Program Notes
Guest speakers: Lorenzo Hagerty & Chris Hedges
[NOTE: All quotations are by Chris Hedges.]
“I think when we speak today about American values what we’re really speaking about are corporate-instilled values.”
“When you spend over a decade brutalizing people, people become brutal.”
“You can’t use the word ‘liberty’ when your government watches you 24 hours a day. That’s the relationship of a master and a slave.”
“There is no difference between a night raid in Oakland and a night raid in Falluja … none!”
Hedges v. Obama
U.S. Drones kill more people than ISIS: Chris Hedges
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
Industrial Workers of the World A Union For All Workers
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
salon.
00:00:23 ►
And yes, in my last podcast, I said
00:00:27 ►
that in just a couple of days I’d be out with a few comments about what Terrence McKenna
00:00:31 ►
had just said regarding the task before us. And yes, it has now been a whole week since
00:00:37 ►
then. But you see, well, I discovered that I had a lot more to say than I first thought.
00:00:43 ►
So it’s taken me a little while longer to put this podcast together.
00:00:47 ►
Now, if you are new here to us in the salon, you should know that today’s program isn’t a normal one for us.
00:00:54 ►
Our long-time listeners already know that one of my main motivations for doing these podcasts is to pass along a few of my thoughts and stories to my grandchildren.
00:01:04 ►
But you see, right now, they’re all too young to even care about them, let alone understand them.
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However, now that I’m in my 70s, I’ve discovered some things that I’d like to ask my own father about,
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but he died in 1975, and by the time I figured out my questions, he was long gone.
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And the same, I’m sure, will be true of my grandchildren.
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Should any of them ever get around to asking some of the questions that led to this podcast,
00:01:31 ►
well, I’ll have been long gone by then. So hopefully you’ll all consider yourselves now
00:01:36 ►
my mature grandchildren and find my stories at least interesting, if not always helpful.
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Also, I should say up front here that if right now you are in college or college-bound,
00:01:48 ►
then there are some things in this podcast that could very well be important to your understanding of where you are right now,
00:01:55 ►
at least in regards to your life path, your destiny.
00:01:59 ►
There’s something in this podcast for you no matter what your age, of course, but if you’re under 30, what you think about and do with the information in this podcast may well be the key to your future.
00:02:10 ►
Now, the main part of this program is a recent talk by Chris Hedges that I’ll be introducing shortly.
00:02:16 ►
Well, maybe not shortly because I’ve got a lot to say right now.
00:02:21 ►
But first I want to play a one-minute soundbite from a different talk by him
00:02:25 ►
that was, well, it was actually the primary catalyst for this program. So I’ll begin with
00:02:30 ►
this little soundbite to sort of set the stage by letting you know that if you think that the
00:02:36 ►
United States is still the land of the free, then you are very far off the mark. Our mainstream
00:02:42 ►
corporate media won’t tell you this, but here’s the current state of freedom
00:02:46 ►
for anyone living in the United States today.
00:02:49 ►
To obtain your personal information,
00:02:52 ►
the FBI can now freely issue national security letters
00:02:56 ►
to your bank, your doctor, your employer,
00:03:02 ►
your public library, or any of your associates without a judicial warrant,
00:03:08 ►
and you will never be notified of an investigation.
00:03:12 ►
It can collect and store in perpetuity all your metadata of your email correspondence and phone records
00:03:21 ►
and track your geographical movements everywhere.
00:03:26 ►
correspondence and phone records and track your geographical movements everywhere. It can assassinate U.S. citizens if it brands this citizen to be a terrorist. It can order the military
00:03:32 ►
under Section 1021, as I mentioned, to arrest you, strip you of due process, and hold you
00:03:39 ►
indefinitely in military detention facilities, including in our offshore penal colonies.
00:03:46 ►
Now, for those of us that have been paying attention, that really isn’t news.
00:03:51 ►
But the reason that it struck me so hard just now is my realization that this Orwellian nightmare of a nation
00:03:57 ►
has become even worse than the horror tales that I was told about the old Soviet Union when I was a child.
00:04:04 ►
horror tales that I was told about the old Soviet Union when I was a child.
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You see, when I was born on August 11, 1942, the entire world was at war.
00:04:15 ►
Today, I fear the situation is even worse.
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How could America, this beacon of freedom to the world, come to this?
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And what are the deepest roots of our problems?
00:04:29 ►
Recently, the entire population of the United States was humiliated by having to admit that,
00:04:35 ►
yes, we are a nation that resorts to medieval methods of torture to other human beings.
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No matter what a person’s crime, our basic humanity should abhor torture,
00:04:44 ►
as we also should abhor those who authorize and promote it. Supporters of torture
00:04:45 ►
seem to me to be close to subhuman, but that’s only my personal opinion. In a recent essay in
00:04:52 ►
Counterpunch, titled Torture and the Violence of Organized Forgetting, Henry Griot said,
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and I quote, certainly this is not to suggest that the United States had not engaged in criminal and lawless acts historically,
00:05:09 ►
or committed acts of brutality that would rightly be labeled acts of torture.
00:05:13 ►
That much about our history is clear, and includes not only the support and participation in acts of indiscriminate violence and torture practiced through and with the right-wing
00:05:25 ►
Latin American dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil
00:05:33 ►
in the 1970s, but also through the willful murder and torture of civilians in Vietnam,
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Iraq, and later at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Afghanistan,
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the United States is no stranger to torture.
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End quote.
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If you want to learn something about the extent of torture as an instrument of U.S. policy,
00:05:56 ►
you should read the Phoenix Program by Douglas Valentine.
00:06:01 ►
In it you will learn that during the American War in Vietnam,
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In it, you will learn that during the American War in Vietnam, over 80,000 civilians were either murdered in cold blood or tortured by the CIA.
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It’s one of the ugliest chapters in American history, and yet it’s never spoken about in our schools. Thank you. plus years. Read Howard Zinn’s masterpiece, A People’s History of the United States, for a start.
00:06:46 ►
That one book will lead you everywhere that you want to go, I promise you.
00:06:51 ►
The other day, that drone murderer who is currently occupying the Oval Office
00:06:55 ►
stood up and, with a straight face, speaking to the American people about the
00:07:00 ►
recent Senate torture report, said, this is not who we are.
00:07:08 ►
Well, my first thought was, bullshit, Obama.
00:07:10 ►
That’s exactly who we are.
00:07:12 ►
We fucking did it, don’t you get it?
00:07:15 ►
We did it, and we all knew about it for years,
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yet your administration just swept it all under the rug.
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You know why we finally got an official government report admitting to torture?
00:07:24 ►
It’s because those nut
00:07:25 ►
jobs at the CIA were stupid enough to bug some Senate staffers. It was a vendetta by the Senate
00:07:31 ►
that got that report out. They certainly didn’t do it out of patriotism. In addition to a nation
00:07:36 ►
that uses torture, we are also a nation that has more of its citizens in prison than any other
00:07:42 ►
nation. Any other. It is a nation where we
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recently learned that Southern California police departments have now begun stocking up on grenade
00:07:51 ►
launchers. Grenade launchers are being stockpiled in our police stations. What the fuck is that all
00:07:58 ►
about? And yet, just this month, Congress cut millions of dollars out of scholarship grant funds
00:08:03 ►
and redirected
00:08:05 ►
these millions to be paid to collection agencies who are hounding young people who are late
00:08:10 ►
on their student loan payments. That’s who we’ve become, collectively, as a nation.
00:08:17 ►
But do you know what? I’m quite sure that this isn’t what we were when I was born. And
00:08:23 ►
while there is no denying that today we are
00:08:26 ►
a nation ruled by greedy oligarchs, deep down inside each of us, we’re not torturers, we’re not
00:08:32 ►
racists, we’re not murderers, but somehow our society has conditioned us in ways that we know
00:08:39 ►
aren’t best for us, but over which we feel we have little control. And that, my friends, is about to change.
00:08:46 ►
I, for one, don’t intend for it to be this way when I die, and I hope you don’t either.
00:08:51 ►
Until I read Howard Zinn’s book a few years ago,
00:08:54 ►
I wasn’t aware of the methods that the wealthy white slaveholders used
00:08:58 ►
to intentionally initiate racism on this continent.
00:09:01 ►
You may think that racism is part of the human makeup, but it isn’t.
00:09:05 ►
Racism in America was consciously created back in the early days of this country
00:09:10 ►
by those wealthy white slaveholders, and you know them. In our schools, we call them our founding
00:09:15 ►
fathers. Doesn’t it seem strange to you that almost every one of the white men who signed
00:09:21 ►
the Declaration of Independence also owned slaves at the time?
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Take a close look at the founding documents of the United States of America,
00:09:29 ►
and you’ll discover that ever since the beginning of this nation,
00:09:33 ►
the deck has been stacked against all but the wealthiest among us.
00:09:37 ►
Let me read two paragraphs from an essay by Chris Hedges,
00:09:41 ►
who I do promise you’ll be hearing from soon,
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but I still have a few more
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things on my mind first, and actually they spring from these two quotes from Hedges’ essay, which is
00:09:50 ►
titled, Let’s Get This Class War Started. And I quote, The inability to grasp the pathology of
00:09:59 ►
our oligarchic rulers is one of our gravest faults. We have been blinded to the depravity End quote.
00:10:30 ►
In the next paragraph, my friends,
00:10:59 ►
and its death throes are becoming ever more destructive,
00:11:03 ►
not only outside its borders, but inside the nation as well.
00:11:07 ►
This empire has accepted the psychosis of permanent war as normal.
00:11:12 ►
It isn’t. War is never the answer.
00:11:15 ►
Yet war has become the only thing that America seems to know how to do
00:11:19 ►
in regards to foreign relations.
00:11:22 ►
And just like during the American Civil War,
00:11:26 ►
it is the poor who fight and die, never the wealthy. If you’ve been paying attention to the news lately, it should be obvious
00:11:32 ►
to you that things are heating up everywhere. In Hong Kong, there was the Umbrella Revolution.
00:11:38 ►
And by the way, dear Umbrella revolutionaries, just because, like in Occupy, your camp was eventually broken up.
00:11:46 ►
Your point has been made and well made, and your great-grandchildren are going to remember your
00:11:50 ►
names because, in the face of overwhelming odds, you’ve shown the world that your voices will be
00:11:56 ►
heard. And we all know this is only the beginning. Now, events here in the States, revolving around
00:12:04 ►
the murders of unarmed black men
00:12:05 ►
by white police, have led to protests that stretch from San Francisco to London. People are
00:12:11 ►
demonstrating once again, and hundreds of demonstrators have also been arrested. But this
00:12:16 ►
time, legal assistance has come to their aid from an unexpected source. You see, all of the legal
00:12:22 ►
infrastructure and networking that was created during the Occupy movement is still in place,
00:12:27 ►
and it is now being used to help the next wave of citizens who are expressing their outrage at what this nation has become.
00:12:35 ►
I have a strong feeling that this coming year is going to be the most significant 12 months since 50 years ago.
00:12:42 ►
You may wonder if there still is reason to believe that in just one year,
00:12:46 ►
a significant change of direction can take place.
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Well, since this is mainly a history lesson,
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I’d like to pass along just a few headlines from the year 1964.
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The year that many people say was the actual beginning of what today is thought of as the 60s.
00:13:03 ►
And so here are a few headlines from that year, in the order that they happened.
00:13:08 ►
President Lyndon Johnson declares a war on poverty.
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Plans to build the New York City World Trade Center are announced.
00:13:16 ►
The 24th Amendment to the United States Constitution,
00:13:20 ►
prohibiting the use of poll taxes in national elections, is ratified.
00:13:24 ►
A Jackson, Mississippi jury, trying Brian Beckwith for the murder of poll taxes in national elections, is ratified.
00:13:29 ►
A Jackson, Mississippi jury, trying Brian Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers,
00:13:33 ►
reports that it cannot reach a verdict, resulting in a mistrial.
00:13:36 ►
The Beatles arrive from England.
00:13:42 ►
Muhammad Ali beats Sonny Liston in his crowned heavyweight champion of the world.
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And a personal aside here about Ali.
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I know that he’s taken some flack for being a conscientious objector during the American war in Vietnam.
00:13:51 ►
But during the time that I was actively involved in the POW issue,
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it was Ali who was one of our primary backers, both financial and otherwise.
00:14:00 ►
He even offered to travel to North Vietnam with us
00:14:03 ►
and help us negotiate for the release of some POWs. He’s done a lot to help us vets and I hope that he’s remembered that way.
00:14:11 ►
Now back to the headlines. Malcolm X is suspended from the Nation of Islam and says that he is
00:14:17 ►
forming a black nationalist party. Mrs. Malcolm Peabody, the 72-year-old mother of the Massachusetts governor,
00:14:29 ►
spends two days in jail for participating in an anti-segregation sit-in.
00:14:34 ►
And for us geeks, IBM announces the System 360.
00:14:40 ►
Sidney Poitier becomes the first African-American to win an Academy Award in the category Best Actor in a Leading Role.
00:14:44 ►
On April 16th, the Rolling Stones released their first album.
00:14:48 ►
The Ford Mustang was officially unveiled to the public.
00:14:52 ►
And here’s another one for us geeks.
00:14:55 ►
On May 1st, 1964, at 4 a.m., John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz ran the first
00:15:02 ►
computer program written in BASIC.
00:15:04 ►
and Thomas Eugene Kurtz ran the first computer program written in BASIC.
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And note this headline.
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Some 400 to 1,000 students marched through Times Square, New York,
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and another 700 in San Francisco,
00:15:20 ►
in the first major student demonstration against the Vietnam War.
00:15:25 ►
Smaller marches also took place in Boston, Seattle, and Madison, Wisconsin that day in 1964 Henry D. and Charles Moore, who were hitchhiking in Medville, Mississippi
00:15:30 ►
were kidnapped and beaten to death by members of the Ku Klux Klan
00:15:34 ►
On May 12th, 12 young men in New York City publicly burned their draft cards to protest the war
00:15:41 ►
and this was the very first of the draft card burnings
00:15:44 ►
Nelson Mandela and seven others are sentenced to life imprisonment in South Africa to protest the war, and this was the very first of the draft card burnings.
00:15:49 ►
Nelson Mandela and seven others are sentenced to life imprisonment in South Africa.
00:15:54 ►
Three civil rights workers are murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi by a local Klansman and a deputy sheriff.
00:15:57 ►
And now that only takes us to the end of June 1964.
00:16:02 ►
You can see it was quite a year, and no matter who or where you were, these stories
00:16:06 ►
were unlike anything that the mainstream press had ever covered before. Keep in mind that the
00:16:12 ►
year began just five weeks after the murder of President Kennedy, and we were already shaken
00:16:17 ►
before all of these events began taking place. Now here are a few headlines from the second half of the year. On July 2nd, President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 abolishing racial segregation in the United States.
00:16:34 ►
U.S. casualties in Vietnam have by now risen to 1,387, including 399 dead and 17 MIAs.
00:16:44 ►
including 399 dead and 17 MIAs.
00:16:49 ►
U.S. presidential nominee Barry Goldwater declares that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice
00:16:52 ►
and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
00:16:56 ►
Now, for those who don’t know about Barry Goldwater,
00:16:59 ►
he was by far the leading American conservative of the day.
00:17:03 ►
It’s an interesting quote, don’t you think?
00:17:06 ►
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,
00:17:09 ►
and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
00:17:13 ►
I’ll let you figure that one out for yourself.
00:17:16 ►
But back to the headlines.
00:17:18 ►
Six days of race riots began in Harlem
00:17:21 ►
after a young, unarmed black man is killed by a white off-duty cop.
00:17:25 ►
Now think about this for a moment.
00:17:27 ►
Fifty years ago, on July 16, 1964,
00:17:32 ►
a ninth grader, James Powell, was shot and killed by police lieutenant Thomas Gilligan.
00:17:38 ►
The second bullet of three fired by Gilligan killed the 15-year-old African American
00:17:43 ►
in front of his friends and about a dozen
00:17:46 ►
other witnesses. A grand jury did not press any charges against the officer. That was
00:17:53 ►
50 years ago. And as my dearly departed mother often said, everything is different, but nothing
00:18:01 ►
has changed. Now, continuing with a few more 1964 headlines,
00:18:07 ►
the U.S. sent 5,000 more military advisors to South Vietnam,
00:18:12 ►
bringing the total number of U.S. forces in Vietnam up to 21,000.
00:18:17 ►
Then, the Gulf of Tonkin incident is followed by aircraft from carriers
00:18:21 ►
heading to North Vietnam in retaliation for alleged strikes against the U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.
00:18:29 ►
Now on a personal note here, I knew some of the men from the Maddox and the Turner Joy,
00:18:34 ►
men who were in the combat information centers of those destroyers at the time.
00:18:38 ►
And to a man they told me that they were never attacked.
00:18:41 ►
And they also said so at the time, but as you know, politics took over.
00:18:46 ►
Now in 1967, while the Summer of Love was taking place in San Francisco,
00:18:51 ►
and while Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had just been released by the Beatles,
00:18:56 ►
I was, in a way, paying my part of the price for that bogus Tonkin Gulf incident,
00:19:02 ►
because by then I had also become a CIC officer and a destroyer
00:19:06 ►
in the Gulf of Tonkin in the South China Sea. And our raider men also saw those false echoes.
00:19:12 ►
It happened regularly. Every night almost we had false alerts. Yet it was only a couple of those
00:19:18 ►
little false echoes a few years earlier that got us openly into the war in Vietnam after 10 previous years of only being advisors,
00:19:27 ►
of course. A little electronic glitch, but my guess is that those warmongers and war profiteers
00:19:34 ►
in Washington, D.C. would have eventually found another way to force the nation into a war if
00:19:39 ►
that one didn’t work. Now back again to the 64 headlines. Mary Poppins had its world premiere in Los Angeles.
00:19:47 ►
And the Warren Commission report, the first official investigation of the assassination of John Kennedy, was published.
00:19:54 ►
Another aside here.
00:19:56 ►
The Warren Commission, it is now almost universally agreed, is basically a crock of shit.
00:20:02 ►
It was a cover-up, pure and simple.
00:20:04 ►
Go take a look at the report online
00:20:06 ►
and check out the autopsy report.
00:20:08 ►
You’ll see some handwritten changes
00:20:10 ►
that were made in order to make
00:20:12 ►
that crazy magic bullet theory possible.
00:20:14 ►
And the man who made the changes
00:20:16 ►
never denied doing so.
00:20:18 ►
That man was Gerald Ford,
00:20:20 ►
who eventually was appointed
00:20:22 ►
to be the U.S. President.
00:20:24 ►
The nation’s first appointed president was well rewarded for his service on the Warren Commission.
00:20:30 ►
1964 was also the year that Dr. Robert Moog demonstrated the prototype Moog synthesizer,
00:20:38 ►
and music hasn’t been the same since.
00:20:40 ►
It was also the year that the Berkeley Free Speech Movement began,
00:20:51 ►
It was also the year that the Berkeley Free Speech Movement began, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. became the then-youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
00:21:01 ►
Nikita Khrushchev was deposed as the leader of the Soviet Union, and the British House of Commons voted to abolish the death penalty for murder in Britain. And it was in 1964 that the U.S. began planning
00:21:05 ►
for a two-stage escalation of the bombing in North Vietnam,
00:21:09 ►
while France performed an underground nuclear test
00:21:12 ►
and Che Guevara addressed the U.N. General Assembly.
00:21:17 ►
Obviously, a lot more happened in 1964,
00:21:20 ►
but from that list you should begin to get a feeling
00:21:23 ►
for how many transformative and long
00:21:26 ►
lasting events took place in a single year. Think of it, Che Guevara at the UN, the beginning of the
00:21:33 ►
major phase of the Vietnam War, the passage of the Civil Rights Act, not to mention the Beatles and
00:21:38 ►
Mary Poppins. It was a mind-bending year and my prediction is that 2015 is going to be even more event-packed than was 1964.
00:21:49 ►
Now, the reason I’m spending so much time on this is quite simple.
00:21:54 ►
That was a year during which momentous events took place.
00:21:58 ►
It was the reawakening of a spirit that had been alive in this land at an earlier time.
00:22:04 ►
And so began the next great push in our struggle for the right to be human, the right to be free.
00:22:10 ►
Now during the first half of that year, 1964, I was in my final semester of engineering school.
00:22:17 ►
And during the last half of that year, I was in my first semester of law school.
00:22:21 ►
And what I haven’t focused on yet was the summer of 64, Freedom Summer. It
00:22:27 ►
was one of the great turning points in American history. And where was I? Well, I’m really sad to
00:22:34 ►
say that I never got involved. Not in Freedom Summer, not in the anti-war movement, not in the
00:22:39 ►
anti-draft movement, not in the free speech movement, not in any of it. In essence, I was a
00:22:45 ►
flower child who slept through the 60s, and I don’t want to see that happen to you. You see,
00:22:51 ►
I come from the lower middle class, and my father didn’t even own a car when I was a kid.
00:22:57 ►
So being the first of our family to go to college, I stayed on the straight and narrow path to the
00:23:02 ►
so-called American dream. At the time, I couldn’t study literature as I wanted,
00:23:07 ►
but was forced into an engineering course because, well,
00:23:10 ►
it was the only major that I could get a student loan for.
00:23:13 ►
And after graduation, I entered law school,
00:23:16 ►
still struggling to work my way deeper into the system,
00:23:18 ►
but eventually the draft was after me,
00:23:21 ►
so to dodge it, I did the cowardly thing,
00:23:23 ►
and instead of heading to Canada, I joined the Navy. By the way, I did really well in the Navy. I eventually
00:23:30 ►
rose to the rank of Lieutenant Commander, and after the war, I became a lawyer, a Texas
00:23:36 ►
lawyer of all things. In other words, I did all that was required of me by the system
00:23:41 ►
that I was born into, and I was a miserable wreck because I felt as if I was living
00:23:46 ►
in two different worlds. The one that I wanted to believe this country was, and then the one that I
00:23:52 ►
was discovering it actually to be. During those early years after returning to civilian life, the
00:23:59 ►
closest I even came to expressing my inner feelings in public was the day when our Navy Reserve unit
00:24:05 ►
had to march in a patriotic parade of some kind.
00:24:08 ►
And at the end of the parade route,
00:24:09 ►
most of us in our unit had our wives
00:24:11 ►
bring some civilian clothes for us.
00:24:13 ►
We slipped into a nearby public restroom,
00:24:16 ►
changed into civilian clothing,
00:24:17 ►
and then we joined hundreds of other vets
00:24:20 ►
at the federal courthouse
00:24:21 ►
where we all threw our medals on the steps
00:24:24 ►
and expressed
00:24:25 ►
our disgust about the ongoing war. That was about it for me in the 60s, nothing to brag to my
00:24:31 ►
grandchildren about. You see what I’m finally getting at now? I don’t want you to be looking
00:24:36 ►
back 50 years from now and wishing that you had become more involved in what is going to be taking place during these teens. It is 2014 after all. We’re
00:24:47 ►
in the teens and as any parent knows the teens can be well difficult for everybody involved.
00:24:55 ►
Now my excuse for not being more involved back then was well I had a family. I had responsibilities,
00:25:02 ►
shoes to buy, rent to pay, college savings to set aside.
00:25:07 ►
I know the litany because I said it to myself every night as I drifted off to sleep,
00:25:11 ►
while wishing that I had done something that day to actually leave this world a better place,
00:25:16 ►
something other than just go to my job and pay my bills, that is.
00:25:20 ►
Eventually, my family responsibilities lightened and then ended,
00:25:33 ►
Eventually, my family responsibilities lightened and then ended, and by great good fortune I met a lovely woman who took me from being a mild-mannered geek to, well, eventually where I am today.
00:25:41 ►
Besides producing around a hundred radical television programs together, she also showed me how to chain myself to the White House fence. We demonstrated with our brothers and sisters of the IWW,
00:25:50 ►
the Wobblies, outside of the stadium for Super Bowl XXV, where some of the very kind NFL fans threw full cans of beer to us, or at us, and of course it would have been a lot nicer if they
00:25:56 ►
hadn’t opened them first. And yes, I’m a member of the IWW, the International Workers of the World
00:26:02 ►
Union, and you should be too. Check it out.
00:26:06 ►
Now, one more demonstration story for the grandkids.
00:26:10 ►
Now, one of my more memorable moments during a demonstration was in Washington, D.C.,
00:26:14 ►
when my then-partner and I made eye contact with Ronald Reagan,
00:26:18 ►
and at the same time, we were giving him the finger.
00:26:22 ►
But he just smiled and waved at us with a blank look on his face. I really don’t think he even registered that we were giving him the finger. But he just smiled and waved at us with a blank look on his face.
00:26:26 ►
I really don’t think he even registered
00:26:28 ►
that we were there.
00:26:29 ►
But my point is, yes,
00:26:31 ►
I waited a long time to become involved
00:26:34 ►
in the struggle that now involves
00:26:36 ►
every human on the planet.
00:26:38 ►
But something that we have today
00:26:39 ►
that we didn’t have 50 years ago
00:26:41 ►
is the Internet.
00:26:43 ►
Archimedes said that he could move the world
00:26:45 ►
if he had a big enough lever.
00:26:47 ►
Well, that’s what the internet is.
00:26:49 ►
The biggest damn lever us common people have ever had,
00:26:52 ►
so let us use it wisely.
00:26:55 ►
When I was producing those television programs
00:26:57 ►
with my radical girlfriend back in Tampa, Florida
00:27:00 ►
in the 80s and 90s,
00:27:02 ►
one of our series was titled Reality Check.
00:27:13 ►
Well, my friends, here at long last is Chris Hedges with what could be a real reality check for you,
00:27:17 ►
at least if you’re a product of the current U.S. public school system propaganda.
00:27:26 ►
I want to back up a little bit because Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act is part of the culmination of an assault on our civil liberties, a long assault,
00:27:34 ►
one which goes back a century, beginning in World War I, on the eve of World War I, we had powerful, progressive, radical movements, labor unions, a radical press,
00:27:56 ►
which, after decades of struggle, had finally begun to put pressure on the business elites, the oligarchic class, the centers of power.
00:28:12 ►
And it was the war that essentially created the mechanism by which this class could respond and fight back.
00:28:23 ►
The labor wars in this country were the bloodiest in the industrialized world.
00:28:29 ►
Hundreds of American workers were killed, thousands were injured,
00:28:34 ►
and tens of thousands, if not more, were blacklisted and displaced from their jobs.
00:28:40 ►
Wilson, who had run on the campaign slogan that he kept us out of the war,
00:28:47 ►
suddenly felt tremendous pressure from Wall Street, and Wall Street always profits off of war.
00:28:53 ►
To enter the conflict when the Russian Revolution meant that the Kaiser could transfer 51 divisions
00:29:00 ►
from the Eastern to the Western Front, and indeed, Germany made a final push
00:29:06 ►
that year and very narrowly defeated the British and the French.
00:29:11 ►
If the British and the French had been defeated, then the tremendous sums of money that Wall
00:29:16 ►
Street banks had lent to those governments would never be repaid.
00:29:23 ►
There was no popular support for this war.
00:29:25 ►
Indeed, when Wilson went to declare war in the White House, in the Congress from the
00:29:31 ►
White House, he had to be protected by an entire cavalry troop for fear of anarchist
00:29:36 ►
bombs.
00:29:37 ►
They could get no one to join.
00:29:39 ►
They had to institute the draft after 30 days.
00:29:42 ►
And there was a fascinating discussion among the intellectual elites,
00:29:47 ►
in particular Walter Lippmann, Arthur Bullard, and others, and I went to the archives in
00:29:52 ►
Princeton and read the papers, about how to respond to the fact that this country did
00:29:58 ►
not want to go to war. Wilson wanted to impose the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act as the kind of iron fist to make people comply.
00:30:09 ►
And Lippmann, Ballard, and others argued that they could employ the understanding of crowd psychology
00:30:17 ►
pioneered by Le Bon, Trotter, and Sigmund Freud to essentially manipulate emotion,
00:30:24 ►
or what Lippmann would call in his book Public
00:30:27 ►
Opinion, written after the war, manufacture consent. That’s where Herman and Chomsky get
00:30:33 ►
that term on their critique of the medium. And they said, we can create mechanisms, a system of mass propaganda whereby people are moved to respond emotionally,
00:30:49 ►
that fact itself doesn’t matter. And that system was set up, the Creel Commission or
00:30:56 ►
the Committee for Public Information, which, by the way, Goebbels studied assiduously when
00:31:04 ►
he created the Nazi propaganda machine. Indeed, one of the textbooks that Goebbels studied assiduously when he created the Nazi propaganda machine.
00:31:06 ►
Indeed, one of the textbooks that Goebbels uses was Edward Bernays’ book, Propaganda.
00:31:11 ►
Bernays came out of the Creel Commission.
00:31:14 ►
Now, that was a seminal moment in American history.
00:31:17 ►
Randolph Bourne writes about it.
00:31:19 ►
He calls war, in which he writes that war is the health of the state. And what he means by that is that in wartime,
00:31:27 ►
the state has the power to accrue to itself all kinds of prerogatives
00:31:32 ►
that it would never be able to accrue to itself in peacetime.
00:31:37 ►
And that system of mass propaganda was a very effective form of manipulation.
00:31:44 ►
And Jane Addams and Born and others, Eugene V. Debs,
00:31:47 ►
write about quite depressing essays
00:31:51 ►
about how it wasn’t just the masses that were seduced into the war effort,
00:31:55 ►
and you had Hollywood making movies like The Kaiser, The Butcher of Berlin.
00:31:59 ►
You had, they call them three-minute men, 50,000 speakers, 45,000 speakers that fanned out across the country.
00:32:06 ►
You had a news bureau that printed pro-war stories,
00:32:09 ►
and every publication in the country had to support the war, including Appeal to Reason,
00:32:15 ►
a socialist journal with the fourth highest circulation.
00:32:17 ►
The masses shut down rather than do it.
00:32:20 ►
So they were pumping out the pro-war news stories, graphic artists.
00:32:24 ►
so they were pumping out the pro-war news stories, graphic artists,
00:32:34 ►
and it not only seduced the masses, but it seduced the intellectual class itself. All of those people who, like Sinclair and others, who had put their energy into social reform,
00:32:41 ►
suddenly transferred their allegiance to this abstract cause, the war
00:32:46 ►
to end all wars, the war for democracy, which was a little hard to sell as long as the czar
00:32:51 ►
was in power.
00:32:55 ►
And only those who held fast, like Debs, like Adams, became targets.
00:33:06 ►
Debs, of course, eventually going to prison for opposing the draft.
00:33:10 ►
And that upended American society in a very deep way.
00:33:15 ►
The person who I think writes most presciently about it
00:33:18 ►
and is often not read and should be is Dwight McDonald.
00:33:21 ►
McDonald looks back at this moment in American history
00:33:24 ►
because at the end of the war,
00:33:27 ►
all of those propagandists went straight to Madison Avenue
00:33:31 ►
and started working on behalf of corporations.
00:33:36 ►
And they started, that’s when you saw the installation
00:33:39 ►
or the upending of traditional American values
00:33:42 ►
of thrift, self-effacement, and replacing
00:33:46 ►
it with hedonism, the cult of the self, consumerism.
00:33:50 ►
And I think when we speak today about American values, what we’re really speaking about are
00:33:57 ►
corporate instilled values.
00:34:04 ►
At the end of the war, the dreaded Hun instantly became the dreaded Red.
00:34:10 ►
And MacDonald writes that we entered something new,
00:34:15 ►
and that was the perpetuation of what he called the psychosis of permanent war.
00:34:22 ►
And he said none of the political theorists, including Karl Marx, anticipated the psychosis of permanent war. And he said none of the political theorists, including Karl Marx,
00:34:26 ►
anticipated the psychosis of permanent war, where year after year, decade after decade,
00:34:33 ►
you are ferreting out internal and external enemies, of course in the name of communism. And that effectively eradicated those populist movements that had put pressure,
00:34:49 ►
pressured the power elite, pressured the liberal class.
00:34:52 ►
Remember, the liberal class, and Chomsky makes this point,
00:34:55 ►
was never designed to be the political left.
00:34:58 ►
The liberal class was designed to be the safety valve
00:35:02 ►
so that when populist movements reacted as they did during
00:35:06 ►
the New Deal, they could ameliorate the system. And Roosevelt says that his greatest achievement
00:35:13 ►
was that he saved capitalism. The destruction of those movements, and we saw the heavy use
00:35:21 ►
of the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act after the war, with the Palmer
00:35:25 ►
raids, the deportment, deportation of Berkman and Emma Goldman and other primarily anarchists,
00:35:33 ►
the trumped-up merger charges delivered against Joe Hill, Big Bill Haywood, the head of the
00:35:40 ►
Wobblies, Hill also in the Wobblies, Hill is executed in Utah, has to flee, spends the last ten years of his life in much misery in Moscow.
00:35:51 ►
It became the mechanism by which everything that had opened up American democracy was shut down.
00:36:01 ►
Now I teach and Rev. D. also teaches in a prison
00:36:08 ►
and as she’ll probably tell you
00:36:12 ►
when you try and get a course approved
00:36:14 ►
to teach in a prison
00:36:16 ►
it’s the exact opposite of trying to teach a course in a college
00:36:19 ►
where you’re trying to entice undergraduates
00:36:22 ►
don’t worry we’ll watch movies all the time
00:36:23 ►
and Star Wars, stuff like that.
00:36:28 ►
You have to write something that is utterly banal
00:36:30 ►
in order to get it past the prison authorities.
00:36:32 ►
So I wrote, I sent to the prison authorities,
00:36:36 ►
I would like to teach a course on American history
00:36:37 ►
and the Constitution and our founding fathers
00:36:41 ►
and the three branches of government.
00:36:43 ►
They said, great.
00:36:44 ►
And then I bought every one of my students a copy of Howard Zinn’s
00:36:50 ►
The People’s History of the United States.
00:36:57 ►
Now, that’s a very important book because, you know,
00:37:02 ►
my students are primarily African American.
00:37:04 ►
They don’t know their own history.
00:37:07 ►
And Zinn is very cognizant throughout that book of the African American experience
00:37:11 ►
and the suffering of African Americans.
00:37:13 ►
I think like Baldwin, Zinn understood,
00:37:16 ►
and this is something that we have yet to grapple with as white Americans,
00:37:20 ►
understood that you cannot grasp what has been done to African Americans in this country
00:37:26 ►
and internalize it in a real way and have an identity.
00:37:30 ►
Baldwin hits on this page after page after page.
00:37:33 ►
He said the grasping of what we have done to African Americans is not about fundamentally just the liberation of Africa.
00:37:41 ►
It’s about our liberation.
00:37:43 ►
And until we understand who we are,
00:37:45 ►
we have no real identity. We have a mythic identity. And that’s right.
00:37:54 ►
And Zinn got it. He got that. And I would be teaching the class and I would hear my students go, damn, damn, we’ve been lied to.
00:38:11 ►
But the brilliance of that book is that it deconstructs the myth
00:38:16 ►
of the founding fathers, which even the left in this country continues to deify.
00:38:21 ►
continues to deify.
00:38:32 ►
These were white, slave-holding, male oligarchs.
00:38:37 ►
And the last thing they wanted, and it’s all in the Federalist Papers, the last thing they wanted was a popular democracy.
00:38:41 ►
And so they created innumerable mechanisms to make sure it wouldn’t happen.
00:38:47 ►
And that was not only the disenfranchisement of African Americans, of women, of Native Americans,
00:38:54 ►
but also men without property. It was about creating a Senate where senators were appointed. It was about creating an electoral college.
00:39:07 ►
So that’s how I have been a long supporter of Ralph Nader.
00:39:11 ►
I was his speechwriter in 2008.
00:39:14 ►
There’s very few Americans I admire as much as Ralph Nader.
00:39:20 ►
And Ralph Nader did not lose the election of 2000 for George W. Bush.
00:39:28 ►
The election, first of all, was stolen by judicial fiat after they stopped the voting in two counties
00:39:36 ►
because they knew Gore had won.
00:39:40 ►
And I think that’s very difficult for Americans to accept
00:39:44 ►
because it means we’re just another banana republic.
00:39:48 ►
And Gore won 500,000 more of the popular vote.
00:39:54 ►
But because of the Electoral College, it didn’t matter.
00:39:58 ►
It had nothing to do with Ralph Nader.
00:40:00 ►
Ralph Nader just scared the shit out of the Democratic Party.
00:40:04 ►
Excuse me, in a church.
00:40:09 ►
And I’ll come for repentance after this.
00:40:17 ►
Okay, that’s my kind of church. It was the Democratic Party that destroyed Nader because Nader built an actual grassroots movement.
00:40:30 ►
The last person to build a grassroots movement in this country was George McGovern.
00:40:36 ►
And when George McGovern built that insurgency, I was a kid.
00:40:42 ►
I was, I don’t know, 13 or something.
00:40:48 ►
And I convinced my parents to let me go down to the McGovern headquarters and work all summer long for McGovern.
00:40:51 ►
And then we went on a week during the convention.
00:40:55 ►
We went on a camping trip.
00:40:57 ►
And we used to have one of those horrible little Nimrod trailers, you know,
00:41:01 ►
that pop out behind my father’s Impala.
00:41:04 ►
And my dad thought it would be great to go out in the middle of the desert in New Mexico,
00:41:08 ►
and we’d all go out and look at the stars.
00:41:10 ►
But, of course, I had to hear my hero, McGovern.
00:41:13 ►
And I crept into the front seat of my father’s Impala and turned on the radio so I could hear the convention.
00:41:21 ►
But, of course, it was a long, it was actually a democratic process.
00:41:26 ►
We didn’t know, it wasn’t choreographed, we didn’t know who the nominee was going to be.
00:41:29 ►
It was a battle, and McGovern didn’t speak until very late.
00:41:34 ►
And I heard his speech, and then the battery went dead.
00:41:38 ►
And I remember this forlorn sight of my father walking through the desert in the morning,
00:41:44 ►
Forlorn sight of my father walking through the desert in the morning,
00:41:50 ►
looking for gas cans or jumper cables or something.
00:41:55 ►
Years later, I had dinner with McGovern,
00:42:10 ►
who I, to this day, have tremendous respect for as a person of such great integrity, and the last person to really confront the militarization of this country in a serious way,
00:42:12 ►
maybe Henry Wallace being the only other one in 48.
00:42:17 ►
And in the course of the dinner, he said something about losing 49 states,
00:42:19 ►
just out of the side of his mouth.
00:42:25 ►
And I said, but Senator McGovern, you never betrayed that 14-year-old boy, ever.
00:42:28 ►
And that’s why I’m here today.
00:42:30 ►
How many politicians can you say that about?
00:42:39 ►
So the Democratic Party, you know, when Ralph in 2008,
00:42:44 ►
when he wanted to hold a rally in Madison Square Garden, he didn’t have any money, of course.
00:42:49 ►
He just called up Madison Square Garden, promised them he’d pay, and he charged everyone $5 at the door, and they filled it. Now, you can imagine what that did to the Democratic Party. And after
00:42:53 ►
the election, it has been constant harassment, challenging all his voter lists to run up his
00:42:59 ►
legal bills. I was at the Climate March, and the night before I did an event with Bernie Sanders and
00:43:08 ►
Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein and this great councilwoman from Seattle, Sawat. She’s great.
00:43:16 ►
And Ralph wasn’t there. Earth Day was Ralph’s idea. Go on YouTube and watch Ralph’s speech on the first Earth Day.
00:43:27 ►
And that’s, I write in Death of the Liberal Class about exactly those kinds of figures
00:43:31 ►
being pushed out by the quote-unquote liberal establishment, the way McGovern,
00:43:36 ►
you know, after McGovern got the nomination, the Democratic Party,
00:43:41 ►
or a huge branch of the Democratic Party, certainly the moneyed interest under Connolly,
00:43:45 ►
just joined with the Nixon Republicans to destroy their own candidate.
00:43:50 ►
And they rewrote the rules so it would never happen again.
00:43:53 ►
We just get the kind of political spectacle that happens now.
00:43:57 ►
So the destruction of those movements, which Zinn grasps,
00:44:02 ►
had a fundamental effect on our democracy
00:44:06 ►
and finally on what’s happening to us today, both economically and politically.
00:44:12 ►
And that was that it removed the counterweight.
00:44:18 ►
I mean, Zinn understood that all of the openings in American democracy
00:44:21 ►
came about by populist movements that never achieved power.
00:44:27 ►
The abolitionists, the suffragists, the labor movement, and finally the civil rights movement.
00:44:34 ►
And that’s something the left has forgotten.
00:44:37 ►
It’s not our job to take power.
00:44:40 ►
Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies writes that the question is not how do you get good people to rule
00:44:49 ►
that’s the wrong question
00:44:50 ►
the question, because as Popper says
00:44:54 ►
most people attracted to power are at best mediocre
00:44:57 ►
which is Obama, or venal which is Bush
00:45:00 ►
I’m not sure he’s even smart enough to be venal.
00:45:11 ►
The question is, how do you make the power elite frightened of you?
00:45:13 ►
That’s what we forgot.
00:45:19 ►
That we have to build movements that hold fast to moral imperatives because power is always the problem.
00:45:22 ►
Julian Benda, in The Treason of the Intellectuals, writes,
00:45:26 ►
as an intellectual, you have a choice between serving two sets of principles,
00:45:31 ►
privilege and power or justice and truth.
00:45:34 ►
Now, justice is not an afterthought for Benda
00:45:37 ►
because Benda understood that you can’t get to truth if you don’t fight for justice.
00:45:44 ►
that you can’t get to truth if you don’t fight for justice.
00:45:57 ►
Because all systems of power, including the university, seek to obscure truth.
00:46:10 ►
And it is the role of those who fight passionately for justice to uncover and speak truth, finally speak truth to power.
00:46:15 ►
And Benda writes that the more you make concessions to those who serve privilege and power,
00:46:19 ►
the more you diminish the fast to justice and truth.
00:46:30 ►
There’s a scene in Kissinger’s memoirs, do not buy the book.
00:46:38 ►
It’s 1971 or something and there’s a gigantic anti-war demonstration, and they’ve surrounded the White House,
00:46:47 ►
and Nixon has put empty city buses end-to-end all around the White House,
00:46:52 ►
and he’s looking out the window, wringing his hands with Henry,
00:46:57 ►
and he says, Henry, Henry, they’re going to break through the barricades and get us.
00:47:03 ►
And that’s just where you want people in power to be.
00:47:15 ►
I lived in France for a while.
00:47:18 ►
I mean, Sarkozy is a Cretan, but he did not want to mess with French students.
00:47:23 ►
If you told French university students that they were going to have to take out loans
00:47:28 ►
of 80,000 a year to go to college, they would shut the damn country down.
00:47:41 ►
Which is precisely what the students here should be doing since they’re destroying your public universities.
00:47:53 ►
And they will destroy it. That’s the goal.
00:47:55 ►
This is not about a tuition increase.
00:47:58 ►
This is about destroying the possibility of public education,
00:48:03 ►
the corporatization of the universities.
00:48:06 ►
They’ll fill it with foreign students and out-of-staters.
00:48:09 ►
And by the time you get to go, even if you’re from California,
00:48:12 ►
you’ll either have to be wealthy or willing to take on debt peonage,
00:48:17 ►
which will cripple your life for years.
00:48:19 ►
And that’s just the way the system’s designed.
00:48:24 ►
I mean, look at the trustee boards of these universities.
00:48:28 ►
Half of them should be in prison.
00:48:36 ►
The presidents of these schools are just overcompensated fundraisers,
00:48:41 ►
licking the boots of every hedge fund manager who shows up on campus.
00:48:47 ►
And let’s not get started on business schools. I mean, what is a business school doing on a
00:48:53 ►
university campus? It is utterly antithetical to an education. It is about manipulation,
00:49:01 ►
hoarding, greed, profit, abuse, exploitation.
00:49:07 ►
And not only that, everything they’re teaching in it is fictitious.
00:49:11 ►
We don’t live in laissez-faire capitalism.
00:49:15 ►
We live in a state of corporate socialism.
00:49:17 ►
You gamble, you piss away how many trillions of dollars,
00:49:21 ►
and then you loot the U.S. Treasury.
00:49:28 ►
Okay, where was I?
00:49:36 ►
So the destruction of these popular movements
00:49:38 ►
had a catastrophic effect
00:49:41 ►
because it removed the counterweight
00:49:43 ►
on the liberal class.
00:49:47 ►
And then we watched the destruction of the liberal class with the rise of Bill Clinton.
00:49:56 ►
Clinton continued to speak in that kind of feel-your-pain language of the liberal class
00:50:03 ►
while he assiduously collected corporate money
00:50:08 ►
and served corporate interests. So it’s under Clinton we get NAFTA, the greatest betrayal of
00:50:13 ►
the working class in this country since the 1948 Taft-Hartley Act. It’s under Clinton that we get
00:50:19 ►
the destruction of the welfare system. And remember that under our old welfare system,
00:50:27 ►
welfare system, and remember that under our old welfare system, 70% of the recipients were children.
00:50:29 ►
It’s under Clinton that we get the deregulation of the FCC, so we now have roughly a half
00:50:35 ►
dozen corporations, Viacom, General Electric, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, Disney, Clear
00:50:41 ►
Channel, that control about 90% of what most Americans watch or listen to.
00:50:50 ►
It’s under Clinton that we get the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill,
00:50:55 ►
which turns the prison industrial complex into a big corporate business,
00:51:00 ►
where the bodies of poor people, primarily of color,
00:51:07 ►
in what Malcolm X called our internal colonies,
00:51:10 ►
which in essence are surplus labor because, of course,
00:51:13 ►
now we’ve been able to move our manufacturing first to Mexico
00:51:16 ►
and then finally on to China and Bangladesh
00:51:18 ►
where they’re making about 22 cents an hour.
00:51:23 ►
You take that surplus labor,
00:51:25 ►
it’s not earning anything
00:51:26 ►
for corporate capital on the streets,
00:51:28 ►
so you put them in cages.
00:51:31 ►
And there, phone companies,
00:51:34 ►
private prison contractors,
00:51:37 ►
guards,
00:51:40 ►
laundries,
00:51:40 ►
they make 50,000 a year.
00:51:45 ►
And that’s why we have a 60% recidivism rate.
00:51:49 ►
Because that’s the way it’s designed.
00:51:50 ►
People say the system doesn’t work.
00:51:52 ►
No, it works.
00:51:53 ►
It works just the way it’s meant to work.
00:51:56 ►
And we both teach in a prison, and it’ll break your heart.
00:52:02 ►
It breaks your heart.
00:52:04 ►
I taught at Princeton.
00:52:06 ►
I’ve taught at Columbia.
00:52:07 ►
I give a few more talks like this.
00:52:09 ►
I’m never going back there.
00:52:10 ►
I’ve taught at NYU.
00:52:14 ►
I got students in that prison that will bury any of those kids, bury them.
00:52:21 ►
Not just in terms of intelligence, but in terms of integrity.
00:52:24 ►
Not just in terms of intelligence, but in terms of integrity.
00:52:30 ►
And you hear the stories of the people we put behind bars,
00:52:32 ►
and it will break your heart.
00:52:34 ►
I’ve got a student in there.
00:52:36 ►
He was 14 years old.
00:52:37 ►
He was in a gang.
00:52:39 ►
There was a knifing.
00:52:40 ►
He didn’t do it.
00:52:41 ►
He was only 90 pounds.
00:52:43 ►
Everybody else in the gang was 19, 18.
00:52:46 ►
They haul him into the police station.
00:52:48 ►
They won’t let him see his family.
00:52:50 ►
He’s crying.
00:52:52 ►
It’s 2 in the morning.
00:52:56 ►
He’s got two detectives beating up on him, saying, just sign this paper, you can go home.
00:52:59 ►
He signs the paper.
00:53:03 ►
At 14, he goes into the adult population.
00:53:05 ►
He’s 39 now.
00:53:06 ►
He’s one of my best students.
00:53:10 ►
He is not permitted to go before a parole board until he’s 70.
00:53:15 ►
I could sit here all night and tell you stories like that.
00:53:23 ►
And if you try to go to court, they are going to hammer you and make an example of you so that no one else tries it
00:53:25 ►
because 94% of everybody in this country who gets convicted of a crime pleas out.
00:53:31 ►
And if you don’t plea out, they’re going to make sure that what they do to you convinces everyone else to plea out.
00:53:39 ►
I have one student.
00:53:42 ►
He was on the U.S. Army boxing team for five years.
00:53:45 ►
He finished his Army service with an honorable discharge.
00:53:49 ►
He comes back to Elizabeth, New Jersey.
00:53:52 ►
He’s training to go pro.
00:53:54 ►
He’s picked up for a crime he did not commit.
00:53:58 ►
They offer him 16 months as a plea.
00:54:01 ►
He said, I didn’t do it.
00:54:03 ►
And if I spend 16 months in a cell, my training’s finished.
00:54:08 ►
It’d take me two years to come back. He goes to trial. He got a 30-year sentence.
00:54:19 ►
And part of what’s frightening about the moment we live in is that when you spend long enough in the prison system
00:54:27 ►
and you understand how it works,
00:54:30 ►
then you know exactly what they’re going to do to us
00:54:33 ►
because it’s the same forces at work.
00:54:39 ►
Now what happens?
00:54:40 ►
Our manufacturing goes overseas.
00:54:43 ►
We shift, in the words of the Harvard historian
00:54:45 ►
Charles Mayer, from what he calls an empire of production to an empire of consumption.
00:54:49 ►
We begin to borrow to maintain both a lifestyle and an imperium we can no longer afford.
00:54:58 ►
And at that point, you begin this steady economic and political decline.
00:55:06 ►
Coupled with the fact, although we’ve known it for 30 years,
00:55:11 ►
that the forces, the corporate forces that are degrading and destroying our ecosystem remain unchecked.
00:55:20 ►
And the economic crisis is intimately twinned with the environmental crisis.
00:55:25 ►
It’s the same crisis.
00:55:27 ►
It’s what Karl Marx understood, that unfettered, unregulated capitalism is a revolutionary force
00:55:34 ►
that commodifies everything that turns human beings into commodities,
00:55:38 ►
the natural world into a commodity that it exploits until exhaustion or collapse.
00:55:43 ►
a commodity that it exploits until exhaustion or collapse.
00:55:54 ►
So that 40% of the summer Arctic sea ice melts in shell oil sees the death throes of our planet as a business opportunity.
00:55:59 ►
The death of labor unions, the loss of manufacturing, the absurdity that has become our press, which
00:56:08 ►
no longer does news. It’s about ratings, it’s about entertainment, it’s about anything but
00:56:12 ►
news. The incredibly confining parameters of what is acceptable political debate. They They just did a study on the recent upgrading or sending of more forces into Iraq
00:56:28 ►
of 89 pundits who were interviewed on the major networks.
00:56:34 ►
One was sort of against it.
00:56:39 ►
And the way that the insidious relationship,
00:56:44 ►
in general, Electric is a defense contractor,
00:56:47 ►
and they own massive numbers of television stations.
00:56:53 ►
They hire ex-military who work for defense contractors
00:56:56 ►
to essentially call for an expansion of the wars in the Middle East,
00:57:01 ►
which makes them rich.
00:57:03 ►
I mean, war is a business. War is a business.
00:57:06 ►
And that’s why stocks of these defense corporations have increased 20-fold since 9-11.
00:57:14 ►
I was invited a few weeks ago to a white upper-middle-class church in New Jersey.
00:57:24 ►
Somebody got the cute idea that it would be a good idea
00:57:25 ►
to invite me for Peace and Justice Sunday.
00:57:31 ►
It was a bad idea.
00:57:33 ►
And they started walking out when I said,
00:57:38 ►
our militarized drones, our attack aircraft,
00:57:41 ►
our missiles, and our heavy artillery
00:57:44 ►
have decapitated far more people, including children, than ISIS.
00:57:58 ►
When you spend over a decade brutalizing people, they become brutal.
00:58:08 ►
a decade brutalizing people, they become brutal. And I quoted the example from a survivor of the Sobibor death camp, who when they got axes and knives and carried out the uprising, he talks
00:58:14 ►
about going into an office and confronting a German with a knife and going, this is for my
00:58:18 ►
mother, this is for my father, this is for my sister, this is for my brother. The act itself, out of context, looks
00:58:27 ►
barbaric. But when you understand what went on in that death camp, it makes perfect sense.
00:58:33 ►
And the idea that the very violence that has created the pathology in front of us
00:58:38 ►
is the solution, is, and I spent seven years in the Middle East,
00:58:48 ►
is, and I spent seven years in the Middle East, is a failure completely to understand who we are and what we’ve done.
00:58:51 ►
Not only as white Americans in America, but as white Americans on the outer reaches of empire.
00:59:00 ►
Now when empires go down, they all go down the same way.
00:59:04 ►
They expand, as the Roman Empire did, Gibbon writes about it,
00:59:09 ►
beyond their capacity to sustain themselves.
00:59:11 ►
They are hollowed out from the inside.
00:59:15 ►
And get in a car and drive across this country in city after city after city.
00:59:20 ►
It’s a wreck.
00:59:22 ►
Our infrastructure is collapsing.
00:59:24 ►
We don’t make anything except weapons.
00:59:27 ►
We, of course, 70% of the world’s weapons, which we then spread out all over the globe like candy.
00:59:35 ►
And the power elites are certainly cognizant that none of the jobs, the unionized jobs that once permitted a single
00:59:48 ►
wage earner to sustain a family, buy a home, have health insurance and a pension, it’s
00:59:56 ►
not coming back.
00:59:59 ►
They understand that that stagnation and decline, we have now half the country living in either
01:00:07 ►
poverty or near poverty, will eventually foster some kind of blowback.
01:00:12 ►
And we see blips on the screen.
01:00:17 ►
And so they’re getting ready.
01:00:19 ►
And they get ready two ways.
01:00:22 ►
First, they corrupt the legal system.
01:00:25 ►
I live in Princeton and down my street is a great friend of mine, Sam Hines, who was
01:00:35 ►
a Marine Corps pilot in the South Pacific in World War II and a professor of literature
01:00:41 ►
at Princeton.
01:00:42 ►
And he gave me a book a few years ago called Define Hitler by Sebastian
01:00:45 ►
Hoffner, and he said, if you want to understand America, read this book.
01:00:49 ►
And that book is written by a lawyer.
01:00:51 ►
He was in the law courts in 1933 with the rise of the Nazis.
01:00:55 ►
And he saw how the first thing they did was essentially twist the legal system to make
01:01:01 ►
criminality legal, which is essentially what waltzed with the lobbyists
01:01:05 ►
and this insane judicial system, which is now just a subsidiary of the corporate state,
01:01:13 ►
has done.
01:01:14 ►
They twist the legal system in such a way as to be able to carry out acts that under even the old Weimar Constitution would have been illegal.
01:01:28 ►
That’s why everything that Richard Nixon was charged with on his impeachment is now legal.
01:01:34 ►
It is. Every single thing.
01:01:38 ►
And the state has done precisely that.
01:01:42 ►
It has radically interpreted, misinterpreted, even things like the 2001 authorization
01:01:48 ►
to use military force act, which Obama says gives him the right to assassinate
01:01:52 ►
American citizens. That’s not in the act. It’s a misuse
01:01:56 ►
of the act. The FISA amendment act, the wholesale surveillance
01:02:00 ►
and, of course, section 1021 of the
01:02:04 ►
National Defense Authorization Act.
01:02:08 ►
What was fascinating about that challenge when we brought that suit, well, there were
01:02:16 ►
two things.
01:02:16 ►
One was Judge Catherine Forrest, when we brought it to the Southern District Court of New York,
01:02:22 ►
constantly kept grilling the government lawyers during the trial.
01:02:29 ►
Can you give me a guarantee, the suit’s called Hedges v. Obama,
01:02:32 ►
can you give me a guarantee that Mr. Hedges will not be picked up under this law?
01:02:38 ►
She must have asked that ten times, at least.
01:02:40 ►
And the government never gave the guarantee because they couldn’t.
01:02:47 ►
And Judge Forrest ruled that the law was unconstitutional,
01:02:52 ►
and she wrote a very lucid 112-page opinion, which you should read,
01:02:57 ►
and I think she wrote it in a way that it would be accessible to those of us
01:03:02 ►
who don’t come out of the legal profession.
01:03:04 ►
She talked about how this opens the way to criminalize’t come out of the legal profession, she talked about
01:03:05 ►
how this opens the way to criminalize an entire segment of the population.
01:03:09 ►
She actually brings up references to 110,000 Japanese Americans who were interned in World
01:03:14 ►
War II.
01:03:16 ►
And when she ruled in our favor, it wasn’t just the government attorneys who had prosecuted the case who
01:03:25 ►
suddenly appeared in our chambers that day, but it was the lawyers from the NSA and the
01:03:30 ►
lawyers from the Pentagon. And they said, you have to put the law back into effect right
01:03:33 ►
now in the name of national security. And to her credit, she did not. And the government
01:03:40 ►
lawyers then went to the Second Circuit Court of New York
01:03:45 ►
at 9 a.m. on Monday morning and demanded the same thing.
01:03:52 ►
And the Second Circuit, unfortunately, conceded.
01:03:57 ►
Now, why?
01:03:58 ►
I mean, the lawyers and I, Carl Mayer and Bruce Efron,
01:04:02 ►
we knew they’d appeal, but why?
01:04:05 ►
Why did they act so aggressively?
01:04:08 ►
And the only thing that we could surmise is because they’re already using the law.
01:04:13 ►
Because there are already dual nationals, Pakistani, U.S., whatever, being held in black sites.
01:04:19 ►
And if that temporary injunction was allowed to stand,
01:04:24 ►
and those people could get out and get access to a court,
01:04:28 ►
the government could be held in contempt of court.
01:04:32 ►
So the Obama administration appealed it.
01:04:35 ►
And let’s be clear, by the way, that Obama’s assault on civil liberties has been far more egregious than Bush.
01:04:40 ►
egregious than Bush.
01:04:51 ►
Including the misuse of the Espionage Act to shut down whistleblowers.
01:04:55 ►
The failure to curb wholesale surveillance.
01:05:00 ►
I mean, we are now the most monitored, watched, eavesdropped photograph population in human history.
01:05:03 ►
And all of our information is stored in perpetuity in government computers,
01:05:08 ►
you can’t use the word liberty when your government watches you 24 hours a day.
01:05:13 ►
That’s the relationship of a master and a slave.
01:05:18 ►
And as Hannah Arendt understood, totalitarian systems always carry out wholesale surveillance not to find crimes,
01:05:27 ►
but to gather enough information on every citizen so that should they seek to imprison them,
01:05:34 ►
there’s something in there that they can find and twist into an accusation.
01:05:40 ►
That’s why there’s wholesale surveillance and blackmail.
01:05:44 ►
Go look at COINTELPRO.
01:05:45 ►
We just had the anniversary of the charming J. Edgar Hoover’s attempt
01:05:49 ►
to force Dr. Martin Luther King to commit suicide.
01:05:52 ►
And by the way, I was in San Francisco,
01:05:55 ►
and I got up and went to Alcatraz, and I was appalled.
01:06:00 ►
That narrative of cops and robbers and good guys and bad guys
01:06:04 ►
and Al Capone and G-men
01:06:05 ►
and the utter masking of the human suffering that went on inside that prison,
01:06:13 ►
including what we did to Native American leaders not only in California but Arizona and everywhere else,
01:06:17 ►
is kind of staggering and gets back to that myth, that inability to confront the reality, our own history,
01:06:24 ►
back to that myth, that inability to confront the reality, our own history,
01:06:32 ►
the self-delusion that is propagated by systems of mass media throughout American society about who we really are and what we really do.
01:06:37 ►
And so the Second Circuit gets it, and they got a problem because stripping an American citizen of their right to due process
01:06:50 ►
and using the military is unconstitutional.
01:06:52 ►
That is kind of a problem for a court that doesn’t want to rule it unconstitutional.
01:06:58 ►
So you go before the hearing.
01:07:01 ►
It’s not a trial.
01:07:01 ►
You get a panel of three judges or four judges.
01:07:03 ►
I can’t remember.
01:07:04 ►
We review the case. And for not a trial. You get a panel of three judges or four judges. I can’t remember. We review the case.
01:07:05 ►
And for months, they don’t rule.
01:07:08 ►
And the reason they don’t rule is because I was also a plaintiff in Clapper v. Amnesty International.
01:07:16 ►
Now, this case was brought over the FISA Amendment Act of the wholesale surveillance,
01:07:21 ►
reached the Supreme Court,
01:07:23 ►
and we charged that the government was carrying out wholesale surveillance
01:07:27 ►
and was impeding our work as journalists.
01:07:31 ►
The government lawyers got up in the Supreme Court and said,
01:07:33 ►
well, this is complete speculation on the part of the plaintiffs.
01:07:38 ►
Not only that, if the government was carrying out surveillance, we would tell them.
01:07:45 ►
And so the Supreme Court threw it out, believing the government attorneys.
01:07:50 ►
And what the Second Circuit did is they waited for that ruling,
01:07:54 ►
and then they said, well, Hedges doesn’t have standing,
01:08:01 ►
credibility to bring the case in Clapper v. Samuels.
01:08:06 ►
I guess he doesn’t have standing in this, and they threw it out.
01:08:09 ►
So they never had to rule on the issue itself.
01:08:16 ►
And that’s how they have been effective at essentially, especially since 9-11,
01:08:22 ►
abrogating their role in terms of the defense of constitutional rights.
01:08:27 ►
We filed a cert, a petition to the Supreme Court. They didn’t take it.
01:08:29 ►
And now it’s up to you.
01:08:31 ►
And it is up to you.
01:08:33 ►
And that’s not hyperbolic.
01:08:36 ►
It always takes that first community or that first person
01:08:42 ►
to stand up and say no, for everyone else to stand up and say no.
01:08:47 ►
For everyone else to stand up and say no.
01:08:50 ►
When we did that trial, it was a two-year process, the NDAA,
01:08:58 ►
they conducted opinion polls that said 97% of the American public do not support the NDAA.
01:09:08 ►
And that trial was a window into how bankrupt our press has become.
01:09:15 ►
Because you had MSNBC with the FBI, led by the FBI informant Al Sharpton,
01:09:21 ►
who ratted out black radical leaders, not just mob figures,
01:09:27 ►
refused to touch it because the bill had been sponsored by Levin and McCain.
01:09:30 ►
It was a Democrat-Republican initiative.
01:09:32 ►
Fox didn’t touch it.
01:09:36 ►
Nobody touched it except my old employer, the New York Times,
01:09:38 ►
which sent a reporter to cover the trial,
01:09:41 ►
and when Forrest issued her decision, wrote an editorial supporting it.
01:09:47 ►
But that, for me, was a window into how bankrupt, and I could spend another lecture critiquing the Times, but that was a window into how bankrupt the press has become, how corroded.
01:09:54 ►
So you have the assault on the legal system, which is now very far advanced.
01:09:59 ►
Mass surveillance, the ability of the executive branch to serve as judge, jury, and executioner, the use of the Espionage Act to shut down whistleblowers,
01:10:08 ►
the end of investigative journalism.
01:10:10 ►
You can’t be an investigative journalist if the person who’s leaking you information
01:10:14 ►
can be instantly found out by the NSA.
01:10:17 ►
So that means there is, and I have friends at the Times,
01:10:21 ►
there is no more investigative journalism into the centers of power.
01:10:25 ►
None. You can’t do it.
01:10:28 ►
And that’s why Snowden fled the country.
01:10:31 ►
And coupled with that, you have the classic scenario of the end of empire,
01:10:40 ►
which Thucydides writes about.
01:10:42 ►
Thucydides writes that Athens became a tyrant abroad and then a tyrant at home.
01:10:50 ►
That the tyranny Athens imposed on others, it finally imposed on itself.
01:10:56 ►
So I, who spent two decades on the outer reaches of empire
01:11:00 ►
and understand the cruelty and violence of empire, which is, despite the rhetoric,
01:11:07 ►
totally about overwhelming force and violence, have watched as the mechanisms of control
01:11:14 ►
on the outer reaches of empire have migrated back into the heart of empire.
01:11:19 ►
For a drug warrant in Oakland, you will have a militarized police force
01:11:27 ►
in Kevlar vests
01:11:30 ►
with long-barreled weapons
01:11:32 ►
with a command helicopter
01:11:33 ►
kicking down your door in the middle of the night
01:11:35 ►
and seizing you.
01:11:37 ►
There is no difference between a night raid in Oakland
01:11:40 ►
and a night raid in Fallujah.
01:11:42 ►
None.
01:11:42 ►
and a night raid in Fallujah. None.
01:11:57 ►
You have the creeping presence of drones adopted by local police forces.
01:12:02 ►
You have the infusion of military hardware, we’ve seen it in Ferguson,
01:12:05 ►
given over to police forces.
01:12:15 ►
You have total security and surveillance, which means that you can monitor any segment of the population you want. And most importantly, you have created what Hannah Arendt defines
01:12:22 ►
as a system of omnipotent policing.
01:12:27 ►
She writes about this in The Origins of Totalitarianism.
01:12:31 ►
And when she writes about this, she says, what happened in Europe? She herself had finished at the University of Heidelberg,
01:12:39 ►
unfortunate choice of lovers, Heidegger.
01:12:44 ►
And she writes, when she gets out of university, the Nazis are in power.
01:12:48 ►
And she said, I had to unlearn everything that I had been taught in school to become
01:12:53 ►
a moral being.
01:12:55 ►
And she joins the Nazi resistance group.
01:12:58 ►
She’s picked up by the Gestapo.
01:12:59 ►
She comes perilously close to being killed.
01:13:02 ►
She’s expelled to France and stripped of her German citizenship.
01:13:04 ►
perilously close to being killed, she’s expelled to France and stripped of her German citizenship.
01:13:12 ►
So she joins the numerous communities of stateless. We have them here. They’re called undocumented workers who have no rights within the society. And she sees how the stateless become
01:13:19 ►
victimized by omnipotent police forces, that’s the word she uses, that can do anything to them.
01:13:25 ►
And that, of course, has been the effect of the war on drugs,
01:13:29 ►
that you go into a community, a marginal community, and you can do anything.
01:13:35 ►
You can arrest people.
01:13:37 ►
There’s actually, people are arrested for, I forget the term,
01:13:42 ►
but it’s called obstructing pedestrian traffic.
01:13:44 ►
It means standing on a sidewalk.
01:13:45 ►
I’m not making it up.
01:13:47 ►
You can be arrested for anything, riding your bike without a headlight,
01:13:51 ►
stacked with warrants.
01:13:53 ►
And Matt Taibbi just did a good book on this called Divide,
01:13:56 ►
where he compared the legal system for the rich, our oligarchs,
01:13:59 ►
and the legal system for the poor.
01:14:00 ►
And it’s quite stunning.
01:14:03 ►
And he’s a great writer, great journalist.
01:14:06 ►
But those omnipotent police forces, Arendt writes,
01:14:08 ►
become insidious when a state
01:14:10 ►
loses its stability because
01:14:12 ►
you already have the corrosion
01:14:14 ►
of the legal system coupled with
01:14:16 ►
a physical mechanism by which to
01:14:18 ►
shut everything down.
01:14:20 ►
And what we’ve done now
01:14:22 ►
in the Middle East is
01:14:24 ►
very dangerous.
01:14:29 ►
Al-Qaeda, I covered Al-Qaeda for a year for the New York Times, based in Paris.
01:14:34 ►
Al-Qaeda was a Klan-based group.
01:14:36 ►
That’s why it was so hard to penetrate.
01:14:41 ►
You didn’t really get into Al-Qaeda unless you were somebody’s cousin or, you know.
01:14:43 ►
But ISIS is completely different.
01:14:46 ►
ISIS has several hundred foreign fighters. And the more we bomb them, the more we drop missiles on them, the more incentive they
01:14:53 ►
have to send some of these foreign fighters back, which the security state knows very well.
01:15:00 ►
And the potential now for catastrophic domestic terrorism has become very high because of that,
01:15:09 ►
because it is much easier for these people who carry valid European and American passports
01:15:14 ►
to slip into the system.
01:15:16 ►
And at that moment, it’s just the flick of a switch.
01:15:20 ►
Everything is in place to go.
01:15:22 ►
everything is in place to go.
01:15:30 ►
The lawyers and I thought one of the reasons that the power elites want to push through the NDAA is because in the end they don’t trust the police to protect them.
01:15:36 ►
I did a protest with 133 members of Veterans for Peace in front of the White House
01:15:43 ►
where we were all arrested.
01:15:47 ►
It’s on YouTube.
01:15:48 ►
Everything’s on YouTube.
01:15:53 ►
And when we were being cuffed,
01:15:58 ►
it turns out that the D.C. police are all in the National Guard
01:16:03 ►
and they were all in Iraq and Afghanistan.
01:16:05 ►
And they would cuff us and they would whisper, keep protesting these wars.
01:16:13 ►
Keep protesting these wars.
01:16:24 ►
All of these New York City cops, they all moonlight for $37 an hour at places like Goldman Sachs,
01:16:30 ►
and they all watch these guys walk by in their $8,000 suits and their hookers and their limos.
01:16:37 ►
They know.
01:16:38 ►
They know.
01:16:41 ►
The whole mood of Zuccotti would change the moment the white shirts came,
01:16:45 ►
white shirts of the officers.
01:16:48 ►
And I think that in the end that’s why they want to be able to call out the military.
01:16:52 ►
You saw in the Chicago teacher strike, you had teachers would go into the bathrooms at the precincts
01:16:59 ►
and the police would applaud them.
01:17:01 ►
That terrifies the state.
01:17:19 ►
No act of resistance, even if it appears insignificant at the time, is ineffectual.
01:17:22 ►
I have seen it.
01:17:26 ►
I covered the revolutions of Eastern Europe.
01:17:34 ►
I was in the Magic Lantern Theater every night during the Velvet Revolution with Václav Havel and Dinsbier and Klaus.
01:17:41 ►
And all through the streets of that city that December
01:17:47 ►
were posters of a Charles University student named Jan Palek,
01:17:53 ►
who when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968
01:17:56 ►
to overthrow the Dubček regime,
01:17:59 ►
in protest had gone to Ventsilov Square,
01:18:02 ►
lit himself on fire.
01:18:04 ►
He died four days later from his burns.
01:18:08 ►
Thousands of students carried his body from Charles University to the graveyard.
01:18:13 ►
This was a non-event, never reported by the state media.
01:18:17 ►
The procession was broken up by the police.
01:18:20 ►
When his grave became a shrine and people would put flowers on it daily,
01:18:26 ►
the communist authority exhumed his body, cremated his remains,
01:18:29 ►
gave the urn to his mother, and said she was not allowed to rebury them.
01:18:33 ►
A week after the communist government fell,
01:18:36 ►
10,000 people walked to Red Army Square and renamed it Jan Palek Square.
01:18:44 ►
I was in Wenceslas Square with Marta Kuvashcheva, the great folk singer, Czech folk singer,
01:18:51 ►
who had sung Prayer for Marta, which was the anthem of defiance to the Soviets and which
01:18:58 ►
was broadcast on the radio as the Soviets crossed the borders to take control of the country.
01:19:07 ►
In punishment, the pro-Soviet regime, which replaced Dubček,
01:19:13 ►
not only banned her from the airwaves but destroyed all of her recording stock.
01:19:16 ►
And in the intervening years from 68 to 89, she had worked on an assembly line in a toy factory.
01:19:22 ►
I was in Ventsilala Square with 500,000 checks
01:19:26 ►
when she walked out on that balcony and she began to sing that song and every check in
01:19:33 ►
the crowd knew every word. Havel got it in The Power of the Power powerless. It’s called living in truth.
01:19:46 ►
And the capacity to stand up and live in truth,
01:19:49 ►
which is what you have the possibility to do as a community,
01:19:55 ►
and speak back to these forces
01:19:57 ►
that are essentially attempting to subjugate us.
01:20:00 ►
That living in truth ripples outwards
01:20:03 ►
in ways that you cannot begin to imagine.
01:20:17 ►
My friend Daniel Berrigan, Father Daniel Berrigan, says that the essence of faith
01:20:22 ►
is that the good draws to it the good.
01:20:29 ►
We don’t know where the good goes.
01:20:31 ►
Faith is the belief that it goes somewhere.
01:20:34 ►
The Buddhists call it karma.
01:20:37 ►
But that faith is real.
01:20:40 ►
That capacity to stand up and bear witness is real.
01:20:45 ►
We cannot judge our lives by what is empirically done before us.
01:20:52 ►
It may be that by the end of our lives, everything we have fought for is worse.
01:20:57 ►
But that doesn’t matter.
01:20:59 ►
That doesn’t invalidate what we’ve done.
01:21:01 ►
doesn’t invalidate what we’ve done.
01:21:07 ►
Because we are able, when we stand up as a moral witness,
01:21:13 ►
to create a power that goes beyond our own lives.
01:21:16 ►
And my father is the example.
01:21:21 ►
A Presbyterian minister, involved in the Civil Rights Movement. I grew up in a small farm town in upstate New York
01:21:25 ►
where Martin Luther King at the time was one of the most hated men in America.
01:21:28 ►
I watched people walk out of his church.
01:21:32 ►
He’d been a sergeant in North Africa in World War II,
01:21:34 ►
came back a pacifist.
01:21:36 ►
He told me when I was 12 or 13 that if the Vietnam War was still being waged
01:21:41 ►
when I was 18 and I had to go to jail, he would go to jail with me.
01:21:46 ►
I still have this vision of sitting for two years in a jail cell with my dad.
01:21:54 ►
His youngest brother, my uncle, was gay and lived with his partner in Greenwich Village
01:22:00 ►
and had been disowned by the rest of my father’s family, and my
01:22:05 ►
father brought him into our family.
01:22:09 ►
And this was the 1970s.
01:22:13 ►
My father understood that the pain of being a gay man in America, which he saw through
01:22:18 ►
his brother who he loved, was being visited on many, many people throughout the country.
01:22:23 ►
And he stood up in the Presbyterian church and called for equal gender equality rights
01:22:29 ►
for all people regardless of their sexual orientation.
01:22:35 ►
Which led, not surprisingly, to the Presbyterian church telling him to be quiet.
01:22:43 ►
And so my father’s response was to open the doors of his church
01:22:47 ►
and hold a citywide Easter service for the GBLT community of the city of Syracuse.
01:22:57 ►
And I was at Colgate University at the time, which was an hour away as an undergraduate.
01:23:02 ►
And my dad was a great preacher, 40 years,
01:23:05 ►
came down and picked me up.
01:23:07 ►
And he said, I’m taking you to this service
01:23:08 ►
because it’s the last time you’re ever going to hear me preach.
01:23:14 ►
And he got up.
01:23:17 ►
That church was packed.
01:23:18 ►
And even before it started, people were weeping
01:23:21 ►
because the church had delivered such cruelty to them.
01:23:26 ►
And my dad got up and said,
01:23:29 ►
marriage is a sacrament.
01:23:33 ►
It is not a reward for being a heterosexual.
01:23:38 ►
And any church that does not honor the sacrament of marriage does not deserve to call itself Christian. self-Christian. Years later, I’m in the New York Times office. I had been the Middle East
01:23:56 ►
Bureau Chief for the New York Times seven years in the region. Bush was calling for
01:24:00 ►
the invasion of Iraq. I understood, like all Arabists, that we were not
01:24:05 ►
going to be greeted as liberators.
01:24:06 ►
Democracy was not going to emanate outwards from Baghdad
01:24:09 ►
across the Middle East.
01:24:10 ►
The oil reconstruction was not going
01:24:13 ►
to pay for rebuilding Iraq.
01:24:19 ►
I gave a commencement address at Rockford College,
01:24:22 ►
where I was booed off the stage for denouncing the war. One
01:24:27 ►
thousand people in the audience actually stood in the middle of my address and began singing
01:24:32 ►
God Bless America. They cut my microphone twice. It’s also on YouTube. They, after 18 minutes, I had two burly senior guys in robes try and climb up and push me off the podium.
01:24:52 ►
Campus security is freaking out.
01:24:54 ►
The president comes over and tells me to wrap it up.
01:25:00 ►
Campus security, before the awarding of diplomas,
01:25:04 ►
it was the last time I’ve ever been invited to give a commencement address,
01:25:09 ►
before the awarding of diplomas wants to hustle me off the stage,
01:25:14 ►
I’m in a robe.
01:25:15 ►
I say, look, my jacket, it’s in the president’s office.
01:25:17 ►
They said, we’ll mail you your jacket.
01:25:20 ►
They drive me to a hotel room, watch me pack my bags, put me on a bus to Chicago.
01:25:26 ►
Well, of course, Fox, the right wing, they get the video clips, the audio,
01:25:31 ►
and just like my friend Jeremiah Wright, I get lynched hour after hour after hour.
01:25:37 ►
And I get called into the New York Times for a reprimand, a written reprimand,
01:25:44 ►
because under guild or union rules, you give the employee the written reprimand, a written reprimand, because under guild or union rules,
01:25:47 ►
you give the employee the written reprimand,
01:25:49 ►
and the next time they violate that reprimand, they’re fired.
01:25:53 ►
And I sat in that office, and I didn’t want to lose my job,
01:25:59 ►
and I realized that I could muzzle myself
01:26:02 ►
and pay fealty to my career,
01:26:05 ►
but to do so would be to betray my dad.
01:26:18 ►
And I quit.
01:26:20 ►
And when I walked out that door,
01:26:57 ►
And when I walked out that door, I realized for the first time that what my father had given me was freedom.
01:27:02 ►
I didn’t need the New York Times to tell me who I was.
01:27:06 ►
I knew who I was.
01:27:13 ►
And that’s your role for us, for the rest of the country. I did everything I could through the courts, and I failed. But the fight’s not over. It’s in your hands. Stand up. Say no. And there are communities across this country who will say no with you.
01:27:29 ►
And even if we fail, it doesn’t matter. I don’t fight fascists because I’m going to win.
01:27:37 ►
I fight fascists because they’re fascists. Thank you.
01:27:55 ►
You know who and what you are.
01:28:02 ►
You don’t need a company, a school, your family or your friends to tell you who you are and what you’re here for.
01:28:04 ►
You’ve known that all along.
01:28:08 ►
Maybe the day has arrived for you to stop being the person that everyone else wants you to be and start being your own person.
01:28:13 ►
Now, I’m not recommending that you follow Chris Hedges’ example and quit your job.
01:28:18 ►
There are as many ways to change our world as there are people in it.
01:28:22 ►
We all have different roles in what’s about to come, and one of the key elements, I believe, is that the status quo must be abolished. And that doesn’t
01:28:31 ►
happen at a society level, it happens at the individual level. Maybe it’s time to do a little
01:28:36 ►
changing of the status quo in your own life. Is this week turning out much like those endless
01:28:42 ►
weeks that have come before it? Then do something. Just
01:28:45 ►
one thing is all, but do one thing out of the ordinary. Do something to get yourself out of
01:28:50 ►
your automatic comfort zone. For some of us, it means marching in protests. Others of us will
01:28:57 ►
engage in various forms of civil disobedience. Some will make speeches, and others continue
01:29:02 ►
working on environmental issues and health issues and minority issues that they’ve already been working on.
01:29:08 ►
This isn’t a one-size-fits-all revolution.
01:29:11 ►
It’s a revolution that begins as they all do, on a personal level.
01:29:15 ►
If you want to do something for racial justice, one of the things that you can do is to continue working to end the so-called war on drugs.
01:29:23 ►
Basically, it’s a race war. Three
01:29:26 ►
quarters of the drug arrests are for cannabis, and the vast majority of those arrests are of people
01:29:31 ►
of color. Yet an overwhelming number of cannabis users are white. These incarcerations of young
01:29:38 ►
black and brown men, where they’re forced into working as prison labor, is slavery. It’s forced
01:29:43 ►
slavery, nothing less.
01:29:46 ►
Now before I close,
01:29:49 ►
I want to say a word to any of our fellow slaughters who may take to the streets in protest.
01:29:52 ►
Pay attention to those around you
01:29:54 ►
and be sure to avoid the agent provocateurs
01:29:56 ►
that the government seeds into
01:29:58 ►
almost every demonstration of any kind
01:30:01 ►
ever since the Occupy movement began.
01:30:03 ►
We the people are non-violent, but our government has become very violent
01:30:07 ►
and will not hesitate to provoke violence at every opportunity it has.
01:30:12 ►
Now, recently I’ve also seen videos of a police line where demonstrators were right up in the policemen’s faces
01:30:19 ►
and shouting obscenities at them.
01:30:21 ►
Now think about what’s going on here for a minute.
01:30:26 ►
obscenities at them. Now think about what’s going on here for a minute. As a personal example,
01:30:32 ►
I know a lot of our fellow salonners are in the military or are ex-military, and like me,
01:30:37 ►
they may have had to cross through lines of anti-war demonstrators that are shouting obscenities at you. It’s something that I’ll never forget. You know, I’d arrived in a position where I had
01:30:43 ►
no choice but to go to work at the base each day, and it was really difficult going through those lines of anti-war demonstrators,
01:30:49 ►
because although I couldn’t say it out loud, I actually agreed with them. Now, I think many of
01:30:54 ►
today’s policemen and policewomen are in the same spot that I was in back in 1968. It’s not a good
01:31:00 ►
place to be, and these men and women are not our enemy. In fact, some of them are fellow slaunters.
01:31:06 ►
I hear from them regularly, and they are good people, just like you and me.
01:31:11 ►
So don’t take your anger out on the police.
01:31:14 ►
Instead, we should be building bridges to our local police.
01:31:17 ►
The cop on the beat, if there is still such a thing, is on our side.
01:31:22 ►
It’s the oligarchs who own and control the police forces that are the enemy.
01:31:26 ►
Not the rich, not the well-to-do,
01:31:28 ►
but the truly wealthy.
01:31:30 ►
It’s the one-tenth of one percent
01:31:32 ►
of us humans.
01:31:33 ►
They’re the ones who own the rest of us
01:31:35 ►
and are the enemy.
01:31:36 ►
And they ultimately must be stopped.
01:31:39 ►
It’s the only way our species
01:31:41 ►
is going to survive.
01:31:43 ►
So let me close now by reading
01:31:44 ►
one more paragraph from Chris Hedges’ essay titled,
01:31:48 ►
Let’s Get This Class War Started.
01:31:50 ►
And I quote,
01:31:52 ►
Class struggle defines most of human history.
01:31:56 ►
Marx got this right.
01:31:57 ►
The sooner we realize that we are locked in deadly warfare with our ruling corporate elite,
01:32:03 ►
the sooner we will realize that these elites must be overthrown.
01:32:07 ►
The corporate oligarchs have now seized all institutional systems of power in the United States.
01:32:14 ►
Electoral politics, internal security, the judiciary, our universities,
01:32:19 ►
the arts and finance, along with nearly all forms of communication, are in corporate hands.
01:32:26 ►
Our democracy, with false debates between two corporate parties, is meaningless political theater.
01:32:34 ►
There is no way within the system to defy the demands of Wall Street, the fossil fuel industry, or war profiteers.
01:32:41 ►
The only route left to us, as Aristotle knew,
01:32:46 ►
is revolt.
01:32:48 ►
It is now time for you
01:32:49 ►
to stand up,
01:32:51 ►
be counted,
01:32:53 ►
and live in truth.
01:32:55 ►
For now, this is Lorenzo
01:32:57 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:33:00 ►
Be careful out there, my friends.
01:33:05 ►
There’s something happening here.
01:33:09 ►
What it is ain’t exactly clear.
01:33:14 ►
There’s a man with a gun over there.
01:33:19 ►
Telling me I’ve got to beware.
01:33:23 ►
I think it’s time we stop. Children,
01:33:26 ►
what’s that sound? Everybody
01:33:27 ►
look what’s going down.
01:33:38 ►
There’s
01:33:40 ►
battle lines being
01:33:41 ►
drawn. Nobody’s
01:33:44 ►
right if everybody’s wrong.
01:33:48 ►
Young people speak in their minds.
01:33:53 ►
Are getting so much resistance from behind.
01:33:58 ►
Every time we stop, hey, what’s that sound?
01:34:01 ►
Everybody look what’s going down What a field day for the heat
01:34:16 ►
A thousand people in the street
01:34:21 ►
Singing songs and carrying signs
01:34:26 ►
mostly say
01:34:28 ►
hooray for our side
01:34:31 ►
it’s time we stop
01:34:33 ►
hey what’s that sound
01:34:35 ►
everybody look
01:34:36 ►
what’s going down Paranoia strikes deep
01:34:50 ►
Into your life it will creep
01:34:55 ►
It starts when you’re always afraid
01:34:59 ►
Step out of line, the men come
01:35:03 ►
And take you away, way
01:35:05 ►
We better stop, hey, what’s that sound?
01:35:09 ►
Everybody look what’s going, we better stop
01:35:11 ►
Hey, what’s that sound?
01:35:13 ►
Everybody look what’s going, we better stop
01:35:16 ►
Now, what’s that sound?
01:35:18 ►
Everybody look what’s going, we better stop
01:35:21 ►
Children, what’s the sound?