For the first time in modern history, a fringe wing of Christian extremists have obtained the highest seats of power in the US government—from Mike Pence to Betsy DeVos.

This new development is coupled with the emergence of the Alt Right, the Trump movement, and the rise of fascist movements abroad.

Renowned journalist and author Chris Hedges has embedded himself in what he calls “Christianized Fascism” and warns that this is the biggest danger we face under Trump.

Chris Hedges & Abby Martin – Trump, Fascism & the Christian Right

**

ABBY MARTIN: Many are calling Trump a fascist, even the next Hitler. Can you define what fascism is?

CHRIS HEDGES: Fascism is not really ideologically based. It’s very protean in terms of its ideology. There’s a German historian I like very much who wrote a book called Male Fantasies1 about the Freikorps, and the Freikorps were the antecedents to the Nazi Party. They were demobilized, right-wing World War I veterans who were used to crush the Spartacus uprising in Berlin and the kind of radical left. They killed Rosa Luxemburg. And it revolves more around emotion, hyper-masculinity, a virulent nationalism, a celebration of “strength” and of “military virtues.” It holds up a kind of moral purity that it claims to represent. Robert Paxton wrote a very good book called Anatomy of Fascism,2 and he notes that fascism in every country has its own peculiar characteristics in the sense that Italian fascism was very different in many ways from German fascism. I think that fascism, although I’ll use the word to describe Trump, is perhaps not finally accurate. I think you’re better off describing our system as what Sheldon Wolin, the political philosopher, calls inverted totalitarianism,3 by which he means that you’re not replacing old symbols and structures. It’s more like the old Roman republic after the civil wars and the rise of Augustus. So you still had a Senate. You still supposedly had a republic, but it was all a facade. So you have corporate forces that purport to pay fealty to electoral politics, the constitution, the iconography and language of American patriotism, but internally they have seized all of the levers of power to render the citizens disenfranchised. And Wolin writes that in that system, politics is never able to trump economics. It’s all about economic consolidation, maximization of profit, and so what we’re getting with Trump is, I think, a species of inverted totalitarianism, with demagoguery.

AM: It’s insane that one of Trump’s first measures was basically making it harder for poor people to get mortgages.

CH: Right, so what we’re going to get is a turbocharged neoliberalism. You can see it from all of the appointments around him.

AM: His political base is far from monolithic. We have the Christian right and the alt-right. I know that you’ve spent an enormous amount of time studying the Christian right, but what exactly is the alt-right. How would you even define this ideology? Would you say it is synonymous with neo-Nazism, like how people are saying that today?
CH: Yes, I think it has a lot of characteristics of neo-Nazism, but so does the Christian right. The Christian right, like the alt-right, is endowed with all sorts of conspiracy theories, coupled with magical thinking, coupled with an utter disdain for historical fact, and I think that what we will see is that the Christian right will fill Trump’s ideological vacuum because he doesn’t really have an ideology. He’s such a narcissist. And I think that that will be handled through Pence, so I think this in many ways will be the empowerment of Christian right, which I’ve always considered a political movement. I went to seminary. I grew up in the church. I do not consider them Christians any more than the German Christian church, which was pro-Nazi, was Christian. The German Christian church had the Nazi flag on one side and the Christian cross on the other. That’s how I look at the Christian right, and that’s why you saw 81% of evangelical voters support Trump, even though his personal life makes a mockery of the very values, the kind of family values that they say they hold sacred. So I think as we’re watching the Trump presidency, especially as it comes under attack from the establishment, both the old landed Republican and Democratic establishment, you’ll see his fortress become the ideology of the Christian right. I wrote a book called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. I didn’t use that word lightly. I think that they are Christianized fascists.

AM: But certainly there’s a differentiation between the Christian right and this emergence of these emboldened bigots who seem to be much more vitriolic—the alt-right, those who call themselves alt-right.

CH: No, I think the Christian right is as bigoted as the alt-right. The Christian Right is much more sophisticated because it is a network. Tens of millions of Americans are hermetically sealed within this bizarre world. With Betsy DeVos this is going to be expanded if everything goes through: $20 billion of federal money will get, in essence, handed off to religious schools, so they are sealed within their news, their religious information, their entertainment all gets colored with this Christianity. So one of things I learned when I wrote the book, which I spent two years on, was I would go to the services and they would have nice music and the chairs would be a lot more comfortable than the pews in the Presbyterian Church where I grew up. And it was kind of warm, and you would feel good, but then you would be pulled into the back rooms where you would be disciplined, and you would be assigned people. They would really break you down and sever you from your family because the next thing you know, you’re there every night of the week. I was in prayer groups where people were weeping because their children weren’t saved or their husband wasn’t saved, and that’s one of the great ironies. As they talk about family they’re the great destroyer of families. So they’re quite clever in having a kind of public face, which in many ways is even appealing, but which is very dark and cultish. I found many aspects of cults within it in terms of the way they broke people down, the kind of inability to question these white male pastors who had direct communication with God, made fabulous amounts of money off of these people’s despair, so I think that the Christian right is a far more dangerous movement than the alt-right, and I think that it has many characteristics that it shares with the alt-right in terms of its anti-Semitism, it’s homophobia, and it’s Islamophobia. I think the alt-right, because it incorporates so-called New Atheists, has its own coloring, but I think it shares many common traits with the Christian right. But I don’t think it’s as dangerous as the Christian right. I think people focus on it because it’s more visible. There is a strain of deep cruelty, savagery even, fascism and intolerance within the Christian right that is institutionalized in a way that makes it a far more dangerous movement than the alt-right.

AM: You mention that 80% of evangelicals voted for Trump. I wanted to briefly talk about how evangelicals became this highly politicized force because they don’t comprise that much of the population.

CH: It’s really a kind of fascinating story. It was a conscious attempt on the part of right-wing groups to politicize Christian conservative movements because traditionally fundamentalists, for instance, and evangelicals hated each other. Fundamentalists considered evangelicals, because they spoke in tongues and stuff, Satan. There were all these divisions. Fundamentalists called on believers to remove themselves from the political process and not be contaminated by it. This was in the 1920s and 30s. And what you saw roughly around 1980 was the rise of what we call dominionism. It was propagated by Rousas Rushdoony who wrote this very turgid book I had to read based on the ten commandments. This goes back to their saying we don’t have to worry about prisons because all murderers will be put to death and women who commit adultery will be stoned. It’s really crude stuff, and that got very heavily funded. They took over seminaries like Southern Baptist, which used to be a great seminary. They used to have in the Southern Baptist Church a fusion of kinds of Christians who were conservative, in terms their personal piety, but they were very left-wing in terms of their politics, which is how my father was, actually. That’s all gone, and so there was a kind of hostile takeover. The essence was: can we create the Christian society? And that viewpoint got infused into a movement that, while it’s called the Christian right, really doesn’t bear any resemblance to what had come before in terms of evangelicalism or fundamentalism. It was a new entity. Many people call it dominionism, and that’s when it got political and it began to strive for political power, with a lot of mistakes at first. They were too heavy-handed. They were too obtuse. Remember Pat Robertson ran for president, this kind of stuff, and now they’ve got a lot more clever, and they ally, for instance, with The Federalist Society. So Liberty University has a law school. They’re producing these federalist judges, so they have quite effectively seeped into the inner workings of power, and it is an ideology that, in that sense, although they speak about tradition, is really new.

AM: And Mike Pence was told by Trump’s people that he would be running domestic policy. He will be the most powerful Christian evangelical, if I’m not mistaken, ever in political history, especially with the executive power that’s given to the presidency. Will this move us forward to what you call Christianized fascism, and if so what would that look like?

CH: Yes, that’s what I expect because this is an ethics-free administration, as we’ve seen. There’s not even a pretense about ethical rules, whether it’s with Trump or anyone else, and so you have what’s going to become a kind of naked kleptocracy, and I’m not just speaking about Trump’s family, which of course will get fabulously rich, but about all those forces that are predatory, sucking money out of the education department. They’re just going to loot the country, but they’re also inept, which is a very bad combination. As that ineptitude becomes more pronounced and more understood, they are going to have to become more ideologically rigid, and I think the only place they’re going to go is to the Christian right. So what is it going to look like? It’s going to look like a Christianized fascism. It’s going to be the fusion of the American flag with the Christian cross and the Pledge of Allegiance. We’ve already seen it. It is going to be assaults on women’s rights. It’s going to be assaults against the educational system, so we’re teaching creationism and magical thinking. It’s going to be attacks against “those forces of secular humanism that are destroying the country.” It’s going to be a kind of sanctification of law and order, and imperial adventurism turned into a kind of crusade. And I think that as society unravels they will stoke this demonization of the other: Muslims, undocumented workers, African- Americans are on the list… feminists, all the way down the list, to vent the frustration and the rage against segments of the society that are vulnerable within the context of a kind of Christianized language. That’s what I think is coming.

AM: Betsy DeVos: you mentioned her. She’s being roundly condemned for many reasons as being Trump’s appointed secretary of education, but people are under-reporting her ties to Erik Prince, her brother. He’s the famous mercenary founder of Blackwater. He’s also one of Pence’s biggest donors, and now he’s advising Trump.

CH: Right, and I had a conversation with Jeremy Scahill who wrote the great book on Blackwater4, and I had been going around the country speaking about the Christian right, and I said, “We don’t have to worry. They’re not fascists because they don’t have an armed wing,” and Jeremy said, “What do you mean? That is their armed wing.” And I realized he was right and I was wrong, and they do have, through Blackwater, essentially mercenary forces at their disposal, and any totalitarian or even authoritarian government relies heavily on vigilante violence because they’re not held accountable for it, even the excesses of the Brownshirts. People forget Hitler would denounce them because he could, but of course he was giving a green light to them, but then they would go beat up a bunch of people and there would be an outcry, and Hitler would say, “Well, they shouldn’t have done that.” These forces, will, I think, play an increasingly prominent and frightening role within American society because they’re not going to be punished. They’re not held accountable and they can carry out forms of coercion and violence and intimidation, and threats on behalf of the state, and the state will protect them, but they’re kind of immune. And that’s classic fascism.

AM: Yeah, we saw it in Israel. We see it everywhere with these kinds of militias that then become…

CH: I saw it in Yugoslavia.

AM: Yeah, but I was going to say Blackwater and what Eric Prince is doing is kind of institutionalized whereas, as far as the vigilante groups on the ground, the actual armed militias that are emboldened by people like Joe Arpaio and are taking action on their own terms at the border, those are different, right?

CH: They are, but they’ll be brought under control. Again, you can go back to the historical record. The state wants centralized control. That’s what finally did in the Brownshirts with the Night of the Long Knives. When Hitler got rid of Röhm and the SS supplanted the Brownshirts. They want control, so I think all of those groups, if we come to this, will be put within structures that may not be public structures, but will be put within structures.

AM: I think a fascinating example of how this has already happened under the Obama administration is the difference between the Standing Rock North Dakota access pipeline protesters, who are unarmed, and crushed, and then you have the Bundy Ranch Militia.

CH: There you go because imagine Bundy and all those guys were black. They’d all be dead. There’s a good example, but that’s always been true, and Richard Hofstadter wrote about that in his last book on violence.5 Throughout American history we have relied on white vigilante thugs to go after African-Americans, the Chinese labor movement. We’ve had bloody labor wars in US history. Hundreds of American workers were killed, and who killed them? Gun thugs, Pinkertons, Baldwin-Felts, mine militias raised by the Scrantons in Pennsylvania. There’s a long tradition of that, including the klan (the KKK), and so we have this kind of historical precedence for what’s coming.

AM: And as the Trump administration uses the rhetoric of alternative facts to basically shut down any dissent, what about the alternative facts being promoted from websites like Breidtbart or Infowars? Do you have any comment on the fact that Steve Bannon is now in the ear of Trump, and so is Alex Jones.

CH: Well, they’re conspiracy theorists, just like Trump, so they just reinforce his kind of loony worldview.

AM: The US isn’t the only country where we’re seeing this far right rise. Obviously, this is happening in Europe and beyond. How is what we’re witnessing here connected to elsewhere in the world?

CH: Well, it’s the result of neoliberal economics where you destroy public institutions, and, whatever you say about communism, and I was there in Eastern Europe, they had a first- class educational system which people did not pay for. Everyone had health insurance. There was full employment, and so neoliberalism went in and destroyed, in the name of the free market—which everyone confused with freedom, all of those institutions. Huge state enterprises closed, and this caused massive unemployment. I was just in Poland. Two million young Poles work as baristas in Spain or somewhere. And it created a new oligarchic class by selling off state assets. This happened, of course as well, with Russia, and people finally woke up and realized they were being had, and they were being had by that “liberal establishment” in the same way that we’ve been had by these liberal elites on the East Coast and the West Coast. And we’ve seen the rise of proto- fascist movements in Hungary and Poland. We’re seeing powerful proto-fascist movements in France and even Germany. And it all goes back to this idea that human society and human life should be ruled by the dictates of the global marketplace. It’s an insane ideology that’s never worked anywhere in human history, but until we break the back of corporate power, we’re not going to blunt the rise of these movements.

AM: Yeah, we’re in such a post-truth reality that people think that Trump is still anti- establishment because they’ve just learned to blame the state for all of their ills.

CH: That’s right, and when they figure out somehow that he isn’t, when they get what’s happening, then you will see turbocharged the hate talk and the hate crimes. That is classic fascism.

AM: Like you said, the police state was already put in place. It just takes someone like Trump to pull the lever.

CH: This was the big mistake. He has all the tools at his disposal to, with the flick of a switch, turn this into a police state. They were all given to him primarily by the Bush and the Obama administrations. We allowed whole segments of our population to be stripped of their rights. I’m talking about poor people of color and marginal communities, a court system where you know 95-94% never even get a trial, of the system of mass incarceration, the police terror where police can use indiscriminate lethal force against unarmed people. Hannah Arendt writes about this in The Origins of Totalitarianism.6 When you allow a segment of your population—she was talking about stateless persons—she herself was stateless in France—to be stripped of their rights, once rights become privileges, then should unrest spread throughout the society, you have both a legal and physical mechanism to impose. They’re already in place to impose on everyone else, and that’s what we’re seeing: that what poor people of color have been enduring in these mini police states is just instantly expanded once the rest of the population is no longer passive.

AM: You talk about how the biggest way to fight Trump, the Christian right and the alt-right is to revolt. Mass resistance. What does that look like? What does that mean? And why is the Democratic Party not the vehicle for the resistance?

CH: Because the Democratic Party is not going to confront the underlying ideological system of neoliberalism or corporate power, which has created the mess that we now live in. Instead of we, and the opposition, dealing directly with the ravages of neoliberalism and what it’s done, you have a Democratic Party that blames the election result on Putin or on FBI director James Comey. This is ridiculous, and it is a way to be as demagogic as Trump, and a way to present alternative facts of your own, and that’s very dangerous because if we don’t have significant segments of the society that deal with the ideology, the utopian ideology of neoliberalism that has led us to this mess, and continues to offer up these alternative facts, then, in essence, they’re going to collude with Trump to create a form of American fascism, and they will be in many ways as responsible. If we don’t go after those corporate forces through acts of civil disobedience, such as at Standing Rock, we don’t have any other way to have our voices heard or to create resistance. Now, it’s going to be ugly under the Trump administration, and Standing Rock was ugly under Obama—rubber bullets, concussion grenades, water in sub-zero temperatures laced with pepper spray. It was ugly there, but it’s going to be even uglier because there just will be no holds barred at all. And in Standing Rock they brought in private security contractors who had just come from Afghanistan and Iraq, which gets back to these kinds of quasi-militias aligned with the Christian right. We’re just going to see a lot more of that. It’s going to be fierce, but there are no institutions left that are authentically democratic, that are going to challenge the centrifugal forces that have brought us to where we are. That’s only going to be done in the streets.

**

FOLLOW // @EmpireFiles & @AbbyMartin

WATCH // YouTube.com/EmpireFiles

The release of the report, submitted by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, that offered details to support U.S. officials’ claims that Russian interference had tainted the recent American presidential election was treated by many news sources as a major development and further justification for treating the Kremlin, not to mention the incoming Donald Trump administration, with suspicion.

Several alternative media sources, including this one, have also wound up on the receiving end of censure and what Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges considers a kind of McCarthyism for questioning prevailing media and government narratives and for continuing to demand concrete proof of Russian intervention.

On this week’s episode of “On Contact With Chris Hedges,” journalists Abby Martin and Ben Norton join Hedges for a wide-ranging discussion about troubling shifts away from fact-based reporting and governance—as well as the potential costs of insisting that, as Norton put it, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

The long awaited intelligence report on Russian ‘interference’ in the 2016 presidential election contains a lengthy and detailed attack on RT’s programming as evidence of a Kremlin plot to subvert U.S. democracy.

The DNI report specifically cited Breaking the Set, a popular RT America show hosted by Abby Martin, as promoting “radical discontent.” Martin gives an impassioned response to former BTS producer, Anya Parampil, about the DNI accusing their two year old show as somehow having an influence on the election.

Abby Martin Blasts DNI Report, New Cold War

**

– The US intelligence agencies’ unclassified report on Russia’s involvement in the election didn’t provide any evidence of hacking, instead choosing to focus on media such as RT. Brian Becker speaks with Abby Martin about why her show was included and the way the mainstream media has slandered her.

– Almost half of the US intelligence report is dedicated to describing RT’s alleged efforts to “fuel discontent in the US.” It goes on to accuse some former programs of being overwhelmingly critical of American and Western governments for years. RT International talks with Abby Martin, who was the host of one of the shows cited in the report, Breaking the Set.

– Abby and Robbie Martin immediately respond to the news of the intelligence report blaming Russia Today, and specifically Breaking the Set, for Trump’s win after it broke in a special edition of Media Roots Radio.

– Journalists Abby Martin and Ben Norton join Chris Hedges for a wide-ranging discussion about troubling shifts away from fact-based reporting and governance—as well as the potential costs of insisting that, as Norton put it, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

– Abby Martin joins journalists Rania Khalek and Kevin Gosztola on their podcast Unauthorized Disclosure to discuss the DNI report, the deep state attempting to undermine POTUS Trump and the rotting Empire.

Chris Hedges, New York Times best selling author, activist, and host of the new show on TeleSUR English Days of Revolt, joins Abby Martin to talk about war, propaganda, and the suppression of radical voices.

Hedges discusses US expansion of power by way of military force and the cultivation of indigenous elites, including supporting the rise of dictatorships—Mabutu Seke in the Congo, Somoza in Nicaragua, and the Shah in Iran. The protection of Western interests led to what Hedges calls the “heavy intrusion of Empire” which included things like the Reagan administration supporting military juntas and orchestrating a counter-revolutionary movement in order to combat Communist advances.

US interventionism hasn’t always been strictly undercover operations but has included unashamedly public use of lethal force, blatant surveillance, the destruction of the most basic of civil liberties, as well as the destruction of democracy – both at home and abroad. Hedges argues that since World War II, the US has masked how much has been spent on military bloc budgets, and that a massive amount of resources are being diverted towards maintaining imperial war, and the military establishment—the expansion of military power leads to catastrophic results for the world socially, economically, environmentally, and politically. And we are already seeing these consequences unfold.

War, Propaganda & the Enemy Within

**

Chris Hedges Destroys “New Atheist” Religious Fundamentalism

**

ABBY MARTIN: Chris, Eugene Debs, the famous socialist candidate back during WWI was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his opposition to the Sedition Act. It made it illegal for anyone to speak out in opposition to the war at that time. What does that say about the myth of democracy from that early on?

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, it says that if you challenge the structures of power, and particularly military power, you are at best marginalized, if not imprisoned. Those kinds of few radical voices that held fast–Randolph Bourne, Jane Adams, Eugene Debs–were excoriated in the press. Emma Goldman was eventually deported along with Alexander Berkman and others. Randolph Bourne said war is the health of the state. What you saw in WWI was the rise of the military corporate machine, which made war against these radicals through the Sedition Act, the Espionage Act and more importantly the Committee for Public Information Commission, or the Creel Commission, which created the system of modern mass propaganda, employing the understanding of crowd psychology pioneered by figures like Le Bon, Trotter and Sigmund Freud, that people were not moved by fact or reason. They were moved by the very skillful manipulation of emotion. And it worked, so Hollywood was making films like “Kaiser: the Butcher of Berlin.” The Creel Commission had its own news division.

You couldn’t even write anti-war editorials. It was against the law. It had speakers’ bureaus and you only had to use the Sedition Act and espionage on those kind of few figures who held fast to an anti-war stance, of which there were not many, and when you read people like Jane Adams, part of what they are most depressed about is how easily the intellectual class, even the reportedly left intellectual class, was seduced in the war effort. Then after the war the dreaded Hun becomes the dreaded Red and we enter what Dwight MacDonald calls this “psychosis of permanent war in the name of anti-communism”–the fusion of war and the war profiteers, the militarists and the war profiteers, which after WWII created a situation of total war.

After WWI, factories re-converted to produce domestic products. After WWII, they kept producing weapons, even though we had peace, so that we could obliterate every Soviet city ten times over with nuclear weapons. It was nuts, but with guaranteed cost overruns and guaranteed profits, that fusion of the militarists and the corporatists hijacked the country, disemboweled the country economically, and made war on all of those advances that had come under the New Deal. So it had both in an economic impact and a political impact. The USA is undoubtedly the world’s biggest, strongest empire in history, but it operates in a different way than empires past.

AM: How has the notion of empire changed over the last century?

CH: America’s unique in the sense that it colonized itself. European countries colonized India and Africa. The Spanish… the Americans… we destroyed through acts of genocide on our indigenous communities, and plundered their resources, so you had especially with the westward expansion, the US cavalry acting on behalf of the mining concerns, the railroad companies, the timber merchants. And once westward expansion was complete by the end of the 19th century, you began expansion beyond US borders. That’s when you had the Cuban-American war with the seizure of Cuba and the Philippines.

You began to see all sorts of gunboat diplomacy throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, in particular Central America. America expanded its power certainly through military force, and the threat of military force, but more by cultivating indigenous elites that would do our bidding, so you saw the rise of all sorts of dictatorships, whether it was Mobutu in the Congo or Somoza in Nicaragua, or the Shah in Iran. And of course we overthrew the Shah’s father then carried out a coup d’état to replace Mossadegh, the Prime Minister who was going to nationalize British Oil. That form of colonial power protected Western interests.

That’s why Allende was overthrown in 1973 and Pinochet was put in power to protect the copper industry from being nationalized. These elites were given tremendous resources. We saw the same thing in 1954 in Guatemala with Arbenz who wanted to challenge United Fruit’s huge acquisition of Guatemalan land to give landless peasants an ability to carry out subsistence farming, and when that happened the CIA raised a kind of black army. A huge propaganda effort run by Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations, would come out of the Creel commission. Of course, Arbenz becomes a communist in the eyes of the press which they, through the manipulation of the press, are able to justify. So it’s a different kind of empire in the sense that, for instance, British troops actually occupied India (although many of those troops were Sikhs). We find venal elites who will do our bidding and when people rise up against those elites we provide those elites with the resources by which they can crush any form of rebellion.

AM: I wanted to talk about El Salvador in particular because you’ve seen and obviously covered extensively the horrors of US wars all over the region. What did this conflict in particular reveal about the length the empire will go to maintain economic hegemony?

CH: So its 1979 and the Sandinistas win in Nicaragua and this sets off all kinds of alarm bells because the Sandinistas–unlike Samoza who was the dictator of Nicaragua and was overthrown and later assassinated in Paraguay–were not going to protect US business interests and they did not want to see this spread throughout the region. And so I covered the war there from 1983 to 1988 and we saw the Reagan administration pump tremendous military, economic and intelligence resources into defeating the rebel group known as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). When I first got to El Salvador in 1983 the FMLN was winning the war.

They created–the Reagan administration–they brought in a huge helicopter fleet–70 Hughes helicopters that they put up in the air which made it hard for these guerrilla groups to mass in any kind of large formation. In 1983 I was able to go out with up to 700 or 800 rebels at a clip. That didn’t happen anymore. They created whole black armies that were recruited from Venezuela, Chile, Honduras and other places, that didn’t exist officially–they were ghosts armies. They called them cazador or “hunter battalions”–about 350 soldiers, very well trained, very well equipped. We would go up into Morazan and come upon the aftermath of tremendous fire, and yet there was no record of the Salvadoran army ever being there. They brought in all sorts of CIA, mostly ex-Cuban operatives, including Felix Rodriguez, who had been part of the effort to hunt down Che Guevara. Indeed he would show us Che Guevara’s wrist watch that he was wearing, taken off Che’s body. So there’s a kind of classic example of the heavy intrusion of empire to thwart… half of the population in El Salvador at the time was landless and most of the land was owned by these coffee barons–roughly ten families. They call them the Big Ten families. It was worse than serfdom. People living in tremendous poverty and deprivation and when they tried to organize peacefully in terms of building labor unions, they were literally gunned down in the streets. They put machine guns up on the rooves of buildings in the capital and then when people began to resist, the death squads, when I got to the country, were killing between 700 and 1,000 people a month. It was butchery which we funded and largely orchestrated.

You saw the same thing in Iraq, by the way. When things broke down in Iraq, they took James Steele–who I knew, a colonel, he had been the head of the military group in El Salvador who had worked with the death squads–they moved him to Iraq and he organized the Shiite death squads which carried out a reign of terror to break the Sunni resistance, and really, if you really want to look at it, create groups like ISIS. That’s how empire works and when you’re up close, as I was for twenty years, and you see the inner workings of empire, you understand how vicious and ruthless and brutal it is. But it’s very hard to penetrate within the heart of empire that reality, so that reporters such as myself who would report on these things were under constant attack, not only from the state department and from the government, but… eventually I was working for The Dallas Morning News on Central America and later for the New York Times… but from our own Washington bureaus that we’re being spun a fictitious narrative, and we were kind of demonized as being the fifth front of the rebel movement. And of course 22 reporters were killed in El Salvador, some of them assassinated by the death squads. The pressure that empire will put on those few reporters who attempt to go out and actually report is fierce and can even involve the loss of life.

AM: In reference to the Iraq war in 2003 and war as a force that gives us meaning, you said that the notion that the press was used in the war is incorrect. The press wanted to be used. Isn’t that the antithesis of what journalism should be: wanting to be used?

CH: Yeah, but you know journalists are careerists like anyone else and they know how to advance within the system. So let’s take for instance the first Gulf War which I covered with a very draconian press restriction. You could only be in a pool. I mean, I didn’t do it. I could speak Arabic, so I was out in the desert, then Cheney drew up a list of ten journalists he wanted expelled and I was top of the list, but they couldn’t find me because I was sleeping in a tent. You wouldn’t think I would be that hard to find in Saudi Arabia. No, the press goes limp in front of the military.

First of all, real war correspondents, people who really know the culture of war and have covered it… you’re talking a couple dozen. Most of them get sent over from their Washington bureau and I would literally watch them dress up in military uniforms and go sit in a five star hotel in Dhahran to hear Schwarzkopf, and sit in the front row, and they weren’t anywhere near a war, nor did they want to go near a war, and that’s true with every war I covered: only about ten or fifteen percent want to go near one. Photographers are a little more honest because they have to get out. They don’t really want to cover the war there, and covering war is a kind of insanity. I have a kind of even empathy for that, but then you shouldn’t be there. And the people who create these kinds of heroic narratives around their soldiers or their leaders and tell the story the way expected… They’re rewarded for it. They’re awarded for it by the institution. They’re rewarded by the military itself. In the first Gulf War, that whole pool system was not actually administered by the military. It was administered by fellow journalists. I used to call them Judenrat. It’s insane, but it coupled with the fact that they didn’t really want to get anywhere near the fighting, and that’s the truth of it. And secondly that they understood what was good for their career, and their career took precedence over the truth, and that’s not uncommon unfortunately.

AM: In 2003 you were booed at Rockford College and you were shamed offstage. I mean it’s just ironic because…

CH: I wasn’t shamed. I was forced offstage. I was willing to keep going. They cut my mic, and then campus security suggested that it was time for me to leave.

AM: The symbolism of that is so ironic because, of course, of the woman you were speaking of earlier, and her opposition to WWI and then we go to the New York Times’ response to this which is just hysterical because they’re saying you’re damaging the paper’s impartiality, meanwhile lauding people like Judith Miller at the time who just became literal stenographers. What was your reaction to that? Did you know at that time it had just become a complete farce? Or were you slighted?

CH: I’d been at the paper for fifteen years, so I knew the consequences for a news reporter. A columnist can say it, but of course columnists are selected by the establishment. I would never be selected as a columnist. You would select Thomas Friedman, or whoever who is not going to make those kind of statements. No, I was conscious of the game I was playing and the danger in terms of where I was going, but I had spent seven years the Middle East. I understood the folly of what we were doing. I felt that as an Arabist, I had a platform and a duty to speak because people I cared about would be and finally were killed in Iraq. Of course it deep-sixed my career, but on the other hand I really couldn’t have lived with myself, given the consequences of what has been done in Iraq: over a million dead, Iraq as a unified country is never coming back. What is it? Four million refugees and displaced, it had one of the most modern infrastructures in the Middle East. It’s been destroyed, and out of these failed states that we created or these failed enclaves we’ve seen the rise of groups like Al-Qaida in Iraq which has finally morphed into ISIS. I was aware of what I was doing, but nobody likes to lose their job, but I don’t think I could have looked back and done anything differently.

AM: Especially since you’re covering already the devastation of the Gulf War targeting of just crucial infrastructure at that point, and then followed by these harsh sanctions that took the lives of half a million children. How the hell can anyone support this continued military adventure over there?

CH: Well, because so much of it’s about natural resources. They always justify their intervention based on “bringing democracy” and “fighting barbarism” while everybody sort of turns their back on the Congo where atrocities are far worse.

AM: Cobalt.

CH: Yeah, I had written a column in which I said you can’t be a socialist unless you’re an anti-imperialist and anti-militarist because it’s really those forces, and we have to remember that the arms industry is a for-profit industry. We sell 40% of the world’s weapons. We have to break the back of empire, not only for what empire is doing to what Frantz Fanon calls “the wretched of the earth,” but for what it’s doing at home because as it disembowels the country, the harsh forms of control that empire uses on the outer reaches of empire migrate back to the homeland, so you get wholesale surveillance, militarized police, indiscriminate use of lethal force on our city streets. We’re in Baltimore where you don’t have to go very far to see that, and destruction of our most basic civil liberties.

This is the disease of empire. It goes all the way back to Thucydides who saw that as Athens expanded it destroyed its own democracy. Thucydides wrote, “The tyranny that Athens imposed on others it had finally imposed on itself.” We’re no exception and that’s what’s happening. We should be cognizant of the suffering of the Palestinians, and the Iraqis, the Afghanis, the Yemenis, the Pakistanis. We should be cognizant of the power of the industrial weapons, the missiles, the thousand-pound iron fragmentation bombs that we’re dropping. We are not. I think only those of us who’ve been near the receiving ends of these weapons understand how widespread this lethal force is–the power of these weapons, but it ultimately has reverberations for us which are already very, very extensive. The forms of power that empire uses to control subject populations abroad are now visible within America itself.

AM: Yet even the most “populist candidate today,” Bernie Sanders is widely popular among people who are so-called radical leftists. He has refused to confront the war industry and the crimes of empire, and continues to do so. You’ve pointed this out time and again. Why is this issue the most important thing to confront?

CH: Well, because what you had after WWII with the fusion of the so-called “defense industry” (the war machine, the arms industry, and the corporatists who profit off of war) is what John Ralston Saul correctly calls “a coup d’état in slow motion.” And you can’t challenge one weapon system. We used to, in the 1960s, Proxmire and others, challenge this weapon system, and that’s over. We mask how much we spend. Officially we spend a little more than 53 percent of discretionary spending on defense. Well, that’s just not true. It doesn’t count Veterans Affairs. It doesn’t count our nuclear weapons program, and it doesn’t count all of the black agendas, the black budgets that we’re not allowed to see. The best estimates are that we’re spending 1.6 to 1.7 trillion dollars a year, and you can’t talk about serious reform when you are diverting such massive amounts of your resources towards the war machine. That’s what Martin Luther King’s 1967 speech at Riverside Church understood: that we can’t build what Johnson called the new society, the great society and maintain imperial war. Bernie has voted for every military appropriations bill there is, to continue these wars. He doesn’t challenge the military establishment, either. Indeed he’s been quite welcoming of defense contractors into the state of Vermont because it provides jobs, and they try and divvy up ten billion dollars per state because they have the ability to do so. But if we don’t break the back of the war machine, if we don’t break the imperialist project, if we don’t terminate the for-profit arms industry, then any rhetoric about significant change is smoke in the wind.

AM: And interestingly enough that’s when Martin Luther King Jr. began to be obsolete. The mainstream media exiled him largely when he started talking about militarism.

CH: They took away his FBI protection, and both King and Johnson knew what that meant. Because of the number of death threats he received, it meant he was doomed.

AM: And you quoted Engels in one of your recent speeches on this point which said that it’s either barbarism or socialism.

CH: It’s often attributed to Luxembourg. She stole it, but it did come from Engels. It is really between barbarism or socialism. Either we reconfigure our relationship to each other and to the planet in a radical way or these forces, which in theological terms are forces of death, will extinguish what hope we have for life. It’s that dire. It’s that dramatic, as anyone who reads climate change reports understands. And this is the folly of empire. This is how empires destroy themselves and always have. It’s how the Roman Empire ended. You expand militarily beyond your capacity to sustain yourself and that’s precisely what we’re doing and what we’ve done, and the consequences of it politically, economically, socially, culturally and finally environmentally are catastrophic.

AM: We hear about revolution in the US like it’s some romanticized thing that can never happen here, something that only happens in other places. You’ve covered so many uprisings, some successful. What has it taught you about the potential for revolution here?

CH: Well, when a political system is seized by a tiny cabal, whatever it is–military, oligarchs–and the system seizes up and only serves the interests of that narrow elite, then there is always blowback. That blowback may not be good. If you go back to the 1930s, that blowback came in the form of fascism. In the 1930s, in the United States it came from an enlightened oligarchy led by Roosevelt, and Roosevelt writes about it quite openly, and in essence he says to his fellow oligarchs, “Either you give up some of your money or we really face the specter of revolution.” We still had the old communist party. We had movements, severely weakened after WWI, but they were still there–the Progressive Party and others–that were able to frighten the oligarchs into creating the New Deal: fifteen million jobs, public works, these kinds of things, many of which–the parks and the post offices (although they’re trying to sell off the post office as they did in Britain)–we still use today, but after WWII those forces set out to destroy the New Deal. Roosevelt used to say, “My greatest achievement is that I saved capitalism.”

AM: You just wrote a great essay that I encourage everyone to read titled “The Real Enemies Within,” in which you write, “The reality of empire is nearly impossible to see from the heart of empire. There can be no rational debate about empire with many desperate Americans who’ve ingested this as their creed. The distortion of neoliberalism has left them little else but the potent and dangerous force within the body politic, and it is growing.” Of course, those who point out the symptoms of a rotting empire are deemed heretics, traitors, just like they’ve been since WWI. What does this longstanding inability to counter this dominant narrative tell us about our society, where it is today, and how we can possibly combat this mythology?

CH: It’s a symptom of the sickness of the society itself, so as people are pushed… For instance, I was just not too long ago in the south and you have one Confederate memorial after another. I was walking through Montgomery with a great civil rights attorney, Brian Stevenson, who spent his life defending death row prisoners, most of whom were poor and black, of course, in Alabama, and he said all this stuff’s been put up in the last ten years. And I said to Brian, “This is exactly what happened in Yugoslavia.” As people reached such a point of despair they were treated into these mythical stories about themselves, and at that point you can’t connect because you’re not speaking about a reality that is defined by verifiable fact. You’re speaking about a myth, and I find the rhetoric against Muslims, and even the acts now that are carried out against Muslims, extremely frightening.

That kind of rhetoric is incendiary. I saw it in every war I covered. You get people to speak in the language of violence and then they carry out acts of indiscriminate violence. I think we’re entering a very frightening and dangerous moment in American history as the government is increasingly, of course, hostage to corporate power and military power, unable to respond to the citizenry, carrying out acts of austerity, stripping us of our civil liberties. We’re the most watched, spied-upon, photographed, monitored population in human history, and I covered the Stasi state in East Germany. You will ignite these proto-fascist forces and it will become sacrelized in the Christian religion. And it speaks in the gun culture and the language of violence, and it is a symptom of a dying civilization because in the end all this is magical thinking. It’s not real and I think the only way to save ourselves, which is why I’m a socialist, is to re-integrate these people into the economic system, and in essence give them hope, give them the possibility of a life, but, in fact of course, we’re doing the opposite. We’re pushing them further and further into extremism. As we do that, that will have very frightening political consequences and there is no shortage of examples throughout human history to prove that.

AM: Thank you so much, Chris Hedges.

**

FOLLOW // @EmpireFiles and @AbbyMartin

WATCH // YouTube.com/EmpireFiles