Abby Martin & Chris Hedges: War, Propaganda & the Enemy Within
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Abby Martin & Chris Hedges: War, Propaganda & the Enemy Within 2015/09/26 This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Abby-Martin–Chris-Hedges-War-Propaganda–the-Enemy-Within- 5 20150926-0023.html For a version with accurate English subtitles, use this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDWHzt-Z_hY ABBY MARTIN: This week I sat down with Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best- 10 selling author who has reported from war zones in Latin America, the Middle East and beyond. His most recent book is titled “Wages of Rebellion: A Moral Imperative of Revolt.” Hedges is also the host of the new show on Telesur English “Days of Revolt” with new episodes airing every Monday night, from someone who’s been on the receiving end of bullets from El Salvador to Iraq, covered uprisings from North Africa to Europe. I wanted to talk to him about war, propaganda and revolt. Chris, Eugene Debs, 15 the famous socialist candidate back during WWI was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his opposition to the Sedition Act. It made it illegal for anyone to speak out in opposition to the war at that time. What does that say about the myth of democracy from that early on? CHRIS HEDGES: Well, it says that if you challenge the structures of power, and particularly military 20 power, you are at best marginalized, if not imprisoned. Those kinds of few radical voices that held fast– Randolph Bourne, Jane Adams, Eugene Debs–were excoriated in the press. Emma Goldman was eventually deported along with Alexander Berkman and others. Randolph Bourne said war is the health of the state. What you saw in WWI was the rise of the military corporate machine, which made war against these radicals through the Sedition Act, the Espionage Act and more importantly the Committee for Public 25 Information Commission, or the Creel Commission, which created the system of modern mass propaganda, employing the understanding of crowd psychology pioneered by figures like Le Bon, Trotter and Sigmund Freud, that people were not moved by fact or reason. They were moved by the very skillful manipulation of emotion. And it worked, so Hollywood was making films like “Kaiser: the Butcher of Berlin.” The Creel Commission had its own news division. You couldn’t even write anti-war editorials. It 30 was against the law. It had speakers’ bureaus and you only had to use the Sedition Act and espionage on those kind of few figures who held fast to an anti-war stance, of which there were not many, and when you read people like Jane Adams, part of what they are most depressed about is how easily the intellectual class, even the reportedly left intellectual class, was seduced in the war effort. Then after the war the dreaded Hun becomes the dreaded Red and we enter what Dwight MacDonald calls this “psychosis of 35 permanent war in the name of anti-communism”–the fusion of war and the war profiteers, the militarists and the war profiteers, which after WWII created a situation of total war. After WWI, factories re- converted to produce domestic products. After WWII, they kept producing weapons, even though we had peace, so that we could obliterate every Soviet city ten times over with nuclear weapons. It was nuts, but with guaranteed cost overruns and guaranteed profits, that fusion of the militarists and the corporatists 40 hijacked the country, disemboweled the country economically, and made war on all of those advances that had come under the New Deal. So it had both in an economic impact and a political impact. The USA is undoubtedly the world’s biggest, strongest empire in history, but it operates in a different way than empires past. 45 AM: How has the notion of empire changed over the last century? CH: America is unique in the sense that it colonized itself. European countries colonized India and Africa. The Spanish... the Americans... we destroyed through acts of genocide on our indigenous communities, and plundered their resources, so you had, especially with the westward expansion, the US cavalry acting 1 50 on behalf of the mining concerns, the railroad companies, the timber merchants. And once westward expansion was complete by the end of the 19th century, you began expansion beyond US borders. That’s when you had the Cuban-American war with the seizure of Cuba and the Philippines. You began to see all sorts of gunboat diplomacy throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, in particular Central America. America expanded its power certainly through military force, and the threat of military force, but more by 55 cultivating indigenous elites that would do our bidding, so you saw the rise of all sorts of dictatorships, whether it was Mobutu in the Congo or Somoza in Nicaragua, or the Shah in Iran. And of course we overthrew the Shah’s father then carried out a coup d’état to replace Mossadegh, the Prime Minister who was going to nationalize British Oil. That form of colonial power protected Western interests. That’s why Allende was overthrown in 1973 and Pinochet was put in power to protect the copper industry from being 60 nationalized. These elites were given tremendous resources. We saw the same thing in 1954 in Guatemala with Arbenz who wanted to challenge United Fruit’s huge acquisition of Guatemalan land to give landless peasants an ability to carry out subsistence farming, and when that happened the CIA raised a kind of black army. A huge propaganda effort run by Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations, would come out of the Creel commission. Of course, Arbenz becomes a communist in the eyes of the press which 65 they, through the manipulation of the press, are able to justify. So it’s a different kind of empire in the sense that, for instance, British troops actually occupied India (although many of those troops were Sikhs). We find venal elites who will do our bidding and when people rise up against those elites we provide those elites with the resources by which they can crush any form of rebellion. 70 AM: I wanted to talk about El Salvador in particular because you’ve seen and obviously covered extensively the horrors of US wars all over the region. What did this conflict in particular reveal about the length the empire will go to maintain economic hegemony? CH: So its 1979 and the Sandinistas win in Nicaragua and this sets off all kinds of alarm bells because the 75 Sandinistas–unlike Samoza who was the dictator of Nicaragua and was overthrown and later assassinated in Paraguay–were not going to protect US business interests and they did not want to see this spread throughout the region. And so I covered the war there from 1983 to 1988 and we saw the Reagan administration pump tremendous military, economic and intelligence resources into defeating the rebel group known as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). When I first got to El Salvador in 80 1983, the FMLN was winning the war. They created–the Reagan administration–they brought in a huge helicopter fleet–70 Hughes helicopters that they put up in the air which made it hard for these guerrilla groups to mass in any kind of large formation. In 1983, I was able to go out with up to 700 or 800 rebels at a clip. That didn’t happen anymore. They created whole black armies that were recruited from Venezuela, Chile, Honduras and other places that didn’t exist officially–they were ghosts armies. They called them 85 cazador or “hunter battalions”–about 350 soldiers, very well trained, very well equipped. We would go up into Morazan and come upon the aftermath of tremendous fire, and yet there was no record of the Salvadoran army ever being there. They brought in all sorts of CIA, mostly ex-Cuban operatives, including Felix Rodriguez, who had been part of the effort to hunt down Che Guevara. Indeed he would show us Che Guevara’s wrist watch that he was wearing, taken off Che’s body. So there’s a kind of classic example of 90 the heavy intrusion of empire to thwart... half of the population in El Salvador at the time was landless and most of the land was owned by these coffee barons–roughly ten families. They call them the Big Ten families. It was worse than serfdom. People living in tremendous poverty and deprivation and when they tried to organize peacefully in terms of building labor unions, they were literally gunned down in the streets. They put machine guns up on the rooves of buildings in the capital and then when people began to 95 resist, the death squads, when I got to the country, were killing between 700 and 1,000 people a month. It was butchery which we [the United States] funded and largely orchestrated. You saw the same thing in Iraq, by the way. When things broke down in Iraq, they took James Steele–who I knew, a colonel, he had been the head of the military group in El Salvador who had worked with the death squads–they moved him 2 to Iraq and he organized the Shiite death squads which carried out a reign of terror to break the Sunni 100 resistance, and really, if you really want to look at it, create groups like ISIS. That’s how empire works and when you’re up close, as I was for twenty years, and you see the inner workings of empire, you understand how vicious and ruthless and brutal it is.