The Chris Hedges Report Podcast

Narrated by Eunice WongText originally published Nov. 3, 2023Bad Moon Rising - by Mr. FishI covered the birth of Jewish fascism in Israel. I reported on the extremist Meir Kahane, who was barred from running for office and whose Kach Party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States. I attended political rallies held by Benjamin Netanyahu, who received lavish funding from rightwing Americans, when he ran against Yitzhak Rabin, who was negotiating a peace settlement with the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s supporters chanted “Death to Rabin.” They burned an effigy of Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabin. Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995 by a Jewish fanatic. Rabin’s widow, Lehea, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters for her husband’s murder.Netanyahu, who first became prime minister in 1996, has spent his political career nurturing Jewish extremists, including Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa’ar, Naftali Bennett, and Ayelet Shaked. His father, Benzion — who worked as an assistant to the Zionist pioneer Vladimir Jabotinsky, who Benito Mussolini referred to as “a good fascist” — was a leader in the Herut Party that called on the Jewish state to seize all the land of historic Palestine. Many of those who formed the Herut Party carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook and other Jewish intellectuals, described the Herut Party in a statement published in The New York Times as a “political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties.”There has always been a strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist project. Now it has taken control of the Israeli state.“The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here,” Zeev Sternhell, a Holocaust survivor and Israel’s foremost authority on fascism, warned in 2018, “the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people.” Sternhell added, “[W]e see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.” The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of Israel’s crypto-fascists, heirs of Kahane’s movement. These Jewish extremists, which make up the ruling coaltion government, are orchestrating the genocide in Gaza, where hundreds of Palestinians are dying daily. They champion the iconography and language of their homegrown fascism. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of blood and soil. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians, who Netanyahu compared to the Biblical Ammonites, massacred by the Israelites. Enemies — usually Muslims — slated for extinction are subhuman who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism understand. Millions of Muslims and Christians, including those with Israeli citizenship, are to be purged. A leaked 10-page document from the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence dated Oct. 13, 2023 recommends the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. It is a grave mistake not to take the blood curdling calls for the wholesale eradication and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians seriously. This rhetoric is not hyperbolic. It is a literal prescription. Netanyahu in a tweet, later removed, described the battle with Hamas as a “struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.” These Jewish fanatics have begun their version of the final solution to the Palestinian problem. They dropped 12,000 tons of explosives on Gaza in the first two weeks of assault to obliterate at least 45 percent of Gaza’s housing units, according to the U.N.’s humanitarian office. They have no intention of being detoured, even by Washington.“It became evident to U.S. officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign,” The New York Times reported.“In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II — including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — to try to defeat those countries,” the paper continued.The goal is a “pure” Israel, cleansed of Palestinian contaminants. Gaza is to become a wasteland. The Palestinians in Gaza will be killed or forced into refugee camps over the border in Egypt. Messianic redemption will take place once the Palestinians are expelled. Jewish extremists call for the Al-Aqsa mosque - the third holiest shrine for Muslims, built on the ruins of the Jewish Second Temple, which

As a member of the US Congress for 16 years, Dennis Kucinich gave over 500 speeches warning about the consequences of US wars against Afghanistan, the Balkans, Iraq, Iran, Libya and Syria. He also spoke out for the imperative of peace in the Middle East, on behalf of Israelis and the Palestinians. He met with leaders of many countries who were grappling to keep their nations out of conflict and came to understand the role some in the US government have played to intentionally catalyze war, fueling arms sales globally, without regard for the consequences. Dennis warns that we are, in his words, cartwheeling towards a massive East v. West war with religious and ethnic overtones. This seemingly inexorable March of nuclear Folly, may, he writes, will pit the United States militarily against China, Russia and their allies. Joining me to discuss how, as he writes, the polarization of US politics, the cognitively impaired and failing executive branch, the instability of the congressional leadership, the purblind partisanship, the ideologically, click-bait driven media has produced a mad blood lust for war against Iran and acceleration toward the abyss, is Dennis Kucinich.Thank you for being a paid subscriber to the Chris Hedges Report. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

Narrated by Eunice WongText originally published Oct. 28, 2023A Bird in the Hand - by Mr. FishDuring the siege in Sarajevo, when I was reporting for The New York Times, we never endured the level of saturation bombing and near total blockage of food, water, fuel and medicine that Israel has imposed on Gaza. We never endured hundreds of dead and wounded a day. We never endured the complicity of the international community in the Serbian campaign of genocide. We never endured Washington intervening to block ceasefire resolutions. We never endured massive arms shipments from the U.S. and other Western countries to sustain the siege. We never endured press reports from Sarajevo that were routinely discredited and dismissed by the international community, although 25 journalists were killed in the war by the besieging Serbian forces. We never endured Western governments justifying the siege as the right of the Serbs to defend themselves, although the U.N. peacekeepers sent to Bosnia were largely a public relations gesture, ineffective in halting the slaughter until forced to respond following the massacres of 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica.I don’t mean to minimize the horror of the siege of Sarajevo, which gives me nightmares nearly three decades later. But what we suffered – three to four hundred shells a day, four to five dead a day, and two dozen wounded a day - is a tiny fraction of the wholesale death and destruction in Gaza. The Israeli siege of Gaza more resembles the Wehrmacht’s assault on Stalingrad, where over 90 percent of the city’s buildings were destroyed, than Sarajevo. On Friday the Gaza Strip had all its communications severed. No Internet. No phone service. No electricity. Israel’s goal is the murder of tens, probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of those who survive into refugee camps in Egypt. It is an attempt by Israel to erase not only a people, but the idea of Palestine. It is a carbon copy of the massive campaigns of racialized slaughter by other settler colonial projects who believed that indiscriminate and wholesale violence could make the aspirations of an oppressed people, whose land they stole, go away. And like other perpetrators of genocide, Israel intends to keep it hidden.Israel’s bombing campaign, one of the heaviest of the 21st century, has killed more than 7,300 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, along with 26 journalists, medical workers, teachers and United Nations staff. Some 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced and an estimated 600,000 are homeless. Mosques, 120 health facilities, ambulances, schools, apartment blocks, supermarkets, water and sewage treatment plants and power plants have been blasted into rubble. Hospitals and clinics, lacking fuel, medicine and electricity, have been bombed or are shutting down. Clean water is running out. Gaza, by the end of Israel’s scorched earth campaign, will be uninhabitable, a tactic the Nazis regularly employed when facing armed resistance, including in the Warsaw Ghetto and later Warsaw itself. By the time Israel is done, Gaza, or at least Gaza as we knew it, will not exist.Not only are the tactics the same, but so is the rhetoric. Palestinians are referred to as animals, beasts and Nazis. They have no right to exist. Their children have no right to exist. They must be cleansed from the earth. The extermination of those whose land we steal, whose resources we plunder and whose labor we exploit is coded within our DNA. Ask Native Americans. Ask Indians. Ask the Congolese. Ask the Kikuyu in Kenya. Ask the Herero in Namibia who, like Palestinians in Gaza, were gunned down and driven into desert concentration camps where they died of starvation and disease. Eighty thousand of them. Ask Iraqis. Ask Afghans. Ask Syrians. Ask Kurds. Ask Libyans. Ask indigenous peoples across the globe. They know who we are.Israel’s distorted, settler colonial visage is our own. We pretend otherwise. We ascribe to ourselves virtues and civilizing qualities that are, as in Israel, flimsy justifications for stripping an occupied and besieged people of their rights, seizing their land and using prolonged imprisonment, torture, humiliation, enforced poverty and murder to keep them subjugated.Our past, including our recent past in the Middle East, is built on the idea of subduing or wiping out the “inferior” races of the earth. We give these “inferior” races names that embody evil. ISIS. Al Qaeda. Hezbollah. Hamas. We use racist slurs to dehumanize them. “Haji” “Sand Nigger” “Camel Jockey” “Ali Baba” “Dung Shoveler” And then, because they embody evil, because they are less than human, we feel licensed, as Nissim Vaturi, a member of the Israeli parliament for the ruling Likud party said, to erase “the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” Naftali Bennett, Israel’s former Prime Minister, in an interview on Sky News on Oct. 12 said, “We’re fighting Nazis,” in other words, absolute evil.Not to

Narrated by Eunice WongText Originally published Oct. 22, 2023Made in Israel - by Mr. FishIsrael, with the backing of its U.S. and European allies, is preparing to launch not only a scorched earth campaign in Gaza but the worst ethnic cleansing since the wars in the former Yugoslavia. The goal is to drive tens, most probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians over the southern border at Rafah into refugee camps in Egypt. The reverberations will be catastrophic, not only for the Palestinians, but throughout the region, almost certainly triggering armed clashes to the north of Israel with Hezbollah in Lebanon and perhaps with Syria and Iran. The Biden administration, slavishly doing Israel’s bidding, is fueling the madness. The U.S. was the only country to veto the U.N. Security Council resolution calling for humanitarian pauses to deliver food, medicine, water and fuel to Gaza. It has blocked proposals for a ceasefire. It has proposed a draft U.N. Security Council resolution that says Israel has a right to defend itself. The resolution also demands Iran stop exporting arms to "militias and terrorist groups threatening peace and security across the region." The U.S. and its Western allies are as morally bankrupt and as complicit in genocide as those who witnessed the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and did nothing.The conflict, which has taken the lives of 1,400 Israelis and at least 4,600 Palestinians in Gaza, is widening. Israel carried out a second airstrike on two airports in Syria. It daily trades rocket barrages with Hezbollah militias. U.S. military bases in Iraq and Syria have been attacked by Shia militias. The USS Carney, a guided missile destroyer, shot down three cruise missiles on Thursday, apparently launched by the Houthis in Yemen and heading towards Israel. Israel is also struggling to quell daily violent clashes in the occupied West Bank. It carried out an airstrike on Sunday on a mosque in the Jenin refugee camp – the first air strike in the West Bank for two decades - that killed at least 2 people. Armed Jewish settlers have been rampaging through Palestinian towns in the West Bank. At least 90 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed by armed settlers or the Israeli military since the Oct. 7 incursion into Israel by Hamas and other resistance fighters, according to the U.N.’s humanitarian office. Some 4,000 workers from Gaza and 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been arrested in the past two weeks, doubling the number of Palestinian prisoners to 10,000 held by Israel, over half of whom are political prisoners“Many of the prisoners have had their limbs, hands and legs broken … degrading and insulting expressions, insults, cursing, tying them with handcuffs to the back and tightening them at the end to the point of causing severe pain … naked, humiliating and group search of the prisoners,” the Palestinian Authority’s Commission for Detainees’ Affairs, Qadura Fares, said at a press conference.B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, told the BBC that since the Oct. 7 attack, it had documented "a concerted and organized effort by settlers to use the fact that the entire international and local attention is focused on Gaza and the north of Israel to try to seize land in the West Bank."Inside Israel, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and Jerusalem IDs are being harassed, detained, arrested and expelled from jobs and universities in what is described as a “witch hunt.” More than 152,000 Israelis have been evacuated from towns and villages near the borders of Gaza and Lebanon.The U.S., in an effort to thwart a military response by Iran that could trigger a regional war, is deploying an additional 2,000 troops to the Middle East. It will redeploy one of its strike groups to the Persian Gulf and send additional air defense systems to the region. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and its strike group — which last weekend was being deployed to the eastern Mediterranean Sea to join the USS Gerald R. Ford — has been redirected to the Persian Gulf. A Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile battery, and Patriot missile defense system battalions, have also been sent to the Persian Gulf.Israel has unleashed its Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – Death, Famine, War and Conquest. It has given Gazans two choices. Leave Gaza or die.Palestinians will be killed not only from the bombs and shells, and eventually, with the ground invasion, bullets and tank shells, but from hunger and epidemics such as cholera. Without water, fuel and medicine and with the breakdown of sanitation, diseases will spread swiftly. The U.N. states that hospitals in Gaza “are on the brink of collapse.” Thousands of patients will die once fuel runs out for hospital generators.A doctor from al-Shifa hospital in Gaza reported in an interview Saturday, “We are collapsing.” He spoke of a lack of oxygen, light and medical supplies, no water in some departments, concerns about cholera and the loss of doctors k

Narrated by Eunice WongOriginally published Oct 18, 2023Liar Liar - by Mr. FishIsrael was founded on lies. The lie that Palestinian land was largely unoccupied. The lie that 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes and villages during their ethnic cleansing by Zionist militias in 1948 because they were told to do so by Arab leaders. The lie that it was Arab armies that started the 1948 war that saw Israel seize 78 percent of historic Palestine. The lie that Israel faced annihilation in 1967, forcing it to invade and occupy the remaining 22 percent of Palestine, as well as land belonging to Egypt and Syria. Israel is sustained by lies. The lie that Israel wants a just and equitable peace and will support a Palestinian state. The lie that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. The lie that Israel is an “outpost of Western civilization in a sea of barbarism.” The lie that Israel respects the rule of law and human rights. Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians are always greeted with lies. I heard them. I recorded them. I published them in my stories for The New York Times when I was the paper’s Middle East Bureau Chief.I covered war for two decades, including seven years in the Middle East. I learned quite a bit about the size and lethality of explosive devices. There is nothing in the arsenal of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) that could have replicated the massive explosive power of the missile that killed an estimated 500 civilians in the al-Ahli Arab Christian hospital in Gaza. Nothing. If Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad had these kinds of missiles, huge buildings in Israel would be rubble with hundreds of dead. They don’t. The whistling sound, audible on the video moments before the explosion, appears to comes from the high velocity of a missile. This sound gives it away. No Palestinian rocket makes this noise. And then there is the speed of the missile. Palestinian rockets are slow and lumbering, clearly visible as they arch in the sky and then tumble in free fall towards their targets. They do not strike with precision or travel at close to supersonic speed. They are incapable of killing hundreds of people.The Israeli military dropped “roof knocking” rockets with no warheads on the hospital in the days leading up to the Oct. 17 strike, the familiar warning given by Israel to evacuate buildings, according to al-Ahli hospital officials. Hospital officials also said they had received calls from Israel saying “we warned you to evacuate twice.” Israel has demanded that all hospitals in northern Gaza be evacuated.Following the strike on the hospital, Hananya Naftali, a “digital aide” to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, posted on X, formerly Twitter: “Israeli Air Force struck a Hamas terrorist base inside a hospital in Gaza.” The post was quickly deleted.Since the Oct. 7 incursion into Israel by Palestinian resistance fighters, which reportedly left some 1,300 Israelis dead, many of them civilians, and saw some 200 kidnapped as hostages and taken to Gaza, Israel has carried out 51 attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza that have killed 15 healthcare workers and injured 27, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Out of 35 hospitals in Gaza, four are not functioning due to severe damage and targeting. Only eight of the 22 UNRWA primary healthcare centers are “partially functional,” the WHO says.The brazenness of Israeli lies stunned those of us who reported from Gaza. It did not matter if we had seen the Israeli attack, including the shooting of unarmed Palestinians. It did not matter how many witnesses we interviewed. It did not matter what photographic and forensic evidence we obtained. Israel lied. Small lies. Big lies. Huge lies. These lies came reflexively and instantly from the Israeli military, Israeli politicians and Israeli media. They were amplified by Israel’s well-oiled propaganda machine and repeated with a cloying sincerity on international news outlets. Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that characterize despotic regimes. It does not deform the truth, it inverts it. It paints a picture that is diametrically opposed to reality. Those of us who have covered the occupied territories have run into Israel’s Alice-in-Wonderland narratives, which we dutifully insert into our stories — required under the rules of American journalism — although we know they are untrue.Israel has invented an Orwellian lexicon. Children killed by Israelis become children caught in crossfire. The bombing of residential districts, with dozens of dead and wounded, becomes a surgical strike on a bomb-making factory. The destruction of Palestinian homes becomes the demolition of the homes of terrorists. The Big Lie — Große Lüge — feeds the two reactions Israel seeks to elicit — racism among its supporters and terror among its victims. The Big Lies fosters the myth of a clash of civilizations, a war between democracy, decency and honor on one side and Islamic terrorism

On October 7 Hamas fighters broke through the security barrier separating Gaza from Israel. They attacked army outposts, villages, an outdoor concert venue and Kibutzim. Some 1,300 Israelis, many of them civilians, were killed. Some 150 Israelis, in cluding women, children and the elderly, were taken as hostages and transported back to Gaza. Israel says 1,500 Hamas militants, most young men who most likely had never been out Gaza, were killed. Israel has ordered some 1.1 million Palestinians in northern Gaza to evacuate. The north includes Gaza City, the most densely populated part of the strip, with 750,000 residents. It also includes Gaza’s main hospital and the Jabalia and al-Shati refugee camps. Gaza is one of the most heavily populated spots on the planet with 2.3 million people. Its borders are sealed by Egypt and Israel. There is no sanctuary with a tiny land mass 25 miles long and only about 5 files wide. Israel has cut off food, fuel, water and electricity, provoking an appalling humanitarian crisis. Joining me to discuss the crisis in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories is the Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein. Norman has written numerous books on the Middle East including “Gaza: an Inquest into its Martyrdom.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

Narrated by Eunice WongPost originally published Oct. 14, 2023This Way for the Genocide, Ladies and Gentlemen - by Mr. FishI have been in urban warfare in El Salvador, Iraq, Gaza, Bosnia and Kosovo. Once you fight street by street, apartment block by apartment block, there is only one rule — kill anything that moves. The talk of safe zones, the reassurances of protecting civilians, the promises of “surgical” and “targeted” air strikes, the establishment of “safe” evacuation routes, the fatuous explanation that civilian dead were “caught in the crossfire,” the claim that the homes and apartment buildings bombed into rubble were the abode of terrorists or that errant Hamas rockets were responsible for the destruction of schools and medical clinics, is part of the rhetorical cover to carry out indiscriminate slaughter.Gaza is such a small area — 25 miles in length and about 5 miles wide — and so densely populated that the only outcome of an Israeli ground and air assault is the mass death of those Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant calls “human animals” and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls “human beasts.” Israeli Knesset member Tally Gotliv suggested dropping “doomsday weapons” on Gaza, widely seen as a call for a nuclear strike. Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Friday dismissed calls to protect Palestinian civilians. “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible … this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true,” Herzog said. “They could’ve risen up, they could’ve fought against that evil regime that took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.” He added, “We will break their backbone.”The demand by Israel that 1.1 million Palestinians — nearly half of Gaza’s population — evacuate northern Gaza, which will become a free fire zone, within 24 hours, ignores the fact that given the overcrowding and sealed borders there is no place for the displaced to go. The north includes Gaza City, the most densely populated part of the strip, with 750,000 residents. It also includes Gaza’s main hospital and the Jabalia and al-Shati refugee camps. Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion military aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising “the right to defend itself.” This is not a war. It is the obliteration of civilians trapped for 16 years in the world’s largest concentration camp. Gaza is being leveled, flattened, destroyed, reduced to rubble. Hundreds of thousands of its impoverished residents will be killed, wounded or left homeless without food, fuel, water and medical help. Nearly 600 children are already dead.The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has been forced to close 14 food distribution centers leaving half a million people without food relief. Gaza’s only power plant has run out of fuel. The United Nations says 12 of its staff have been killed by Israeli air strikes, 21 out of 22 UNRWA health facilities in Gaza have been damaged and hospitals lack basic medicines and supplies.Israel, as it has in the past, will block the dissemination of independent reporting and images once some 360,000 soldiers launch a ground assault. It cut internet service in Gaza on Saturday. The brief glimpses of Israeli atrocities that make it out will be dismissed by Israeli leaders as anomalies or blamed on Hamas. The West refuses to intervene, as 2.3 million people, including 1 million children, are deprived of food, fuel, electricity and water, see their schools and hospitals bombed and are butchered and rendered homeless by one of the most advanced military machines on the planet.The gruesome images of Israelis gunned down by Hamas is the currency of death. It trades carnage for carnage, a macabre dance that Israel initiated with the massacres and ethnic cleansing that allowed for the creation of the Jewish state, followed by decades of dispossession and violence meted out to the Palestinians. The Israeli army, before the current assault, had killed 7,779 Palestinians in Gaza since 2000 including 1,741 children and 572 women, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. This figure does not include Gazans who died due to drinking contaminated water or being denied access to medical treatment. Nor does it include the rising number of Gazan youth who, having lost all hope and struggling with deep depression, have committed suicide.I spent seven years reporting on the conflict, four of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief of The New York Times. I stood over the bodies of Israeli victims of bus bombings in Jerusalem by Palestinian suicide-bombers. I saw rows of corpses, including children, in the corridors in Dar Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. I watched Israeli soldiers taunt small boys who in response threw rocks and were then callously shot in the Khan Youni

Stephanie Gibaud in June 2008 was ordered by one of her managers at the UBS Bank in Paris to destroy all her computer files that related to customers with offshore accounts in Switzerland. The order came in the wake of the 2007 American banker Bradley Birkenfeld’s disclosure of client information to the U.S. Department of Justice that suggested the bank was facilitating massive tax evasion schemes for its American clients – ultimately leading to a penalty of $780 million. Swiss banks have long been havens for those seeking to avoid taxes. In 2014, Credit Suisse would also plead guilty to sheltering money for its clients so they could avoid taxes and paid $2.6 billion in penalties.Gibaud was the only bank employee at UBS who refused to delete her files. She protested to UBS management and French regulators. Her documents would eventually help to identify 38,000 offshore bank accounts amounting to $ 12 billion dollars.UBS responded by trying to fire her as part of a mass redundancy of one hundred employees, during the 2008 financial crisis. The French Ministry of Work intervened, but her life at UBS became excruciating. She suffered harassment and discrimination along social and professional isolation. She endured constant anxiety and depression. UBS fired her in 2012. She was sued for defamation by the bank after writing her book “The Woman Who Knew Too Much, part of a series of law suits that plague her to this day. She requested compensation totaling 3.5 million euros. The judge gave her 4,500 euros, to cover her legal fees.UBS was eventually forced to pay a record fine in 2019 of $ 4.9 billion dollars. But Gibaud found herself financially ruined and blacklisted from the financial sector where she had spent her career.The French legal system does not compensate whistleblowers, unlike the United States. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, for examplerecently awarded an anonymous whistle-blower around $ 200 million for providing information about Deutsche Bank’s manipulation of the LIBOR benchmark. Birkenfeld, who exposed UBS’s offshore accounts for American clients, was handed a check from the U.S. Treasury for $ 104 million dollars minus taxes.Gibaud is currently battling in the French courts to become the first legally-recognized whistle-blower, which could pave the way for greater protection – and compensation. Joining me from France to discuss global banking, fraud, the fate of whittelbloers and her case is Stephani Gibaud, author of The Woman Who Knew Too Much and Whistleblowers: The Man Hunt. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

Narrated by Eunice WongText originally published Oct. 8, 2023Out of Sight, Out of Mind - by Mr. FishThe indiscriminate shootings of Israelis by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance organizations, the kidnapping of civilians, the barrage of rockets into Israel, drone attacks on a variety of targets from tanks to automated machine gun nests, are the familiar language of the Israeli occupier. Israel has spoken this blood-soaked language of violence to the Palestinians since Zionist militias seized more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, destroyed some 530 Palestinian villages and cities and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in more than 70 massacres. Some 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed between 1947 and 1949 to create the state of Israel in 1948.Israel’s response to these armed incursions will be a genocidal assault on Gaza. Israel will kill dozens of Palestinians for every Israeli killed. Hundreds of Palestinians have already died in Israel air assaults since the launch of “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” on Saturday morning, which left 700 Israelis dead. Prime Minister Netanyahu warned Palestinians in Gaza on Sunday to “leave now,” because Israel is going to “turn all Hamas hiding places into rubble.”But where are Palestinians in Gaza supposed to go? Israel and Egypt blockade the land borders. There is no exit by air or sea, which are controlled by Israel. The collective retribution against innocents is a familiar tactic employed by colonial rulers. We used it against Native Americans and later in the Philippines and Vietnam. The Germans used it against the Herero and Namaqua in Namibia. The British in Kenya and Malaya. The Nazis used it in the areas they occupied in the Soviet Union, Eastern and Central Europe. Israel follows the same playbook. Death for death. Atrocity for atrocity. But it is always the occupier who initiates this macabre dance and trades piles of corpses for higher piles of corpses.This is not to defend the war crimes by either side. It is not to rejoice in the attacks. I have seen enough violence in the Israeli occupied territories, where I covered the conflict for seven years, to loathe violence. But this is the familiar denouement to all settler-colonial projects. Regimes implanted and maintained by violence engender violence. The Haitian war of liberation. The Mau Mau in Kenya. The African National Congress in South Africa. These uprisings do not always succeed, but they follow familiar patterns. The Palestinians, like all colonized people, have a right to armed resistance under international law. Israel never had any interest in an equitable settlement with the Palestinians. It built an apartheid state and has steadily absorbed larger and larger tracts of Palestinian land in a slow motion campaign of ethnic cleansing. It turned Gaza in 2007 into the world’s largest open air prison.What does Israel, or the world community, expect? How can you trap 2.3 million people in Gaza, half of whom are unemployed, in one of the most densely populated spots on the planet for 16 years, reduce the lives of its residents, half of whom are children, to a subsistence level, deprive them of basic medical supplies, food, water and electricity, use attack aircraft, artillery, mechanized units, missiles, naval guns and infantry units to randomly slaughter unarmed civilians and not expect a violent response? Israel is currently carrying out waves of aerial assaults on Gaza, preparing a ground invasion and has cut the power to Gaza, which usually only operates two to four hours per day.Many of the resistance fighters who infiltrated into Israel undoubtedly knew they would be killed. But like resistance fighters in other wars of liberation they decided that if they could not choose how they would live, they would choose how they would die.I was a close friend of Alina Margolis-Edelman who was part of the armed resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in World War II. Her husband, Marek Edelman, was the deputy commander of the uprising and the only leader to survive the war. The Nazis had sealed 400,000 Polish Jews inside the Warsaw Ghetto. The trapped Jews died in the thousands, from starvation, disease and indiscriminate violence. When the Nazis began to transport the remaining Jews to the extermination camps the resistance fighters fought back. None expected to survive.Edelman, after the war, condemned Zionism as a racist ideology used to justify the theft of Palestinian land. He sided with the Palestinians, supported their armed resistance and met frequently with Palestinians leaders. He thundered against Israel’s appropriation of the Holocaust to justify its repression of the Palestinian people. While Israel dined out on the mythology of the ghetto uprising, it treated the only surviving leader of the uprising, who refused to leave Poland, as a pariah. Edelman understood that the lesson of the Holocaust and the ghetto uprising was not that Jews are morally superior or eternal victims. History

Narrated by Eunice WongText Originally published Oct. 1, 2023Protest (Assemby Required) - by Mr. FishThere was a decade of popular uprisings from 2010 until the global pandemic in 2020. These uprisings shook the foundations of the global order. They denounced corporate domination, austerity cuts and demanded economic justice and civil rights. There were nationwide protests in the United States centered around the 59-day Occupy encampments. There were popular eruptions in Greece, Spain, Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Turkey, Brazil, Ukraine, Hong Kong, Chile and during South Korea’s Candlelight Light Revolution. Discredited politicians were driven from office in Greece, Spain, Ukraine, South Korea, Egypt, Chile and Tunisia. Reform, or at least the promise of it, dominated public discourse. It seemed to herald a new era.Then the backlash. The aspirations of the popular movements were crushed. State control and social inequality expanded. There was no significant change. In most cases, things got worse. The far-right emerged triumphant. What happened? How did a decade of mass protests that seemed to herald democratic openness, an end to state repression, a weakening of the domination of global corporations and financial institutions and an era of freedom sputter to an ignominious failure? What went wrong? How did the hated bankers and politicians maintain or regain control? What are the effective tools to rid ourselves of corporate domination?Vincent Bevins in his new book“If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution” chronicles how we failed on several fronts.The “techno-optimists” who preached that new digital media was a revolutionary and democratizing force did not foresee that authoritarian governments, corporations and internal security services could harness these digital platforms and turn them into engines of wholesale surveillance, censorship and vehicles for propaganda and disinformation. The social media platforms that made popular protests possible were turned against us.Many mass movements, because they failed to implement hierarchical, disciplined, and coherent organizational structures, were unable to defend themselves. In the few cases when organized movements achieved power, as in Greece and Honduras, the international financiers and corporations conspired to ruthlessly wrest power back. In most cases, the ruling class swiftly filled the power vacuums created by these protests. They offered new brands to repackage the old system. This is the reason the 2008 Obama campaign was named Advertising Age’s Marketer of the Year. It won the vote of hundreds of marketers, agency heads and marketing-services vendors gathered at the Association of National Advertisers’ annual conference. It beat out runners-up Apple and Zappos.com. The professionals knew. Brand Obama was a marketer’s dream.Too often the protests resembled flash mobs, with people pouring into public spaces and creating a media spectacle, rather than engaging in a sustained, organized and prolonged disruption of power. Guy Debord captures the futility of these spectacles/protests in his book “Society of the Spectacle,” noting that the age of the spectacle means those entranced by its images are “molded to its laws.” Anarchists and antifascists, such as those in the black bloc, often smashed windows, threw rocks at police and overturned or burned cars. Random acts of violence, looting and vandalism were justified in the jargon of the movement, as components of “feral” or “spontaneous insurrection.” This “riot porn” delighted the media, many of those who engaged in it and, not coincidentally, the ruling class which used it to justify further repression and demonize protest movements. An absence of political theory led activists to use popular culture, such as the film “V for Vendetta,” as reference points. The far more effective and crippling tools of grassroots educational campaigns, strikes and boycotts were often ignored or sidelined.As Karl Marx understood, “Those who cannot represent themselves will be represented.”“If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution,” is a brilliant and masterfully reported dissection of the rise of global popular movements, the self-defeating mistakes they made, the strategies the corporate and ruling elites employed to retain power and crush the aspirations of a frustrated population, as well as an exploration of the tactics popular movements must employ to successfully fight back.“In the mass protest decade, street explosions created revolutionary situations, often on accident,” Bevins writes. “But a protest is very poorly equipped to take advantage of a revolutionary situation, and that particular kind of protest is especially bad at it.”The seasoned activists who Bevins interviews echo this point.“Organize,” Hossam Bahgat, the Egyptian human rights campaigner, tells Bevin in the book. “Create an organized movement. And don’t be afraid of representation.

"I was first introduced to the idea of political poetry on October 18, 1970, about midnight, in an all-night Harvard Square corner bookstore,” Doug Rawlings writes. “A few months before that encounter I had returned from the war in Viet Nam. To say that I was confused and angry is an understatement. I was also somewhat lost. Then on that fateful night I found this wonderful collection of poems by Denise Levertov that captured her journey to North Viet Nam as a peace activist. This was the first serious “discussion” I had read from and about “my” war. And true to what Robert Bly considers effective political poetry, Levertov used the personal to open up the universal. I was captured, and unlike my response to military “service,” I did not want to escape. Instead, I sought out more of her work and other poets and, eventually, began to write my own poems."Rawlings, who recently made his first visit to Vietnam since he was there as a soldier, has been haunted throughout his life by the war. The images from the war do not go away – the bodies, the carnage, the faces, the children, the smells, the deafening concussions, all are present. These images make their way into his poems. Rawlings, who was one of several cofounders of Veterans for Peace, which today claims thousands of members in 130 chapters worldwide, has spent his life trying to convey the horror of war and atone for the crimes we committed against the Vietnamese people. Joining be to discuss the war, its aftermath and his return to Vietnam after 53 years, is Doug Rawlings who is a retired professor of English from the University of Maine Farmington. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

John F. Kennedy’s last battle, cut short by his assassination, was the effort to build a sustainable peace with the Soviet Union. Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics at Columbia University, in his new book “To Move the World” chronicles the campaign by Kennedy from October 1962 to September 1963 to curb the arms race and build ties with his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev. Sachs looks at the series of speeches Kennedy gave to end the Cold War and persuade the world to make peace with the Soviets. Kennedy implemented the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. But Kennedy’s vision was not shared by many Cold warriors in the establishment, including some within his administration. Joining me to discuss ”To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace” is Professor Jeffrey Sachs. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

Narrated by Eunice WongText originally posted Sept. 16, 2023Business is Booming - by Mr. Fish“We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary Clinton famously quipped when Muammar Gaddafi, after seven months of U.S. and NATO bombing, was overthrown in 2011 and killed by a mob who sodomized him with a bayonet. But Gaddafi would not be the only one to die. Libya, once the most prosperous and one of the most stable countries in Africa, a country with free healthcare and education, the right for all citizens to a home, subsidized electricity, water and gasoline, along with the lowest infant mortality rate and highest life expectancy on the continent, along with one of the highest literacy rates, swiftly fragmented into warring factions. There are currently two rival regimes battling for control in Libya, along with an array of rogue militias. The chaos that followed Western intervention saw weapons from the country’s arsenals flood the black market, with many snatched up by groups such as the Islamic State. Civil society ceased to function. Journalists captured images of migrants from Nigeria, Senegal and Eritrea being beaten and sold as slaves to work in fields or on construction sites. Libya’s infrastructure, including its electrical grids, aquifers, oil fields and dams, fell into disrepair. And when the torrential rains from Storm Daniel — the climate crisis being another gift to Africa from the industrialized world — overwhelmed two decrepit dams, walls of water 20 feet high raced down to flood the port of Derna and Benghazi, leaving up to 20,000 dead according to Abdulmenam Al-Gaiti, Mayor of Derna, and some 10,000 missing. “The fragmentation of the country’s disaster management and disaster response mechanisms, as well as deteriorating infrastructure, exacerbated the enormity of the challenges. The political situation is a driver of risk,” said Professor Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization.Taalas told reporters last Thursday that “most of the human casualties” would have been avoided if there had been a “normally operating meteorological service” which “would have issued the [necessary] warnings and also the emergency management of this would have been able to carry out evacuations of the people.”Western regime-change, carried out in the name of human rights under the doctrine of R2P (Responsibility to Protect), destroyed Libya - as it did Iraq - as a unified and stable nation. The flood victims are part of the tens of thousands of Libyan dead resulting from our “humanitarian intervention,” which rendered disaster relief non-existent. We bear responsibility for Libya’s prolonged suffering. But once we wreak havoc on a country in the name of saving its persecuted — regardless of whether they are being persecuted or not — we forget they exist. Karl Popper in “The Open Society and Its Enemies” warned against utopian engineering, massive social transformations, almost always implanted by force, and led by those who believe they are endowed with a revealed truth. These utopian engineers carry out the wholesale destruction of systems, institutions and social and cultural structures in a vain effort to achieve their vision. In the process, they dismantle the self-correcting mechanisms of incremental and piecemeal reform that are impediments to that grand vision. History is replete with murderous utopian social engineering — the Jacobins, the communists, the fascists and now, in our own age, the globalists, or neoliberal imperialists.Libya, like Iraq and Afghanistan, fell victim to the self-delusions peddled by humanitarian interventionists — Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ben Rhodes, Samantha Power and Susan Rice. The Obama administration armed and backed an insurgent force that they believed would do the bidding of the U.S. Obama in a recent post urged people to support aid agencies to alleviate the suffering of the people of Libya, a plea that ignited an understandable backlash on social media.There is no official tally of the casualties in Libya that have resulted directly and indirectly from the violence in Libya over the last 12 years. This is exacerbated by the fact that NATO failed to investigate casualties resulting from its seven month bombardment of the country in 2011. But the total figure of those killed and injured is likely in the tens of thousands. Action on Armed Violence recorded “8,518 deaths and injuries from explosive violence in Libya” from 2011 to 2020, 6,027 of which were civilian casualties.In 2020, a statement published by seven U.N. agencies reported that “Close to 400,000 Libyans have been displaced since the start of the conflict nine years ago — around half of them within the past year, since the attack on the capital, Tripoli, [by Field Marshal Khalifa Belqasim Haftar’s forces] started.”“The Libyan economy has been battered by the [civil war], the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine,” the World Bank reported in April of this year. “The count

The United States, like many industrialized countries, has undergone a corporate coup d’état in slow motion, cementing into place a system of control the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls inverted totalitarianism. Inverted totalitarianism retains the institutions, symbols, iconography, and language of the old capitalist democracy, but internally corporations have seized all the levers of power to accrue ever greater profits and political control. Claire Provost and Matt Kennard in their book “Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy,” chart the way the corporate coup d’état was orchestrated. It examines the use of an international legal system to control and plunder the resources in the developing world, including the overthrow of governments that challenge corporate dominance. The authors expose the nefarious alliance between Non-Profit organizations and corporations, one that prioritizes profit rather than justice. The document leading the weakening of labor laws and evisceration of worker’s protections and rights. To enforce this predatory behavior corporations have not only created, in essence, a global supreme court but raised and funded private mercenary militias to crush labor movements and intimidate and even murder activists. The subversion of democracy abroad is accompanied, the authors argue, by the subversion of democracy at home. The mechanisms of control pioneers to plunder the developing world are being used in the industrial world. Joining me to discuss Silent Coup is Matt Kennard, a former staff reporter for the Financial Times and co-founder and chief investigator at Declassified UK, a news outlet that investigates British foreign policy. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

Narrated by Eunice WongTest Originally Published Sept. 10, 2023The Enlightenment - by Mr. FishI am standing in a classroom in a maximum security prison. It is the first class of the semester. I am facing 20 students. They have spent years, sometimes decades, incarcerated. They come from some of the poorest cities and communities in the country. Most of them are people of color. During the next four months they will study political philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, Niccolò Machiavelli, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and John Locke, those often dismissed as anachronistic by the cultural left.It is not that the criticisms leveled against these philosophers are incorrect. They were blinded by their prejudices, as we are blinded by our prejudices. They had a habit of elevating their own cultures above others. They often defended patriarchy, could be racist and in the case of Plato and Aristotle, endorsed a slave society. What can these philosophers say to the issues we face — global corporate domination, the climate crisis, nuclear war and a digital universe where information, often manipulated and sometimes false, travels around the globe instantly? Are these thinkers antiquated relics? No one in medical school is reading 19th century medical texts. Psychoanalysis has moved beyond Sigmund Freud. Physicists have advanced from Isaac Newton’s law of motion to general relativity and quantum mechanics. Economists are no longer rooted in John Stuart Mill.But the study of political philosophy, as well as ethics, is different. Not for the answers, but for the questions. The questions have not changed since Plato wrote “The Republic.” What is justice? Do all societies inevitably decay? Are we the authors of our lives? Or is our fate determined by forces beyond our control, a series of fortuitous or unfortunate accidents? How should power be distributed? Is the good statesman, as Plato argued, a philosopher king — a thinly disguised version of Plato — who puts truth and learning above greed and lust and who understands reality? Or, as Aristotle believed, is the good statesman skilled in the exercise of power and endowed with thoughtful deliberation? What qualities are needed to wield power? Machiavelli says these include immorality, deception and violence. Hobbes writes that in war, violence and fraud become virtues. What forces can be organized to pit the power of the demos, the populace, against the rulers, to ensure justice? What are our roles and duties as citizens? How should we educate the young? When is it permissible to break the law? How is tyranny prevented or overthrown? Can human nature, as the Jacobins and communists believed, be transformed? How do we protect our dignity and freedom? What is friendship? What constitutes virtue? What is evil? What is love? How do we define a good life? Is there a God? If God does not exist, should we abide by a moral code? These questions thunder down through the ages, asked during different times and under different circumstances. The most radical contemporary philosophers, including Frantz Fanon author of The Wretched of the Earth, built their edifices on the foundations of the political philosophers that came before them. In Fanon’s case it was Friedrich Hegel. As Vladimir Lenin correctly said of Marx, most of his ideas could be traced to previous philosophers. Paulo Freire, the author of “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” studied philosophy. Hannah Arendt, who wrote“The Origins of Totalitarianism,” was steeped in the ancient Greeks and Augustine.“It is indeed difficult and even misleading to talk about politics and its innermost principles without drawing to some extent upon the experiences of Greek and Roman antiquity, and this for no other reason than that men have never, either before or after, thought so highly of political activity and bestowed so much dignity upon its realm” Arendt writes in “Between Past and Future.”Cornel West, one of our most important contemporary moral philosophers, who once admonished me for not having read the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, is as conversant on Søren Kierkegaard, which Cornel taught at Harvard, and Immanuel Kant as he is on W.E.B. DuBois, Fanon, Malcolm X and bell hooks. The ancient philosophers were not oracles. Not many of us would want to inhabit Plato’s authoritarian republic, especially women, nor Hobbes’ “Leviathan,” a precursor to the totalitarian states that arose in the 20th century. Marx presciently anticipated the monolithic power of global capitalism but failed to see that, contrary to his utopian vision, it would crush socialism. But to ignore these political philosophers, to dismiss them because of their failings rather than study them for their insights is to cut ourselves off from our intellectual roots. If we do not know where we came from, we cannot know where we are going. If we cannot ask these fundamental questions, if we have not reflected on these concepts, if we do not understand

Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, was removed from his post after he made public the widespread use of torture by the Uzbek government and the CIA. He has since become one of Britain’s most important human rights campaigners, a fierce advocate for Julian Assange and a supporter of Scottish independence. His coverage of the trial of former Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond, who was acquitted of sexual assault charges, saw him charged with contempt of court and sentenced to eight months in prison. The very dubious sentence, half of which Murray served, upended most legal norms. Murray was sentenced, his supporters argue, to prevent him from testifying as a witness in the Spanish criminal case against UC Global Director David Morales being prosecuted for installing a surveillance system in the Ecuadorean Embassy when Julian Assange found refuge that was used to record the privileged communications between Assange and his lawyers. Morales is alleged to have carried out this surveillance for the CIA. Murray has published some of the most prescient and eloquent reports from Assange’s extradition hearings and was one of a half dozen guests, including myself, invited to Julian and Stella’s wedding in Belmarsh Prison in March 2022. Prison authorities denied entry to Craig, based on what the UK Ministry of Justice said were security concerns, as well as myself from attending the ceremony. Joining me to discuss what is happening to Julian and the rapid erosion of our most basic democratic rights is Craig Murray. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

Narrated by Eunice WongText originally published Sept. 3, 2023Welcome In - by Mr. FishCorporate capitalism, defined by the cult of the self and the ruthless exploitation of the natural world and all forms of life for profit, thrives on the fostering of chronic psychological and physical disorders. The diseases and pathologies of despair — alienation, high blood pressure, diabetes, anxiety, depression, morbid obesity, mass shootings (now almost two per day on average), domestic and sexual violence, drug overdoses (over 100,000 per year) and suicide (49,000 deaths in 2022) — are the consequences of a deeply traumatized society. The core traits of psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt — are celebrated. The virtues of empathy, compassion and self-sacrifice, are belittled, neglected and crushed. The professions that sustain community, such as teaching, manual labor, the arts, journalism and nursing, are underpaid and overworked. The professions that exploit, such as those in high finance, Big Pharma, Big Oil and information technology, are lavished with prestige, money and power.“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane,” Eric Fromm writes in The Sane Society.The classic works on trauma by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Gabor Maté and Dr. Judith Herman state bluntly that what is accepted as normal behavior in a corporate society is at war with basic human needs and our psychological and physical health. Huge segments of the American public, especially the tens of millions of people who have been discarded and marginalized, endure chronic trauma. Barbara Ehrenreich in “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” describes the life of the working poor as one long “emergency.” This trauma is as destructive to us personally as it is socially and politically. It leaves us in a state of dysphoria where confusion, agitation, emptiness and loneliness define our lives. Whole segments of American society, especially the poor, have been rendered superfluous and invisible. As Dr. van der Kolk writes, “trauma is when we are not seen and known.”“Our culture teaches us to focus on our personal uniqueness, but at a deeper level we barely exist as individual organisms,” Dr. van der Kolk notes.Trauma numbs our capacity to feel. It fractures our self. It disconnects us from our bodies. It keeps us in a state of hyperarousal. It makes us confuse our desires, often artificially implanted by the consumer society, with our needs. Traumatized people view the world around them as hostile and dangerous. They lack a positive image of themselves and lose the capacity to trust. Many replace intimacy and love with sexual sadism, which is how we became a pornified culture. Trauma creates what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls a “counterfeit” world defined by phantom enemies, lies and dark conspiracies. It negates a sense of purpose and a life of meaning. Trauma, Dr. Herman writes, “impels people both to withdraw from close relationships and to seek them desperately.” It induces feelings of shame, guilt, and inferiority, she writes, “as well as the need to avoid reminders of the trauma that occurs in daily life. Trauma severely compromises the capacity for intimacy. Trauma can dramatically reduce focus to extremely limited goals, often a matter of hours or days.” “If trauma entails a disconnection from the self, then it makes sense to say that we are being collectively flooded with influences that both exploit and reinforce trauma,” Dr. Maté writes. “Work pressures, multitasking, social media, news updates, multiplicities of entertainment sources — these all induce us to become lost in thoughts, frantic activities, gadgets, meaningless conversations. We are caught up in pursuits of all kinds that draw us on, not because they are necessary or inspiring or uplifting, or because they enrich or add meaning to our lives, but simply because they obliterate the present.”Trauma also drives many to flee into the arms of those who are orchestrating the abuse.Systematic and repetitive trauma, whether by a single abuser or a political system, destroys personal autonomy. The perpetrator becomes omnipotent. Resistance is accepted as futile. “The goal of the perpetrator is to instill in his victim not only fear of death but also gratitude for being allowed to live,” Dr. Herman writes. This trauma lays the foundation for the most insidious characteristic of all tyrannies, large and small. Total control. Prolonged trauma reduces its victims to a state of psychological infantilism. It conditions them to plead for their own enslavement.“We are not content with negative ob

Many Americans are aware of the campaigns of voter suppression, the difficulties in registering to vote, how casting a ballot can often be cumbersome and time consuming as well as the flawed mechanisms used to count votes. Hundreds of laws have been passed by state legislatures to address these issues following the debacle that marked the 2000 presidential election. The absurdity of the Electoral College, a system that sees candidates such as George W. Bush and Donald Trump lose the popular vote and win the election, is periodically raised for discussion. The disenfranchisement of voters in Washington, D.C., Guam and Puerto Rico, along with ex-felons, is also part of our public debate about elections.But what is rarely discussed or understood is how the electoral system has been rigged to prevent third parties and independent candidates from competing equally with Republicans and Democrats. A series of arcane laws and rules governing our elections make it exponentially harder for those outside the two ruling parties to get on the ballot, receive exposure or participate in public debates. Commissions and boards set up to supposedly ensure fairness are composed exclusively of representatives from the two ruling parties. The Federal Election Commission, for example, is composed of three Republicans and three Democrats. This discrimination, which is euphemistically labeled “bipartisanship,” is, as Theresa Amato writes, political apartheid. As the political scientist Theodore Lowi noted, “One of the best-kept secrets in American politics is that the two-party system has long been brain dead – kept alive by support systems like state electoral laws that protect the established parties from rivals and by Federal subsidies and so-called Campaign reform. The two-party system would collapse”, he writes, “in an instant if the tubes were pulled and the IV’s were cut.” The attorney Theresa Amato was the national presidential campaign manager and in-house counsel for Ralph Nader in the 2000 and 2004 elections. Her book “Grand Illusion: The myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny” is a sobering and often chilling account, based on her experience in the Nader campaigns, of the nefarious mechanisms to prevent third parties and independents from competing in the election process. Joining me to discuss her book and how the two ruling parties have effectively closed elections to outsiders is Theresa Amato. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

There are few intellectuals who have been as attacked, censored and blacklisted as long and as ruthlessly as the Middle Eastern scholar Norman Finkelstein. He has been hounded out of universities, denied speaking engagements, had his books and scholarship either ignored or dismissed. It is surprising, perhaps, that Professor Finkelstein’s latest book is a savage attack on identity politics. He likens the current woke culture of the left to red baiting when his heroes Paul Robeson, Pete Seager, Rosa Luxemburg, Paul Sweezy and Annette Rubinstein were marginalized and in the case Luxemburg assassinated. “The cancel culture of my childhood targeted,” he writes, “in the name of anti-communism, popular leftist movements rooted primarily in class politics. The new cancel culture still targets class politics but this time round in the pseudo-radical name of identity politics. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. “Whereas class politics has historically focused on a massive redistribution of wealth from the haves to the have nots, identify politics (racial, sexual, etc.) in the uppermost tier of a social structure left largely intact in all its steep gradations.” he writes. “The primary vehicle of this politics is the Democratic Party, the mass base of which was once the white working class, but which is now in transition to becoming an identify-based party, in which identity displaces class as its organizing principle and base constituency.” Joining me to discuss woke culture, which Professor Finkelstein calls a “civic form of McCarthyism,” and how it buttresses the ruling capitalist class is Professor Norman Finkelstein. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

The Crucifixion of Julian Assange - by Mr. FishI dedicate this sermon to my mentor at Harvard Divinity School, Bishop Krister Stendhal.Prophets are notoriously difficult people. They are not saints. They are people of agony, as Rabbi Abraham Heschel writes, whose “life and soul are at stake.” The prophet is moved by human anguish. Prophets are not soothsayers. They do not divine the future. Injustice, for the prophet, “assumes almost cosmic proportions.” A prophet, consumed by an unnatural fury, gives witness to “the divine pathos.” “God,” Heschel writes, “is raging in the prophet’s words.” He or she stands unflinchingly with the crucified of the earth, even to the point of their own destruction. “While the world is at ease and asleep,” Heschel writes, “the prophet feels the blast from heaven.” The prophet says “No” to his or her society, “condemning its habits and assumptions, its complacency, waywardness, and syncretism.” And the prophet “is often compelled to proclaim the very opposite of what his [or her] heart desires.”Prophets believe in justice even when the world around them says there will be no justice. It is not that they transcend reality. It is that they are compelled to strike out against it, refusing to be silent no matter how hard life becomes. They are gripped by what Reinhold Niebuhr calls “a sublime madness in the soul,” for “nothing but such madness will do battle with malignant power” and “spiritual wickedness in high places.” This madness is dangerous, but vital because without it “truth is obscured.” Liberalism, Niebuhr goes on, “lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks. It is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history.”But as the priest Amaziah says of the prophet Amos, “The land is not able to bear all his words.”The Biblical prophets — Elijah, Amos, Jeremiah, Isaiah — believed that anything worth living for was worth dying for. Their enemy was not only suffering, calumny, poverty, injustice, but a life devoid of meaning. “You have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live,” the civil rights icon Fred Shuttlesworth said. Prophets cannot be intimidated. They cannot be bought. They are single-mindedly obsessed. James Baldwin, himself a prophet, understands. He writes:“Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary function as they function, and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it. Otherwise, they could never endure, much less embrace, the lives they are compelled to lead.”The powerful and the rich make war on the prophet. They slander and insult the prophet. They question the prophet’s sanity and motives. They make it hard for the prophet to survive removing the prophet’s meager source of income. They punish and marginalize those who stand with the prophet. They silence the prophet’s voice, through censorship, imprisonment and often murder. The list of martyred prophets is long. Socrates. Joan of Arc. Isaac Babel. Federico García Lorca. Miklós Radnóti. Irène Némirovsky. Malcolm X. Martin Luther King Jr. Victor Jara. Ken Saro-Wiwa.The truth grips the prophet so that he or she is bound so strongly to it that nothing but death can separate them from it. In that truth they find God.“One can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of a pure regard for truth,” Simone Weil writes. “Christ likes for us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.”Who crucified Jesus? Organized religion. Organized politics. Organized business.The executioners have not changed. They simply changed the story, created a counterfeit gospel, as the poet Langston Hughes writes:Listen, Christ,You did alright in your day, I reckon –But that day’s gone now.They ghosted you up a swell story, too,Called it Bible –But it’s dead now.The popes and the preachers’veMade too much money from it.They’ve sold you to manyKings, generals, robbers, and killers –Even to the Tzar and Cossacks,Even to Rockefeller’s Church,Even to THE SATURDAY EVENING POST.You ain’t no good no more.They’ve pawned youTill you’ve done wore out.The Carthaginian general Hannibal, who came close to defeating the Roman Republic in the Second Punic War, committed suicide in 181 B.C. in exile as Roman soldiers closed in on his residence in Bithynia, now modern-day Turkey. It had been more than 30 years since he led his army across the Alps and annihilated Roman legions. Rome was only able to save itself from defeat by replicating Hannibal’s military tactics. It did not matter that there had been over 20 Roman consuls since Hannibal’s invasion. It did not matter that Hannibal had been hunted for decades and forced to perpetually flee, always just beyond the reach of Roman authorities. He ha

There is scant evidence that William Shakespeare authored the plays and sonnets attributed to him. But questioning the authorship is an unacceptable heresy among Shakespearean scholars who liken it to believing the moon landing was faked. These scholars have built their academic careers on the foundations of the Shakespearean myth, writing long biographies that are almost all based on hypothesis and conjecture. They are the guardians of the one true church, and like grand inquisitors arrogantly dismiss intriguing arguments to be made for other authors including Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, Christopher Marlowe, Mary Sidney, Francis Bacon, and others. Or perhaps, like the King James Bible, published in 1611 after several years of work by a committee of 47 scholars and clergymen, the plays were a collaborative effort by several talented writers and poets. Even the most adamant defenders of Shakespearean authorship concede that some of the plays attributed to him, such as Pericles, contain the work of other authors. What is not in dispute is that even raising this issue is a literary taboo. But this is not an idle question, for a writer’s past and experience illuminates his or her work, despite what the post-modernists preach. The Shakespeare narrative fits perhaps too neatly into popular mythology – the story of a poorly educated glover’s son who arrives in London from a rural village and conquers the stage and writes the most immortal verse in the English language. Joining me to discuss the debate is Elizabeth Winkler author of “Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

Narrated by Eunice WongText originally published August 12, 2023The Kennedy Promise - by Mr. FishThe long nightmare of oppression of Palestinians is not a tangential issue. It is a black and white issue of a settler-colonial state imposing a military occupation, horrific violence and apartheid, backed by billions of U.S. dollars, on the indigenous population of Palestine. It is the all powerful against the all powerless. Israel uses its modern weaponry against a captive population that has no army, no navy, no air force, no mechanized military units, no command and control and no heavy artillery, while pretending intermittent acts of wholesale slaughter are wars. The crude rockets fired at Israel by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance organizations — a war crime because they target civilians — are not remotely comparable to the 2,000 pound “bunker-buster” Mark-84 bombs with a “kill radius” of over 32 yards and which “create a supersonic wave of pressure when they explode” that have been dropped by Israel on crowded Palestinian neighborhoods, the thousands of Palestinian killed and wounded and the targeted destruction of basic infrastructure, including electrical grids and water purification plants.Palestinians in Gaza live in an open air prison that is one of the most densely populated spots on the planet. They are denied passports and travel documents. Malnutrition is endemic in the Occupied Territories. “High proportions” of the Palestinian population are “deficient in vitamins A, D, and E, which play key roles in vision, bone health, and immune function,” according to a 2022 World Bank report. The report also notes that over 50 percent of those aged six to 23 in Gaza and over half of its pregnant women are anemic and “more than a quarter of pregnant women and more than a quarter of children aged 6–23 months [in the West Bank are] anemic.”Eighty-eight percent of Gaza’s children suffer from depression, following 15 years of the Israeli blockade, according to a 2022 report from Save the Children and over 51 percent of children were diagnosed with PTSD following the third major war on Gaza in 2014. Only 4.3 percent of the water in Gaza is considered fit for human consumption. Palestinians in Gaza are crammed into unsanitary and overcrowded hovels. They often lack basic medical care. Unemployment rates are among the highest in the world at 46.6 percent. Zionism’s goal, since before Israel’s inception, has been to displace Palestinians from their land and reduce those who remain to a struggle for basic subsistence, as Israeli historian Professor Ilan Pappe, notes:10 March 1948, a group of eleven men, veteran Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish officers, put the final touches on a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. That same evening, military orders were dispatched to units on the ground to prepare for the systematic expulsion of Palestinians from vast areas of the country. The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centers; setting fire to homes, properties, and goods; expelling residents; demolishing homes; and, finally, planting mines in the rubble to prevent the expelled inhabitants from returning. Each unit was issued its own list of villages and neighborhoods to target in keeping with the master plan. Code-named Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew)...Once the plan was finalized, it took six months to complete the mission. When it was over, more than half of Palestine’s native population, over 750,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villages had been destroyed, and 11 urban neighborhoods had been emptied of their inhabitants. These political and historical facts, which I reported on as an Arabic speaker for seven years, four of them as The Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times, are hard to ignore. Even from a distance. I watched Israeli soldiers taunt boys in Arabic over the loudspeakers of their armored jeep in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza. The boys, about 10 years old, then threw stones at an Israeli vehicle. The soldiers opened fire, killing some, wounding others. In the Israeli lexicon this becomes children caught in crossfire. I was in Gaza when F-16 attack jets dropped 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs on densely packed neighborhoods. I saw the corpses of the victims, including children, lined up in neat rows. This became a surgical strike on a bomb-making factory. I watched Israel demolish homes and apartment blocks to create buffer zones between the Palestinians and Israeli troops. I interviewed destitute families camped in the rubble of their homes. The destruction becomes the demolition of the homes of terrorists. I stood in the bombed remains of schools as well as medical clinics and mosques. I heard Israel claim that errant rockets or mortar fire from the Palestinians caused these and other deaths, or that the attacked spot

On Aug. 19, 1953, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, who had seized Iran’s vast oil fields from the British and put them under Iranian control, was removed from power in a coup organized and financed by the British and U.S. governments. He was replaced by the dictatorial Shah who immediately signed over forty percent of Iran’s oil fields to U.S. companies. The coup ushered in a long nightmare of repression, buttressed by Iran’s brutal secret police, Savak, trained and equipped by the CIA. The Shah not only crushed the democratic aspirations of Iranians, but enriched U.S. oil companies and purchased billions of dollars of weapons from U.S. weapons manufacturers.The CIA and the British intelligence used bribery, libel, black propaganda that accused Mossadegh of being a communist, assassinations and orchestrated riots by paid mercenaries to overthrow the democratic government. They hired agents to pose as communists to threaten religious leaders, while the U.S. ambassador lied to the prime minister about alleged attacks on American nationals. They oversaw the assassination of the chief of police, Mahmoud Afshartous, a Mossadegh loyalist, leaving his mutilated body on the street as a warning to others who might defend the democracy. At least 300 people were killed in fighting in the streets of Tehran. Mossadegh’s house was surrounded by and attacked, killing many of his security detail. Mossadegh was sentenced to three years in prison followed by house arrest for life.The dictatorship of the Shah fueled the virulent anti-American backlash that led to the 1979 revolution and the establishment of a militant Islamic government. The Iran coup became the template used by the CIA to overthrow other governments around the globe that challenged U.S. imperialism and exploitation by global corporations. The list of CIA orchestrated coups that installed compliant right-wing dictatorships includes not only Iran but Guatemala, Indonesia, South Vietnam, the Congo, the Dominican Republic, Iraq, Indonesia, Cambodia, Chile, Bolivia, Ethiopia, Angola, East Timor, Argentina and Afghanistan. Hundreds of million people suffered because of U.S. interference the loss of their freedom, impoverishment and repression because of these interventions. They were sacrificed on the altar of U.S. power and corporate profit. Joining me to discuss his documentary, Coup 53, is the is Iranian filmmaker Taghi Amirani. His film uses newly discovered archival material to expose how the CIA worked clandestinely to overthrow Mossadegh, providing us as well with the blueprint for the numerous other CIA coups carried out in the last few decades. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

The fusion of politics, news and entertainment has given prominence to comics especially those such as Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, John Oliver and Bill Maher who serve as attack dogs for the Democratic Party, which has joined forces with the establishment wing of the old Republican Party against Donald Trump and his supporters. By belittling Trump and his followers these comics feed the smug self-righteousness of the ruling establishment and their sense of moral and intellectual superiority. These comics and the networks that give them platforms – HBO, Comedy Central, TBS, ABC, CBS, NBC and even CNN which has hired comics such as W. Kamau Bell to host shows on the news network - have little to no effect on the political landscape. They are as loathed and ignored by Trump supporters as they are feted by Trump haters. They are constrained by the corporations and advertisers that employ them. They function as court jesters, never questioning the right of the rulers to rule or the terrible social injustices built into a rigged system. They traffic almost exclusively in negativity – searching out the weird, the bizarre, the stupid and the inane in celebrity culture or mainstream news reports. They perpetuate the fiction that we live in a democracy. They do not challenge the folly of permanent war from the Middle East to Ukraine. They do not call out the corporations that have deindustrialized the nation and abandoned and impoverished American workers. They serve as attack dogs for critics of the system, even if these critics come from the left. John Oliver, for example, devoted a show to mocking Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. Bill Maher made public his $ 1 million donation to Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign. These comics traffic in a self-defeating cynicism that eschews all critiques of the real configurations of power. Power only laughs at its own jokes. And these are the jokes these mainstream comics tell. Joining me to discuss the transformation of comedy from an art form rooted in the counterculture to a one that has largely become a megaphone for power, is Lee Camp, who, like the comics of another era -- Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Mort Sahl, Bill Hicks and George Carlin and a handful of his contemporaries including Jimmy Dore – is not afraid to use his razor-sharp wit against our real enemies. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

Narrated by Eunice WongText originally published Aug. 3, 2023Red Crosshairs - by Mr. FishNEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — Judy Danella, president of United Steel Workers Local 4-200 — the union that represents Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital’s more than 1,700 nurses — stands in a church basement before a room full of her union members. Her voice quavers slightly as she delivers grim news. The hospital management, whose top administrators earn salaries in the millions of dollars, has refused to concede to any of the nurse’s core demands. Friday at 7:00 a.m. they will be locked out of the hospital and on strike.But it is not only the strike that concerns Danella, who is wearing a blue T-shirt that reads: “Safe Staffing Saves Lives.” “It is 100 percent my belief that the goal is to break the union,” says Danella, who has worked at the hospital for 28 years. “This is about the future of nursing.”The front line against corporate tyranny is not the ballot box. It is in the desperate struggle by the overworked and underpaid to prevent corporate behemoths from turning everyone into gig workers without health and retirement benefits, job security, sustainable incomes or equitable working conditions. Nurses, battered by the almost inhuman demands put on them during the pandemic, have been especially hard hit. Almost one-third of New Jersey’s nurses have left the profession in the last three years.“We went from heroes to zeroes,” says Jessica Aquino, a nurse who has been at the hospital for 16 years.RWJBarnabas Health, which owns 12 acute care hospitals, including Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, and four specialty hospitals, is the largest healthcare provider in the state of New Jersey. Its 37,000 employees, including 9,000 physicians, care for more than three million patients a year. It has $6.6 billion in annual revenue. It is registered as a 501(c) (3) not-for-profit charitable organization.The company, Danella suspects, plans to make the punishing working conditions and staff reductions permanent. Unchecked, they will continue to raise insurance premiums, which can cost a nurse with a family $500 a month. They will refuse to increase salaries, which range between $43 and $64 per hour, including the paltry $5 per hour rate, which the hospital management offered to increase to $6, for on-call nurses waiting at home. The union asked for the minimum wage for on-call nurses and then offered to drop the hourly amount to $10. The on-call nurses receive their standard pay rate once they clock in. They will, if union demands are not met, be denied retirement medical benefits and retention bonuses. The crippling attrition rate will continue. At least 700 replacement nurses, known as travelers, from states including Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and Kentucky, have been relocated to New Brunswick in the last few days and set up in area hotels to replace the striking nurses. These travelers, paid as much as $120 per hour and given housing and travel allowances, earn more than the unionized nurses. But travelers have no control over their working conditions. If the union is broken, the profits made from slashing services and chronic staff shortages will more than offset their higher salaries.The nurses know what they are up against, especially with the governor’s office announcing that they will remain “neutral.” This neutrality means that the heavy handed tactics of Barnabas, which includes a relentless propaganda campaign and “town hall” meetings in the hospital to turn union members against the union leadership, will not be restrained. In a move that backfired, one of the deans from Robert Wood Johnson Medical School at Rutgers, Dr. Carol Terregino, sent an email to second, third and fourth year medical students asking them to volunteer when nurses go on strike. She said the students would be “answering call bells, checking in on patients and supporting the replacement nursing staff.”The medical students refused, writing back that “the request to provide unpaid labor in jobs we are not trained to do at the expense of our own educational programming raises concerns about exploitation and risks creating an unsafe environment for patients.”Congress, at the same time, is abetting the nationwide assault on our healthcare. Every proposed solution sees it hand more money and tax breaks to the healthcare industry, which lavishly funds congressional campaigns.“My concern is that they are so saturated with money they will try and starve us out,” said Sarah Caley, a nurse who works in radiology and has been at the hospital for over seven years. “We are hoping they will crack, that they are all talk, but ultimately this is a drop in the bucket for them.”The health-care system has raised the costs for patients and shrunk the accessibility of medical care. In 1975 the U.S. had about 1.5 million hospital beds and a population of about 216 million people. Now, with a population of over 330 million people, we have around 925,000 beds

Dr. Judith Herman in her classic work Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, which we discussed last week, detailed three stages to recovery. In the first stage the survivor focuses on the complex and demanding task of establishing safety in the present, with the goal of protection from further violence. Safety gives the survivor the space to recover from the terror that reduced him or her to abject submission and to regain a sense of agency. In the second state of recovery, the survivor revisits the past to grieve and make meaning of the trauma. Out of this grief is forged a new identity that does not deny the past nor allow it to define his or her identity. As Dr. Herman writes, “social support is a powerful predicator of good recovery, while social isolation is toxic. People cannot feel safe alone, and they cannot mourn and make meaning alone.” The third stage sees the survivor refocus on the present and future, expanding and deepening his or her relationships with a wider community and the possibilities in life. Some survivors see their own suffering as part of a much larger social problem. They join with others, including other survivors, to work to build a better world. Robert J. Lifton calls this “a survivor mission.” In Dr. Herman’s new book, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice, which we will discuss today, she adds justice as the fourth stage to recovery. “If trauma is truly a social problem,” she writes, “then recovery cannot simply be a private, individual matter. The wounds of trauma are not merely those caused by the perception of violence and exploitation; the actions or inactions of bystanders – all those who are complicit in or who prefer not to know about the abuse or who blame the victims – often cause deeper wounds.” Full healing, she adds, because it originates in a fundamental injustice, requires a full hearing within the community to repair, through some measure of justice, the trauma survivors have endured. Joining me to discuss her new book, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice is Dr. Judith Herman, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and cofounder of the Victims of Violence Program. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

Narrated by Eunice WongTest Originally published July 30, 2023Main Street America - by Mr. FishMECHANIC FALLS, Maine – I am sitting in Eric Heimel’s barbershop in the center of Mechanic Falls. Russ Day, who was the owner for 52 years before he sold it to Eric, cut my hair as a boy. The shop looks the same. The mounted trout on the walls. The worn linoleum floor. The 1956 Emil J. Paidar barber chair. The two American flags on the wall flanking the oval mirror. The plaque that reads: “If a Man is Alone In the Woods, With No Woman to Hear Him, Is He Still Wrong?” Another plaque that reads: “Men have 3 hairstyles parted…unparted…and DEPARTED!” I can almost see my grandfather, with his thick gold masonic ring on his pinky finger smoking an unfiltered Camel cigarette, waiting for Russ to finish.Eric charges $15 per cut. He wanted to be a welder, but the welding classes were full.“Hair. Welding. Same f****n’ thing,” he says, wearing a black T-shirt that reads “Toad Suck” and has a picture of a toad riding a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. On Eric’s hat is a homemade deer hair fly, known as a mouse, he uses for fly fishing. “Big bait. Big fish,” he says.“There are 17,000 cars and trucks a day that go through that light,” he says, looking at the traffic light outside his shop. “I only need 10 or 20 of them a day to stop for a cut.”The pandemic hit his barbershop hard. Clients, for months, disappeared. Eric did not get the Covid vaccine. He doesn’t trust pharmaceutical companies and is not convinced by government assurances that it is safe and effective. Then, on top of Covid, there was an issue of the sign over the shop that read: “Russ Day’s Barbershop.”Russ wanted it back.“When I bought the shop I bought the sign,” Eric says.One night the sign was stolen.“It wasn’t Russ,” he says. “He’s in his eighties. It must have been his son-in-law.”“Did you call the police?” I ask.“How are you going to win in court against an 82-year-old guy?” he answers. “Besides, I’ve never called the police on anyone.”Russ informed Eric he wanted his mounted trout.“I already gave him his salmon,” Eric says. “It’s not Russ’s trout anymore. It’s Eric’s trout.”We discuss local news, including the man who last fall put his credit card in the Citgo gas pump, poured gas over his head and lit himself on fire. He died. An intoxicated man in May fired several shots at another man on True Street. He missed. There was also a stabbing when two neighbors got in a fight. But serious crime is a rarity, although many people have small arsenals in their homes.The former mill town of 3,107 people, like rural towns all across America, struggles to survive. There isn’t much work since the Marcal Paper Company mill — which operated three shifts a day and was located on the banks of the Little Androscoggin River that runs through the center of Mechanic Falls — closed in 1981. My aunt worked in the accounting department. By then the town’s glory days were long gone. The Evans Rifle Manufacturing Company, which made repeating rifles and the brick and canned goods factories, shoe shops, the steam engine plant, W. Penney and Sons, one of the largest machine shops in the state, were already distant memories. The weed-choked foundations of the old factories lie on the outskirts of town, forgotten and neglected. The old paper mill was destroyed by fire in 2018. There are empty storefronts downtown and the ubiquitous problem with food insecurity — the regional high school has a year-round free breakfast and lunch program — and opiates and alcoholism. Within a small radius are three or four marijuana dispensaries. The house where my grandparents lived, two blocks from the center of town, burned down. So did the church across the street. Its charred remains have never been razed. On Sunday mornings I could hear the congregation singing hymns. The bank in the center of town closed. It is now a photographer’s studio and a hair salon. There is a casino in the town of Oxford which, like lottery tickets, functions as a stealth tax on the poor. The day I visit, a fundraiser is being held at an ice cream shop for an eight-year-old boy who needs a kidney transplant.The town is 97 percent white. The average age is 40. The median household income is $34,864. Trump won Androscoggin County, where Mechanic Falls is located, with 49.9 percent of the vote in the last election. Biden received 47 percent. Republicans like Trump never had much appeal in the past. Franklin D. Roosevelt carried the county in the 1932 election. In 1972 the county voted for George McGovern. Jimmy Carter won the county in his two presidential elections. But, as in tens of thousands of rural enclaves across the country, once the jobs left and Democrats abandoned working men and women, people became desperate. Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, after the mill closed with the loss of over 200 jobs, won the county, as they did the state. But things have not improved. Across the street from the barbershop is Bamboo G

Dr. Judith Herman’s book Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, as The New York Times wrote, is “one of the most important psychiatric works published since Freud.” It is the foundational text, along with The Body Keeps Score, written by Dr. Herman’s close collaborator Bessel van der Kolk, for understanding trauma and how to treat it. Trauma is widespread in American society, not only among veterans that fought in our forever wars, but in millions of homes across the country beset by domestic and sexual violence. One in five Americans was sexually molested as a child. One in four was beaten by a parent to the point of a mark being left on their body. One in three couples engages in physical violence. A quarter of us grew up with alcoholic relatives. One out of eight witnessed their mother being beaten or hit. The consequence of this trauma is personal and social. It impels people, Dr. Herman writes, both to withdraw from close relationships and to seek them desperately. It results in a profound disruption in basic trust. It induces feelings of shame, guilt and inferiority, as well as the need to avoid reminders of the trauma that occur in daily life. Trauma compromises the capacity for intimacy. Trauma can dramatically reduce focus to extremely limited goals, often a matter of hours or days. It often engenders the survivor triad of insomnia, nightmares and psychosomatic illnesses. Chronic trauma can result in a paralysis of initiative, feelings of apathy, helplessness and depression. And it can see survivors, to blunt the pain of the trauma, engage in a variety of self-destructive behaviors, a retreat into drugs, alcohol and self-harm, including suicide. In short, repeated trauma forms and deforms the personality, especially when this trauma occurs in childhood. Trauma is of epidemic proportions in the U.S. The failure to address our trauma has grave individual, social and political consequences. In the first of two-parts Dr. Herman, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and cofounder of the Victims of Violence Program, discusses her book Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Next week we will discuss her new book Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

Narrated by Eunice WongText originally published July 22, 2023Witness - by Mr. FishFilms about war, shorn of the bone crushing fear, the putrid stench of the corpses, the deafening noise of explosions, the constant exhaustion and the nervous anxiety that comes with trying to understand what is happening in the terrifying chaos, are pale and inadequate reflections of the vast enterprise of industrial slaughter. And these are the good films, of which there are only a few. Most feature war films and documentaries, from The Sands of Iwo Jima to Saving Private Ryan, are war pornography. They romanticize those wielding the terrible instruments of death. They justify the unjustifiable. They pay homage to the war machine. They entice naïve young men and women into becoming cannon fodder. They distort the public’s perception of war, leaving those who return from war and attempt to speak the awful truth alienated and ignored. Those in war who do the fighting, endowed with a god-like power to kill, are a minority. The real face of war is the hardship and grief suffered by civilians caught up in the maw of destruction. Their stories are hard to hear. Their fate is hard to see, which is why images from war are always sanitized. If we truly saw war, it would be so shocking, so disturbing, so disgusting, war would be hard to wage. The best accounts of war, for these reasons, eschew scenes of combat. The documentary “20 Days in Mariupol,” a chronicle of the first 20 days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, captures what I witnessed as a war correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. It fails, as all films about war must fail, but it succeeds where few films about war succeed. It relentlessly rips back the veil on war - fatally wounded children and pregnant women torn apart by shell fragments; the frantic and doomed efforts of doctors to save them; the shrieks and lamentations of those cradling the bloodied bodies of the dead; the collapse of the social order once the fragile structures of a civil society cease to exist and looting and pillage become a way to survive. In war there are only predators and prey. War is ugly and tawdry. Violence creates nothing. It only destroys — human beings, animals, schools, homes and apartment blocks, hospitals, bridges. It is the purest expression of death. All the forces that nurture and sustain life — familial, civil, social, cultural, ecological — are slated for obliteration. Associated Press video journalist Mstyslav Chernov and his colleagues, photographer Evgeniy Maloletka and producer Vasilisa Stepanenko, documented the first three weeks of the Russian assault on the port city of Mariupol. The three Ukrainian reporters were the only ones from a foreign news agency to remain in the city. The movie draws from 25 hours of film, only 40 minutes of which were transmitted to the AP editors. Much of the footage, even if it could all have been transmitted, would never have been disseminated. It is too graphic.The film focuses exclusively on Russian atrocities. It ignores those committed by Ukrainians. I covered enough wars to know there were some. The neo-Nazi Azov Regiment, and other fascist-inspired militias, played a major role in the fighting in Mariupol. These militias have been accused of terrorizing and executing ethnic Russians and those suspected of sympathizing or working with separatists. The Azov Regiment’s symbol is a black “Wolfsangel,” an emblem used by Nazi units in World War II. The regiment embraces the fascist ideology of blood and soil. The fascist militias are absent in the film. This is by design. The journalists do not address the plight of ethnic Russians, although Mariupol is a largely Russian-speaking city. While most in the city consider themselves to be Ukrainian, almost half also identify as Russian. These ethnic Russians usually blame the war in the Donbas, which has been raging since 2014 and where the city is located, on the government in Kyiv. What happened to the ethnic Russians and separatists the Ukrainians considered collaborators? Were Ukrainian military units using hospitals as bases of operations in violation of the Geneva Conventions? There were scenes of armed Ukrainian soldiers in hospital corridors. The documentary leaves these questions unanswered. It is not that what we see in the film is not true. Rather, it is that the film omitted what would not reflect well on Ukraine. When you depend on military units for protection and logistics you censor your reporting. If the reporters had reported on the abuses and atrocities carried out by Ukrainian units the protection they received would have been withdrawn. As much as I admire the documentary, the lie of omission is still a lie. It is the most common lie told in war. Only reporters who dare to report without embedding in military units are free to report the truth. But this is very dangerous and lonely work. This willful self-censorship is a serious flaw in the film, b

Narrated by Eunice WongText originally published July 15, 2023Of the People By the People For the People - by Mr. FishThe Republican and Democratic parties have no intention of allowing independents and third parties into their exclusive club. A series of arcane laws and rules governing elections make it extremely difficult for outsiders to get on the ballot, receive exposure, raise money, comply with regulations that are designed to advance the interests of Republicans and Democrats or participate in public debates. Third parties and independents are effectively disenfranchised, although 44 percent of the voting public identify as independent. This discrimination is euphemistically labeled “bipartisanship,” but the correct term, as Theresa Amato writes, is “political apartheid.”“One of the best-kept secrets in American politics is that the two-party system has long been brain dead — kept alive by support systems like state electoral laws that protect the established parties from rivals and by Federal subsidies and so-called Campaign reform,” the political scientist Theodore Lowi noted. “The two-party system would collapse in an instant if the tubes were pulled and the IV’s were cut.”Amato was the national presidential campaign manager and in-house counsel for Ralph Nader in the 2000 and 2004 elections. Her book “Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny” is a sobering account of our political apartheid, based on her experience in the Nader campaigns. It chronicles in minute detail the nefarious mechanisms, especially the Byzantine rules that vary from state to state, to even get on the ballot. Third parties not already ballot-qualified and independents must collect valid signatures on a petition to run for president. Some states require a fee or a few hundred signatures. Others require tens of thousands of signatures. The Republicans and Democrats set the requirements in state legislatures, and then, flush with corporate cash and teams of lawyers, haul independents and third party candidates into court to challenge the validity of their petition signatures. These lawsuits are used to invalidate signatures to force candidates off the ballot, deprive voters the opportunity of supporting other candidates, as well as drain the campaign budgets of small competitors. Republican and Democratic party state-level officials, either elected or appointed, administer the federal elections to serve their party’s advancement. The requirements to get on the ballot resemble the rules erected during Jim and Jane Crow to prevent African-Americans from being able to register to vote. Ohio, for example, demands that petition signatures be written from only one county on each petition, forcing circulators to carry around stacks of county petitions. The state of Washington requires a 10 day advance notice published in a newspaper before holding a nominating convention. West Virginia mandates that circulators first get credentials from the county clerk, in every county, which must be displayed while collecting signatures. Nevada requires that each petition be notarized. “To complicate matters further, in a Kafkaesque way, many of the election officials are afraid to say exactly what provisions of their state law mean; they do not want to be implicated in a legal battle — so they often claim that they do not know, that they cannot say, and that you cannot rely on anything they say,” Amato writes. “Alternatively, you may get different opinions, based on whom you ask, or encounter election officials who just don’t know the law they are enforcing, even in some of the biggest states, as we found in 2004 in California.”Commissions and boards set up to monitor elections, such as The Federal Election Commission, are also composed almost exclusively of Republicans and Democrats. Amato describes mastering the Federal Election Commission campaign finance laws as equivalent to learning “a foreign language in a few days” and then trying to teach it to campaign staff and volunteers who have little or no experience with federal regulations.The national, state, and local branches of the Republican and Democratic parties contract vendors and political consultants to work on each campaign cycle. This is usually not true for third parties and independents, who lack the resources and funds to build a permanent campaign infrastructure. The two ruling parties can also rely on Super Political Action Committees, or Super PACs, to raise unlimited amounts of cash from wealthy individuals, labor unions, corporations and other political action committees. The Super PACs can make unlimited “independent” expenditures on behalf of the campaign, although they are not supposed to give directly to the campaign or co-ordinate their activities with federal candidate committees. Republicans and Democrats, because they raise so much money, have no incentive to participate in the public financing system or create an alternative one that might ass

According to the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, 14.3 percent of Americans — nearly 50 million people — were living in poverty in December. “If America’s poor founded a country,” Matt Desmond writes in his book “Poverty, By America,” “that country would have a bigger population than Australia or Venezuela. Almost one in nine Americans – including one in eight children – live in poverty. There are more than 38 million people living in the United States who cannot afford basic necessities, and more than 108 million getting by on $55,000 a year or less, many stuck in that space between poverty and security. More than a million of our public schoolchildren are homeless, living in motels, cars, shelters, and abandoned buildings.” More than 2 million American’s don’t have running water or a flushing toilet at home.” These statistics are bad enough, but when seen through the lens of institutionalized racism they are even worse. In 2019, the median white household has a net worth of $188,200, compared with $24,100 for the median Black household. And yet as Desmond writes, “spending on the nation’s thirteen largest means-tested programs – aid reserved for Americans who fall below a certain income level – went from $1,015 a person the year Ronald Regan was elected president to $3,419 a person one year into Donald Trumps’ administration. That’s a 237 percent increase.” Why does poverty on this scale exist given our affluence? Desmond argues that poverty in America is not an accident. It is by design. The majority of Americans, he writes, benefit from a system that callously exploits the poor. Joining me to discuss his book “Poverty, By America” is Matthew Desmond, professor of sociology at Princeton University. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

Narrated by Eunice WongText Originally published July 9, 2023When Goliaths Infiltrate the Fourth Estate - by Mr. FishLONDON: The persecution of Julian Assange, along with the climate of fear, wholesale government surveillance and use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, has emasculated investigative journalism. The press has not only failed to mount a sustained campaign to support Julian, whose extradition appears imminent, but no longer attempts to shine a light into the inner workings of power. This failure is not only inexcusable, but ominous. The U.S. government, especially the military and agencies such as the CIA, the FBI, the NSA and Homeland Security, have no intention of stopping with Julian, who faces 170 years in prison if found guilty of violating 17 counts of the Espionage Act. They are cementing into place mechanisms of draconian state censorship, some features of which were exposed by Matt Taibbi in the Twitter Files, to construct a dystopian corporate totalitarianism. The U.S. and the U.K. brazenly violated a series of judicial norms and diplomatic protocols to keep Julian trapped for seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy after he had been granted political asylum by Ecuador. The CIA, through the Spanish security firm UC Global, made recordings of Julian’s meetings with his attorneys, which alone should invalidate the extradition case. Julian has been held for more than four years in the notorious Belmarsh high-security prison since the British Metropolitan Police dragged him out of the embassy on April 11, 2019. The embassy is supposed to be the sovereign territory of Ecuador. Julian has not been sentenced in this case for a crime. He is charged under the Espionage Act, although he is not a U.S. citizen and WikiLeaks is not a U.S.-based publication. The U.K. courts, which have engaged in what can only be described as a show trial, appear ready to turn him over to the U.S. once his final appeal, as we expect, is rejected. This could happen in a matter of days or weeks. On Wednesday night at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Stella Assange, an attorney who is married to Julian, Matt Kennard, co-founder and chief investigator of Declassified UK, and I examined the collapse of the press, especially with regard to Julian’s case. You can watch our discussion here. “I feel like I’m living in 1984,” Matt said. “This is a journalist who revealed more crimes of the world’s superpower than anyone in history. He’s sitting in a maximum-security prison in London. The state that wants to bring him over to that country to put him in prison for the rest of his life is on record as spying on his privileged conversations with his lawyers. They’re on record plotting to assassinate him. Any of those things, if you told someone from a different time ‘Yeah this is what happened and he was sent anyway and not only that, but the media didn’t cover it at all.’ It’s really scary. If they can do that to Assange, if civil society can drop the ball and the media can drop the ball, they can do that to any of us.” When Julian and WikiLeaks released the secret diplomatic cables and Iraq War logs, which exposed numerous U.S. war crimes, including torture and the murder of civilians, corruption, diplomatic scandals, lies and spying by the U.S. government, the commercial media had no choice but to report the information. Julian and WikiLeaks shamed them into doing their job. But, even as they worked with Julian, organizations such as The New York Times and The Guardian were determined to destroy him. He threatened their journalistic model and exposed their accommodation with the centers of power.“They hated him,” Matt said of the mainstream media reporters and editors. “They went to war with him immediately after those releases. I was working for The Financial Times in Washington in late 2010 when those releases happened. The reaction of the office at The Financial Times was one of the major reasons I got disillusioned with the mainstream media.”Julian went from being a journalistic colleague to a pariah as soon as the information he provided to these news organizations was published. He endured, in the words of Nils Melzer, at the time the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, “a relentless and unrestrained campaign of public mobbing, intimidation and defamation.” These attacks included “collective ridicule, insults and humiliation, to open instigation of violence and even repeated calls for his assassination.”Julian was branded a hacker, although all the information he published was leaked to him by others. He was smeared as a sexual predator and a Russian spy, called a narcissist and accused of being unhygienic and slovenly. The ceaseless character assassination, amplified by a hostile media, saw him abandoned by many who had regarded him a hero. “Once he had been dehumanized through isolation, ridicule and shame, just like the witches we used to burn at the stake, it was easy to

When the socialist Jeremy Corbyn became the leader of the Labour Party in Britain in 2015 and mounted a grassroots campaign in 2017 to become the British Prime Minister the ruling corporate elites, along with the war industry, panicked. They conspired with the Israel lobby to mount a vicious campaign of character assassination against Corbyn and his supporters, accusing them, even if they were Jewish, of anti-Semitism. Corbyn has been a long-time champion of Palestinian rights. The media did its part to crucify Corbyn as a bigot while Labour party officials ruthlessly purged the party of Corbyn supporters. Corbyn was eventually driven out of the party in 2020 after the snap election loss against Boris Johnson. The neutralization of Corbyn is an ominous precedent. The purging of Corbyn and his supporters effectively emasculated the left within the Labour Party. This was its goal. The unholy alliance between Israel, the war industry and the corporatists raise the question of whether it is possible in Britain or the United States to reform the system from within. Joining me to discuss these issues is Asa Winstanley an associate editor and reporter with the website Electronic Intifada and the author of “Weaponizing Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

Narrated by Eunice WongText Originally Published July 2, 2022Preying for Peace - by Mr. FishThe playbook the pimps of war use to lure us into one military fiasco after another, including Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Ukraine, does not change. Freedom and democracy are threatened. Evil must be vanquished. Human rights must be protected. The fate of Europe and NATO, along with a “rules based international order” is at stake. Victory is assured.The results are also the same. The justifications and narratives are exposed as lies. The cheery prognosis is false. Those on whose behalf we are supposedly fighting are as venal as those we are fighting against. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was a war crime, although one that was provoked by NATO expansion and by the United States backing of the 2014 “Maidan” coup which ousted the democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych wanted economic integration with the European Union, but not at the expense of economic and political ties with Russia. The war will only be solved through negotiations that allow ethnic Russians in Ukraine to have autonomy and Moscow’s protection, as well as Ukrainian neutrality, which means the country cannot join NATO. The longer these negotiations are delayed the more Ukrainians will suffer and die. Their cities and infrastructure will continue to be pounded into rubble.But this proxy war in Ukraine is designed to serve U.S. interests. It enriches the weapons manufacturers, weakens the Russian military and isolates Russia from Europe. What happens to Ukraine is irrelevant. “First, equipping our friends on the front lines to defend themselves is a far cheaper way — in both dollars and American lives — to degrade Russia’s ability to threaten the United States,” admitted Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. “Second, Ukraine’s effective defense of its territory is teaching us lessons about how to improve the defenses of partners who are threatened by China. It is no surprise that senior officials from Taiwan are so supportive of efforts to help Ukraine defeat Russia. Third, most of the money that’s been appropriated for Ukraine security assistance doesn’t actually go to Ukraine. It gets invested in American defense manufacturing. It funds new weapons and munitions for the U.S. armed forces to replace the older material we have provided to Ukraine. Let me be clear: this assistance means more jobs for American workers and newer weapons for American servicemembers.”Once the truth about these endless wars seeps into public consciousness, the media, which slavishly promotes these conflicts, drastically reduces coverage. The military debacles, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, continue largely out of view. By the time the U.S. concedes defeat, most barely remember that these wars are being fought. The pimps of war who orchestrate these military fiascos migrate from administration to administration. Between posts they are ensconced in think tanks — Project for the New American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, The Atlantic Council and The Brookings Institution — funded by corporations and the war industry. Once the Ukraine war comes to its inevitable conclusion, these Dr. Strangeloves will seek to ignite a war with China. The U.S. Navy and military are already menacing and encircling China. God help us if we don’t stop them.These pimps of war con us into one conflict after another with flattering narratives that paint us as the world’s saviors. They don’t even have to be innovative. The rhetoric is lifted from the old playbook. We naively swallow the bait and embrace the flag — this time blue and yellow — to become unwitting agents in our self-immolation.Since the end of the Second World War, the government has spent between 45 to 90 percent of the federal budget on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest sustained activity of the U.S. government. It has stopped mattering — at least to the pimps of war — whether these wars are rational or prudent. The war industry metastasizes within the bowels of the American empire to hollow it out from the inside. The U.S. is reviled abroad, drowning in debt, has an impoverished working class and is burdened with a decayed infrastructure as well as shoddy social services. Wasn’t the Russian military — because of poor morale, poor generalship, outdated weapons, desertions, a lack of ammunition that supposedly forced soldiers to fightwith shovels, and severe supply shortages — supposed to collapse months ago? Wasn’t Putin supposed to be driven from power? Weren’t the sanctions supposed to plungethe ruble into a death spiral? Wasn’t the severing of the Russian banking system from SWIFT, the international money transfer system, supposed to cripple the Russian economy? How is it that inflation rates in Europe and the United States are higher than in Russia despite these attacks on the Russ

Dean Yates was a reporter for Reuters who led teams that covered the 2002 Bali bombings and the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in Indonesia. He served as deputy bureau chief for Israel and Palestine in 2006, during the Lebanon War and was the Reuters bureau chief in Iraq, overseeing a staff of 100 people, from 2007-2008. It was during his time in Iraq that a U.S. Apache gunship gunned down two Reuters journalists in Baghdad on July 12, 2007. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange published footage of that attack in 2010 known as the Collateral Murder video. Yates struggled in the aftermath with severe PTSD and was consumed by guilt over the killing of his two Iraqi colleagues. His trauma was a time bomb, leading to substance abuse, rage, numbness and pushing up to the edge of suicide. He was hospitalized three times in a psychiatric ward. He, like many former war correspondents, felt abandoned by his news organization. He was unable to recapture the camaraderie and sense of purpose, even meaning, that comes with war reporting. The toxicity of his trauma, which took a heavy toll on his wife and children, became the new war he had to fight. Yates has written a brutally honest memoir about his battle, Line in the Sand: A Journalist’s Memoir of War, Trauma, Infidelity and Healing. He joins me to discuss the trauma of war reporting, its crippling consequences and the struggle to heal and find peace. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

Redacted - by Mr. FishThe journalist Matt Taibbi has been targeted by the Democratic Party for exposing extensive government blacklists used to censor left-wing and right-wing critics. Given access to the internal traffic of Twitter by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, he documented repeated cases where the FBI and other government agencies repeatedly suppressed news and commentary. The censored content was almost exclusively produced by those critical of the dominant narrative advanced by the Democratic Party and the old establishment wing of the Republican Party. Which has joined forces with the Democrats. Threads that were censored included those from the Yellow Vests movement, activists from the Occupy movement, Global Revolution Live, negative stories about Joe Biden, reports on the Ukrainian energy company Burisma that paid Hunter Biden about $1 million a year while his father was vice-president, positive stories about Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, reports about Ukrainian human rights abuses and details of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. These accounts that were flagged and usually disappeared. The so-called “moderation requests” were sent by an entity called the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF). The FITF is an FBI-led interagency task force that includes numerous government agencies, including Homeland Security, the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department. It flags what it considers objectionable content for about two dozen social media companies, including Twitter, Facebook, Google, Pinterest and Wikimedia. In March, Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger were called to testify before the Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government. While Taibbi was testifying on March 9, an IRS agent visited his house in New Jersey. Taibbi discovered that the IRS opened a case against him on the day he published a Christmas Eve Twitter thread from a letter House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan sent to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel inquiring about Taibbi’s case. It was a Saturday. It was Christmas Eve. Taibbi did not owe taxes. The case was four years old. All this suggests that the IRS case was politically motivated and the FBI was monitoring Taibbi. Taibbi ran into a buzzsaw of orchestrated character assassination when he testified. The Democratic members of the committee rarely let Taibbi speak. They delivered vicious and insulting diatribes, which were then broadcast on outlets such as MSNBC and CNN, part of the effort to further discredit Taibbi. The ranking committee member, Stacey Plaskett, sent Taibbi a letter accusing him of lying to Congress and threatened Taibbi with a five-year prison sentence. Joining me to discuss this wholesale censorship, and the efforts by the ruling establishment, including the Democratic Party, to discredit him and his work is Matt Taibbi. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

Redacted - by Mr. FishThe journalist Matt Taibbi has been targeted by the Democratic Party for exposing extensive government blacklists used to censor left-wing and right-wing critics. Given access to the internal traffic of Twitter by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, he documented repeated cases where the FBI and other government agencies repeatedly suppressed news and commentary. The censored content was almost exclusively produced by those critical of the dominant narrative advanced by the Democratic Party and the old establishment wing of the Republican Party. Which has joined forces with the Democrats. Threads that were censored included those from the Yellow Vests movement, activists from the Occupy movement, Global Revolution Live, negative stories about Joe Biden, reports on the Ukrainian energy company Burisma that paid Hunter Biden about $1 million a year while his father was vice-president, positive stories about Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, reports about Ukrainian human rights abuses and details of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. These accounts that were flagged and usually disappeared. The so-called “moderation requests” were sent by an entity called the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF). The FITF is an FBI-led interagency task force that includes numerous government agencies, including Homeland Security, the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department. It flags what it considers objectionable content for about two dozen social media companies, including Twitter, Facebook, Google, Pinterest and Wikimedia. In March, Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger were called to testify before the Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government. While Taibbi was testifying on March 9, an IRS agent visited his house in New Jersey. Taibbi discovered that the IRS opened a case against him on the day he published a Christmas Eve Twitter thread from a letter House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan sent to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel inquiring about Taibbi’s case. It was a Saturday. It was Christmas Eve. Taibbi did not owe taxes. The case was four years old. All this suggests that the IRS case was politically motivated and the FBI was monitoring Taibbi. Taibbi ran into a buzzsaw of orchestrated character assassination when he testified. The Democratic members of the committee rarely let Taibbi speak. They delivered vicious and insulting diatribes, which were then broadcast on outlets such as MSNBC and CNN, part of the effort to further discredit Taibbi. The ranking committee member, Stacey Plaskett, sent Taibbi a letter accusing him of lying to Congress and threatened Taibbi with a five-year prison sentence. Joining me to discuss this wholesale censorship, and the efforts by the ruling establishment, including the Democratic Party, to discredit him and his work is Matt Taibbi. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

Narrated by Eunice WongText originally published June 18, 2023STOP THIS - by Mr. FishHigh Court Judge Jonathan Swift — who previously worked for a variety of British government agencies as a barrister and said his favorite clients are “security and intelligence agencies” — rejected two applications by Julian Assange’s lawyers to appeal his extradition last week. The extradition order was signed last June by Home Secretary Priti Patel. Julian’s legal team have filed a final application for appeal, the last option available in the British courts. If accepted, the case could proceed to a public hearing in front of two new High Court judges. If rejected, Julian could be immediately extradited to the United States where he will stand trial for 18 counts of violating the Espionage Act, charges that could see him receive a 175-year sentence, as early as this week. The only chance to block an extradition, if the final appeal is rejected, as I expect it will be, would come from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The parliamentary arm of the Council of Europe, which created the ECtHR, along with their Commissioner for Human Rights, oppose Julian’s “detention, extradition and prosecution” because it represents “a dangerous precedent for journalists.” It is unclear if the British government would abide by the court’s decision — even though it is obligated to do so — if it ruled against extradition, or if the U.K. would extradite Julian before an appeal to the European court can be heard. Julian, once shipped to the U.S., would be put on trial in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia where most espionage cases have been won by the U.S. government. Judge Vanessa Baraitser at Westminster Magistrates’ Court refused to authorize the U.S. government's extradition request in Jan. 2021 because of the severity of the conditions Julian would endure in the U.S. prison system. “Faced with the conditions of near total isolation without the protective factors which limited his risk at [Her Majesty’s Prison] Belmarsh, I am satisfied the procedures described by the U.S. will not prevent Mr. Assange from finding a way to commit suicide,” said Baraitser when handing down her 132-page ruling, “and for this reason I have decided extradition would be oppressive by reason of mental harm and I order his discharge.”Baraitser’s decision was overturned after an appeal by U.S. authorities. The High Court accepted the conclusions of the lower court about increased risk of suicide and inhumane prison conditions. But it also accepted four assurances in U.S. Diplomatic Note no. 74, given to the court in Feb. 2021, which promised Julian would be well treated. The U.S. government claimed that its assurances “entirely answer the concerns which caused the judge [in the lower court] to discharge Mr. Assange.” The “assurances” state that Julian will not be subject to Special Administrative Measures (SAMs). They promise that Julian, an Australian citizen, can serve his sentence in Australia if the Australian government requests his extradition. They promise he will receive adequate clinical and psychological care. They promise that, pre-trial and post-trial, Julian will not be held in the Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado. No one is held pre-trial in ADX Florence. But it sounds reassuring. ADX Florence is not the only supermax prison in the U.S. Julian can be placed in one of our other Guantanamo-like facilities in a Communications Management Unit (CMU). CMUs are highly restrictive units that replicate the near total isolation imposed by SAMs.None of these “assurances” are worth the paper they are written on. All come with escape clauses. None are legally binding. Should Julian do “something subsequent to the offering of these assurances that meets the tests for the imposition of SAMs or designation to ADX” he will, the court conceded, be subject to these harsher forms of control. If Australia does not request a transfer it “cannot be a cause for criticism of the USA, or a reason for regarding the assurances as inadequate to meet the judge's concerns,” the ruling read. And even if that were not the case, it would take Julian 10 to 15 years to appeal his sentence up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which would be more than enough time to destroy him psychologically and physically. No doubt the plane waiting to take Julian to the U.S. will be well stocked with blindfolds, sedatives, shackles, enemas, diapers and jumpsuits used to facilitate “extraordinary renditions” conducted by the CIA. The extradition of Julian will be the next step in the slow-motion execution of the publisher and founder of WikiLeaks and one of the most important journalists of our generation. It will ensure that Julian spends the rest of his life in a U.S. prison. It will create legal precedents that will criminalize any investigation into the inner workings of power, even by citizens from another country. It will be a body blow to ou

Dr. Cornel West, the moral philosopher and civil rights activist, is running for president on the Green Party’s ticket. Dr. West will be a singular voice for serious social and political change in an electoral system saturated with corporate money and rigged to crush third parties. He calls for “a paradigm shift,” a realignment of “the ideological landscape,” demanding that we redirect the focus of governing institutions from the demands of markets and corporations, the military machine, empire and the ruling oligarchs, to poor and working people. His decades-long commitment to the oppressed, his fierce opposition to American militarism and empire, his condemnation of the grotesque avarice of the billionaire class, and his determination to halt the ongoing ecocide, will see him contemptuously dismissed by the establishment, which is why we must support him. If this campaign becomes a movement, and it will need a lot of organizing to get Dr. West on the ballot and build grassroots support, the array of forces that will seek to discredit and sabotage his candidacy will be formidable. The Israel lobby, the war industry, the courtiers in the media, the corporatists, the billionaire class and the Democratic Party leadership, will be as vicious to Dr. West as these forces in Britain were to Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. But at the same time if we do not mount a political revolution and overthrow he ruling corporate duopoly we are headed not only for corporate tyranny but ultimately the extinction of the human species, along with most other species. Joining me to discuss his presidential campaign is Dr. Cornel West. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

Narrated by Eunice WongText originally published June 11, 2023Lonesome Farewell - by Mr. FishPrinceton, N.J. — As I write this, the sun is a hazy reddish orange orb. The sky is an inky yellowish gray. The air has an acrid stench and leaves a faint metallic taste in my mouth. After 20 minutes outside, my head starts to ache, my nose burns, my eyes itch and my breathing becomes more labored. Streets are deserted. The ubiquitous lawn service companies with their machine mowers and whining gas-powered leaf blowers have disappeared, along with pedestrians, cyclists and joggers. Those who walk their dog go out briefly and then scamper back inside. N95 masks, as in the early days of the pandemic, are sold out, along with air purifiers. The international airports at Newark and Philadelphia have delayed or canceled flights.I feel as if I am in a ghost town. Windows shut. Air conditioners on full blast. The Air Quality Index (AQI) is checked and rechecked. We are hovering around 300. The most polluted cities in the world have half that rate. Dubai (168). Delhi (164). Anything above 300 is classified as hazardous.When will the hundreds of forest fires burning north of us in Canada — fires that have already consumed 10.9 million acres and driven 120,000 people from their homes — be extinguished? What does this portend? The wildfire season is only beginning. When will the air clear? A few days? A few weeks? What do you tell a terminal patient seeking relief? Yes, this period of distress may pass, but it’s not over. It will get worse. There will be more highs and lows and then mostly lows, and then death. But no one wants to look that far ahead. We live moment to moment, illusion to illusion. And when the skies clear we pretend that normality will return. Except it won’t. Climate science is unequivocal. It has been for decades. The projections and graphs, the warming of the oceans and the atmosphere, the melting of polar ice sheets and glaciers, rising sea levels, droughts and wildfires and monster hurricanes are already bearing down with a terrible and mounting fury on our species, and most other species, because of the hubris and folly of the human race. The worse it gets the more we retreat into fantasy. The law will solve it. The market will solve it. Technology will solve it. We will adapt. Or, for those who find solace in denial of a reality-based belief system, the climate crisis does not exist. The earth has always been like this. And besides, Jesus will save us. Those who warn of the looming mass extinction are dismissed as hysterics, Cassandras, pessimists. It can’t be that catastrophic.At the inception of every war I covered, most people were unable to cope with the nightmare that was about to engulf them. Signs of disintegration surrounded them. Shootings. Kidnappings. The bifurcation of polarized extremes into antagonistic armed groups or militias. Hate speech. Political paralysis. Apocalyptic rhetoric. The breakdown of social services. Food shortages. Circumscribed daily existence. But the fragility of society is too emotionally fraught for most of us to accept. We endow the institutions and structures around us with an eternal permanence.“Things whose existence is not morally comprehensible cannot exist,” Primo Levi, who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, observed. I would return at night to Pristina in Kosovo after having been stopped by Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) rebels a few miles outside the capital. But when I described my experiences to my Kosovar Albanian friends — highly educated and multilingual — they dismissed them. “Those are Serbs dressed up like rebels to justify Serb repression,” they answered. They did not grasp they were at war until Serb paramilitary forces rounded them up at gunpoint, herded them into boxcars and shipped them off to Macedonia.Complex civilizations eventually destroy themselves. Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments,” Jared Diamond in “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress,” detail the familiar patterns that lead to catastrophic collapse. We are no different, although this time we will all go down together. The entire planet. Those in the Global South who are least responsible for the climate emergency, will suffer first. They are already fighting existential battles to survive. Our turn will come. We in the Global North may hold out for a bit longer, but only a bit. The billionaire class is preparing its escape. The worse it gets, the stronger will be our temptation to deny the reality facing us, to lash out at climate refugees, which is already happening in Europe and along our border with Mexico, as if they are the problem. Wright, who calls industrial society “a suicide machine,” writes: Civilization is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progr

When police in Atlanta stormed a music festival in March being held by activists protesting Cop City, the proposed $90-million dollar police and firefighter training center that would be built on forest land, twenty-three of the activists arrested. They were accused of carrying out acts of vandalism and arson at a Cop City construction site over a mile from the music festival under Georgia’s domestic terror statute, although none of the arrest warrants tie any of the defendants directly to any illegal acts.Cop City is yet another complex designed by the corporate state to train police in urban warfare. The plans include military-grade training facilities, a mock city to practice urban warfare, explosives testing areas, dozens of shooting ranges, and a Black Hawk helicopter landing pad. “It is a war base where police will learn military-like maneuvers to kill black people and control our bodies and movements,” Kwame Olufemi of Community Movement Builders points out. “The facility includes shooting ranges, plans for bomb testing, and will practice tear gas deployment. They are practicing how to make sure poor and working class people stay in line. So when the police kill us in the streets again, like they did to Rayshard Brooks in 2020, they can control our protests and community response to how they continually murder our people.” But just as ominous as the militarization of domestic police forces and training complexes to turn police into internal armies of occupation is the use of terrorism laws to charge and imprison activists, protesters and dissidents.Former Chicago Tribune reporter Will Potter in his book Green is the New Red documents how terrorism laws are used to crush dissent, especially dissent carried out by imprison animal rights and environmental activists. He likens the campaign to McCarthyism in the 1950s and warns that we are on the cusp of cementing into place a police state.Potter, who became a vegan when he was a student at the University of Texas, participated in a canvassing campaign organized by a group called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, while working at the Tribune. The goal was to close down the laboratory of Huntingdon Life Sciences, which used animals for testing. The organizers were arrested for trespassing. And then Potter got a first-hand look at what was happening to civil liberties in the U.S. Two FBI agents appeared at Potter’s apartment demanding information about the group. If he refused to cooperate, he was told, his name would be included on the domestic terrorist list. Potter would eventually leave the paper to report on the government’s intimidation of activists, including nonviolent activists, who spoke out against the corporate state and the seizure of political and economic power by the 1 percent. Joining me to discuss the Orwellian world being erected around us is Will Potter. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

Narrated by Eunice WongText originally published: June 5, 2023Go West - by. Mr. FishDr. Cornel West, the moral philosopher and civil rights activist, will formally announce today he is running for president on the People’s Party ticket. Cornel will be a singular voice for serious social and political change in an electoral system saturated with corporate money and rigged to crush third parties. His decades-long commitment to the oppressed, his fierce opposition to American militarism and empire, his condemnation of the grotesque avarice of the billionaire class, and his determination to halt the ongoing ecocide, will see him contemptuously dismissed by the establishment. For all of these reasons we must support him.“We’re at such a low point in the American empire,” Cornel said when we spoke about his decision. “Its spiritual decay and its immoral decadence are so profound that we have to begin on the foundational level of a spiritual awakening and a moral reckoning. Organized greed. Institutionalized hatred. Routinized indifference to the lives of poor and working people of all colors. We’ve got to get beyond an analysis of the predatory capitalist processes that have saturated every nook and cranny of the culture. We’ve got to get beyond the ways in which the political system has been colonized by corporate wealth and by monied elite. We’ve got to get beyond that sense of impotence of the citizenry. These are all the signs of an empire in decline. The only thing that we have to add is military overreach, and we see that as well.”If this campaign becomes a movement, and it will need a lot of organizing to get Cornel on the ballot and build grassroots support, the array of forces that will seek to discredit and sabotage his candidacy will be formidable. The Israel lobby, the war industry, the courtiers in the media, the corporatists, the billionaire class and the Democratic Party leadership, will be as vicious to Cornel as these forces in Britain were to Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. Entrenched power will fight us with every tool in its arsenal. And, as with Corbyn, these assaults — rooted in a mendacious campaign of character assassination — will be relentless. Cornel said he seeks “a paradigm shift,” a realignment of “the ideological landscape.” He calls on us to redirect the focus of governing institutions from the demands of markets and corporations, the military machine, empire and the ruling oligarchs, to poor and working people.“What we need is a recognition that the corporate duopoly, both parties, constitute major obstacles and impediments for the kind of spiritual awakening and moral reckoning that focuses on poor and working people,” Cornel said.He is calling, in short, for a political revolution and the overthrow of the ruling corporate class.“Trump is mendacious,” he said. “Everybody knows that he’s a criminal. Everybody knows that he’s a gangster. Yet at the same time, the best that the Democratic Party can put forward is mendacity and hypocrisy. The Democratic Party has an arrogance against working and poor people of all colors. We’re a laughing stock. Is Trump versus Biden the best the country can do?”He sees the two ruling parties as “parasitical,” playing off each other in a tawdry burlesque act designed to perpetuate corporate dominance. It’s impossible, he points out, in the two party system to vote against the interests of the big banks, the fossil fuel industry, the Israel lobby, the drug and insurance companies, the animal agriculture industry and the arms merchants. The weapons manufacturers, who consume nearly half of the Pentagon budget, look at permanent war, whether in the Middle East, Ukraine or with China, as a business opportunity. These structural evils are sacrosanct. And these are the evils which, if left unchecked,will ultimately kill us.“It’s not a narrow choice, it’s a preposterous choice,” he said.“There is a difference in neofascist catastrophe and neoliberal disaster,” he said. “Catastrophes are worse than disasters. Disasters have less scope and range regarding certain kinds of issues. I never want to downplay the least vulnerable in our society — our gay brothers, lesbian sisters, trans, Black poor, brown poor, Indigenous poor. They are more viciously attacked by the neofascists than the neoliberals. But the neoliberals capitulate to the attack. I would never say they’re identical, but I would say poor and working people are still getting crushed over and over again.”“If we can’t bring together the best of the trade union movement, if we can’t bring the best of the Black freedom movement, the Indigenous people’s movement, the women’s movement, the gay-lesbian movement, the queer movement as a whole, then we’re going under,” he added. “And then what’s at stake is, as you know, the utter destruction of the planet, destruction of the species, destruction of American democracy and for me, coming out of the Black prophetic tradition, the destruction of the Black prop

The police in the United States, through a series of Supreme Court decisions, as well as policies enacted by state and city governments, have become largely immune from prosecution, even when they commit serious felonies such as murder. Police officers are criminally charged in less than 2 percent of fatal shootings and convicted in less than one-third of those cases. When officers injure but do not kill, they are even less likely to be prosecuted. Police in America are virtually omnipotent, prosecuted in a handful of high-profile cases that receive national attention, but otherwise freed to engage in lawless behavior, especially in poorer communities. University of California law professor Joanna Schwartz in her book Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable, details the myriad of ways the legal system has stripped the citizens of protections from police abuse. The wholesale blocking of civil rights litigation means that police are rarely held accountable for the crimes they commit, blunting all efforts to enact meaningful police oversight, legal accountability and reform. Joining me to discuss her book, our failed justice system and police forces that function, especially in poor communities, as rouge militias, is Professor Joanna Schwartz. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

Narrated by Eunice WongText originally published May 28, 2023Redacted - by Mr. FishOn Dec. 24, 2022 Matt Taibbi was in a room at the Parc 55 Hotel in San Francisco poring through reports sent to Twitter from an entity called the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF). The FITF is an FBI-led interagency task force that forwards “moderation requests” from numerous government agencies, including Homeland Security, the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department, to social media outlets. Taibbi was given access to the internal traffic by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk. It revealed how the FBI and other government agencies routinely suppressed news and commentary. He published a Twitter thread that night, Christmas Eve, with the headline “Twitter and Other Government Agencies”.“There would be a list of YouTube videos,” Taibbi said when I reached him by phone. “There would be a notation that would say ‘We assess that these are all created by the Internet Research Agency in Russia. We assess that they are promoting anti-Ukraine attitudes.’ I would see that all those videos were no longer on YouTube. You can make your own deduction from that, but that was the pattern. They would send Excel spreadsheets full of account names and either all or most of them would be gone.”The content that was suppressed included right-wing and left-wing reports critical of the dominant narrative advanced by the Democratic Party and the old establishment wing of the Republican Party, which has been folded into the Democratic Party. Threads from the Yellow Vests movement, activists from the Occupy movement, Global Revolution Live, negative stories about Joe Biden, reports on the Ukrainian energy company Burisma that paid Hunter Biden about $1 million a year while his father was vice-president, positive stories about Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, reports about Ukrainian human rights abuses and details of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop were part of the plethora of accounts that were flagged and disappeared. I was a victim of this censorship. The six-year archive of my show On Contact, broadcast on RT America, was erased from YouTube, although not one show was about Russia and none violated YouTube’s content guidelines. Episodes were later reposted on The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel. The show gave a voice to those targeted by the FITF — anti-imperialists, anti-capitalists, prison reform advocates, Black Lives Matter and Palestinian activists, anti-fracking activists and independent intellectuals, journalists and authors including David Harvey, Noam Chomsky, Sami Al-Arian, Glen Ford, Amira Hass, Mumia Abu Jamal, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Medea Benjamin, Nils Melzer, Pankaj Mishra, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi and Cornel West.The FBI, before the release of Taibbi’s Twitter thread on Dec. 24, had denounced the Twitter Files as the work of “conspiracy theorists” who fed the public “misinformation” and whose “sole purpose” was “discrediting the agency.” “They must think us unambitious, if our ‘sole aim’ is to discredit the FBI,” Taibbi responded. “After all, a whole range of government agencies discredit themselves in the Twitter Files. Why stop with one?”Taibbi was acutely aware these Christmas Eve revelations, which for the first time revealed the role of the CIA, would further enrage the intelligence agencies.“My understanding is that the FITF has a staff of at least 80,” Taibbi said. “It consists primarily of the FBI, but it also includes people from the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The FITF was the conduit for content moderation requests that went to the tech platforms. They had something called an industry meeting which was, at first monthly and then weekly, leading into the 2020 election. It included companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Wikimedia, a series of others, about two dozen of them. They would have a general briefing on trends. Individually, each of the companies were receiving notices. Some of them were receiving weekly notices from the FITF. Twitter was. We know that because there were very specific instructions about how it was done. Requests that came from the states went through the DHS. Requests that came from the Federal Government went through the FBI. They went through a program called Teleporter. That’s how we got those documents.”In March, Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger were called to testify before the Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government. While Taibbi was testifying on March 9, an IRS agent visited his house in New Jersey.Taibbi discovered that the IRS opened a case against him on the day he published his Christmas Eve Twitter thread from a letter House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan sent to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel inquiring about Taibbi’s case. It was a Saturday. It was Christmas Eve. Taibbi did not owe taxes. The case was four years old. All this suggests that the IRS case was politically motivated and

At the end of any empire there are always a handful of chroniclers who, like Cicero in the Roman Republic, see clearly the looming disintegration of empire. They call out the bankruptcy of an inept and corrupt ruling class, blinded by hubris, as well as a populace that has checked out of civic life and is entranced by bread and circus spectacles. Chalmers Johnson in his trilogy “American Empire: Blowback,” “The Sorrows of Empire,” and “Nemesis” The Last Days of the American Republic,” does a masterful job of showing how and why we are disintegrating. So does Andrew Bacevich who in his newest book of essays, “On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century,” writes about the debacles that have beset the American empire since the Vietnam war, a conflict he fought in as a young army officer. He warns that our inability to be self-critical, to dissect and understand the litany of disasters that have followed on the heels of Vietnam, including the twenty-years of fruitless warfare in the Middle East, will have terrible consequences for us and much of the rest of the globe. Joining me to discuss his new book is Andrew Bacevich, the president and co-founder of the Quincey Institute for Responsible Statecraft. A West Point graduate and retired Army Colonel, he is also professor emeritus of history and international relations at Boston University. His other books include “The New American Militarism,” “The Limits of Power,” “America’s War for the Greater Middle East” and “After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

Narrated by Eunice WongText originally published May 21, 2023Run for Your Lives! - by Mr. FishThere is no report, investigation or new revelation, including the recent release of Special Counsel John Durham’s “Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns” that will implode the myth that Russia was responsible for the election of Donald Trump. Myths are impervious to facts. They fulfill an emotional yearning. They are a short circuit from reality into a world of childish simplicity. Hard and painful questions are avoided. Thought-terminating cliches are spat out to blissfully embrace a willed ignorance. The cynical con the Democratic Party and the FBI carried out to falsely portray Donald Trump as a puppet of the Kremlin worked, and continues to work, because it is what those who detest Trump want to believe.If Russia is blamed for Trump’s election, we avoid the unpleasant reality of our failed democratic institutions and decaying empire. We avoid facing the inevitable rise of a Christianized fascism borne out of widespread impoverishment, rage, despair and abandonment. We avoid acknowledging the complicity of the Democratic Party in the orchestration of the largest social inequality in our nation’s history, the evisceration of our basic civil liberties, endless wars and an electoral system bankrolled by the billionaire class, which is legalized bribery. The myth allows us to believe that Democratic politicians, like the establishment Republicans who have joined them, are the guarantors of a democracy they destroyed.Our reality is bleak and frightening, especially given the abject refusal by the ruling oligarchs to deal seriously with the climate emergency. We face a precarious future. The monumental task of restoring democracy outside the confines of a broken electoral system and corporate-indentured institutions is daunting and not guaranteed. We stand on the cusp of tyranny. Blaming Vladimir Putin for the rise of an American demagogue — demagogues are always vomited up from dysfunctional political systems — magically makes the existential dilemma disappear.The liberal media during the Trump-Russia saga, including The New York Times and the Washington Post, which shared a 2018 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on alleged Russian influence during the 2016 election, provided thousands of stories and reports that falsely painted the Trump administration as a tool of Russia. Their readers, like the viewers of CNN and MSNBC, were fed a comforting myth. When you feed a public consoling myths — the most absurd being that America is a good and virtuous nation — there is no accountability. Myths make us feel good. Myths demonize those blamed for our self-created debacles. Myths celebrate us as a people and a nation. But it is like handing heroin to junkies. Shatter the myths, even if the facts are incontrovertible, and you become a pariah. I found this out when I and a handful of others, including Robert Scheer, Phil Donahue and Michael Moore, denounced calls to invade Iraq. It made no difference that I had been the Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times, was an Arabic speaker and had spent seven years reporting in the region, including in Iraq. I was censored, driven from The New York Times and attacked by George W. Bush’s useful idiots in the media, and the Democratic Party, as an apologist for Saddam Hussein.The same ugly reception greeted those of us who questioned the “evidence” used to argue that Trump was a tool of Russia. We were branded stooges of Moscow and Trump apologists. We were again locked out of the debate. Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept, Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone and Aaron Mate at The Nation, found themselves under intense pressure for questioning the Trump-Russia narrative. All now work as independent journalists. You can see my interview with Taibbi here. Jeff Gerth is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who worked at The New York Times from 1976 until 2005. He spent two years investigating the Trump-Russia story for a four-part series published in the Columbia Journalism Review. He too became an object of vitriol. David Corn at Mother Jones, one of the most prolific shills for the Trump-Russia conspiracy, wrote a column after Gerth’s exhaustive 24,000-word series called “Trump-Russia Denialists Still Can’t Handle the Truth.” Gerth called Corn’s attack “a form of McCarthyism.” You can see my interview with Gerth here.All the investigations into Trump’s ties with Russia are unequivocal. There was no collusion. The Steele dossier, financed at first by Republican opponents of Trump and later by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and compiled by former MI6 British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, was a fake. The charges in the dossier — which included reports of Trump receiving a “golden shower” from prostituted women in a Moscow hotel room and claims that Trump and the Kremlin had ties going back five y

Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera reporter with more than two decades of experience covering armed conflicts, knew the protocol. She and other reporters remained in the open, clearly visible to Israeli snipers about 650 feet away. Her flak jacket was emblazoned with the word “PRESS.”There were two initial rounds of shooting that were fired at the journalists. In the first, producer Ali Al-Samoudi was shot. As the journalists turned to run away from the gunfire, Shireen was shot below her helmet during the second round, according to the Human Rights organization Al Haq.There were a few seconds when the Israeli sniper saw profiled in his scope Abu Akleh, one of the most recognizable faces in the Middle East. The accuracy of the M-16, especially the M16A4s equipped with the Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight (ACOG), a prismatic telescopic sight, is very high. In the fighting in Fallujah so many dead insurgents were found with head wounds that observers at first thought they had been executed. The bullet that killed Abu Akleh was deftly placed between the very slim opening separating her helmet and the collar of her flak jacket.I have been in combat, including in clashes between Israeli and Palestinian forces. Snipers are dreaded on a battlefield because each kill is calculated. The execution of Abu Akleh was not an accident. She was singled out for elimination. Whether this killing was ordered by commanding officers, or whether it was the whim of an Israeli sniper, I cannot answer. Israelis shoot so many Palestinians with impunity my guess is the sniper knew he or she could kill Abu Akleh and never face any consequences. The shooting, Al Jazeera said in a statement, was “a blatant murder, violating international laws and norms.” Abu Akleh, the network added, was “assassinated in cold blood.”Abu Akleh, who was 51 and a Palestinian-American, was a familiar and trusted presence on television screens throughout the region, revered for her courage and integrity and beloved for her careful and sensitive reporting on the intricacies of daily life under the occupation. Her reporting from the occupied territories routinely punctured Israeli narratives and exposed Israeli abuses and crimes, making her the bête noire of the Israeli government. It is very hard to believe she was not a deliberate target. Joining me to discuss the murder of Abu Akleh and the refusal by the Biden administration to hold Israel accountable for the killing is Kavitha Chekuru, a senior producer for the Al Jazeera show Fault Lines that produced the investigative report titled The Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

Narrated by Eunice WongText originally published May 12, 2023With Sammy at the graduation ceremony for formerly incarcerated students at Rutgers University in Newark on FridayNewark, N.J. — We know the story. The absent father who leaves when his son is five-years-old and moves back to Puerto Rico. The single mother, rarely at home because she works long hours to keep her three children fed and pay the rent. The poverty. The crime. The instability. Later, the stepfather who drinks, uses drugs and beats his stepchildren. The child acting up. Dropping out of school. Joining a gang. The robberies. The one that went wrong and left a man dead. Prison.The students I teach in prison have variations of the same story. They are funneled into the maw of the prison-industrial-complex, the largest in the world, and spat out decades later, even more lost and traumatized, to wander the streets like ghosts until most, unequipped to survive on the outside and without support, find themselves back in the old familiar cages.But I tell this story because it needs to be told. I tell it because this time the end will be different. This time the system will not win. I tell it because neglected and abused children, no matter what crime they commit, should not be imprisoned as if they were adults. I tell it because we are complicit. I tell it because until we stop investing in systems of control and start investing in people, especially children, nothing will change. It will only get worse.“I come from a very violent childhood,” says Sammy Quiles, who was released from prison after serving a 30-year sentence a few weeks ago. “My mother — once my father was out of the picture — worked and partied. Me and my sisters were relegated to making it on our own or with babysitters. And then when she met my stepfather that was only exacerbated. He was a drunk, drug-abuser and very violent. I was hit with fists, bats, hangers, you name it. It was physical, emotional and verbal abuse.”I taught Sammy in East Jersey State Prison in Rahway, New Jersey, in the Rutgers college degree program. I did not know his story until he was released. I never know the stories of my students. They are not their crime. And years, often decades later, they are not who they were. Sammy, in my classroom, was reserved, determined, hardworking, brilliant and unfailingly courteous. That is who Sammy is. Who he was, to me, is irrelevant.That is not how Sammy was seen as a child, a troubled boy coping with abandonment and terrible abuse. He threw temper tantrums. He could not sit still. He was disruptive. The school system labeled him “emotionally disturbed.” He was placed in special education classes in the second grade.“Decisions were made early on in my life that I would serve the service sector of society,” he says. “I wasn’t taught innovative curriculums. They sent me to woodshop or auto mechanic schools.”He dropped out of school in the 10th grade. At 15 he left home “because the streets seemed safer for me.” “I tried to get fast-food jobs, but I didn’t last long,” he says. “My behavior was erratic, problematic. I didn’t do well with authority and structured environments. I robbed and stole. I became a car thief, a stick-up kid. That’s how I ate.”He found the Latin Kings.“Every government institution abandoned me or punished me for my behavior, but it was a gang member that helped me with homelessness, with putting clothes on my back, putting a few dollars in my pocket, fed me — his family fed me,” he recalls. “I understand today that they exploited my aggressive behavior, but they’re the ones that helped me when I left home. It felt like I had a community. They taught me about my culture. They instilled this pride in me. There was protection.”He was initiated into the Latin Kings in a schoolyard in Lakewood, New Jersey. He had to recite from memory 10 small paragraphs, or lessons, in front of a circle of some 30 gang members. Then each member embraced him. They shot a hand gesture they called “crowns,” their gang greeting.“I felt empowered, I felt accepted, I felt like I had a family,” he says.He swiftly ascended within the ranks of the gang.“I had a knack for learning the lessons, the materials they gave,” he says. “I was very interested in the literature. It was all based on culture and a lot of Puerto Rican history and about revolutionaries and where I come from. And then the aggressive nature — I was very aggressive.”The gang sold cocaine and crack. But he continued working as a “stick up kid” who robbed drug dealers and members in rival gangs. A robbery usually brought in a few hundred dollars that was divided up with other gang members. He often used his portion to buy gifts, such as sneakers, for his two younger sisters.He looked up to older gang members who became surrogate fathers. One of them recruited him to rob a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant when he was 17.“My loyalty to this individual warped my judgment,” he says.The manager of the Kentucky Fri

Narrated by Eunice WongText originally published: May 3, 2023And Our Flags Are Still There - by Mr. FishThe detention and persecution of Julian Assange eviscerates all pretense of the rule of law and the rights of a free press. The illegalities, embraced by the Ecuadorian, British, Swedish and U.S. governments are ominous. They presage a world where the internal workings, abuses, corruption, lies and crimes, especially war crimes, carried out by corporate states and the global ruling elite, will be masked from the public. They presage a world where those with the courage and integrity to expose the misuse of power will be hunted down, tortured, subjected to sham trials and given lifetime prison terms in solitary confinement. They presage an Orwellian dystopia where news is replaced with propaganda, trivia and entertainment. The legal lynching of Julian, I fear, marks the official beginning of the corporate totalitarianism that will define our lives.Under what law did Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno capriciously terminate Julian’s rights of asylum as a political refugee? Under what law did Moreno authorize British police to enter the Ecuadorian Embassy — diplomatically sanctioned sovereign territory — to arrest a naturalized citizen of Ecuador? Under what law did Donald Trump criminalize journalism and demand the extradition of Julian, who is not a U.S. citizen and whose news organization is not based in the United States? Under what law did the CIA violate attorney-client privilege, surveil and record all of Julian’s conversations both digital and verbal with his lawyers and plot to kidnap him from the Embassy and assassinate him?The corporate state eviscerates enshrined rights by judicial fiat. This is how we have the right to privacy, with no privacy. This is how we have “free” elections funded by corporate money, covered by a compliant corporate media and under iron corporate control. This is how we have a legislative process in which corporate lobbyists write the legislation and corporate-indentured politicians vote it into law. This is how we have the right to due process with no due process. This is how we have a government — whose fundamental responsibility is to protect citizens — that orders and carries out the assassination of its own citizens, such as the Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son. This is how we have a press which is legally permitted to publish classified information and our generation’s most important publisher sitting in solitary confinement in a high security prison awaiting extradition to the United States.The psychological torture of Julian — documented by the United Nations special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer — mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston Smith in George Orwell’s novel “1984.” The Gestapo broke bones. The East German Stasi broke souls. We, too, have refined the cruder forms of torture to destroy souls as well as bodies. It is more effective. This is what they are doing to Julian, steadily degrading his physical and psychological health. It is a slow-motion execution. This is by design. Julian has spent much of his time in isolation, is often heavily sedated and has been denied medical treatment for a variety of physical ailments. He is routinely denied access to his lawyers. He has lost a lot of weight, suffered a minor stroke, spent time in the prison hospital wing — which prisoners call the hell wing — because he is suicidal, been placed in prolonged solitary confinement, observed banging his head against the wall and hallucinating. Our version of Orwell’s dreaded Room 101.Julian was marked for elimination by the CIA once he and WikiLeaks published the documents known as Vault 7, which exposed the CIA’s cyber warfare arsenal which includes dozens of viruses, trojans and malware remote control systems designed to exploit a wide range of U.S. and European company products, including Apple's iPhone, Google's Android, Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung’s Smart TVs, which can be turned into covert microphones even when they appear to be switched off.I spent two decades as a foreign correspondent. I saw how the brutal tools of repression are tested on those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.” From its inception, the CIA carried out assassinations, coups, torture, black propaganda campaigns, blackmail and illegal spying and abuse, including of U.S. citizens, activities exposed in 1975 by the Church Committee hearings in the Senate and the Pike Committee hearings in the House. All these crimes, especially after the attacks of 9/11, have returned with a vengeance. The CIA has its own armed units and drone program, death squads and a vast archipelago of global black sites where kidnapped victims are tortured and disappeared. The U.S. allocates a secret black budget of about $50 billion a year to hide multiple types of clandestine projects carried out by the National Security Agency, the CIA and other intelligence agencies, usua

When the new 20-dollar bill is issued in 2030 it is scheduled to have on one side a portrait of Harriet Tubman, the fiery abolitionist who made over a dozen clandestine trips south to free enslaved people and later served as a scout for the Union Army during the Civil War. The back of the bill is supposed to have a statue of the slaveholding 7th president, Andrew Jackson, who was one of the principal organizers of the genocidal campaigns against Native Americans. It is a bit like Germany issuing a bill with Ann Frank on one side and Adolf Eichmann on the other. This schizophrenia reflects the bifurcation within the country where the dwindling majority of whites often embrace the so-called white replacement theory, seeing in the effort to honor the nation’s diversity and own up to the sins of white supremacy, a campaign to erase them. The fight over symbols and monuments is grounded in this fear of dethronement, for as Erin L. Thompson writes “monuments aren’t history lessons---they’re pledges of allegiance.” Owning up to our past, the goal of critical race theory, shatters the myth perpetuated by white supremists that our racial hierarchy is not somehow engineered but the natural outcome of a meritocracy where whites are endowed with superior intelligence, talent and civilization, while Blacks deserve to be at the bottom of society because of their innate characteristics. Owning up to the past eradicates the whitewashing in textbooks, monuments, memorials and historical narratives and forces white Americans to grapple with a history every bit as evil as that perpetuated by German fascists. As Clarence Lusane, the author of “Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy,” argues: “rolling out a Tubman twenty-dollar bill not only disrupts and diminishes the legacies of white supremacy that persist in official narratives, but that doing so is a necessary step toward diminishing and abolishing racist distortions of our political economy, health and medical institutions, and justice system.” Joining me to discuss this battle over national symbols and monuments is Professor Clarence Lusane, the director of the International Affairs program and former chair of the Political Science Department at Howard University. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe