2020 Allard Prize Keynote: Chris Hedges

i would now like to introduce someone who has dedicated his life to investigating and telling important truths chris hedges is a pulitzer prize winning journalist who worked as a foreign correspondent for almost 20 years including as a new york times foreign correspondent in the middle east and in the balkans he is reported from more than 50 countries in 2002 mr hedges received the amnesty international global award for human rights journalism mr hedges is the author of 12 books including the bestseller days of destruction days of revolt a new york times bestseller he writes a bi-weekly column for sheer post and host the emmy-nominated show on contact mr hedges has taught at columbia university new york university princeton university and the university of toronto he also currently teaches college credit courses in the new jersey prison system it is my pleasure to turn the floor over to chris hedges thank you the theologian reinhold neighbor wrote that those with the courage to defy malevolent centers of power what emanuel kant called radical evil were possessed by a sublime madness in the soul this sublime madness is vital without it he wrote truth is obscured and niebuhr also knew that traditional liberalism was a useless force in the face of radical evil liberalism neighbor said lacks the spirit of enthusiasm not to say fanaticism which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks it is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history daphne howard and the investigators judges and district attorneys who worked with the international commission against impunity in guatemala most of whom are now blacklisted and smeared by the guatemalan government were empowered by this sublime madness they were solitary persecuted voices that demanded justice they were our conscience our moral guides ironic points of light flashing out as w h auden wrote wherever the just exchanged their messages abraham heschel noted that the voices of all prophets are a scream in the night while the world is at ease and asleep the prophet feels the blast from heaven define evil cannot be rationally defended it makes a leap into the moral which is beyond rational thought those that defy evil know that they will not be rewarded at least by the powerful and the institutions that serve them for virtue but corrupt rulers deeply fear those who are propelled by sublime madness who cannot be bought off or intimidated who are beholden to a moral commitment that transcends the practical those for whom self-promotion even public opinion are meaningless those who do not seek or need adulation daphne steve and the human rights investigators in guadalajara who restored the world accountability word accountability to the ruling elites remind us that as augustine wrote hope has two beautiful daughters anger and courage anger at the way things are and the courage to see that they do not remain the way they are radical evil for immanuel kant was the privileging of one's own interest over that of others effectively reducing those around you to objects to be manipulated and used to enhance your profit or your power but hannah aaron who also used the term radical evil saw that it was worse than merely treating others as objects radical evil she wrote rendered vast numbers of people superfluous human refuse they possessed no value at all they were once they could not be utilized by the powerful discarded and so what do the powerful do to those they cannot control or silence those who shine a bright light into the inner workings of power exposing the lies the decadence and corruption ruling elites are skilled in the dark arts of black propaganda they use the courts to file libel suits and freeze bank accounts they threaten and destroy careers and they are not immune to murder the ruling elites know most seeking the comfort and advancements that comes with conformity will do their bidding a compliant media wedded to the structures of power is usually little more than an echo chamber for the elites dehumanizing and transforming these lonely truth-tellers through character assassination and lies into hated pariahs in daphne's last interview she said and i quote i'm in a situation where people who can't even read english and therefore have never read anything i've written at the same time are aware of who i am know that they are meant to hate me or dislike me or despise me or disagree with me or whatever and react to me on that basis totally irrespective of what i write but as the figure they are told to hate so this has become a massive massive problem and i've had cases especially when the incitement is really high at times of political tension when i've had problems even with people in the street and i look at them and think okay what's their problem with me i don't think they've ever read anything i've written the efforts to discredit and defame daphne was done as well to the investigators in guatemala the former president jimmy morales when he shut down the commission declared yvonne to be a threat to national security as well as to howard who was outed at the danska estonian branch as the dansk estonian branch whistleblower in 2018 when an anonymous source provided his name to an estonian newspaper the leak violated european danish and estonian law and it had to have come from within the bank but no european law enforcement agency investigated the leak nor did anyone provide protection to howard whose life was now in jeopardy for exposing what looks like the largest money laundering scheme in banking history and needless to say he has been blacklisted by the banks and the financial sector the aim of the leak was of course to try and pressure and intimidate me as you can see it hasn't worked howard said clearly it was not a good time including my wife's family back in estonia at least here in the uk we were somewhat insulated i bought a copy of the financial times with a photo of me on the front cover in my local village shop without attaching any attracting any comment after that there were various further articles in the danish press to disparage me curiously these stopped after the danish prosecutor preliminarily charged top management and and searched their homes we can only speculate where those stories came from expose the mendacity the corruption the crimes of the ruling elites and you pay it is what they did to socrates what they did to martin luther king jr when he was assassinated in 1968 was one of the most hated men in america at least among white americans and what they are doing to julian assange it is a game as old as time flannery o'connor recognized that the ethical life always entails confrontation she wrote saint cyril of jerusalem an instructing catechumens wrote the dragon sits by the side of the road watching those who pass beware least he devour you we go to the father of souls but it is necessary to pass by the dragon no matter what form the dragon may take it is of this mysterious passage past him or into his jaws stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell and this being the case it requires considerable courage at any time in any country not to turn away from the storyteller the central call of the ethical life as defined by the christian religion is called bearing the cross it is a call very few people achieve bearing the cross in christian theology is counterintuitive it says that the last shall be first and the first last it demands non-violence it holds fast to justice in the face of withering attacks it stands always with the abused and the oppressed those the jesuit priest ignacio elia korea who was murdered by the death squads in el salvador called the crucified people of history it binds adherence to a higher moral law those who bear this cross which up ends and endangers their lives are driven by sublime madness for them there is no other way to live it is the central struggle of life the struggle between good and evil the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us sigmund freud wrote it must present the struggle between eros and death between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction as it works itself out in the human species this struggle is what all life essentially consists of we are tempted indeed in a consumer society encouraged to reduce life to a simple search for happiness happiness however withers if there is no meaning the other temptation is to disavow the search for happiness in order to be faithful to that which provides meaning but to live only for meaning indifferent to all happiness makes us fanatic self-righteous and cold it leaves us cut off from our own humanity and the humanity of others we must hope for grace for our lives to be sustained by moments of meaning and happiness both equally worthy of human communion and it is this grace this love which in our darkest moments allows us to endure i witnessed many acts of physical courage as a war correspondent but moral courage the courage to speak truth and demand justice in the face of entrenched power to defy those in your unit to name and report war crimes and atrocities carried out by your comrades and ordered by your superiors bringing with it vilification threats and sometimes death was very very rare it requires as all of those honored today experienced the courage to accept becoming an outcast it requires an inner strength and fortitude that even the toughest warriors usually lack and this is why as hannah aaron pointed out the only morally reliable people are not those who say this is wrong or this should not be done but those who say i can't do this i once asked the radical catholic priest daniel berrigan who was sent to federal prison for 18 months after he and his brother father phil berrigan and seven other religious religious activists in 1968 burned 378 draft cards of young men about to be sent to vietnam how he defined faith faith he said is the belief that the good draws to it the good even if empirically all the evidence around us says otherwise the buddhists call this karma but as christians he told me we do not know where it goes but we believe it goes somewhere dan whose 50 books of poetry essays and scripture commentaries as well as his play the trial of the catonsville 9 are as important a contribution as this activism was the bet noir of senior church officials including the archbishop of new york cardinal francis spellman fbi director j edgar hoover fabricated a case against the berrigan brothers for conspiring to blow up tunnels under federal buildings in washington and kidnap richard nixon's national security adviser henry kissinger dan who took part in the freedom rides and civil rights marches in the south was in and out of jail all his life seven other activists he illegally entered a general electric nuclear missile plant in king of prussia pennsylvania in 1980 they hammered and poured blood on the fragile cones of the mark 12a warheads he had been by the time he died a few days short of his 95th birthday arrested hundreds of time but what of the price of peace he asked in his book no bars to manhood i think of the good decent peace-loving people i have known by the thousands and i wonder how many of them are so afflicted with a wasting disease of normalcy that even as they declare for peace their hands reach out in an instinctive spasm in the direction of their comforts their home their security their income their future their plans that five-year plan of studies that 10-year plan of professional status that 20-year plan of family growth and unity that 50-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise of course let us have peace we cry but at the same time let us have normalcy let us lose nothing let our lives stand intact let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties and because we must encompass this and protect that and because at all costs at all costs our hopes must march on schedule and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost because of this we cry peace and cry peace and there is no peace there is no peace because there are no peacemakers there are no peace makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war at least as exigent at least as disruptive at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake the ethical life is not about the pursuit of happiness it does not embrace the illusion of inevitable human progress it is not about achieving wealth celebrity or power it entails self-sacrifice it is about our neighbor the organs of state security and dan's case the fbi monitor and harass you they amass huge files on your activities they disrupt your life in daphne's case they took her life we live in an age of radical evil the architects of this evil are despoiling the earth and driving the human species toward extinction they are stripping us of our most basic civil liberties and freedoms they are orchestrating the growing social inequality concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a cabal of global oligarchs through fraud and theft they are destroying our democratic institutions the goal is to render people superfluous push to the margins of society where they and their children are no longer considered to have value value always determined by the amount of money produced and amassed the french moral philosopher albert camus argued that we are separated from each other our lives he wrote are meaningless we cannot influence fate we will all die our individual being will be obliterated and yet camus wrote that one of the only coherent philosophical positions is revolt it is a constant confrontation between human beings and their obscurity it is not aspiration for it is devoid of hope the revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate without the resignation that ought to accompany it a living man or woman can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object cameo warned but if he or she dies in refusing to be enslaved he or she reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object camus is right about the absurdity existence right about finding worth in the act of rebellion rather than some bizarre dream of an afterlife or sunday school fantasy that god rewards the just and the good oh my soul the ancient greek poet pindar wrote do not aspire to immortal life but exhaust the limits of the possible i differ with camus only in that i believe that rebellion itself is not ultimately meaningless it has the intrinsic power dan called faith to defy radical evil even if radical evil appears triumphant and we must note that the rulers of guatemala have shut down the work of the international commission against impunity that there have been no trials and no convictions for the 2017 assassination of daphne and that the massive financial fraud made public by howard has yet to result in justice but nevertheless these efforts by these people allow them and us to be free and independent human beings all those who expose truth chip away however imperceptibly at the edifice of the oppressor they sustained by their actions the dim flames of hope and love and in moments of profound human despair these flames are never insignificant they keep alive the capacity to be human and we must become as camus said so absolutely free that existence is an act of rebellion all those who do not rebel in our age of totalitarian capitalism who convince themselves that there is no alternative to collaboration are complicit in their own enslavement they commit spiritual and moral suicide vaslav havel noted that these epic battles between good and evil are rarely planned they are innate it is not selflessness it is the giving of one's best self giving one's highest self under the world it is finding true selfhood selflessness is martyrdom dying for a cause self-hood is living for a cause it is choosing to create good in the world choosing to treat others as we would want to be treated choosing to hold up the universal self that unites us all and these acts are the irreducible essence of life itself you do not become a dissident just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career hovel said you are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility combined with a complex set of external circumstances you are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them it begins as an attempt to do your work well and ends with being branded an enemy of society the dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all he or she is not seeking power he or she has no desire for office and does not gather votes he or she does not attempt to charm the public he or she offers nothing and promises nothing he or she can offer if anything only their own skin and they offer it solely because they have no other way of affirming the truth they stand for their actions simply articulate their dignity as a citizen regardless of the cost i stood with hundreds of thousands of rebellious czechoslovakians in 1989 on a cold winter night in prague's venezuela square as the singer marta kubashova approached the balcony of the milantrich building kubashova had been banished from the airwaves in 1968 after the soviet invasion for her anthem of defiance prayer for marta her entire catalog including more than 200 singles had been confiscated and destroyed by the state she had disappeared from public view her voice that night suddenly flooded the square pressing around me were throngs of students most of whom had not been born when she vanished they began to sing the words of the anthem there were tears running down their faces it was then that i understood the power of rebellion the power of truth it was then that i knew that no act of rebellion however futile it appears in the moment is wasted and it was then that i knew that the communist regime was finished the people will once again decide their own fate the crowd sang in unison with kubashowa i had reported on the fall of east germany before i arrived in prague i would leave czechoslovakia to cover the bloody overthrow of the romanian dictator nikolai ceausescu collapse of the communist regimes in eastern europe was a lesson about the long hard road of defiance that makes profound social change possible the rebellion in prague as in east germany was not led by the mandarins in the political class but by marginalized artists writers journalists clerics activists and intellectuals such as hovel whom we met most nights during the upheavals in prague in the magic lantern theater these czech activists no matter how bleak things appeared had kept alive the possibility of justice and freedom just as daphne steve and the investigators in guatemala have kept alive the possibility of justice and freedom in our own time their stances and protests which took place over 40 years of communist rule turn them into figures of ridicule a sore the state seek to erase them from national consciousness they were the dis dismissed by the pundits who control the airwaves as cranks agents of foreign powers fascists are misguided and irrelevant dreamers i spent a day after the velvet revolution with during the velvet revolution with several elderly former professors who had been expelled from the romance language department at charles university for denouncing the 1968 soviet invasion their careers like the careers of thousands of professors teachers artists social workers government employees and journalists in our own universities during the communist witch-hunts were destroyed after the soviet invasion the professors had been shipped to a remote part of bohemia where they were forced to work on a road construction crew they shoveled tar and grated road beds and as they worked they dedicated each day to one of the languages in which they were all fluent latin greek italian french spanish or german they argued and fought over the interpretations of homer virgil dante gotte proust and cervantes they remained intellectually and morally alive kubashova who had been one of the most popular recording stars in the country was by then reduced to working for working in a factory that assembled toys the playwright hovel was in and out of jail the long long road of sacrifice tears and suffering that led to the collapse of these despotic regimes stretched back decades those who made change possible did not try to reform the communist party they did not attempt to work within the system they did not even know what if anything their protests would accomplish but through it all they held fast moral imperatives they did so because these values were right and just they expected no reward for their virtue indeed they got none they were marginalized and persecuted and yet these poets playwrights actors singers writers journalists finally triumphed over state and military power they drew the good to the good they triumphed because however cowed and broken the masses around them pier appeared their message of truth and defiance did not go unheard it did not go unseen unseen the steady drum beat of what hovel called living in truth exposed the dead hand of authority and the rot and corruption of the state the walls of prague were covered that chilly winter with posters depicting jan university student set himself on fire in venezuela square on january 16 1969 in the middle of the day to protest the crushing of the country's democracy movement he died of his burns three days later the state swiftly attempted to erase this act from national memory there was no mention of it in the state media a funeral march by university students was broken up by the police pollock's grave which became a shrine saw the communist authorities exhume his body cremate his remains and ship them to his mother with a provision that his ashes could not be placed in a cemetery but it did not work his defiance remained a rallying cry his sacrifice spurred the students in the winter of 1989 to act and prague's read army square shortly after i left for bucharest was renamed john square ten thousand people went to the dedication we like those who oppose the long night of communism have few mechanisms within the formal structures of power that will protect or advance our rights we too have undergone a coup d'etat carried out not by the stone-faced leaders of a monolithic communist party but global corporate power we too have our designated pariahs and huge black holes of state-sponsored historical amnesia we may feel in the face of the ruthless corporate destruction of our nation our culture and our ecosystem powerless and weak but we are not we have a power that terrifies the ruling elites and all those we honor today are evidence of this power any act of rebellion no matter how few people show up or how heavily it is censored chips away at the edifice of power all acts of rebellion keep alive the embers for larger movements to follow it passes on another narrative it will as the rot of the state consumes itself attract wider and wider numbers perhaps this will not happen in our lifetime but if we persist we will keep this possibility alive if we do not it will die i want to close with a personal story this is the first time i have spoken in public about it i want to tell this story especially for daphne's husband and three sons i am a writer like daphne i have always written i wrote incessantly as a boy just as i write incessantly now a strange inner compulsion when i was a boy i wondered how my writing could make the world a better place especially because i admired my father a presbyterian minister who was in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement i did not want to write for myself i wanted to write for others when i was 19 years old donald bowles an investigative journalist for the arizona republic who like daphne uncovered influence peddling bribery and fraud among the ruling political class got into his car it was june 2 1976. he drove a few feet suddenly a remote controlled bomb consisting of six sticks of dynamite taped to the underside of the car beneath the driver's seat detonated the explosion shattered his lower body opened the driver's door and left immortally wounded while half outside the vehicle both legs and one arm were amputated over a 10-day period on the 11th day he died i felt the blood rushed to my head as i read the story i had never heard of don boles he had been followed his phone had been tapped he had been denounced his personal records including his bank records were illegal take illegally taken and scrutinized to frame him i got a pair of scissors i cut out bowl's picture i taped it to the wall i knew in that instant what i would do with my writing and with my life there is a young woman or a young man somewhere who until daphne was murdered may not have heard of her they did not only hear her story they felt the seismic impact of her life they saw in her courage her relentless pursuit of truth her sublime madness what it meant to truly be a writer what it means to have a life of meaning meaning they have her picture it is seared into their mind i do not doubt this i was that young person once i felt that blast from heaven the good draws to it the good and this good is unconquerable it is part of the eternal battle against evil and it has the power to transform the world my faith has been tempered in hell the russian war correspondent and novelist vastly grossman wrote my faith has emerged from the flames of the crematoria from the concrete of the gas chamber i have seen that it is not human kind that is impotent in the struggle against evil but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against humankind the powerlessness of kindness of senseless kindness is the secret of its immortality it can never be conquered the more stupid the more senseless the more helpless it may seem the vaster it is evil is impotent before it the prophets religious leaders reformers social and political leaders are impotent before it this dumb blind love is humankind's meaning human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil it is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness but if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now then evil will never conquer thank you

Channel: Allard Prize

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Length: 36min 11sec (2171 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 03 2020