Chris Hedges - Markets and Morals

[Music] and now to present the special program here in the hall of philosophy for this week focused on markets and morals and today's distinguished guest is chris hedges he is a pulitzer prize-winning journalist and writer a graduate of harvard divinity school and a foreign correspondent for nearly two decades in an amazing array of countries latin america africa the middle east and the balkans he writes and speaks ex extensively on war religion american culture empire the conflict in the middle east and the suffering of the working class his best seller war is a force that gives us meaning draws on the many conflicts he covered to explore what war does to societies and to individuals he examines both faith and belief in american society in his books losing moses on the freeway the ten commandments in america and his new york times bestseller american fascists the christian right and the war on america and i don't believe in atheists his his capacity to write extensively would take me longer than i should take because i know that you come here not to hear about him but to hear chris today he will be doing a book signing and the books will be his latest books the world as it is dispatches on the myth of human progress and days of destruction days of revolt the book signing will be at the hall right across the way and it will be right at the end of this program and there will there will be at least these two and perhaps in a couple other books that he has written that will be available for sale we are also want to call your attention to the fact that this lecture was only made possible through the generosity of doris chipola and she has supported today's lecture this afternoon speaker is especially gifted by doris in memory of her loving partner charlene m tanner because of their special interest in social justice peace and the environment their hope is that this lecture will inspire others to create a healing environment for the world let us say thank you to doris would you stand doris she's here i know [Applause] thank you please now would you welcome chris hedges thank you [Applause] thank you um doris asked me to say a couple words about my dad which is especially appropriate he was a presbyterian minister who spent time at chautauqua certainly the man who influenced my life more than anyone else i grew up in a small farm town in upstate new york scohari new york less than 2 000 people where my father had five churches he would consolidate the services and preach three uh do three services every sunday and i often traveled with him he was an outspoken supporter of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s at a time when martin luther king was one of the most hated men in america in rural white enclaves such as the one i lived in he was a vocal opponent of the war in vietnam he had been a veteran he'd been a sergeant in north africa in world war ii and what got him into particular trouble with the presbyterian church was his outspoken support of gender equality gay rights ordination and marriage for gblt people in the 1970s this was a very lonely position to take his uh youngest brother my uncle was gay and my father for that reason had a particular sensitivity to the pain of being a gay man in america in the 1950s and the 1960s and when i was in college at colgate university by that time my father had a church in syracuse and when he found that there was no gblt group at colgate he brought the gay speakers to the campus and i would join groups of students my dad and gay activists and this finally led after several of these meetings to my father telling the community that they had to form a gblt alliance but they were too uncomfortable at the time coming out of the closet a problem my dad solved by driving down one day taking me to lunch and telling me although i was one of the most committed heterosexuals at colgate that i had to found it which i did met every tuesday night with my name attached to it and when i would go into the dining hall for breakfast lunch or dinner the guy would take my car check off the box and hand it back to me and go my dad taught me many things the church was particularly harsh on him for this stance and wanted him to stop speaking out and his response on an easter sunday was to hold a citywide easter service in defiance of the church hierarchy for the gblt community and he came down and picked me up at colgate and told me correctly that it was probably one of the last times i'd ever hear him preach and i remember walking into that church where people were clutching hands and weeping and my father getting up and saying marriage is a sacrament it is not a reward for being a heterosexual and any church that refuses to honor the sacrament of marriage does not deserve to call itself christian and so i hope if there are any presbyterians here today who are going to the general assembly you will honor my father's memory and all of those who have suffered within the institution and approve gay marriage and gay ordination [Applause] i wrote a book few years ago for connaught big publishing house in new york on the press it wasn't my idea it was theirs and when they got the manuscript the editor read it through uh gave it to a few other editors who then got back to me to tell me that they hated it they said that they would be willing to publish the book after they assigned an editor to excise what they called all the negativity well you can imagine how that went down so i got nation books to buy them out and in that process of transferring the manuscript to another publisher began to reflect that it wasn't just the press that had collapsed as an institution but all of the pillars of the liberal establishment had crumbled the liberal church which of course i came out of labor culture which has become either commercialized or trivialized large part public education and of course the democratic party and the question that i asked myself is what happened how did these forces that in a capitalist democracy once made incremental or piecemeal reform possible cease to function and that investigation took me back to a period in american history one of course where chautauqua has its roots in the era before world war one when we had powerful progressive forces including of course rauschenbusch's social gospel uh anarcho-syndicalist unionists the wobblies uh powerful anarchists socialist movements which had battled in the bloodiest uh struggle in the industrialized world between the ownership class and labor as richard hofstetter points out far more people died in the united states in the struggle for labor rights hundreds thousands of course wounded and maimed than in any other industrialized nation and on the eve of world war one these forces had coalesced some of the most widely read journals in the country were socialist including appeal to reason which had the fourth highest circulation in the united states the masses and then world war one broke upon the united states uh wilson of course had run for reelection uh in 1916. on the slogan he kept us out of the war uh and with a collapse of the eastern front and czarist russia uh it uh freed the kaiser to move over 50 divisions onto the western front which of course then unleashed an offensive that nearly uh toppled the british and the french and so there was tremendous pressure from wall street uh on wilson to enter the war because of the loans the massive loans that have been given to the british and the french that would not be repaid if the germans were victorious this was of course was aided by the kaiser's attempt to impose a naval blockade and yet there was no sentiment no support within the country for the war which wilson was keenly aware of and when he went to the congress to make his announcement that he would was declaring war he was actually protected by an entire cavalry troop in that trip from the white house to the congress because of fear of uh attacks by anarchists and there's a fascinating intellectual debate at that moment between walter lippman who goes on to write public opinion and a guy named arthur berlard and george creel and wilson wilson wants to use the harsher measures of the espionage act and the sedition act to force people to get behind the war effort and lippmann makes the argument that through a system of modern mass propaganda the masses the majority of the population can be enticed to support the war effort and the sedition in the espionage act will only have to be used for the most recalcitrant uh figures including eugene v debs who uh uh even from prison uh i think it was the 1920 election polls uh six percent of the vote nine hundred thousand votes uh and that reconfigured american society uh lipman won that argument and the committee for public information or the creel commission was set into place a massive the first system really of modern modern mass propaganda it's not accidental that edward bernays the father of modern public relations uh his work propaganda that he writes after the war becomes one of the seminal texts that goebbels uses when he builds the nazi propaganda machine and this system of mass propaganda employs the understanding of crowd psychology pioneered by figures like le bon trotter and of course sigmund freud who through marriage was bernay's uh uncle twice over uh that people were not moved by fact or reason but by the skillful manipulation of emotion and so the creel commission because it was headed by george creel committee for public information as it was known as the creel commission uh has its own film division in hollywood that is making movies like the kaiser the butcher of berlin it has its own news division that is putting out daily pro-war stories and no publication in the country is allowed to publish unless it supports the war which is why the masses shuts down and appeal to reason runs pro-war editorials as required by law it has speakers bureaus 45 000 they call them three-minute men who would fan out across the country graphics artists and when you read the writings of randolph-born or jane adams who stood fast against the war there's a constant despair at not only how effective this system of mass propaganda is into seducing people behind the war effort but how effective it has been into seducing the intellectual class behind the war effort that there are very very few people who are able to resist uh adam's of course being booed finally off of a stage in carnegie hall for her denunciation of the war and the effect of that system of mass propaganda uh as the great social critic dwight mcdonald wrote mcdonald i think unsadly sort of forgotten in american letters anyone who knows noam chomsky's development knows that mcdonald for five years after world war ii published a magazine called politics in which he uh ran articles by hannah errant and george orwell and bruno betelheim and others and chomsky credits that magazine to his own political awakening mcdonald mcdonald's remarkable uh essayist and he says in essence that two things that i think are very true first is that the war was the rock on which these progressive movements broke and secondly that after the war you saw a perpetuation of this system of crowd manipulation or mass propaganda all of those who had worked within the systems uh this system of mass propaganda migrated after the war to madison avenue and began working on behalf of corporations and the government indeed when in 1954 the u.s government carries out the coup d'etat against arbenz in guatemala they hire bernays to do the sort of the black publicity or the you know the black information that's that gets people behind the coup um the second thing that mcdonald notes is that after the war it creates what he says was never anticipated by any of the major uh political and social theorists of the 19th century including karl marx and that is the psychosis of permanent war which mcdonald says effectively gets the masses to call for their own enslavement so immediately when the war is over the dreaded hun becomes the dreaded red and you see those weakened forces progressive movements socialists even the communist party which had played an important role in this country up until world war ii and a role which has been uh pretty effectively erased from american history bard ruskin comes out of the communist party and works with king and uses that experience to do things such as integrating lunch counters and such the early things we saw in the civil rights movement tactics that had been employed by the communist party in the 20s and 30s and that's of course why i figure like paul robeson joins the communist party because even debs and in later life debs was critical of this did not fully accept african americans into the socialist party and indeed debs's political awakening came with the pullman railroad porter strike in uh i think it was 1898 uh in which first time debs goes to prison and uh and because they wouldn't include the african-american uh porters uh the strike was broken those racial divisions were not part of the communist ideology so after the war you see severe repression against the remnants of these radical or populist forces we see appeal to reason is shut down the masses is shut down uh the uh espionage act and the sedition act are used to destroy the wobblies the anarcho-syndicalist union so you have joe hill and utah hung on trumped up murder charges big bill haywood another wobbly leader again on trumped-up murder charges flees the country spends the last 10 years of his life uh unhappily in moscow uh you have the deportation of emma goldman and berkman and at the same time we have madison avenue we have public relations inculcating within the culture corporate values upending traditional american values of thrift self-effacement and replacing it with the hedonism of the cult of the self instilling within a consumer population consumption as a kind of inner compulsion and at this point american society i think becomes cursed by these two forces the force what mcdonald calls the psychosis of permanent war that constant ferreting out of the internal enemy uh of course in the name of anti-communism now it's in the name of the war on terror um and the uh bombardment of the of public discourse with a culture of lies and manipulation now at that point um these forces which had cornered the robber baron class uh are shattered uh and we see uh uh their final resurgence uh with the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s but it's important to remember that figures like roosevelt or his vice president henry wallace who responded to the new deal responded to the crisis of the great depression were conciliatory figures they were moderating figures indeed roosevelt even says that his greatest achievement is that he saved capitalism and that illustration of the policies that roosevelt adopted is a perfect example of as noam chomsky points out how a liberal class in a capitalist democracy is supposed to function it is supposed to make piecemeal or incremental reform possible it's not designed as the political left it's designed as a kind of safety valve so that when there is a breakdown within the system you have a mechanism by which you can ameliorate the suffering of the underclass to keep the system balanced and the destruction of those radical movements the systematic destruction of those progressive and radical movements who held fast to moral imperatives and then especially with the house on american activities committee uh purges in the 1950s the disemboweling of the liberal class essentially broke that mechanism i teach in a prison and we'll begin another course this fall every course is different the last one i taught was on i used leon litwack's great works uh been in the storm on reconstruction and trouble in mind on jim crow but the course before that that when you when you teach in a prison it's exactly the opposite of teaching at a university i've taught at princeton a few other places where you're in when you teach at princeton you're trying to write something for the course catalog to entice students when you teach in a prison you're trying to write a course description that will get slipped past prison authorities so the course before this i wrote i would like to teach a course on american history uh our founding fathers uh the constitution uh the values of our nation which they embraced and then i went out and bought every inmate a copy of howard zinn's people's history of the united states [Applause] i run my prison classes a bit like a dictator because otherwise every i found every class descends in a discussion about the hood which is interesting to me but not why i'm there i'm safe to raise your hand and um but i i i always love zinn um but boy after teaching him to african-american prisoners i came away i mean this guy's um you know in the pantheon of intellectual saints as far as i'm concerned because i saw how cognizant he was of the history of those whose voices never get told and i would hear the prisoners as i was going through my 90-minute lecture notes on zinn say damn damn we've been lied to and they have been lied to because american democracy and you can go back to the federalist papers was set up in such a way as to preclude the voices of the majority there was a terror on the part of our slave-holding white male founding fathers of direct or popular democracy and they created numerous mechanisms to shut people out of course uh people were of color were already shut out native americans african-americans women men without white men without property and then we had the electoral college as some of you may know i've been a long supporter of ralph nader i wrote his speeches for him in 2008 the last time he ran i spoke to the university of wisconsin some students said we love ralph but his speeches are so boring um that as xin understood all of the openings in american democracy came from radical movements that fought back against an entrenched power elite whether that was the abolitionists the suffragists labor and finally the civil rights movement although as cornell west points out correctly this martin luther king civil rights movement was a legal victory um it didn't free us from uh the institutional or economic forms of racism that keep the majority of our poor especially poor of color in what both malcolm x and martin luther king called internal colonies and uh the battle was a battle to create space and so you had radical movements that never achieved formal positions of power that pressured a liberal center to respond again we can go back to the 1964 civil rights movement which unfortunately our supreme court has just gutted um as an example johnson responding to a radical movement and these radical movements they're imperative was was uh to hold fast to ideals it meant that they would never achieve power in a formal sense and yet you could argue that until he was assassinated in april of 1968 the most powerful political figure in the united states was dr king because when he went to selma or he went to memphis 50 000 people went with him and the destruction of those radical movements accompanied by the disemboweling of the liberal class has been disastrous for all of the gains that we have made and we are of course steadily seeing what gains had been made including new deal legislation like glass-steagall or the voting rights act stripped away from us as the predatory class now has no impediments um and the uh the result is a kind of inability on the part of uh the system of power to function at least to function on behalf of the citizenry there are two very good books that i would recommend by ellen schrecker the historian on the 1950s one is called no ivory tower about what happened within the university and i forget the name of the other but it's both on the mccarthy period and they were very instructive to me uh in that it wasn't just the high profile figures uh charlie chaplin or pete seeger or if stone who's driven out tainted with of course henry wallace himself 1948 presidential candidate is uh becomes a political pariah because he's supposedly soft on communism but this was far more insidious thousands and thousands of people lost their jobs and though and schrecker points out the way it worked is that the fbi would show up at a high school and what we don't know is that many high schools were purged social social workers especially were targeted because social workers in this country used to organize on behalf of their clients musicians writers artists directors but they would show up with a list no evidence they would tell you that seven or eight high school teachers were communist sympathizers they would without any kind of investigation be removed from their jobs and blacklisted this was especially true of course within the universities i taught for a semester at the university of toronto and uh one of the most eminent mathematicians in the united states uh was their chandler davis who was hauled before the house on american activities committee and refused to name names and sent to prison uh for six months and then of course could not get a job in academia and spent the rest of his career at the university of toronto he actually wrote some mathematical paper or treatise in prison and dedicated the monograph to the u.s prison authorities who had housed and fed him during his research but this has had an absolutely disastrous effect and we are now feeling the consequences of what's been carried out against us unfettered unregulated capitalism as karl marx correctly pointed out is a revolutionary force it has no self-imposed limits everything in their eyes becomes a commodity human beings become commodities the natural world becomes a commodity that it exploits until exhaustion or collapse and that is why the environmental crisis is intimately twinned with the economic crisis we allowed corporate forces in the name of maximizing corporate profit to destroy the country and in particular our manufacturing base to create what ralph nader correctly calls a global system of neo-feudalism where workers in the united states are told that to be competitive in a global marketplace they have to uh be competitive against people earning 22 cents an hour in sweatshops in bangladesh or prison labor in china and this as the harvard historian charles mayer points out created a transformation within the united states so that as mayor says by the 1970s we transitioned from being what he called an empire of production to an empire of consumption we began to borrow to pay for a level of consumption and an empire we could no longer afford it also gave rise to this faux liberalism embodied first in the figure of bill clinton clinton spoke as barack obama does in that kind of feel your pain language and yet assiduously carried out an assault against the very people linguistically and rhetorically he said he protected and that the liberal wing of the democratic party indeed did once protect so that under clinton you get nafta 1994 the greatest betrayal of the working class in this country since the 1940 taft-hartley act 1948 taft-hartley act that makes it difficult to organize it's under clinton that you get destruction of the welfare system and remember that in our old welfare system 70 of the recipients were children it's under clinton that you get the deregulation of the fcc so that a half dozen corporations viacom general electric rupert murdoch's news corp disney clear channel buy up all of the airwaves and reduce political discourse it reminds me of what uh dorothy parker once said about katherine hepburn's emotional range as an actress it goes from a to b step outside those parameters as a nader does or as a chomsky does and you might as well be uh muzzled you're not heard it's under clinton that we get the omnibus bill that explodes the prison population and i just in a very moving day a couple weeks ago drove cornell west and my great friend james cohn hands down the greatest theologian in the united states up to see mumia abu jamal in prison in frackfill pennsylvania and there i was with you know arguably three of the most important african-american radicals intellectuals of our time and one point in the visiting room uh both mumia and cornell love curtis mayfield and i'm listening to cornell west and mumia abu jamal seeing curtis mayfield's ghetto child at the top of their lungs in the uh in the waiting room so the distortion within the country the stripping especially poor people of color of the capacity by which they can earn a living and find dignity and i think that i'm not a great fan of pope john paul ii but i think his encyclical on work is brilliant his understanding that work is finally about self-esteem uh about your uh sense of being um and and and the message that that essentially happens when this prison population explodes to poor people of color is that once in the street you are worth nothing but behind bars to the state and to private contractors you're worth 30 to 40 000 a year and that's a form of neo-slavery um prisoners work uh in prison populations from at the at the height it's a dollar an hour um it's in new jersey if you call the ministry of tourism it's a female inmate picking up the phone who's earning 23 cents an hour and in county jails like union county jail and elizabeth they work for nothing it's under clinton that you get the destruction of glass-steagall and the ripping down of the firewalls between investment and commercial banks that precipitate the national and the global crisis now why because clinton knew that if he did corporate bidding he would get corporate money so that by the 1990s the democratic party has fundraising parity with the republicans and when barack obama runs in 2008 he gets more now the internal mechanisms of the security and surveillance state i was just in london interviewing julian assange and as some of you know i sued barack obama in federal court in the southern district court over section 1021 of the national defense authorization act we won to obama's surprise unfortunately the second circuit just ruled two days ago obama appealed and uh they ruled in his favor i don't know how familiar you are with section 1021 but it's truly a frightening piece of legislation it permits the us government contravening 200 years of domestic law to use the military to seize u.s citizens who are deemed in the words of this section to have substantially supported now that's not material support that's not a legal term it's an amorphous term substantially supported al qaeda the taliban are something called associated forces hold those citizens in military facilities including in our offshore penal colonies like guantanamo until in the language of that section the end of hostilities which in any age of permanent war is forever um uh and judge forrest who courageously ruled in our favor a 112 page opinion which is worth reading because it's really a kind of treatise on the destruction of the separation of powers and the fact that as john ralston saw correctly says we've undergone a coup d'etat a corporate coup d'etat in slow motion and it's over they've won we see it with the national security state the fact that the judicial legislative and executive branches of government have all signed off onto this egregious assault against our civil liberties because the state understands where we're headed it knows the catastrophic effects of climate change um and yet these forces uh these corporate forces uh that have uh essentially are now operating without any constraints um uh have no checks so 40 of the summer arctic sea ice melts shell oil is up there dropping half a billion dollar drill bits it's the death the rose of the planet uh and to them it's a business opportunity mining the last vestiges of fish stocks oil natural gas and and minerals and obama is cut precisely out of that mold of clinton the democratic party in europe would be considered a far right party obama's assault on civil liberties has been far worse than under george w bush an absolutely remarkable fact the fisa amendment act which retroactively makes legal what under our constitution has traditionally been illegal the warrantless wiretapping monitoring and eavesdropping of tens of millions of american citizens the radical and i i think most dispassionate legal scholars would go inappropriate interpretation of the 2001 authorization to use military force act as giving the government the right to assassinate american citizens and of course i'm speaking about anwar awlaki the yemeni cleric and not incidentally his 16 year old son two weeks later who was on no terrorism list at all the use of the espionage act this is quite disturbing as a former reporter for the new york times obama has used it seven times including now against edward snowden um to shut down whistleblowers and people of conscience and of course we sadly just saw judge lin in the bradley manning trial uh uphold the government's right to charge manning with aiding the enemy um the utter inversion of the rule of law and of the moral order um yes of course manning committed a crime but next to the war crimes that he exposed the crime that he committed is marginal and yet the killers take just the collateral murder video where helicopter pilots were gunning down unarmed iraqi civilians and then coming around to shoot civilians who came to the rescue of those who had been wounded including two children who were in a van and including two colleagues of mine from reuters who were killed um the war criminals are not prosecuted those who stand up and have an act of conscience to expose the malfeasance and criminal activity and fraud of government are kiriakou the cia analysis to expose torture is now spending 30 months in federal prison in pennsylvania um and the use on the part of the state of these mechanisms including the espionage act has essentially and i speak to many colleagues who still do investigative reporting shut down any possibilities of shining a light within the inner workings of power so that we have in essence a two-tiered legal system one that uh functions on behalf of that one percent uh goldman sachs i mean the bottom line now in american politics is that there is no way to vote against the interests of goldman sachs or exxon mobil or citibank that these corporations now are cannibalizing the country reconfiguring the united states into an oligarchic system indeed it's a global oligarchic system and uh you cannot have a functioning democracy in an oligarchy it's not a new idea thucydides wrote about it indeed thucydides said that the tyranny that athens imposed on others as an empire it finally imposed on itself so that when empires implode and we are imploding economically morally physically look at our infrastructure major cities we just saw detroit declare bankruptcy in order to keep a population under control you bring the harsher forms of control from the outer reaches of empire back to the heart of empire that's what happens in empire drones privatize security 70 percent of our intelligence work is now done by private contractors as jeremy scahill has pointed out a night raid by a militarized police force in oakland command helicopters searchlights command vehicles police in black kevlar vests with automatic weapons looks no different from a night raid in fallujah how then do we confront what has happened to us it is not by responding or playing the game of the political theater that is put upon us just from the environmental crisis that confronts us alone we have no time it is only by beginning to recapture the moral imperative of radical movements that stood up to these forces karl popper in the open societies enemies rights that the question is not how do you get good people to rule popper says that's the wrong question most people attracted to power popper says are at best mediocre or venal the question is how do you make the power elite frightened of you there's a scene in kissinger's memoirs do not buy the book 1971 there's a huge anti-war demonstration and nixon has put empty city buses end to end all around the white house as a kind of barricade and he's standing looking out the window with kissinger ringing his hands going henry henry they're going to break through the barricades and get us and that is just where we want people in power to be thank you very much [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so you can you can thank doris for the counterweight for david brooks all right we have about uh 15 20 minutes for questions so you know how to do it and we're already lined up what we do here is we go start here and then we'll go over here and go back and forth thank you mr hedges for a very stimulating talk in your 2000 book 2006 book american fascism you described the christian dominionist movement as a fascist movement with growing power numbers and strength could you update that in 2013 is it still growing in numbers and strength does it represent the threat that you described in that book today yes he's referring to a book i wrote on the christian right called american fascists the christian right and the war in america i was trying to reach out to them american america is a peculiar culture in that it's a deeply violent culture i think it's 80 out of every 100 americans owns a weapon 1.5 million assault rifles um and yet throughout our history with a few exception like the shays rebellion or the uprising of the coal miners at blair mountain that violence has almost always been vigilante violence the kkk the slave patrols the pinkertons and it stems as writers like richard slotkin and others have pointed out from this puritan ethic this belief that we have a divine right to use force to sanctify the world and of course we're still trying to do it in places like iraq afghanistan pakistan somalia and the christian right uh and by the way karen armstrong's here she wrote a very good book on that called the battle for god the christian right changed radically on your right to use the word dominionism because traditionally fundamentalists or evangelicals were very wary of politics um uh indeed especially in fundamentalist religion you were called believers were called on to remove themselves from the contaminants of politics but we saw with the rise of this dominionist movement as articulated by rashduni and later others this fusion of the iconography and language of american patriotism with the iconography and language of christianity and and that has been given expression even in mercenary armies such as blackwater which was renamed z and i think has renamed something else within figures like eric prince and part of the danger of the destruction of radical movements in this country is that as we deteriorate as we face both challenges from economic and environmental dislocations uh that species of american fascism that celebration of violence that clutching the christian cross and the weapon remains very much part of our national psyche so that when you look at groups like the tea party militias the lunatic fringe of the republican party which may be all of the republican party you see that classic fascist ethos where you you target the vulnerable you turn on the weak you blame the social ills on muslims undocumented workers homosexuals feminists intellectuals liberals have a very long list of people they hate and so uh i think that the the danger of a right-wing backlash that embraces violence and the language of violence remains very real and very frightening and much of what's happening now reminds me of i covered the war in yugoslavia for the new york times the breakdown of yugoslavia where you have a political center that is paralyzed as in essence our political center is dostoevsky wrote about this demons is about this notes from underground is about this and dostoevsky was nothing if not prescient about the consequences of that as explicated in raskolnikov's stream at the end of crime and punishment he knew that that political paralysis that defeated liberalism or that bankrupt liberalism people who spoke in the traditional language of liberalism and yet were ineffectual in a society that functioned or deteriorated saw a revolt and it wasn't just revolt against liberals it was a revolt against liberal values that's of course what happened in weimar and that's what happened in yugoslavia so that with the economic meltdown of yugoslavia and the inability on the part of a self-identified liberal senator to respond you vomited up figures like radovan carrick sloboda milosevic frantusman in the same way that in weimar you vomited up the nazi party and we are not immune to that number one and number two because we have systematically destroyed our popular movements we've lost the traditional counterweight should that happen here's a pragmatic question i imagine many people have uh during the 1960s 50 000 people knew to follow dr king uh i know you participated in the occupy wall street movement which seemed to have petered out pretty quickly um whom do we follow now and and how well the occupy movement was destroyed i mean let's be clear barack obama in a coordinated federal effort shut down the encampments of the occupied movement because the democratic party was terrified of the occupy movement the occupy movement was a mainstream movement it gave expression to the concerns of the mainstream and and part of what frightens me is the inability on the part of the power elite to respond to the issues that pushed people into the street krugman writes in his columns about responding rationally to the economic crisis and i agree a rational response to where we are would have been a moratorium on foreclosures and bank repossessions a forgiveness of all student debt a massive jobs program especially targeted at people under the age of 25 and a rational health care system capitalists should not be allowed anywhere near a health care system we live in moral terms we live in a country where it is legally permissible for a corporation to hold a sick child hostage while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves trying to save their sons or daughters that's the moral degeneracy to which we have fallen a rational response would be a response that ameliorates the suffering the tremendous suffering in days of destruction days of revolt joshua and i for the last two years have been in the poorest pockets of this country places like pine ridge south dakota where the average life expectancy of a male is 48. that is the lowest in the western hemisphere outside of haiti that's the united states and if you saw uh with the so-called austerity programs unfortunately the tribals the tribes are being decimated that's rational but when you unleash these forces which are utterly unplugged from the reality these people don't fly lloyd blankfein they don't get on commercial air jets they don't they're they live in a new yorker writer called it richistan they don't even live in the united states and yet they make all the decisions their lobbyists write all the laws and what happens go back and read tainter uh tainter's great work the collapse of complex civilizations or redmonds ancient societies we're going down the way all civilizations go down our elites are withdrawing into the equivalent of the forbidden city or versailles and and driving the masses harder and harder and harder extracting more blood more blood more blood until of course the whole system goes down the difference being that this time when we go down the whole planet goes with us huh has what's a rational response to bp which apparently according to a washington spectator has dumped four million gallons of a dispersant in the gulf which has just taken the oil to the bottom and is destroying sea life is putting people out of business all along the gulf coast what's the rational response to their lying publicity campaign well i mean i mean this is exactly the point in theological terms these corporations are systems of death and they will quite literally kill us they will drive the ecosystem or exhaust and corrode and degrade and destroy the ecosystem until the human species can no longer sustain itself and the formal mechanisms of power will not help us so the only response is civil disobedience as wendell berry says going to jail is more time than i care to donate to the u s government however we have nothing else left and that is why uh i was a not only a strong supporter of the occupy movement cornell west and i held a people's hearing of goldman sachs uh in zuccotti park we had unemployed or high school new york city high school teachers have been laid off single mothers who'd been evicted from their homes and then we marched on uh goldman sachs where uh i and several other activists were arrested uh and what's fascinating is that uh you know daniel berrigan i i had uh dinner with him a couple months ago 93. as father berrigan says you know it is a moral imperative it's not anymore about what's practical it's about what's right and that we who come out of a community of faith are called to do the good as barrigan says or at least the good insofar as we can determine it and then let it go that the buddhists call it karma for us that's faith the faith that the good draws to it the good which of course is always nonviolent i covered the revolutions in eastern europe east germany czechoslovakia romania and i watched especially figures like hovel i spent every evening in the magic lantern theater in prague with hovel and the other klaus dinsbear and others who would go on to inherit the government and i saw especially go back and read havel's 1978 essay the power of the power less that capacity to live in truth that the wider public may appear asleep and may not respond and yet they can recognize truth when they see it so that up and down the streets of prague that winter were posters of a young charles university student jan who to protest the soviet invasion of his country the overthrowing of duke check had lit himself on fire in wensala square four days later he died of his burns thousands of university students that marched to the cemetery with his body were broken up by police none of it was ever reported in the state media when his grave became a shrine his remains were exhumed and cremated and his ashes were given to his mother and she was told she could not rebury them his picture was everywhere in that city and two weeks after the communist government fell 10 thousand people in prague went to red army square and renamed it jan pollock square i was in wencesla square that december night was snowing 500 000 people and a woman who had once been czechoslovakia's greatest singer marta kubasheva walked out on the balcony in 1968 she had sung an anthem of defiance calling on checks to rise up and fight the soviet invasion and when the pro-soviet regime was installed she became a non-person her entire recording stock was destroyed her voice was not allowed to appear on the airwaves and in the intervening years she had worked on an assembly line in a toy factory and when she walked out on that balcony and sang that anthem every check in the crowd knew every word and that's faith that is the belief that standing up for what's right faith is not practical um if we wait for the practical we're doomed faith is that moral imperative embodied in great figures like king and remember king at the end of his life was a very lonely man the black power movement was disintegrating even his own movement he was especially after the riots and watts he was booed he was under pressure from stokely carmichael and others to become more militant and two months before he died he got up under all that pressure to at least condone acts of violence and he said i take non-violence to be my lawfully wedded wife in sickness and in health that's faith and that's why i invested as much time as i did in the occupy movement because they were young they weren't as confident as they looked and yet they spoke in a language of non-violence and a language of concern for those we have walked out upon and the liberal class in this country is responsible for that abandonment of the poor and the working class we busied ourselves with a boutique activism of multiculturalism and identity politics all of which i support but not when it is divorced from justice [Applause] yeah it kind of goes into my question and i i applaud the the occupy movement because even though it i don't think it petered out it but anyway it died it did at least bring to the attention of people issues that maybe they hadn't thought about but when you're talking about all the young people and i have two daughters in their 20s who i think are trying as best they can to walk the walk but they get out of college in this kind of environment and and i have and there's a synthesis i if i'm cynical they are even more so right and what do you think about the the youth coming up i i when i see occupy walls walsh the movement i think you know maybe they'll be better than we are but i don't know because the the usual systems that they could turn to have have are gone or at least are are letting them down right i mean we cannot continue where we're going i mean this is you know i love paul krugman and i read his stuff but he wants to get us back to where we were we can't go back to where we were if we are going to survive as a species a material diminishing of our situation does not mean a spiritual diminishing of our situation it means a recreation of communities especially on a local level and i think that we have to look at the occupy movement as a tactic in the same way that rosa parks got on a bus in 1954 and it was five years before we had the freedom riders i think something has been unleashed by the occupy movement that terrifies the state which is why the state is working as hard as it is to shut down public space to make public space unavailable so another mass movement doesn't arise it's why the security and surveillance state is downloading and storing all of the electronic communications every single one of us here today has in perpetuity in supercomputers in utah because they're frightened because they understand internally how rotten it is and one of the reasons why they want the ndaa passed is because ultimately they don't trust the police to protect them you saw it in the chicago teachers strike where teachers in the street would go in and use bathrooms and precincts and the police would applaud them i was arrested with 131 veterans in front of the white house protesting the war in afghanistan was you know for me that's my church was snowing watermelon slim a vietnam veteran played taps on his harmonica veterans from vietnam iraq afghanistan most in their uniforms folded the flag of a boy had been killed in afghanistan a few weeks before everyone was silent someone beat a drum everybody marched single file through the snow to the fence to be arrested and most of us were crying and when the police cuffed us they would whisper in our ears of course all of them are vets they would whisper in our ears keep doing what you're doing because these wars stink that terrifies the state because as berrigan said you draw the good to the good how did the east german communist party fall eric honaker the dictator for 19 years sent an elite paratroop division down to leipzig i was there at the time to fire on the crowd and they refused hanukkah lasted another week in power what broke the autocratic rule of the czar it was when the bred riots and petrograd erupted the cossacks were sent in and instead of crushing the riots they fraternized with the crowd and i think the truth we speak is one that is accessible to the foot soldiers of the elite because police have brothers relatives who've been foreclosed who don't have jobs and it is by holding fast to that moral imperative and speaking truth to power or as vaslav havel says living in truth that is our best mechanism for breaking the back of these systems of death we'll take four more short questions short answers so chris this is uh more a call to action for you to you from me we need leadership in this country to help us citizens somehow come together in a way that we can take back our country and um you know i don't want to burn myself you know i don't want to i've i spent one night in prison or jail that was enough that was 40 years ago that was enough but um i've been to many demonstrations in my lifetime there were a lot of very intelligent people this week who came to speak of course including yourself who who know the huger facts what's behind everything that's going on and we as a citizen we need people to help create an organized movement to take these facts out of the books and the lectures and help channel us so that we can do something and i that's all i'm going to say but my last thing is if so i'm asking you you know a lot of people you know you know so much get a band of brilliant people together to help us regain ourselves and make sure 50 of them at least are women okay thanks i i think they're there um and i mean one of the things that stunned me about the occupy movement is how thoughtful these people were but i think that we have created a mechanism by which their voices are not heard um msnbc is a corporate-sponsored uh gossip machine just like fox it just spins it in a different direction but actual voices you notice cornell west never appears on msnbc neither does nader neither does chomsky the msnbc crew for all their uh moral posturing never covered the ndaa case at all because it didn't make obama look good and so the systems of propaganda and then you turn to the commercial airwaves and it's just trivia celebrity gossip i wrote a book called empire illusion the end of literacy in the tribe of spectacle that looks at all this um but i think that uh the voices are there but society is so deformed that we don't hear them and again let's go back to you know the dying days of any empire that's what happened read cicero so that in the civil war cicero who invades against the arena which subsumes the intellectual and emotional life of rome in the tawdry in in violence in often sexual violence um cicero's hunted down beheaded and his hands are cut off and they bring his severed head hands to the arena and they announce he'll never write or speak again and 40 000 people cheer and i think that's where we are i think you know the uh you know the the sort of the turning of voices like my friend jeremiah wright into pariahs um and the way they do it is by mocking them in the way they mock nader and they mock anyone and chomsky's just been completely erased from the radar screen at all so they're there they are there um but we live in a species of what the political philosopher sheldon wolin and that's another great book democracy incorporated calls inverted totalitarianism where corporate systems control everything including systems of information including universities like princeton that function as corporations as one who studied back in the day under jim cohn and uh cornell west at union seminary i say amen to what you said about those amazing human beings a quick two-part question should we then in light of what you've told us again today and written about bother at all with with the voting process the electoral process and number two do you take any hope from the demographic changes regionally and nationally so that very soon now people of color and women will thankfully outnumber white males well um i mean as emma goldman said if voting was that effective it'd be illegal um i vote but you know i have voted since 2000 in opposition to the system which meant voting for nader and then voting in the last election for jill stein and nader's i think was right in that he said if we can get five 10 15 million people as a counterweight we can begin to frighten the power elite that was always nader's goal and i think the more and this is why the occupy movement was uh so disturbing to the power elite the more the masses are willing to step outside the system the more power we will get in terms of the demographic changes um we have to be careful with that because corporations look they're colorblind everybody's a consumer to them and and the way obama was sold to us he was sold as a brand um and effectively as a brand which is why after the 2000 election his campaign won advertising ages top annual award which was marketer of the year because the professionals knew precisely what he had done so again uh the inclusion of voices minorities genders who have traditionally been excluded is a good thing but i'll go back to what i said before not when it is divorced from justice hi um there's a national movement underway to pass a con constitutional amendment to say the corporations not people and money is not speech money out of politics and so 16 states have already passed this resolution in 500 cities new york los angeles so i'm wondering um if you would write a book perhaps on what the world would look like if that amendment were actually passed and we could get money out of politics because the vision seems to be lacking in partly me but partly i have a hard time imagining what life might actually be like if congress was actually working for us well the last people who want money out of politics are the people in congress who i mean let's just take off the number of millionaires i mean this has become a very lucrative business as hillary clinton is now illustrating to us um you know these people step outside of the political arena and are lavished with money and go back in it's a form of legalized bribery and to count on these people to reform a system that serves their own very narrow and selfish interests i think isn't going to work and so again i'm going to go back and say that um you know we've got to do precisely what the annie warren demonstrators in 1971 did to nixon and that's it begin to make those in these circles of power scared to death thank you [Applause] you

Channel: Chautauqua Institution

Views: 59,653

Keywords: Chautauqua Institution, CHQ, Chris Hedges (Author)

Id: louXSal4CYs

Length: 73min 58sec (4438 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 24 2013