XRTV Interview: Chris Hedges on Coronavirus, Climate and What Next?

okay well thank you everyone for coming along my name is Roger I know that I'm one of the cofounders of extinction in belly we're very honored tonight to have address from New York and we're going to be doing a an interview and then opening opening things up to questions from the people watching I want to sort of just go through a few points before we start first of all the views expressed in this video don't necessarily reflect the views of everyone in exile the idea is for these interviews just this will provoke debate an open discussion for myself I've got a few sort of general questions to ask Chris about obviously the whole situation and then we'll we'll take things from there the second thing I want to do is just acknowledge that were in the middle of an unprecedented crisis the corona virus has changed everything is changing everything by the day and I think we should all be aware of what massive suffering is going on around the world this moment and is going to get even worse over the coming weeks and I think we need to look at what's happening with a very serious manner I think because this is real and one of the reasons I feel it's good to have Chris on is because Chris is being making really uncompromising statements about the reality of our situation for a long time and it seems a good idea to to have him on tonight to discuss these these matters I am NOT going to say master detail what Chris has done or not doing it suffice to say was as Robin said journalist with New York Times and Sphinx listen fourteen books on the state of the world and I am going to you open up with a few general questions and then that's alright requests then I will invite some questions from the people watching okay so my first question is obviously a lot of people know you Chris in the States and I expect a lot of people in the UK who are primarily people watching this video I guess I've heard of you so much so I'd like to just start off with it it's okay so you're just giving a general background to your your life and and your progress to this point in time my father was a Presbyterian minister also world war ii veteran had been in north africa i grew up in a in a small town i lived next to the church my dad was the major influence on my life he was very involved in the civil rights movement this was at a time when in small rural enclaves such as the one we lived in Martin Luther King was one of the most hated men in America indeed people walked out of his sermons he was part of a group called concerned clergy and laity against the war founded by the radical priests Catholic priest Dan and Phil Berrigan Phil Berrigan later became a friend close friend baptized my youngest daughter opposing the Vietnam War I was a boy in the 60s but he took me to these events had a profound impression on me and finally he was very outspoken in terms of g/b ltq rights his brother his youngest brother was gay and lived with his partner in Greenwich Village and had been disowned by most of the families so the only family my uncle had Jamie was us and my father translated that pain of being a gay man in America in the 1950s in the 1960s into you know the the injustice that the church in particular visited on G BLT community the cruelty of the church and he was eventually pushed out because of that so he set the template for my own life I went to Divinity School at Harvard although I'd written I was a writer by nature wrote since I was a child published my first piece when I was 12 in a historical journal it was actually the history of my father's church published a piece in the Christian Science Monitor while I was still in college but I couldn't reconcile the supposed neutrality and objectivity of journalism with my father's commitment to social justice so I moved into an urban ghetto in Boston Roxbury and ran a small church as a seminarian across the street from Mission main mission extension housing project which was at the time one of the probably the rocky was without question the most dangerous and roughest project in the city and that's where I an often say I learned to hate liberals people who talk about empowering people they never met I would travel from the ghetto it back to classes in Cambridge at Harvard and saw through exactly the the way that kind of rhetoric was used for self a jewel a ssin would be the only way to put it well in fact the actions carried out by the liberal elites were selfish and self-centered in a large part and I dropped out of Divinity School I went to South America I studied Spanish in Bolivia with the Maryknoll fathers and decided that I would be a journalist in Latin America this was in the early 1980s so you had the dictatorship in Argentina the military junta that had disappeared 30,000 of its own citizens who had Augusto Pinochet in Chile Rios Montt in Guatemala a murderous regime in El Salvador where I would end up spending five years as a reporter and I felt that it was as close as my generation was going to come to fighting fascism and this was of course rooted in my reverence which continues to this day for George Orwell so that was how I stumbled into journalism it was informed by that kind of social justice of giving a voice to people who otherwise would not have a voice it put me in war zones for pretty much two decades I spent five years covering the wars in Central America I spent seven years in the Middle East I was in Sarajevo during the war in the former Yugoslavia and then Kosovo and these were jobs that other reporters of the New York Times didn't want as in fact when I went to the executive editor of the New York Times joelly veld and told him that I wanted to go to Sarajevo his response as well I guess the line starts and ends with you so people say we'll often look at my career because I was 15 years with the New York Times I was the Middle East bureau chief I was the Balkan bureau chief for The Times and I think incorrectly assumed that somehow there was a change in fact because I my role at the institution was to stand as a reporter with those who were dealing with severe repression I mean even of course horrific violence when I got to Sarajevo it was being shelled there were 2,000 shells a day 45 foreign journalists had already been killed by the time I got there a photographer I worked with was wounded three days after I got there and you know two dozen people wounded four to five dead it killed everyday so it was it was the I imposed myself in those kinds of situations that's why I spent so much time in Gaza and I I didn't I was offered at one point London I didn't want to go to London I against London I like England but I had zero interest in reporting you know on the Royals or God knows what else you do from a first world country so I came back to the United States and did a fellowship at Harvard in classics mostly reading the Aeneid and Latin went back to the paper and that's when my troubles began because I applied the same kind of radical critique to the Bush administration the calls to invade Iraq which I publicly opposed which angered the paper now one could speak quite frankly about slobodan milosevic but and work for the New York Times but one could not speak quite frankly about George W Bush and work for the New York Times and that's what got me into trouble I was booed off of a commencement stage in Rockford Illinois in 2003 for denouncing the war it's on YouTube and and then the the right-wing trash media Fox News Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial denouncing me and I was given a formal written reprimand by the New York Times and told I was no longer allowed to speak about the war but and I remember it wasn't the easy decision I'm not gonna pretend it was my palms were sweaty I lost my job not just my job my pension I knew I was cooked I you know if I continued to speak out I would not be hired by any journalistic enterprise in the United States and but I also knew as I sat in that office that in order for me to muzzle myself which is what they were asking me to do you know was a you know it was kind of to pay fealty to my career but to do that would be to betray my father and I remember walking out of the building on 229 West 43rd Street in New York and I think articulating for the first time that what my father had given me who himself had been pushed out of the institutional church where he had worked for 40 years was freedom I didn't need the New York I didn't need the imprint tour of the New York Times to tell me who I was I don't have a doctorate so I have a master's degree I started looking for a job to teach high school English and coach track I used to be a track runner in college in high school and I had written a book called war as a force that gives us meaning which I didn't expect anyone to buy it was kind of an examination of the culture of war after 20 years of covering war and it just became this massive bestseller sold hundreds of thousands of copies and that allowed me to sustain myself as a writer which I have done ever since and as Roger pointed out I am you know I examine culture I wrote a book on the Christian Right called American fascist the Christian Right in the war on America I wrote on the collapse of liberalism book called death of the liberal class I wrote on you know our post literate spectacle society it's called Empire of illusion the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle I wrote a book with a great cartoonist Joe Sacco called days of destruction days of revolt which is written out of the poorest pockets of the United States Camden New Jersey per capita the poorest and most dangerous city in America the coalfields of southern West Virginia Pine Ridge South Dakota Native American reservation or the average life expectancy is 48 for a male that's the lowest in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti the produce fields in Florida where literally you encounter examples or scenarios of slavery I interviewed undocumented workers who had night were chained inside a truck and their families are threatened back in Guatemala or Honduras if they you know attempt in any way to report what's going on this kind of abuse to the authorities so that's been my work since I came back to the United States and then I would just also add because it's important to me in that I've teach in a prison I teach through Rutgers University I teach college credit courses to incur those who are incarcerated my students were incarcerated we graduated 27 formerly incarcerated from Rutgers University this year who had been released when we conferred degrees BA degrees on 33 on the inside and if you go to youtube and type in Chris Hedges Rutgers graduation you can see the graduation talk that I gave so I think there's a complete in my mind complete consistency to both my politics and my commitment although of course working for an elitist mainstream publication like the New York Times I think sometimes it's not understood by people who just read the Straight resume yeah thanks so I mean one of the reasons I've actually interviewed you before but you know one of the reasons I personally have been really interested in your work is because you've got so much practical experience of the real world and I guess that's pretty rare tp'ing thinkers and intellectuals who I'm actually been on the frontline as it were and I think this is like one reason to talk to you tonight is it sort of bills to me at least that real world has suddenly exploded in areas where it hasn't been that's pretty like that for a long time too generations maybe and I have to confess that for myself personally though I like to feel like understand the world I am I've had moods of feeling a little bit lost about exactly what's going on and and so what I'm interested in is is you know in the light of your experience how how do you think we should understand the coronavirus crisis you know both in York and she but also globally I mean what what you're thinking about here and I mean it's the first fatal blow against the structures of industrial neoliberal society these structures have been hollowed out and weakened look at your National Health Service by the forces of neoliberalism by these global corporate forces these speculators and finance seers have seized control not only of national economies you don't control your own economy and any more than we do we just saw this with a quote unquote stimulus passage package that was passed today that provides gigantic bails out bailouts to the airline industries and and we know from 2008 what they're going to do with the money that's why the stock market is rally they buy back their stock they pay themselves huge bonuses and they lay off their workers so we've hollowed the country out with the foundations of capitalists democratic systems both within the UK and the United States are weak and tottering and the coronavirus the pandemic that now faces us is the first assault against a structure that's so in feeble that it can't handle it this is particularly true in the United States where we're really in for it here I'm just anecdotally I know numerous people have severe what looks like severe corona symptoms including my friend Joe Sacco and yet they can't get tested and one of my friends is a doctor and she couldn't get tested and so if their case is the number of cases in the United States because although we had adequate warning of course but we didn't have the test kits we don't have the protective gear New York City is turning into a disaster zone with makeshift morgues tents already being set up outside of hospitals we have projected unemployment now at 30% economists are saying I think it was three point three million filed for unemployment last week and you you have to remember that because of unlike Britain we don't have a National Health Service it's a for-profit health care system so we have huge segments of the population that are outside of the healthcare system completely that not just undocumented workers and the 80 million people who are either underinsured or uninsured but now all of these workers that had employee provided health insurance that that's 58 percent who are losing their jobs the estimate is that to be treated for the coronavirus it's $30,000 so you're going to be slapping people who don't have work with these gigantic medical bills or denying them medical care at all indeed was a teenager recently who died of Corona was turned away from the hospital because he didn't have insurance and so we we haven't contained the virus it's spreading exponentially because of a lack of testing we don't know where it is so we can't contain it and we have a structure in the United States which guarantees that people will not receive adequate medical care or they won't even go in to get tested remember the 11 million undocumented workers in the United States don't have access to medical care and they're not about to show up in an ER where ice the immigration you know service can grab them and throw them in a detention center which is a whole other issue because people are being warehoused including children in these detention centers where the virus will spread we also have to point three million people in our system of mass incarceration that's 25 percent of the world's population once the corona virus gets in those prisons it will you know rage because of the close confinement and of course one of my worries is that it's now Coronas been identified in the Gaza Strip which was one of the most densely populated and spots on earth without addict not only just adequate medical care but even adequate supplies of clean water so and and I really think this all goes back to the destruction of the kinds of institutions that certainly were put in place in the New Deal in the United States were put in place an old labor and then dismantled by Tony Blair and Margaret Margaret Thatcher later Tony Blair and quote-unquote New Labour dismantled in the United States by Reagan and then our version of Tony Blair Bill Clinton and Joe Biden let's not forget was integral part of this and so the system has been reconfigured to serve the interests of these global corporate oligarchic elites for a long time at the expense of the rest of us and and now because of the stress caused by this pandemic we're paying for it I don't see how we're going to come back from it certainly not like before you have the capitalist class and we've seen it with Trump call for this ridiculous idea that you can return to work by Easter Sunday because they would rather one two three four percent of the population and of course the most vulnerable part of the population die rather than see the economy go into a tailspin it's going to be I mean one thing's going to trigger another I mean so Americans if you have a certain income level you may get a check for a thousand dollars which is ridiculous it's gonna get funneled right back into your landlords pocket or the credit card companies or something out but then we're already talking hearing about rent strikes there's under way in st. Louis and that's because especially low-income people can't pay their rents and then what happens that this is a accelerating problem as we speak and wasn't even addressed by the stimulus package terrible word but the bailout for big industry that was just passed today so what happens then well if history is any guide from 2008 and from today than the huge multi-millionaire slumlords like the Kushner's this is Trump's son-in-law will get bailed out and people be on the streets so the system doesn't work and or doesn't work for us and as these stresses multiply and and as the system fails in any meaningful way to rectify the suffering or address the suffering that is gripping larger and larger segments of the population then the problem will only be exacerbated and and made worse I mean you know what did we do in the United with this bailout package they extended unemployment benefits for four months I mean this is ridiculous and it phenomenally short-sighted because it will create social unrest and social upheaval what direction that will take I don't know the United States has a large segment I mean most of them support Trump who are in essence fascistic and their outlook as the situation deteriorates I have no doubt that Trump will do what he has done in the past which is to incite violence and exacerbate racist attacks against people who will be blamed for the breakdown undocumented workers I mean now we've got Chinese Americans you know liberals we were already seen Trump's effort through lawsuits to muzzle the press I mean we're headed I think in a you know I think I'm worried I mean certainly in the United States can't speak to britain night I don't know it as well but certainly in the United States we're headed to a very kind of frightening corporate totalitarianism and we have created both legally and physically the mechanisms to put that in essence totalitarian system in place in our d-- industrialized urban pockets where poor people of color live where there is no work and the only work you can get is in the illegal economy which pushes you right into the prison system the jails in prison we have militarized police by that i mean police who are issued military-grade weapons that's long-barreled weapons kevlar vests armored personnel carriers if you watched the riots in Ferguson you saw it or the uprise in Ferguson you saw that equipment and with fifty caliber machine guns mounted on top you know aimed at unarmed protesters in the streets that that with the flip of a switch can be used throughout the whole country and we've created legal mechanisms largely through terrorism laws which have been used quite ruthlessly against Muslim activists in the country since 9/11 to strip you of habeas corpus due process even impose secret trials where defendants are not allowed to see or including their lawyers the evidence that's being used against them so it's all there it's all ready to go Hannah Aaron writes about this and origins of totalitarianism where she warns and she herself of course after spending three weeks imprisoned by the Gestapo is expelled from Germany and stripped of her citizenship so she's undocumented in French she's stateless and she writes about the phenomena of being stateless and she said once rights become privileges once the state has the ability to strip you of your protections as a citizen then everyone can be stripped of those rights which of course is what Germany ultimately did so I think you know as Mark Twain said history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes there are lessons of the past that you know we should heed and I'm very I'm very worried I mean on a personal level I'm worried for my children but I'm also worried for where the United States potentially is headed yeah well I I mean I feel like a lot of people were being waiting for something to happen right because there's so many tensions and so many dysfunctions in the systems though you know we have to live live through and as you could say a little bit about some of the underlying structures that have led us to this situation have been writing books since about 2000 about these these structures and there's a deeper story here I guess that you've written about is why Western societies have come to this place of of vulnerability and you know where we are today so you may be referring some of your bucks maybe you can say these underlying underlying processes well you know I'm not a Marxist in the sense that I don't buy into Marx's utopianism of the proletariat state you know that's Hegelian and I but I do think Marx's analysis with the heavy contribution of angles who had the data of capitalism is correct that's why the first volume of Marx's three volume capital and I admit it's a slog is an important book and as Marx understood unfettered or unregulated capitalism these are his words as a revolutionary force and that's because it by nature by its nature commodifies everything the human world becomes a commodity human beings become commodities the natural world becomes a commodity that it then exploits until exhaustion or collapse and that's what and and let's not divorce capitalism from imperialism and white supremacy I mean having spent two decades in the developing world I understood very very well that imperialism was the expression of white supremacy beyond the borders of the the Brits you know perfected that notion of the white man's burden and the raj and it gets as it it's it's this most revealing example or illustration of of the inherent racism within the system because you impose by force you take control of countries where people of color live and you exploit cheap labor that's what capitalism is doing now corporate capitalism and you plunder the resources I remember interviewing once the President of the Congo you know the friend the not the Belgian Congo but there's to Congress but not Zaire but the Congo and he the French oil company was in there taking all of the oil and even the president of the country had no idea how much they were taking indeed the the state French oil company had its own private army that French mercenaries that control the oil fields within his country and so capitalism by nature when it's unfettered and unregulated and uncontrolled will go in and exploit natural resources and human beings until collapse and that was the fundamental reason that Joe Sacco and I went out and did our book days of destruction days of revolt we went to the places where capitalism that capitalism destroyed first I mean take the coal fields of southern West Virginia I mean when we got the coal via and I encourage everyone who comes to the states to see it because that's what's gonna do to the rest of us which was the idea of the book so it's just a toxic wasteland billion gallon impoundment ponds filled with heavy metals and carcinogens you can't breathe the air every couple hours we were in a four-wheel vehicle I'd have to get out with paper towels because my windows were black from just from the soot in the air from the coal dust from open-pit mining from these draglines mountaintop removal of course you go into the elementary schools and in the nurse's office there were rows of little inhalers because all the kids can't breathe the water I mean even some of these hollows you could turn on the faucet and light the water on fire cancer was an epidemic that you know they owned the judges they owned the press I'm talking about the coal companies they owned all of the governor they owned all of the state legislators and and we wrote the book to say you know there they were first but we're next and what's happened with Imperial capitalist expansion is that they don't have any place left to go they would go into a certain area and destroy it and then move on to somewhere else you know one civilization would exhaust resources collapse and move and then and then the Spanish would do its conquest and and we are one of the few countries that carried out in essence imperial expansion internally before in 1898 we turned on Spain but what do they leave behind now there's nowhere else to go it spent 400 years of pillage looting environmental destruction and the games up so this time when but I hesitate to use the word civilization but when industrial power goes down the whole planets gonna go with us and we've reached you know I we you know I think there's strong evidence we're beyond the tipping point we're certainly which XR knows in a period of mortal peril existential peril and we're powerless to just as were powerless to get our government to respond in a rational way to this pandemic we're powerless to get them respond in a rational way to the ecocide that ultimately will kill all of us because this is the nature of unfettered and unregulated capitalism and I actually it's you know I come out of I'm presbyterian actually I am ordained but I come out of a very dark I come out of Calvin very dark view of human nature I'm not I don't like capitalism I see it as the enemy but I also realized that not everyone but but but a significant portion of human beings are dominated by self-interest but if you don't regulate and control that self-interest then it destroys your society and that's what's happened with the difference being instead of the old capitalist class you know the people who ran the textile mills in Birmingham or Manchester it's a global capitalist class that is moved manufacturing into you know not now not don't use this to be you know overly dramatic but into slave camps in China I mean certainly the Weaver's or slaves or appalling sweatshops where with wage theft and terrible conditions and when workers don't meet quotas they're not paid and they climb on the tops of these overcrowded dormitories and jump off and commit suicide and and so we've kind of rolled backwards 70% of the US economy is based on consumption most of which of course we don't need and that's what's freaking at the the capitalist class this pandemic has essentially shut that consumption down and so yeah you're watching seizures within the capitalist system that are quite profound and quite dramatic and may be hard to rollback and with those seizures will come profound social dislocation yeah so I mean how I see and I think how you see is that you know the climate crisis obviously extinction rebellion is primarily orientated towards is the inability to deal with it is an outcome of some of these things you've been talking about and I suppose for a lot of people it feels like the coronaviruses precursor to the climate crisis there's a lot of similar dynamics its inability to assess risks its inability to protect those vulnerable is that how you how you would see the larger sort of climate crisis situation yeah because I mean the climate crisis we know will create a very similar phenomena in that it will destroy coastal cities we know that it already is because of rising temperatures increasing pandemics and the destruction of crops through droughts and wildfires look at Australia and through pests that are no longer in colder months controlled so yes I look at this pandemic as you know I hate to say it but the beginning of the end is it's you know even if we get through it and in the United States there are gonna be a lot of people who die because of the tremendous and aptitude on the part of the corporate elites here I mean the idea that we don't have even stockpiled masks because we don't make anything anymore except weapons that we don't have ventilators that we don't even have enough hospital beds we're using military hospital ships to go to Los Angeles and New York I mean I think this exposes the internal rod that has been going on for a few decades and the inability on the part of this rapacious corporate oligarchic elite which has consolidated both wealth and power into their own hands you know you know Ralph Nader who I admire and is a friend and I was a speechwriter and when he ran calls these people traitors and he's right there are absolutely traitors they have no loyalty they'll use the resources of the state whether it's the Federal Reserve or the military or the courts or the legislative bodies to further their own interest but they're incapable of understanding or or fostering in any way the common good and there's two rules there's one rules for one rule for them trumping his entire life has been an example of this there's one legal system for them and there's a completely different system for us Matt Taibbi wrote a book about this which is good called the divine and that's right and I think the great mistake on the part of liberal elites and this would be true for people who supported Sanders and I was quite public about this in 2016 and I think I've been proven right into 20 is that the Democratic Party which is you know as Ralph says it's just one it's a it's a duopoly it's one corporate party you just get to pick which flavor you want do you want to be a nativist racist Islamophobic homophobic you know with a confederate flag plaster on the back of your pickup or do you want to be inclusive and tolerant and want to have a woman president or a gay president or african-american president actually Obama was an African American who's biracial his father was from the United States but as Cornel West said about Obama he was just a black mascot for Wall Street it's an advertising gimmick on all of the substantial issues whether it's imperial power we just saw it with this bailout bill whether it's free trade whether it's the security and surveillance state within the state there's no difference you know that they argue over what Freud call the narcissism of minor difference these are largely cultural issues some of which are important certainly women women's right to choose without question but they're tangential issues to political issues they you know cable news shows will spend all of their time you know having people fight over these issues and I think but it's really way to cover up on how and all of the major issues there's I mean this latest trade bill which was passed replaced NAFTA which is just NAFTA with another name I think there were fifty people in the Congress that voted against it it was almost complete unanimity by both parties and so Schumer and Pelosi are figures of the corporate state they their power comes from funneling Wall Street money to anointed Democratic candidates I was with Bernie Sanders in 2016 at the climate March with sha misawa the socialist City Councilwoman from Seattle and she was pressing him about running as an independent arguing correctly that the Democratic Party was never going to give him the nomination and that we were never going to build a sustainable political movement or you know he calls it a political revolutionary movement in an election cycle and I think 2020 has just proved his naivete Bernie's answer was I don't want to end up like Nader which means I don't want to end up a pariah don't want the Democratic Party to mount a campaign so I lose my Senate seat I don't want to lose my seniority within the Democratic caucus which he has you know I'm gonna be a loyal lieutenant to Schumer for four years and they're gonna give me a chance and he was wrong and I think X are one of the reasons I like XRD is it gets it the system is not going to respond to us the only hope is to pit power against power and that means to create centrifugal forces of power outside of the system yeah well this seems to me like one of the main things that like separates you from other commentators because I hear a lot of commentators you know have a fairly standard analysis which should have reflect what you've said you know that the system is basically broken but it seems to me like they don't want to cross the Rubicon to actually say that rebellion is both necessary and justified and I think that something that maybe more people are gonna stop thinking about as a result of what's going to happen next few months and I think like the question for me is okay so you know Bernie Sanders campaign isn't the political revolution he claims it to be then what does the political revolution in 2020 look like you know what the main structures and features an organization or you know features that that point the way because the fact of the matter is no one really has got a lot of experience of it in the Western world right it's not like we've been doing this for a long time it's been thirty years people trying to do gradualist and reformist sort of measures you know often with really good intentions of course but hasn't actually brought us anywhere as we're finding out at the moment so what what's your vision you know how do you see that physical revolution everything within our power to obstruct and destroy the mechanisms of corporate power and their ability to garner profit that's why I was at Standing Rock you know in France with the yellow vests I was with XR in New York when we shut down the street in front of the New York Stock Exchange that's it that that that's our only hope and I'm not Eve I'm not I I don't share the culture is kind of mania for hope I think hope is or the selling of false hope is disempowering I think we have the first thing we have to do is face the very oblique nassif or us and even accept that we may not succeed but that we have a moral imperative especially for those of us who have children because they're going to inherit what's left of this world to get out and fight in every way possible to make that world sustainable for them so I don't know if I'm going to succeed I'm 63 years old but I at least want my kids to look back and say that I tried and that's gonna be uncomfortable I don't like going to jail I've been to jail not for a long period of time but I've been to jail as you have that's kind of more time than I care to donate to the US government but I'll do it and I I you know even if it we fail we create a community we nurture life with in what I would call a culture of death and I guess in that sense I fall back on somebody who comes out of a faith tradition and I'm not in any way trumpeting one faith over another I spent 20 years overseas I saw how people out of all faiths and all tradition rose up on behalf of the oppressor to fight for the oppressed and those are the people who have kinship with and who I admire whether they're Muslim or Hindu or it makes no difference but I do think that that the fact that I come out of a religious tradition is not accidental because as Daniel Berrigan the great radical priest said I when I asked him to define faith once he said faith is the belief that the good draws to it the good even if all empirical evidence says otherwise I think that there is empirical evidence that the good draws to it the good it's why I like X R I'm rooted in non-violence and but then we have to let it go I mean there's no surety there's no certainty certainly that within our lifetime I mean within my lifetime everything that I fought for has gotten worse but that I don't think invalidates what I've done and I think that's where being rooted in a faith tradition I mean certainly our two greatest prophets in the United States Malcolm X and Martin Luther King came out of you know deep religious traditions and beliefs there's a wonderful moment you know people forget there's one great biography of King by Darrell called burying the cross people forget that King like Malcolm at the end of his life was a very lonely figure I mean most people have walked out the young black activists had gone off to the Black Power movement he was booed when he went to watts after the riots and the FBI after he denounced the Vietnam War in 1967 a year to the day from when he was assassinated withdrew his his protection his physical protection and both King and and Hoover and Johnson President Johnson knew what that meant King knew he would die in the same way that Malcolm knew he would die and there was a moment where King was with his staff under tremendous pressure and he just got up and he said I take non-violence to be my lawfully-wedded wife and sickness and his health and and and I think that that at that moment you saw the power of faith the you know that the king himself was watching his movement disintegrate he knew his life was going to be terminated very soon and and that is finally what sustained him in the same way that that's what sustained Malcolm X yeah I think this is again something that separates you from a lot of conventional sort of commentators that to my mind seems it be still transfixed with a sort of material utilitarian sort of rationale for action which is you know we can make things better and we need to work out how to do it and then we can't do it and if we can't then we don't act and I mean my reading and the tradition I come from is very much you know my parents were Christians as well what have you and the tradition died few like to come from it because there's a good way to live your life and that's all you can do you count you can't expect anything more this life doesn't owe you anything you know and I I think what's sad I guess is that we've lost because we've had things so good for so many people I guess in the West anyway you sort of lost hold of what that actually means and was wondering whether you know what the first time I saw your videos I was quite shocked because I felt like you were talking directly to me because you're sort of you are referring back to some traditions that really don't get referred to and I feel personally like we need to reconnect with some of those historical philosophies or ways of life or ways of resistance and some dream may be to just finish off you can talk a little bit about what you think those main those main philosophies or ways of being oh you know that younger people today can learn from well you're right as soon as you know I would say both for revolutionaries and for the religious the practical is irrelevant Hannah Aaron said you know don't trust people who say this shouldn't be done or this ought to be done only trust those people who say I can't so I just lost my job at truth dig where I have had a column for 15 years every Monday because the staff went on strike over the attempts of the wealthy heiress who funds the site to fire the editor Bob Sheeran because of a series of labor abuses including the attempt to give employees contracts where they sign away all their labor and civil rights under California national law now that wasn't practical and I mean that irony is that she didn't pay me I had actually raised through grant money my own salary for the site and the site has been shut down and all of us are unemployed but there wasn't any question as soon as she started it would have been you know easy I suppose to try and have some kind of accommodation but I couldn't stand by and watch what she was doing to Bob Scheer one of the legendary journalists in the United States the former editor of ramparts his 84 almost 84 now one of the Titans of American journalism and at the beginning it was just me I mean I called him in Sorella she pushes you're not going out alone it ended up snowballing and the entire staff went on strike and so you know and and some of these editors have taken that's the only source of income they had so they're the economic cost for them is far greater than for me I am in the midst of reading a book and I have a television show and they don't so they're far more courageous then I was but again it's it's that you know you can't it's not about what's practical it's what about what's right and I think that when you take what you believe in so far as you can determine it as a moral stance and you don't pay a cost and it's probably not that moral I mean most moral stances if they're truly moral I mean we all can you know talk about the evils of Jim Crow or something in these kinds of horrible systems of the past but one of my problems with this church in the United States is where are they on mass incarceration which for me is the civil rights issue of our time they're nowhere to be seen so the rhetoric of the liberal class never matches its actions but I think for the revolutionary the radical and ultimately the religious it does come down to as Aaron said I mean I can't it's what's right or wrong no matter what the consequences are not only and not only that but it's right or wrong no matter what the outcome is even if the outcome at least in the short term appears to be detrimental to what you say and one and I'm gonna be very hard to picked up I mean I mean the editor called the Nation magazine they don't want me I mean they don't want this kind of critique I mean I'll find somewhere to go but I you know life short you learn that in war and in the end you you wanna look back and you know not regret that you didn't stand up not regret that you were crippled by fear or self-interest that your life meant something I mean that comes down to the fundamental question of what constitutes a life of meaning and you know as Faulkner said every life viewed from the inside is a failure we're all in that sense failures but I know that you know they you know Auden said these ironic points of light that flash out wherever the just exchanged their messages I mean I I am propelled forward by these figures like my father who stood up at personal cost in the past I can't betray them and I won't betray them and they allow me to define what is a life of meaning for me even if the rest of society not only doesn't recognize it but even attempts to negate it and I think that is the power of we would say bearing witness doing what is right that that there is I mean beragon became a close friend before he died the great radical priest but burned draft records with homemade napalm and and stood there praying until they arrested and put him in the federal in a federal prison for 23 months broke into nuclear sites and poured his blood over weapons he just wouldn't stop and when you have those kinds of bombs those kinds of relationships that and especially as you age as I'm aging in many ways their presence becomes more real than the presence of people around you they're constantly I mean is very close to the theologian James Kohn who we just lost America hands down America's greatest theologian his book the cross in the lynching tree is stunning where he condemns the white church and white theologians for never denouncing lynching which they never did no theologian ever mentioned it and he talks about lynching as a modern form of crucifixion because remember they lynched children and he said you know there it was the crucifixion right in front of them and the church couldn't see it and he talks about that commitment to the crucified of the earth and that is our that's our role that we are to stand with a crucified of the earth earth and that when you truly stand with the oppressed ultimately you will be treated like the oppressed and of course that I is the greatest validation of a life yeah thanks yeah I'm glad we touched him what it really means to for each of us as individuals and I think that's really what it comes down to the end of the day I mean I'm sure lots of people watching this call and it's easy to it's easy to have the right analysis it's not so easy to look into your own self and decide what it means to be who you are right that's the difficult bit I mean we all struggle with everyday of course but yeah Ruth once thank you for for your comments about these things and I think Robins going to organize a few questions from people is that right Robin I think Karen is got about 20 minutes or so yeah people have got questions feel free to check them in in the QA Cara scan is gonna help with asking them to you guys I think we'll start with a question from Marco he says do you think that at this time in place it's more important to want to win or to want to be right most revolutionaries throughout history don't win most of them get extinguished that's just a historical fact and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr says that you know what revolutionaries are people who revolt rise up against the system are endowed with is sublime madness and by that he means that the traditional mechanisms of liberal reform don't work there too tp'ed they're too intellectual and Niebuhr adds that the problem with liberals is that they don't ultimately understand evil and so if you stand up and your criteria is to win then you're going to be easily demoralized and defeated but if you stand up because it's right that of course doesn't mean you won't win but it means that you're in it for the long term that you're not wedded to the emotional highs and lows that characterize a consumer society so next we have one from Jason he says he's a podcaster in Guatemala he was asking how can independent media in Latin America or anywhere be most effective during this crisis well I I would say that most of the examples of effective nonviolent civil disobedience come from the global South not from the industrialized north so I would say that he probably has a lot more to teach me than I have to teach him through this crisis how can we best direct attention to rebuild economies around something like donut economics which factors in the earth's resources so the nature of capitalism is that it only defines itself by what its against communism socialism because its own nature is so venal and self-centered and when the Europeans and Ural Americans carried out their campaign of genocide against Native Americans it wasn't only to steal a land and the buffalo herds and the gold in the Black Hills it was to destroy a competing communal ethic which was completely opposed to the ethic of capitalism in an indigenous culture people who hoarded things for them selves were despised either everyone ate or no one ate and I think that ethic was as threatening to capitalism as perhaps most threatening to capitalism so we have to as indigenous communities around the world have reminded us recover that communal ethic where everyone eats or no one eats where those who hoard material possessions and power for themselves and their own are thrown out and despised I mean the great indigenous leaders like Sitting Bull I think offer examples for where we have to go and Sitting Bull you know scathing contempt for Europeans and euro Americans who who thought they could buy an own land I think directs us or helps us rediscover a kind of ethic that might make it possible for pockets of human society to sustain themselves at least for a while a question for watcher and Chris it seems that we're finally getting a taste of what government and media telling the truth is like does this change the way that exile should look at this demand because it seems like the government is still inadequate even when the truth is told well I'll let Roger start with that are you talking about which government I mean as awful as Boris Johnson is and he's certainly awful we win the prize for you know utter insanity yeah well there are degrees of insanity as we're discovering in this crisis on the brazilian guy gets the top prize at the moment but yeah I mean the way I iced it is that in terms of the broader climate crisis is there's still a fundamental denial of responsibility by governments to look at physical reality and for me like the coronaviruses a really clear example of where nature decides is going to do something and because our culture and our political class doesn't recognize that nature as any power or any say then it ignores it until is too late and for me like there's a direct analogy here of not telling the truth about the broader geophysical situation which is you know really straightforward is you'll know that if you caught carbon into the atmosphere then you're going to destroy the weather systems and have mass starvation and that's done that the extremity of that risk is simply not existing I mean I think is a question I don't know you think Chris but I think this crisis may go some way to actually reminding ordinary people anyway that there is enough a world out there you know and it needs to be considered I don't know what I think we're learning a lesson in the danger of human hubris you go back and I studied classics and and read you know all of the great classical playwrights Sophocles that was a persistent common theme that human hubris would destroy you because there were forces natural forces beyond your control that if you didn't honor and if you thought you could dominate would crush you and that's precisely what's happening you know consumer culture is kind of an anaphora in the sense that it revolves around the cult of the self the sense of total empowerment extended of course through the access to machines even immortality the obsession of the culture with youth you know all of this has fed very dark proclivities that are within all of us and those who provide a dose of wisdom whether artists or writers or have been so pushed to the margins because their voices don't fit with this mantra of positive thinking positive thoughts you know as if somehow positive thoughts you know or what we desire and what we want and you know how we view ourselves you know it's never affected by reality so you know I hope you're right Roger the only thing I would say from my many years of watching and reporting from disintegrating societies is that often times people have very short memories if they can get back into the particular however unhealthy milieu that they were in thank you for that one so I'm gonna just Marge a couple here so we've got one asking how you Chris feel about filling up jails with rage blockers and therefore do you think civil disobedience helps in this crisis or any crisis and if not commercial Protestant solutions so the point is to get so many roadblocks that there's no room in the jails I was after Occupy Wall Street they shut down Zuccotti we had a series of demonstrations where we took over streets without city permits one of them had 10,000 people but the could the police do with 10,000 people what were they gonna do you know arrest a thousand I mean they couldn't even fit a thousand in the city jails so the idea is to get the numbers or get waves of numbers that in essence overload the system so it doesn't function once you get a million I mean I covered the revolutions in Eastern Europe we had 500,000 people and Alexander Platz in East Germany in East Berlin or the same number in Prague during the Velvet Revolution where the police gonna do they joined them because what happened as well saying in wages rebellion you paraphrase Sparta I do not fight fascist because I will win I fight fascist because they are fascists and they've looked at fascism through a religious sense in another book beyond just that really just scope however how widespread is fascism in the world and are we past the tipping point of what you and Waylon foresaw is inverted totalitarianism for full on global fascism so yeah I love that quote I use it so much I've had to stop using it because I could see like I'd get in front of an audience they kind of mouth it along with me although I do think it's great and I did steal it from Sartre who was talking to a friend of his he was trying to talk him out of going to back to fight in the Spanish Civil War that last year when it was clear that the fascist forces were gonna win and is the friend his friend said I don't fight fascists in French and we don't fight fascist cuz their fascist I fight I don't think fascist because I'm gonna win I fight fascist cuz they are fascists so I mean that gets to the point we spoke about earlier about just standing up and and fighting evil because it's evil I in my book American fascist the Christian Right in the war in America at the end of the book I was very very I didn't use the word fascist lightly in the title and I went to the two great scholars of fascism that would be Fritz turn himself who fled Nazi Germany as a teenager and he wrote the politics of cultural despair and then I went to that Robert Paxton who wrote anatomy of fascism teaches at Columbia and I and I had spent two years with a Christian right which i think is a heretic all fascist force and of course that's why they're now filling the ideological void of Trump Pompeyo Betsy DeVos bar Carson all these people come out of the Christian heart Christian right and they couldn't I mean I I so I didn't use the word lightly but I remember Stern saying that you know in Germany there was a yearning for fascism before the word fascism was invented I think you certainly see that in the United States you see it in Britain you know you know Nigel Faraj these kinds of figures even Boris Johnson to an extent they're flirting and empowering fascistic forces were more advanced in the United States because the Christian Right has had years of building infrastructure media platforms Liberty University Patrick Henry University they are stacking the federal courts courtesy of the Trump administration Betsy DeVos is busy funneling federal dollars into quote-unquote Christian schools as a way these are his were her words to advance the kingdom her brother Eric Prince the founder of Blackwater there was just a story in The New York Times the other day about how he has been used to infiltrate groups including teachers unions means kind of the equivalent of the brown shirts so I britain's british society is different and i once heard eduardo galeano who i admire immensely at a talk start talking about american society he just didn't quite get it because he wasn't here so I'm not gonna try and do an assessment of your society you can all do it better than I can but certainly within American society those forces are real on the last point inverted totalitarianism this is a very most important political philosopher Sheldon Wolin wrote a book called democracy incorporated he creates this term inverted totalitarianism by which he means it's not classical totalitarianism it doesn't find its expression through a demagogue or a charismatic leader but through the anonymity of the corporate state so like the late Roman Empire you have the facade of the American system electoral politics the Constitution which is been rendered by judicial Fiat null and void we don't have the right to privacy or anything else and so you have the facade but internally corporations control all the levers of power that's what he means by inverted totalitarianism and and he says that that is different from classical forms of totalitarianism because it is about the primacy of profit so both under Stalinism or under Nazism profit was not the primary incentive I mean at the end of the war they were dedicating tremendous amounts of railroad stock even though they needed it to transfer weapons to fight the the Soviet forces that were overrun in Eastern Europe they filled it with you know Jewish families to send them off to Auschwitz or Sobibor somewhere in inverted totalitarianism Proffitt always takes precedent over human life which gets me right back to the health care system in the United States where we are now in the middle of a pandemic watching the primacy of profit over human life yeah I was just gonna add you know this this comment you have about fashions and it's not just a piece of rhetoric as it were or a you know an assertion when I was doing my research and civil disobedience at King's College I was talking to another researcher researched the working class miners who went to fight against fascism in a Spanish Civil War and you know he's the main resort his research was again that people didn't go to Spain in order to beat fascism they went to Spain because it had to be done that's that was the phrase it had something had to be done and they had to do something about it and I think you know for me this is the central theme of what actually we have to do which is to do things because they have to be done you know if you go down to learn and sit in the road obviously you want to get negotiations with government at that changing climate change my view but the fundamental reason why you're sitting in the road is because it has to be done as simple as that you know and paradoxically you know my research and experience shows that the more people who don't care about whether they win or not the more likely you are to win because you're not so vulnerable to the outcome I mean it's it's one of those weird head-fuck things you know because you just go round in circles but it's certainly true and industry my experience to do you know various sorts of social minute work for several decades is the people that are sustainable are doing it because it's something I have to do because it's the right thing to do and that's what sustains you over the long term much as you said Chris so you know it's a major lesson I guess I would also add that it gives you power because people know you can't be bought off people know that you're not going to be dissuaded through an argument about why this doesn't make sense and you know maybe you should go talk to the Democratic leadership it gives you a kind of power because they know that your unwavering so I would agree totally it's kind of paradoxical that it your power comes from the point where you don't really care whether it's the seeds or not that's where your power comes from yeah yeah it's a good quote I found recently for a man Larry Kramer who's one of the key activists in the at tops campaigns around aids and I think I've got this right said something along the lines of we didn't give a flying what people thought of us and that's what gave was our strength and that's a really interesting point of view you didn't really be around the bush that guy but yeah that's exactly right I remember I was very critical of the black bloc and antiva during occupy and I spent a lot of time in Zuccotti and some of the occupy activists who weren't black bloc said well you know it's hurt the movement and you know everybody admired you and now they don't and I said the moment I need your adulation I'm finished it doesn't matter what you think of me it doesn't make any difference my job at least insofar as I can do it is to speak the truth even if it's an unpopular truth it's not - it's not running for anything I'm not a politician I'm not trying to be popular I don't I don't care whether I'm popular or not and I think that that that quote from Kramer is exactly right as soon as you give a about what people think actually Dwight MacDonald a great social theorist Rota essay called mask all midcult which is very good and it's about the danger of intellectuals appealing to mass culture you know in thinking that their influence is determined by their the numbers of people are able to reach you know going on MSNBC or something which didn't exist when you wrote it but but that's right that that's not actually their power and so yeah that's that's you know we or those of us who you know certainly as a writer who attempt to explain reality as soon as we get caught up in in what the reacts potential reaction might be or what the reaction is then you know we lose whatever power we have I think I think that's a really good point for everyone with an X all you need is you have to so I guess just another question for me even for its Roger and I guess Chris from your American perspective what do we need to be doing in the UK to keep post created subsidies and bailouts from going to ecocidal industries and Chris if you could interpret that in any way that we awesome well I guess I'll begin I mean we just passed this bill today which does precisely that I think that you know we're going going to have to build organizations of resistance things like rent strikes didn't have to rent strike anyway because there have any money to pay the rent if we hit projected unemployment levels of 30% that this you know the oh the the the system responded the way it did because there's it doesn't have any pressure from us we don't count you know it it costs staggering a billion dollars to run for president you know the people who pay for it are not paying for it because they love democracy the elected officials get to Washington and the lobbyists write the legislation it's kind of a system of legalized bribery we just don't have any influence because we don't have that kind of money we don't have that kind of clout so what we do have is numbers and through those numbers we do have the ability to in organized and concerted fashion the profits and the economy of the ruling elites and that that's that's that's our only hope yeah well from my perspective looking mainly uh what's gonna happen when we come out of this and I think a lot of people are and I think for me personally extinction rebellion needs to be extremely clear in telling the truth about there's no going back to what we had before you know what that leads to and we knew what is going to lead to in the future we allow the climate change situation to continue so I mean again looking at what we've just been talking about we need to engage in muscle disease because that's what needs to be done it's as simple as that and where do we succeed or not who knows but there's good reason to believe there's going to be a lot of people open to to the ordinance because they all live through an example of what it means to ignore ignore nature so we'll see of course so sure we have one more question before we finish is that okay yes I guess what's around at what you were saying someone has asked given that we know the state is somebody not going to respond in any meaningful way to the climate and ecological emergency should we be straight back onto the street disrupting dunbine it violently as soon as the crown of iris restrictions are lifted of course that's the only mechanism we have and in some ways the corona virus is a gift to the security and surveillance state because it's dangerous and people shouldn't do it right now to form crowds where people are cannot practice social distancing so unfortunately the nature of the pandemic and the imperative that that people isolate as much as possible not only for ourselves but more importantly for vulnerable communities allows the the forces that we are opposed against to consolidate power without mass resistance however there are mechanisms we can use and I go back to that rent strike that don't require people to get out in the street and those mechanisms have to be used and they have to be used soon okay shall we leave it at course is that okay yeah thanks for doing it Roger yeah well I just want to thank everyone for coming to this interview and this session and obviously to Chris for taking the time to talk to us all that's great thank you so much I mean we're hoping we not to do a few more of these yeah with with other people do and say anything yeah sure so I'm just gonna she's gonna show a little bit about what we're doing upcoming so this is part of a new series that we're working on looking at yeah this idea of being alone together right we're all in our step isolation right now but we've got a lot of content coming out of exile TV at the moment we want to support people this is a real time I think for emotional connection and we go a full program coming up over the next week with different events and talks like this coming up also chances to connect reach other people's assemblies online a chance to hear what everyone thinks about this Cobin 19 crisis that were in a chance to talk about act on it as well as you know fun activities like disk obedience you want to have a dance break online get involved so tomorrow we've got economics on the crisis coronavirus climate change and what needs to change that we were poor Mason and commentator for economics editor for channel 4 and BBC Newsnight and also with Molly Scott Cato so we were boost this program and help it grow so if you can people who are watching today can you please support extinction rebellion to fundraise in a way that we can really continues this fight for the life on Earth as it says carbon 19 has changed many things but the rebellion must not stop so if you're watching here tonight please do go on and click on giving a monthly donation by direct debit and support us through the rebellion to help make this happen we'd really appreciate anything you can give towards this work and thank you so much for your time and efforts involved right well thank you very much and keep safe everyone okay all right thanks everyone right bye bye everyone you

Channel: Extinction Rebellion (XR) UK

Views: 272,902

Keywords: extinction rebellion, climate change, xr, sixth extinction, global warming, air pollution, activism, climate breakdown, Ecological crisis, act now, tell the truth, join xr, recycle, protest, regenerative culture, carbon emissions, fossil fuels, chris hedges, roger hallam, corona virus, covid 19

Id: 3FfkKkmCSu4

Length: 82min 45sec (4965 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 28 2020