening Russia. It is a proxy war, designed by the U.S. to achieve this end. Take Russia out of the equation and there would be little tangible support for Ukraine. There are other occupied peoples, including the Palestinians, who have suffered as brutally and far longer than Ukranians. But NATO is not arming Palestinians to defend themselves from genocide or holding them up as heroic freedom fighters. Our love of freedom does not extend to Palestinians or the people of Yemen, the Kurds, Yazidis and Arabs resisting Turkey, a longtime NATO member, in its occupation and drone war throughout the north and east of Syria. Our love of freedom only extends to people who serve our “national interest.”

The European powers, often to their own detriment, have been recruited into this proxy war. Certainly these European states, especially Germany and the U.K., profit from arms sales, but the war itself, which will one day end with a negotiated settlement and an exchange of land for peace, something that could have been achieved before the war began, is an American project that Europe has foolishly decided to back. It is a project of militarists and weapons manufacturers most governments are too weak to oppose.

There will come a time when the Ukrainians, like the Kurds, will become expendable. They will disappear, as many others before them have, from our national discourse and our consciousness. They will nurse for generations their betrayal and suffering. The American empire will move on to use others, perhaps the “heroic” people of Taiwan, to further its futile quest for global hegemony. China is the big prize for our Dr. Strangeloves. They will pile up even more corpses and flirt with nuclear war to curtail China’s growing economic and military power. This is an old and predictable game. It leaves in its wake nations in ruins and millions of people dead and displaced. It fuels the hubris and self-delusion of the mandarins in Washington who refuse to accept the emergence of a multipolar world. If left unchecked, this “game of nations” may get us all killed.

For two decades you have been dealing with uprisings and revolutions around the world. Why do you think people in the West do not revolt against such a deeply unjust and bankrupt system?

ANSWER:

The ruling elites, terrified by the mobilization of the left in the 1960s, or by what political scientist Samuel P. Huntington called America’s “excess of democracy,” built counter-institutions to delegitimize and marginalize critics of corporate capitalism and imperialism. They bought the allegiances of the two main political parties. They imposed obedience to the neoliberal ideology within academia and the press. This campaign, laid out by Lewis Powell in his 1971 memorandum titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” was the blueprint for the creeping corporate coup d’état that 45 years later is complete.

The destruction of democratic institutions, places where the citizen has agency and a voice, is far graver than the ascendancy to the White House of the demagogue Trump. The coup destroyed our two-party system. It destroyed labor unions. It destroyed public education. It destroyed the judiciary. It destroyed the press. It destroyed academia. It destroyed consumer and environmental protection. It destroyed our industrial base. It destroyed communities and cities. And it destroyed the lives of tens of millions of Americans no longer able to find work that provides a living wage, cursed to live in chronic poverty or locked in cages in our monstrous system of mass incarceration.

This coup also destroyed the credibility of liberal democracy. Self-identified liberals such as the Clintons and Barack Obama mouthed the words of liberal democratic values while making war on these values in the service of corporate power. The far-right revolt we see rippling across the country is a revolt not only against a corporate system that has betrayed workers, but also, for many, liberal democracy itself. This is very dangerous. It will allow the radical right under a Trump administration to cement into place an Americanized fascism.

It turns out, 45 years later, that those who truly hate us for our freedoms are not the array of dehumanized enemies cooked up by the war machine—the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians or even the Taliban, al-Qaida and ISIS. They are the financiers, bankers, politicians, public intellectuals and pundits, lawyers, journalists and businesspeople cultivated in the elite universities and business schools who sold us the utopian dream of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism is a stealth ideology, one that at once dominates our lives, but exists in relative anonymity. Its effects have radically reconfigured western societies through deindustrialization, austerity, the privatization of utilities, postal services, schools, hospitals, prisons, intelligence gathering, police, parts of the military and railroads, along with spawning wage stagnation and debt peonage. It has deformed a tax system and gutted regulations to funnel wealth upwards, creating an income inequality that rivals pharaonic Egypt. Neoliberalism was behind the catastrophic financial meltdown in 2007 and 2008. It is behind rise in chronic underemployment and unemployment, the assault on organized labor, the drop in health and educational standards, the resurgence of child poverty, the degradation of the ecosystem and the rise of demagogues such as Donald Trump and the far right. In the world of neoliberalism everything, including human beings and the natural world, is a commodity that is exploited until exhaustion or collapse. Neoliberalism inverts traditional social, cultural and religious values. The market is God. All will be sacrificed before the idol Moloch. This callousness has seen the hundreds of millions in the industrial world who have been disenfranchised succumb to diseases of despair including, suicide, addictions, gambling, self-harm, morbid obesity, sexual sadism and a retreat into Christianized fascism – the subject of my book “America: The Farewell Tour. It has eviscerated the moral authority and traditional role of government, reducing government to a stripped-down system of internal control and national defense. But it has also effectively eradicated the traditional mechanisms, including unions, which once held the powerful and the billionaire class in check. To revolt against this system means a long, arduous process of rebuilding popular movements and organizations to confront  the global power elite, but as we see these elites through wholeslae surveillance, laws that criminalize dissent and protest and militarized police are doing everything to make this impossible.

Do you see the emergence of a political movement in the United States or Europe capable of offering a viable alternative?

ANSWER:

There was a decade of popular uprisings from 2010 until the global pandemic in 2020. These uprisings shook the foundations of the global order. They denounced corporate domination, austerity cuts and demanded economic justice and civil rights. There were nationwide protests in the United States centered around the 59-day Occupy encampments. There were popular eruptions in Greece, Spain, Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Turkey, Brazil, Ukraine, Hong Kong, Chile and during South Korea’s Candlelight Light Revolution. Discredited politicians were driven from office in Greece, Spain, Ukraine, South Korea, Egypt, Chile and Tunisia. Reform, or at least the promise of it, dominated public discourse. It seemed to herald a new era.

Then the backlash. The aspirations of the popular movements were crushed. State control and social inequality expanded. There was no significant change. In most cases, things got worse. The far-right emerged triumphant. We failed on several fronts, and this requires that we examine our own tactics and strategies.

The “techno-optimists,” as Vincent Bevins points out in his book “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution,” who preached that new digital media was a revolutionary and democratizing force did not foresee that authoritarian governments, corporations and internal security services could harness these digital platforms and turn them into engines of wholesale surveillance, censorship and vehicles for propaganda and disinformation. The social media platforms that made popular protests possible were turned against us.

Many mass movements, because they failed to implement hierarchical, disciplined, and coherent organizational structures, were unable to defend themselves. In the few cases when organized movements achieved power, as in Greece and Honduras, the international financiers and corporations conspired to ruthlessly wrest power back. In most cases, the ruling class swiftly filled the power vacuums created by these protests. They offered new brands to repackage the old system. This is the reason the 2008 Obama campaign was named Advertising Age’s Marketer of the Year. It won the vote of hundreds of marketers, agency heads and marketing-services vendors gathered at the Association of National Advertisers’ annual conference. It beat out runners-up Apple and Zappos.com. The professionals knew. Brand Obama was a marketer’s dream.

Too often the protests resembled flash mobs, with people pouring into public spaces and creating a media spectacle, rather than engaging in a sustained, organized and prolonged disruption of power. Guy Debord captures the futility of these spectacles/protests in his book “Society of the Spectacle,” noting that the age of the spectacle means those entranced by its images are “molded to its laws.” Anarchists and antifascists, such as those in the black bloc, often smashed windows, threw rocks at police and overturned or burned cars. Random acts of violence, looting and vandalism were justified in the jargon of the movement, as components of “feral” or “spontaneous insurrection.” This “riot porn” delighted the media, many of those who engaged in it and, not coincidentally, the ruling class which used it to justify further repression and demonize protest movements. An absence of political theory led activists to use popular culture, such as the film “V for Vendetta,” as reference points. The far more effective and crippling tools of grassroots educational campaigns, strikes and boycotts were often ignored or sidelined.

As Karl Marx understood, “Those who cannot represent themselves will be represented.”

In your impressive speech at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in North Troy last December, describing the crimes being committed in Gaza, you said: 'We are the most ruthless and efficient murderers on the planet: for that alone we rule the damned of the earth”. How does the mass media work to cover up these crimes?

ANSWER:

The mass media makes its living by selling the myth of America to the public.  This has always been true. But things are worse now. Where we once were able to find a few voices that attmepted to speak honestly about who we are as a nation and the crimes carried out in our name, it is now nearly imposible to battle against the burlesque that mascarades as news.

There has been a critical shift within American society from a print-based culture to an image-based culture. Traditional news gathering is in steep decline. As we become unmoored from a world of print, from complexity and nuance, and with it information systems built on the primacy of verifiable fact, the a primacy is placed on entertainment, not news. News can no longer compete with the emotional battles that hyperventilating hosts on trash talk shows mount daily. The public has embraced the emotional carnival that has turned news into another form of mindless entertainment. The cri de coeur for a return to reason, logic and truth is the last cry raised by the forlorn representatives of a dying civilization. Cicero did the same in ancient Rome. And when his severed head and hands were mounted on the podium in the Colosseum and his executioner, Mark Anthony, announced that Cicero would speak and write no more, the crowd roared its approval.

We have lost thousands of reporters and editors, based in the culture of researched and verifiable fact, who once monitored city councils, police departments, mayor’s offices, courts and state legislators to prevent egregious abuse and corruption. And we are also, even more ominously, losing the meticulous skills of reporting, editing, fact-checking and investigating that make daily information trustworthy.

The decline of print has severed a connection with a reality-based culture, one in which we attempt to make fact the foundation for opinion and debate, and replaced it with a culture in which facts, opinions, lies and fantasy are interchangeable. As news has been overtaken by gossip, the hollowness of celebrity culture and carefully staged pseudo-events, along with the hysteria and drama that dominate much of the airwaves, our civil and political discourse has been contaminated by propaganda and entertainment masquerading as news. And the ratings of high-octane propaganda outlets such as Fox News, as well as the collapse of the newspaper industry, prove it.

In a recent episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Gideon Levy presented The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe, explaining the spiritual destruction of both Israel and Palestine that the current genocide in Gaza is causing, as well as the implications of the new military operations in Lebanon. The worst change, according to Levy, is that Israel has lost its humanity. Is the same happening in western countries? How is it possible that in the West there is not empathy with the innocent victims in Gaza? How has this ethical, spiritual degradation of the West come about?

ANSWER:

There is empathy, but not in the circles of power. This is because the Israel lobby has bought off nearly every senior politician in the United States and poured millions into campaigns to defeat those with the moral courage to defy Israel. The lobby sustains a campaign of vicious character assassination, smearing and blacklisting against those who defend Palestinian rights—including the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe and university students, many of them Jewish, in organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine—is not an anti-Semitic trope. It has pushed through the passage of Israeli-backed legislation requiring their workers and contractors, under threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. The power of the Israel lobby was on display when we saw the shameless cheerleading by most members of Congress of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he addressed Congress in the midst of the Gaza genocide. The well-funded campaigns by the Israel lobby, which works closely with Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, to discredit any American politician or academic who even slightly deviates from Israeli policy shuts down any criticism of the apartheid state and the genocide. The massive interference in our internal affairs by Israel and the Israel lobby, far exceeding that of any other country, including Russia or China, means Israel owns our political class.

Again in his book, Levy writes about 7 October: The path of terror is the only way open to the Palestinians to fight for their future. The path of terror is the only way to remind Israel, the Arab states and the world of their existence. They have no other way. Israel has taught them that. If they do not use violence, everyone will forget them, and a little later they will be remembered only through terrorism. Only through terrorism will they achieve anything. One thing is certain: if they lay down their arms, they are doomed. Do you agree with this view?

Yes. The hijackers, for example, who carried out the attacks on 9/11, like all radical jihadist groups in the Middle East, spoke to us in the murderous language we taught them. 

I was in Times Square in New York City shortly after the second plane banked and plowed into the South Tower. The crowd looking up at the Jumbotron gasped in dismay at the billowing black smoke and the fireball that erupted from the tower. There was no question now that the two attacks on the Twin Towers were acts of terrorism. The earlier supposition, that perhaps the pilot had a heart attack or lost control of the plane when it struck the North Tower seventeen minutes earlier, vanished with the second attack. The city fell into a collective state of shock. Fear palpitated throughout the streets. Would they strike again? Where? Was my family safe? Should I go to work? Should I go home? What did it mean? Who would do this? Why?

The explosions and collapse of the towers, however, were, to me, intimately familiar. I had seen it before. This was the familiar language of empire.  I had watched these incendiary messages dropped on southern Kuwait and Iraq during the first Persian Gulf War and descend with thundering concussions in Gaza and Bosnia. The calling card of empire, as was true in Vietnam, is tons of lethal ordnance dropped from the sky. The hijackers spoke to America in the idiom we taught them.

The ignorance, masquerading as innocence, of Americans, mostly white Americans, was nauseating. It was the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. It was the greatest act of terrorism in American history. It was an incomprehensible act of barbarity. The stunningly naive rhetoric, which saturated the media, saw the blues artist Willie King sit up all night and write his song “Terrorized”.

“Now you talk ‘bout terror,” he sang. “I been terrorized all my days.”

But it was not only Black Americans who were familiar with the endemic terror built into the machinery of white supremacy, capitalism, and empire, but those overseas who the empire for decades sought to subdue, dominate, and destroy. They knew there is no moral difference between those who fire Hellfire and cruise missiles or pilot militarized drones, obliterating wedding parties, village gatherings or families, and suicide bombers. 

They knew there is no moral difference between those who carpet-bomb North Vietnam or southern Iraq and those who fly planes into buildings. In short, they knew the evil that spawned evil. America was not attacked because the hijackers hated us for our values. America was not attacked because the hijackers followed the Quran – which forbids suicide and the murder of women and children. America was not attacked because of a clash of civilizations. 

America was attacked because the virtues we espouse are a lie. We were attacked for our hypocrisy. We were attacked for the campaigns of industrial slaughter that are our primary way of speaking with the rest of the planet. Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense in the summer of 1965, called the bombing raids, which would eventually kill hundreds of thousands of civilians north of Saigon, a form of communication with the communist government in Hanoi. 

What advice would you give to those trying to get information in the West today?

ANSWER:

There are good alternative sites, even Israeli sites such as 972 Magazine, that still report truthfully. Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, Mondoweiss, Electronic Intifada have all done a tremendous job reporting the genocide in Gaza. Many of Al Jazeera’s reporters have been assassinated by Israel because of their courageous coverage. Read the reports filed by those outside your own country, especially if you are following the Middle East. Looks for journalists and commentators you trust. And read histroy books.  News without historical context is impossible to understand.

What books from the past would you recommend reading today for those trying to understand the reality in which we live?

ANSWER:

There are many, but here are a few on the Middle East.

Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide by Atef Abu Saif

The Great War for Civilization and Pity the Nation by Robert Fisk.

The Ethnic Cleaning of Palestine and The Biggest Prison on Earth by Ilan Pappe

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi

Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew and The Iron Wall by Avi Shlaim

Fateful Triangle by Noam Chomsky

Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom by Norman Finkelstein

Drinking the Sea at Gaza by Amira Hass

The Punishment of Gaza and The Killing of Gaza by Gideon Levy

The Fall of the Ottomans by Eugene Rogan

Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco

The Question of Palestine by Edward Said

A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin

The Prize by Daniel Yergen