Lawrence Wilkerson, retired US Army Colonel and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has some surprising things to say about the US government.

Wilkerson doesn’t hold back when he explains how US foreign policy has always been about the expansion of sheer power. After WWII, the US expanded “imperial dots”, or military impressions in order to generate a financial apparatus that would expand Empire, allowing for the rich to continue to grow their capital.

While many parts of the world are forced to live in abject poverty, there are generations of families that have a concentration of wealth that surpasses the GDP of most countries. According to the latest Oxfam study, only 62 people now own as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity.

Wilkerson decided to come forward and blow the whistle about US crimes after learning about how torture had been authorized and encouraged by the highest levels, violating the Geneva Conventions, the law of war, and the manuals that they operated under. “I can’t stay silent anymore. I’m going to speak out.”

Wilkerson joins Abby Martin for a must-watch interview exposing the dark underbelly of DC bribery, intelligence hoaxes as war pretexts and the ruthless nature of US corporate Empire.

Former Bush Official: “The Ship Is Sinking”

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ABBY MARTIN: I’m sitting here in Washington, D.C. with the rare opportunity to speak with someone who served in the innermost circles of the US war machine. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson is a former US Army Airborne Ranger who flew over 1,000 combat missions in Vietnam. He was national security adviser to the Reagan administration and later served as chief of staff to Colin Powell during the Bush administration. You’re a retired Army officer. You’re a Republican. Given your inside experience in the government and military, how would you explain the purpose of US foreign policy?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Today? Today the purpose of US foreign policy is to support the complex that we’ve created in the national security state that is fueled, funded and powered by interminable war, and the ramifications thereof. That’s a sad commentary on what America has become, but it’s a realistic and I think honest appraisal of what America has become.

AM: Has it ever been about altruism?

LW: You could say there were even altruistic aspects to the slaughter and ethnic cleansing of Native Americans from the Mississippi to the Pacific coast by Phil Sheridan’s Army of the West. If you wanted to really dip into the bag and find something, but I don’t think overall and comprehensively it’s been altruistic. It’s been about sheer power, and lately it’s not even been about realistic application of that sheer power, or realistic attempts to expand it. It’s been more or less so failed in its overall general aspects that it has diminished our real power in the world. And this is what concerns me most seriously because history demonstrates, I think, that this is what empires do when they’re getting ready to collapse. They began to be so zealous of their own power and its expansion that they actually decrease their power until it becomes inevitable that they cease to exist, or they don’t exist in the same form they did when they were an empire.

AM: And you’ve talked about the capital interests that are behind pretty much every US military intervention in the last decade if not century. What sort of economy are we waging war in today and what capital interest would you say are behind the war on terror?

LW: After WWII, the United States engaged in a monstrous twilight conflict, if you will, that it calls the Cold War. It’s probably a pretty apt term. In that process it built up what are the appurtenances now of a national security state: the military-industrial-congressional complex, all the armaments industry that goes into that, the far-flung basing structure we have all over the world which now is eight or nine hundred places that we have little colonial dots, if you will, imperial dots, and to the wars there we’re fighting now almost interminably.

All of this is the leftover of what we did during that Cold War, which could include physical expenditures beyond the scope even of human imagination. We’ve spent so much money on maintenance of our empire that is becoming a critical part of it too. Our debt now is something like eighteen trillion dollars, unparalleled debt in my mind in the in the history of empire, in constant dollars or in current dollars. So this is a situation that’s unsustainable, but it has come to a point where the power structure, which I would define as both the financial apparatus that this empire has generated, and the economic aspects of it which are less and less industrialized and productive, therefor [less] a real economy, in other words, and more and more playing with money and the interest on money and capital in general, as Thomas Piketty has pointed out in his book Capitalism in the 21st Century so eloquently. We now have more capital awash in the world than we have earned income. Earned income is a very second place in the world. Capital is the real driving force in the world and this capital is passed on from family to family, from generation to generation and therefore corruptive and poisonous.

We’re in real trouble right now because of what this empire has generated, because of the incentives and motivations of it, and because it’s basically run by about 1 percent of the people, if not fewer, in this country constituting essentially a plutocracy. There are 400 families, 400 wealth centers, private wealth centers in the United States constituted around a family structure that equal the gross domestic product of Brazil. Today I read a percentage which I can’t even recall—it had so many zeros in front of it—but it was much less than one percent of the country that has the approximate wealth of the GDP of India. So we’re talking about a concentration of wealth, and a concentration of capital, which is not productive wealth unless it is actually going back into the real economy to generate industry that produces something. It’s unconscionable. It’s reprehensible in many ways because what you’ve got is the rest of the country, and in many respects the rest of the world, living off the rest of the scraps.

AM: And it’s totally unsustainable, as you were mentioning, this is not a trajectory that is going to last. Behind the belligerents waging a war there are certain industries that are in play that continue to garner interest, extract resources.

LW: Look at what’s happening in Syria right now, for example, just a microcosmic example. The Air Force is about to run out of ordnance. It has dropped so many bombs and shot so many cruise missiles that it’s about to run out of ordnance. Well, I will guarantee you that companies like Raytheon and Lockheed and others who make these armaments are salivating because they are going to be making another round of these are armaments, and into the interminable unknown future they’re going to be making these armaments. It’s incredible what we are doing.

AM: And in fact they are salivating at that. At Lockheed, Boeing, all these different institutions, defense institutions, are openly talking about what a great benefit this is to them—this Syria war, all of these escalations. I wanted to read you a quick fact. In 2008, the Government Accountability Office found that over 2,400 former generals were employed at 52 of the biggest defense contractors as senior executives and acquisition officers. A high percentage of retired general officers retire, go straight into jobs in the defense industry making well over six figures, often with the corporations they dealt with while serving. How does this revolving door function? I mean, how close is this relationship in terms of actual foreign policy creation.

LW: It’s so close that you actually had during the Iraq war, and as far as my history lessons go, it’s the first time it’s occurred this way and now is going on continuously, general officers who not only go out into the armaments industry and its associated paraphernalia and make money based on their influence gained while in service, you actually have them going out and joining the media and making the media more conversant with and attuned to and want war. So you actually have general officers who will go to CNN, go to MSNBC, go to Fox News, and they will get again your six-figure salaries for being the security experts on those news shows, and they will report to the American people the dire need for this continued conflict, the dire need for soldiers on the ground in Syria, the dire need for more war. It’s incredible what has happened in that respect. That’s not a direct contribution to the armaments industry, but it’s certainly a very vivid contribution to the war mongering and to the interminable state of war.

AM: Is it the interlocking board of directors in these companies, or is it just advertising injected straight into the corporate media?

LW: I wish it were something that you could put your finger on like that. It’s so many different things, including what you just said, but not necessarily consciously or coherently except in some cases, I think. It’s all of these things contributing and it’s not any one of them. As Eisenhower said in his farewell address, it’s not something you put your finger on and say, “Aha! That’s malicious. That’s intent. It’s not only complicit. It’s intent.” It’s not that. It’s this accumulation of vast power that’s oriented towards what first increases its power, and second what makes it rich that comes together and causes this. If it were something that you could root out and you could hand over to the FBI or to the Supreme Court or someone to adjudicate, it would be a different matter, I think, not that it would get done very easily, but it would be a different matter. It’s not something like that. It’s pernicious. As Eisenhower said, it’s in every state house in every federal office building. It’s even in every home in America. It is this unconscious sometimes power-driven aspect of it that makes it so difficult to combat. In fact, I’ll sit here and be a pessimist, a cynic, and I’ll say we aren’t going to correct this until something truly serious happens to right the ship of state, which might also sink the ship of state. Now we have every other general officer, admiral, walking out and signing up with glee to work for armaments.

AM: Well, other than the egregious unethical nature of how this functions… I mean, what is the legal caveat to how this is actually working? Is it just a machine that’s working on its own and just continues to become more pernicious as time goes on?

LW: They’re not the most competent people in the world. They’re not the most capable people in the world, and they’re not the most, shall we say, professional people in the world. That’s a part of it, but a second part of it is it’s become the thing to do. It’s become de rigueur. I mean, it’s what you do if you serve 30-35 years. You expect to have a six-figure salary with someone like Raytheon or Halliburton or Booz Allen Hamilton. We haven’t talked about the Beltway bandits that do more intelligence than the CIA. Now I use that term very loosely there—intelligence, but it is a corporate complex that is growing, and its surrounds everything else, including what I call fateful decision making, which is the decision-making to send young men and women to die for state purposes.

AM: And speaking of the young men and women who go to die, you know there seems to be a huge class stratification between the people who are making the policy and the people who are actually giving their lives on the battlefield. I mean, if you join the military in today’s age, whose interests are you serving when you do put your life on the line?

LW: You’re serving what one veteran in my seminar at William and Mary [University] said to me not too long ago, about three weeks ago, an Army veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan: You’re serving the ulterior purposes of the leadership of the country, and I said, “What do you mean by that?” And he said, “You’re serving corporate and commercial interests. You’re serving the interests of people who bureaucratically are seeking power within the structure, and you’re serving the interest of what is basically an incompetent governing process.” Wow. That was a pretty powerful statement, I told him, and he said, “Yep, and I’ll never go back again. I guarantee you that because I didn’t realize that until I was about halfway through my last tour in Afghanistan.”

AM: Let’s talk about the draft. It hasn’t been in place for some time. On one hand, you have the military so desperate that they’re paying NFL and sports stadiums for pro-military propaganda. On the other hand, you have women that are now being pushed to enlist. What do these measures of desperation mean and what do you think about the draft?

LW: It really isn’t an all-volunteer force. It’s an all recruited force because we’re spending billions of dollars to entice these people, who feel that they don’t have many other prospects, into the armed forces. We’re bringing them into a service that is supposed to be professional, disciplined and altruistic. We’re bringing them in with the most heinous of selfish, greedy purpose. We’re paying them what they couldn’t make otherwise. We’re giving them bonuses. It is so bad now that the cost for personnel in my army and to certain extent in the marine corps is coming close to being fifty percent of the cost of that service on an annual basis. If for no other reason the all-volunteer force is going to bankrupt the defense department, so they’re going to have to look at some other options.

AM: Let’s talk about your role in the Bush administration during the lead-up to one of the most devastating wars ever perpetrated by the empire—the Iraq war. You not only served as Colin Powell’s chief of staff, but you prepared his infamous speech to the UN about Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction. How did you miss the faulty nature of the intelligence, given your weeks-long analysis, given the stakes?

LW: I’ve looked at it from a much more, shall we say, soul-piercing way. Not only was the intelligence picture a failure on the part of the intelligence agencies for various reasons, it was also cherry-picked by the vice president. It was put together to a certain extent by the Office of Special Plans, in Doug Feith’s shop in the Pentagon, and it was largely orchestrated, as the MI6, the British memo said, it was orchestrated, shaped around the policy or the policy was essentially fed with intelligence that would shape it, that would feed it. So there were a number of reasons for the failure. There were a number of reasons for my own personal failure. I lament those reasons. I will never forget the occasion. I’ll go to my grave remembering it, but I can certainly, from an academic point of view, see how this this is sad, and it frightens me to a certain extent how this happened in the past, has happened in the past or whether it’s something in the future.

For example, let me give you a vivid example. I’ll tell you how I looked at the immediate reports that Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons in Syria a year or so ago. I said bullshit. I’ll believe it when I see evidence that it actually happened. And I went to every person I knew in the intelligence community, and every person outside the United States I knew to include two people who were in Syria at the time, and I knew what was going on and I respected their vision and their knowledge. None of them could confirm for me, not a single one, that Bashar al-Assad used those chemical weapons. Instead there were possibilities they were used by other parties in Syria as well as by Assad, and frankly, the evidence looked more strongly for other parties than the president. So I still think there is high potential for this kind of manipulation of intelligence, this kind of fabrication of intelligence, and this kind of refusal to take dissent in the leadership in this country right now today. And I’ll tell you very seriously I’m very skeptical of the intelligence establishment and what it says.

AM: Right, I mean, I always thought it was weird that the UN weapons inspectors were there on the ground and that’s when Assad decided to use the chemical weapons—when he already knew that was the red line. This whole red line mantra is really interesting because why should weapons of mass destruction of any sort of be that red line to actually legitimize the invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation? I wanted to say one more thing about the case. One of the biggest resonating factors, I think, in the speech was Saddam’s anthrax stockpiles and bio-weapons labs. Considering the fact that America had just been traumatized by its own anthrax attacks where five people tragically lost their lives, why did you choose to hinge so much on anthrax in the speech?

LW: No, as a matter of fact, we winnowed that thing to death. We threw tons of stuff out that we simply looked at and said, “All this is is an extrapolation from 1991 or 92. In other words, we looked at it and said the CIA has no evidence that Saddam has done what they’re saying he’s done. All they’ve done is made a linear projection. If he was producing six ounces in 1991, and we knew that positively from the inspectors after the war, then he’s now got 46 ounces because he could do two a year, or whatever. That’s what they’ve done.

AM: Of course, it came out that the anthrax came from our own bio-weapons lab. The final report from the FBI found no hard evidence linking Bruce Ivins to the attack.

LW: Well, I don’t know that, and I can’t tell you why don’t know that, but I don’t know that. I don’t know it with the clarity with which you just expressed it.

AM: That’s what the FBI said.

LW: Well, the FBI is as incompetent as any other bureaucratic entity within the federal structure.

AM: Right, but I think it is pretty much conclusive that it came from within… I mean, the bio-grade of the anthrax came from within the US establishment.

LW: It wouldn’t surprise me.

AM: Well, let’s talk about what was your kind of deciding factor to speak out and be so vocal…

LW: Torture. When Powell came through my door in May, I guess it was, of 2004, and told me about some photographs that we’re going to come out, may be made public, about a place called Abu Ghraib in Iraq… By the time I walked out of the State Department, I was ready to go find somebody and cut his throat because I knew that the United States had been involved in heinous activities in Vietnam. I knew they’d been involved in heinous activities in the Philippines. Indeed, a brigadier general, as I recall it, machine-gunned a thousand people in a ditch in the Philippines, and Teddy Roosevelt had sent him a telegram congratulating him. When people found out what he’d really done, Teddy had to kind of withdraw that approval, but I knew we had done some really bad things in the past, particularly in war, but I never, never knew any time in our history where those bad things had not only been authorized at the highest levels in the land but encouraged by the highest levels in the land. And I mean the president and the vice president of the United States and some of the cabinet officers. They were complicit in this. They gave instructions that they damn well knew we’re going to cause the Armed Forces of the United States to involve themselves in violations of the Geneva Conventions, the law of war and the manuals that they operated under. That just threw me. I said I can’t stay silent anymore. I’m going to speak out.

AM: And looking back at the horrors of the administration, as you mentioned, the torture, wanton detention, and of course, the illegal war that was based on false pretenses that cost the lives of a million Iraqis. Do you think that any members of the Bush administration should be charged with war crimes?

LW: I’ve said so in the past. I do think they should be charged. I think six lawyers in particular ought to be disbarred immediately. They should have been disbarred immediately. I think they should probably also be tried.

AM: Soldiers have been continuously dying in Afghanistan in America’s longest war. Today they’re still facing death, horrific injuries, for essentially no purpose it seems. I mean…

LW: Be careful.

AM: How do you think they should understand the war in Afghanistan?

LW: Be careful.

AM: What do you think their purpose should be?

LW: The war in Afghanistan has morphed. It’s not about Al-Qaida anymore, and it’s not about the Taliban anymore. It’s about China, Russia, the soft underbelly of Russia, which is mostly Muslim, about Pakistan, about Iran, about Syria, about Iraq, about whether Kurdistan is stood up or not, and ultimately about oil, water and energy in general. And the US presence in Afghanistan, I’ll predict right now, will not go away for another half century.

AM: My God. That’s a horrible thought.

LW: And it will grow. It will not decrease. It will grow.

AM: And let’s talk about strategic influence especially. We see this Cold War resurrection going on right now. As someone who lived throughout the Cold War… the schism within the establishment when it comes to Russia and this new posturing with Russia… After the reunification of Germany there was a promise on behalf of NATO that it would not continue to build up.

LW: Not one inch further east is what Jim Baker, Secretary of State, said to Edward Shevardnadze.

AM: What interests are behind the build-up?

LW: Why do we want more countries in NATO? Because then Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and Boeing and others can sell to them. Then the Soviets, now the Russians, won’t be selling to them. Why did we want Ukraine?

AM: Don’t we have enough?

LW: Empire never has enough. That’s the nature of imperial power. It never has enough. Have you ever watched Battlestar Galactica or Star Wars, or Game of Thrones? Empire never has enough power. It never has enough wealth. It never has a more stable status quo. It has an increasingly unstable status quo, and so its efforts are ever more frenetic to protect that status quo, its power and its wealth, and even expand them. That’s the nature of Empire, and that’s what we are now. That’s what we are. Everyone’s protestations to the contrary, that’s what we are. Depending on whose reports you read, about a third, 20% I’ll say, to 30 percent of Russia’s heavy armaments industry is in Ukraine. What do they do for tanks? What do they do for their heavy armaments in their military if Ukraine goes? The idea that we could do something in Ukraine, covert or otherwise, and have Putin not respond is just laughable.

AM: I feel like a lot of people of course feel helpless, especially those of us living within the Empire, paying and sponsoring all these atrocities with our tax dollars. What can we do to prevent this government, the military industrial complex from crushing us?

LW: The people, the American people, or at least a substantial powerful minority of them, hopefully a powerful majority of them, are going to have to get sick and tired of this. They’re going to have to get angry about it, and they’re going to have to take action. That’s the only thing that I see as a way to salvage this republic before it sinks completely. We are going to have to have a very powerful minority, or hopefully, as I said a majority, 51%, 52%, who actually stand up on their hind legs and say, “I’ve had it. This isn’t going to happen anymore. You’re not getting…” Does that mean revolution? It might. It might indeed.

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FOLLOW // @EmpireFiles and @AbbyMartin

WATCH // YouTube.com/EmpireFiles

Transcript by Dennis Riches

Lawmakers pushing through the next bloated war budget have received millions in campaign contributions from defense contractors, according to Open Secrets.

While the military industrial complex churns unabated and bombs drop across the Middle East in our names, citizens in America continue to be victimized by economic warfare and terrorized by militarized police forces.

On this episode of Media Roots Radio, Eugene Puryear, organizer with the ANSWER coalition and author of Shackled and Chained, connects the war at home and abroad on a systems level while deconstructing the toxic neoliberal ideology that dominates global policy in the 21st century.

If you want to directly download the podcast, click the down arrow icon on the right of the soundcloud display.

To hide the comments to enable easier rewind and fast forward, click on the icon on the very bottom right.

This Media Roots podcast is the product of many long hours of hard work and love. If you want to encourage our voice, please consider supporting us as we continue to speak from outside party lines. Even the smallest donations help us with operating costs.

Listen to all previous episodes of Media Roots Radio here.

Follow @AbbyMartin and @EugenePuryear

Photo by flickr user Moyan Brent

Articles aplenty have appeared to mark the recent 50th anniversary of the first battle between US soldiers and the army of what was known in this country as North Vietnam. Come April, we can expect far more commentary on the 40th anniversary of the end of the fighting in what is still referred to as the “Fall of Saigon.”

This is especially significant considering the Pentagon recently posted a lengthy history of the Vietnam War (the Vietnamese, whose struggle for independence was waged against the Chinese, the French and the Japanese, in addition to the US, refer to this same period as the American War). Many sifting through its website might be confused as to why the stories differ dramatically from what one would hear from a war veteran or activist.

Pinpointing where US aggression in Vietnam began depends on how one determines when war starts. It’s silly to claim it began in February of 1965, as tens of thousands of Vietnamese were already dead at US hands by that point. Better to trace the origins to 1945, when the United States refused to recognize the new government established by Vietnamese independence forces.

See, Japan invaded Vietnam years earlier and French colonialists ceded the country to the Japanese. When French colonialists finished sipping cognac in Paris and decided to re-invade Vietnam, the US backed them to the hilt with weapons, financing and diplomatic cover. Unsurprisingly, the Vietnamese people resisted – just as they had resisted other occupiers for centuries.

As the French failed its attempt at re-conquest, the US bore more of the war’s burden until, in 1954, the Vietnamese were again on a path to independence. Yet the US undermined the elections Washington knew Ho Chi Minh would win in a landslide. As in dozens of cases over the past 100 years, the US opposed democracy in favor of aggression. Elections are praised when the right people win; machine guns raised if the wrong people win.

The US flew Ngo Dinh Diem in from New Jersey and installed him as dictator. Eventually, Kennedy had him whacked a mere three weeks before he himself was assassinated. This was not, however, before Kennedy began the saturation bombing of South Vietnam with napalm, while also calling for ground troops and organized strategic hamlets.

Lyndon Johnson’s fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964 was another turning point. Within six months, the Peace Candidate who had startled the world with a campaign ad attacking Barry Goldwater as a warmonger extended the invasion and bombing campaign in Vietnam. So it remained until the Super Rich grew antsy about the financial costs of the war, the US’s growing international embarrassment, unprecedented domestic upheaval, an army that increasingly wouldn’t fight, and the stark realization that there was no way the Vietnamese could lose militarily. I recall reading years ago something a Vietnamese elder who had probably seen as much death and destruction as anyone who ever lived said (I’m paraphrasing): We can settle this now or we can settle it a thousand years from now. It’s up to the Americans.                 

It’s impossible to calculate the Vietnamese death toll. Whatever Vietnam has said has been dismissed by the powerful, as anti-American propaganda and US elites have never bothered to summarize. Their attitude was captured perfectly by a general speaking of a more recent conflagration: “We don’t do body counts.” Not, anyway, when the dead bodies are victims of US violence.  

Three million Vietnamese deaths is a commonly cited figure but undoubtedly far too low. Also completely ignored is the Vietnamese experience of Agent Orange and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, for example. Take the terrible suffering of US soldiers and multiply their numbers ten thousand fold or more and we get a sense of the damage to the Vietnamese. Additionally, Vietnam and the rest of Indochina (it’s often conveniently forgotten that the US also waged war against Laos and Cambodia) are full of unexploded ordinances that regularly cause death and injuries, to this day. There’s also the starvation deaths of hundreds of thousands throughout Indochina immediately after the war. A countryside ravaged by bombing, combined with the curtailment of airlifts, doomed those hundreds of thousands once the US imposed an ironclad embargo. That’s an unpleasant truth, though; so much easier to blame everything on the Vietnamese Communists and the despotic Khmer Rouge.

Discussions of Vietnam are hardly academic exercises; the US is on a global rampage and falsifying history has paved the way to the US-caused deaths of three million Iraqis since the first invasion in 1991, to cite just one of many recent examples. We remain in the grips of people who worship wealth and are in love with war, so any truth and reckoning about Vietnam and the destruction imperialism wreaks on the world will have to come from us.

Andy Piascik is a long-time activist and award-winning author | [email protected]

Photo by flickr user Manhhai

Pine Ridge is one of the poorest counties in the US, and its conditions are comparable to developing countries. This is partly why Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and brilliant social critic, Chris Hedges, has referred to places like Pine Ridge as capitalism’s “sacrifice zones.”

Although this systemic subjugation is as old as civilization itself, the oppression of people in far away lands is now backed with an unprecedented amount of military force. Society’s toxic perpetuation of the “Military Mind” causes profound destruction, both domestically and internationally.

As 21st century capitalism thrives on an unsustainable model of endless growth, Hedges discusses the inevitable collapse of industrial civilization, analyzes cult-like behavioral patterns that rise out of desperation and explores the antidote to defeatism in an enlightening interview series with Breaking the Set.

“I don’t fight fascists because I’ll win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.” – Chris Hedges

Abby

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 Chris Hedges Part I: Crisis Cults and the Collapse of Industrial Civilization

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Chris Hedges Part II: The Military Mind and the Antidote to Defeatism

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AM: Why are places like Pine Ridge so susceptible to extreme poverty?

CH: These are places where unfettered capitalist forces – backed by force on behalf of the railroad companies, timber merchants, and the people who profited from decimating the buffalo herds – minding concerns, came in and seized the land of Native Americans and killed most of them. Not only that, but after herding them into what—in essence—were prisoner of war camps set out to destroy their culture, their religion, their language. That’s why Indian children were taken from their parents and put in Christian boarding schools where they were not allowed, for instance in Pine Ridge, to speak Lakota. What’s happening now with the late end of the industrial age and capitalism is that the reservation; that environment that Native American people have endured and suffered under is being extended and growing in greater and greater areas. We’re all being sacrificed as the residents of Charleston, West Virginia were sacrificed when their water was poisoned by coal companies, and it’s still poisoned. Although they’ve been told to drink it, people and children are coming home from school sick. This is not something that is unknown to Native Americans. I think that whole demented project of ceaseless exploitation, expansion, and violence. The template for that was set in the Westward expansion.

AM: You discuss how the world is globally integrated under an unsustainable form of capitalism, but America positions itself atop the totem pole justified by the notion of American exceptionalism. How do you think that that notion plays into the global collapse?

CH: Well, corporations are preying on the United States in the way that they prey on all nation’s states. They are in this essence super-national. They owe no loyalty to any one nation. That’s how you have seen the decimation of the American manufacturing base; that is how you’ve seen the transference of capital overseas where it lies beyond the reach of taxation. You have seen the rise of the decimation of the working class, and the rise of tremendous numbers of poor, whether they are listed as ‘in poverty’ or a category called ‘near poverty’. We’re now talking about half the country. The myth of America is still there; the idea of if you work hard, you can make something of yourself; the idea that we have a right to travel the globe and impose our virtues—supposed virtues—on other countries by force, which is what we are doing and attempting to do throughout the Middle Easy, although it’s not going very well for us.

Imperialism has always been a mask for trade, for business, for control of natural resources. That has been true since the United States began its imperialist expansion with the conquest of the Philippines, Cuba, the control of the Caribbean for sugar and bananas, into the Middle East for oil. So, what we are seeing is a clash between the myths that America once used to identify itself. Let’s not forget that many of the most fervent supporters of imperialist expansion came from labor unions. I mean, GOMPers was at the Versaille Treaty. All segments of this society are complicit. But these forces, which in essence kind of cannibalize both the natural environment and exploit human labor and have been doing this on the outer reaches of empire for decades, are now being done internally just as it was done in the original conquest of the United States against Native Americans.

AM: You talk about the impending environmental catastrophes, and also the severe economic uncertainty on the horizon—why do you think there is no sense of urgency on a large scale to address these troubling trends?

CH: Because they’re not reported. The commercial media is about bread and circus. It’s about spectacle. It’s about celebrity gossip. It’s about the Super Bowl. I mean, every week it’s something new. If we had a responsible media, especially a broadcast media, we would understand that climate change at this point is an emergency; that at this point the effects of climate change are unstoppable, and if we don’t radically configure our relationship with the ecosystem, very, very quickly the human species itself is in jeopardy. You can look at the World Bank report on climate change, turn up the heat, the World Bank can hardly be accused of being a radical organization and they speak at the end of that report in utterly apocalyptic terms. So, scientists—especially people who study climate change—they know very well what’s happening, and yet we are not hearing their voices.

We are mesmerized by electronic hallucinations, and that’s of course how corporations want it. When forty percent of the summer Arctic Sea ice melts, companies and corporations, like Shell Oil, look at the death throes of our planet as a business opportunity and they’ll run up and drop a half a billion dollar drill bits down into the Arctic Sea. I think what we have seen is a kind of iron control of the systems of information by corporate power who are determined to exploit, and exploit, and exploit until collapse, and now we’re about to see—in all likelihood—the President approve the northern leg of the Keystone XL Pipeline. So, it’s an uninformed public. It’s a public which has been diverted. They’re emotional and intellectual energy has been invested into spectacle, coupled with a ruthless corporate totalitarianism that thinks only in terms of quarterly profit and has absolutely no concern for the common good or sustenance of the ecosystem that might provide some kind of decent and acceptable living standards for future generations.

AM: Chris, but on the flip side you’ve also said that as collapse become palpable, humanity will retreat in what anthropologists call ‘crisis cults’. What is a ‘crisis cult’ and why does our psychological hardwiring always revert back to these modes of groupthink?

CH: When things become so desperate, human societies retreat into forms of magical thinking. At the end of the Indian Wars and the latter part of the 19th Century, you saw the rise of the Ghost Dance which swept through the remnants of native communities. These communities believed that the Great Spirit, the warriors would come back; the buffalo herds would come back; they would get their lands back; the white colonizer would disappear. That is replicated, as anthropologists have studied, throughout societies that collapse.

Now, the way we express our crisis cult, is through the radical Christian right, again, a form of magical thinking which denies evolution, which believes in the rapture; that those believers, when Jesus returns, will be raptured up into heaven. That’s a classic example of a crisis cult, so that when things become desperate you gather in a church, you pray, you carry out Christian ritual, you tend to lash out at a society to purge. You see it in the rhetoric. Whether it’s against homosexuals; whether it’s against undocumented workers, Muslims, a long list of contaminants that will somehow make the society right—all of that has within it the makings of a crisis cult. But crisis cults are what societies do when despair reaches such a level—and we’re certainly headed in that direction—when you are unable in a real way to affect the environment of the world around you, then you wrap yourself in these cocoons of fantasy.

AM: In the article The Myth of Human Progress, you write in reference to truth that people quote, ‘get as close as they can before the flames and heat drive them back. This intellectual and moral honesty, Nietzsche wrote, comes with a cost. Those singed by the fire of reality become ‘burnt children’, he wrote, eternal orphans in empires of illusion. Chris, if this is the way it has always worked, and those who seek truth are constantly ostracized, is humanity just doomed to be subject to empires of illusion?

CH: Well, I’m quoting Nietzsche there about looking down that only artist and philosophers have the capacity to look into what he calls the ‘molten pit of reality’, and when they come back out they find that the wider populous which is unable to look can’t deal with it. So, I depart a little bit from Nietzsche there. Nietzsche, like Plato, says that you create illusions, myth in order to explain a reality or help people cope with a reality. Unfortunately, the role of truth tellers in distraught or disturbed societies, and we have our own examples of that whether it’s Noam Chomsky, or Ralph Nader, or Cornell West—all of them, for getting up and speaking an unpleasant truth, have been pushed to the fringes of society.

The Liberal class is guilty, maybe even guiltier than the stations like MSNBC, which are utterly subservient to the Democratic Party and to the cult of Barack Obama, have kept those voices form us. So it’s not just the right, it’s the left, too; they are both trading in a false reality and that’s very dangerous, because when you can’t confront reality, when your society shuts out those voices that seek to describe what reality is and how it works, then you can’ talk about hope and you can’t talk about change because all hope and change is essentially redirected into a dead political process, or redirected in phantasm, in the idea that Barack Obama is going to save us from Wall Street or from the drone wars, or from environmental degradation. It’s a bit like those poor prisoners in the Gulag were writing letters to Uncle Joe Stalin. That is symptomatic and I think the United States would be probably a good example of an empire in serious decay and decline. These are qualities that are symptomatic of a society that no longer has the intellectual and moral health to face hard facts, readjust and carry out forms of self-criticism and self-correction.

AM: Let’s talk about that new Oxfam study that recently came out that shows how eighty-five people control the equivalent of the bottom half of the World’s wealth. What’s your response to people that say, “We just have to remove those eighty-five people”?

CH: Well, it’s a system of corporate power which is not necessarily driven by individuals so much as driven by corporate interests. Exxon Mobil, Citibank, Goldman-Sachs. So, you can arrest and imprison the head of Golman-Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein—which is where he belongs—but somebody will take his place. What has to happen is we have to break the back of corporate power which is now global, and break the logic whereby everything is about profit; that nothing has value beyond its monetary value. That’s an extremely dangerous moment for any society to live in, because when nothing has an intrinsic value, whether that’s water, air and human beings, then the ruthlessness of those corporate forces mean that you will squeeze every ounce of potential profit. Everything becomes a commodity and you squeeze those commodities until there’s nothing left and that’s exactly what’s happening. So, it’s not individuals, it’s the rise of corporate power which is a species of totalitarianism. Different; it differs from past systems of totalitarianism but it is no less totalitarian than fascism or communism, or totalitarian forces.

AM: Right. The system is a machine at this point. If those people died today, it would still grind on. In a recent article you discuss the menace of the military mind and how only devotion to establish forms of behavior result in individual success. How do you think this concept applies to the director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, and his feelings towards journalists who have exposed NSA documents?

CH: Well, I speak as a former war correspondent who spent twenty years covering conflicts around the globe—Latin America, the Middle East, the Balkans, Africa—so, I know the military really well and blind obedience, aggressiveness resort to violence.  All of these things; you know, destruction of individuality, all of these things work really well on a battlefield. They don’t work very well in a peacetime society. So, when Clapper made this comment that Edward Snowden and his quote-unquote ‘accomplices’—and he was clearly referring to journalists such as Laura Poitras and Glen Greenwald—should be prosecuted, I understood exactly what he was saying. He was a former Lieutenant General; he comes out of this military culture which detests the press, and has always made war on an independent press. Their vision of journalism are all the little lackeys who sit through their press conferences and follow them around and write glowing tributes to their heroism, or whatever they’re directed to write in press pools.

But actual journalism is something that within the military culture they’re deeply hostile, too, and the triumph of military values is—again—symptomatic of a civilization in decline; the rigidity, the celebration of hyper-masculinity, the lack of empathy, the belief that every problem should be dealt with by force both internationally and domestically, militaristic hyper-masculine regimes speak exclusively in the language of force, and then you see within popular culture, subsequently, a celebration of those hyper-masculine military values. I’ve been in enough combat to tell you those values are quite useful in a firefight, but they will destroy a civil society. I think that is a window into how tattered our civil society has become, and how we have shifted our allegiance from an open society, from empathy, from a capacity to embrace various opinions and outlooks and political stances to this increasingly rigid militaristic society, and Clapper is a figure who exemplifies precisely this sickness.

AM: Chris, in a recent speech you gave, you said quote, ‘I do not know if we can build a better society. I do not even know if we will survive as a species. But I know these corporate forces have us by the throat. And they have my children by the throat. I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.” Chris, Glen Greenwald recently spoke about how one man, Edward Snowden, has changed the world, and that singular capacity is the antidote to defeatism. What do you regard as the antidote to defeatism?

CH: You can’t talk about hope if you don’t resist, and Edward Snowden has certainly resisted. Heroically. We must carry out the good, or at least the good so far in as we can determine it, and then we have to let it go. The Buddhists call it ‘karma’. I come out of the seminary; that’s what faith is. It’s the belief that it goes somewhere even if empirically everything around you seems to point in the other direction. Once we give up, once we stop resisting, then we’re finished. Not only finished in a literal sense, but finished spiritually and morally. So, I fall back in moments of distress like this on that belief, which is one that I learned in seminary; that we have a capacity and an ability and a moral duty to fight against forces of evil even if it looks almost certain that those forces will triumph.

Transcript by Juan Martinez, Photo by flickr User theNerdPatrol

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