An Interview with Chris Hedges, a weekly columnist, journalist, reporter, author, Presbyterian minister, and a Pulitzer Prize winner for his reporting.
MALKIN: What are your greatest concerns about the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)? Also, tell me about the federal lawsuit you filed against President Obama and the U.S. government that challenged the NDAA.
HEDGES: Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act overturns over 150 years of domestic law that prevents the U.S. military from carrying out domestic policing. The NDAA also authorizes the military to carry out, in essence, extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil who, in the words of that section, “substantially support” Al Qaida, the Taliban, or something called “associated forces.” This is not material support, which is a defined legal term. “Substantial support” is an amorphous term and “associated forces” is another nebulous term. Section 1021 would strip these citizens of due process, an egregious violation of one of our most basic constitutional rights, and hold them in military facilities including in offshore penal colonies or “black sites” until, in the language of this section, “the end of hostilities.” In an age of permanent war that means probably forever.
The NDAA is a major step in eviscerating one of the most basic tenets of the Constitution. It had bi-partisan support and was initially sponsored by Senators Levin and McCain. In January, 2012, I met with lawyers Bruce Saffron and Carl Meyer and we sued the President in the Southern District Court of New York. Judge Katherine B. Forest ruled in our favor and declared in her 112-page opinion that not only was the law unconstitutional, but that it opened the way for the government to criminalize whole categories of people and hold them in military detention facilities. She brought up the case of the 110,000 Japanese Americans who were interned in military camps without due process during World War II. The Obama administration immediately appealed the decision. We knew they’d appeal but we were surprised at how aggressively they reacted. They sent lawyers to Judge Forest’s chambers demanding that she lift the temporary injunction and put the law back into effect until the Second Circuit appellate court could hear the administration’s appeal. To Judge Forest’s credit, she refused. At 9:00 AM that next Monday morning the government attorney’s went to the second circuit and asked the court to lift the temporary injunction and put the law back into effect in the name of national security.
That surprised both myself and the lawyers. The only thing we could surmise was that the government had to have the law put back on the books as swiftly as possible because they were probably already using it. I suspect there were already U.S.-Pakistani dual nationals being held in places like Bagram or other black sites. If they could get out and get access to a lawyer, the government could be held in contempt of court. The Second Circuit reviewed the case and they took a long time to rule because they were in a corner as the NDAA is patently unconstitutional. The New York Times, really one of the only media outlets to seriously cover the trial after Judge Forest’s ruling, wrote an editorial praising her decision.
The Second Circuit was aware that I’d been a plaintiff in a case before the Supreme Court called Klapper vs. Amnesty International over warrantless wiretapping. This was before the Snowden revelations. In that trial the government attorneys said that I and the other plaintiffs had no standing or right to bring the case because any charge that we were being monitored by the government was, in the words of these government lawyers, “speculation.” They even went on to say that if we were being monitored the government would have told us. All of this we now know was false because of the Snowden revelations. Not only am I being monitored, everyone’s being monitored.
The Second Circuit waited for the ruling from the Klapper vs. Amnesty International case and then they dodged the constitutional issues regarding the NDAA by saying, “Hedges doesn’t have standing in Klapper vs. Amnesty International therefore he doesn’t have standing in Hedges vs. Obama” and they threw it out. That has been typical of the judiciary since 9/11. We’ve seen a kind of evisceration of our basic civil liberties and a refusal by the courts to address this shredding of our constitutional rights. The way they do it is essentially by denying standing to people such as myself. We filed a sort of petition and asked the Supreme Court to hear our case and they turned us down. That means that section 1021 of the NDAA is law.
How do you recommend that people resist the NDAA and mass surveillance?
It’s been pretty clear over the past decade that we don’t really have any rights left. The judiciary has not stood up to protect our constitutional right to privacy in the face of incontrovertible evidence that every single form of our electronic communication is not only being captured but being stored in perpetuity by the government. This is such a blatant and egregious violation and yet the judicial system is so dysfunctional and subservient to state and corporate power that it doesn’t react. That’s extremely frightening because we’ve ceded to the corporate state the power, in the event of any kind of unrest, the ability, in essence, to declare martial law at the flick of a switch. This has been twinned with the war on drugs because in marginal communities we’ve created omnipotent police forces that are beyond the law. They can kick in your door in the middle of the night and burst in wearing Kevlar body armor with long-barreled weapons.
In the Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt writes about this as one of the preconditions for totalitarian states; a segment of the population is categorized as being outside the law. In her case, she was writing about the stateless —mostly Jews—who had been stripped of their passports and had no rights and were expelled to countries like France. When you create the mechanism to persecute those who have been stripped of their rights and couple that with the upending of the legal system, that means everything is in place to extinguish an open society. That’s what we’ve done and that’s what’s so frightening.
I think that any kind of resistance is important. Any kind of maneuvering that local communities can do to try and create zones where the rule of law is restored is good. On the other hand, I think we have seen that we live in a system that doesn’t pay any kind of credence to the legalities of the constitution, the common good, or the most basic rights of the citizen.
Many observers suspected that widespread, warrantless surveillance was happening. Were you surprised about the Edward Snowden revelations, which have revealed myriad details about worldwide spying by the U.S. government?
Those of us who brought the Klapper vs. Amnesty International case did so because we suspected that widespread warrantless surveillance was happening. I can’t say I was surprised by Snowden’s information; it confirmed our deepest fears about what the government was doing. The surprise is that once the programs were exposed and documented, there was so little reaction on the part of the populace. People don’t understand how dangerous it is to allow any state to accrue that kind of power of surveillance.
As a reporter I covered the Stasi State in East Germany. When you are watched 24 hours a day, as we all are, you can’t use the word liberty. That’s the relationship between a master and a slave.
How do you respond to people who say, “I don’t mind being watched. I don’t do anything wrong.”
Those people don’t understand how totalitarian systems work. They better turn off their televisions and start reading people like Hannah Arendt. They should read Sheldon Wolin and others who have written about inverted and corporate totalitarianism. Totalitarian systems carry out wholesale surveillance not to find crimes. It’s so they have information should they seek to shut down an individual or a group. They can manufacture evidence from the data they’ve collected to criminalize and incarcerate those they’ve targeted. Go back and look at what fascism and communism did. That’s why they had systems of mass surveillance. Blackmail was one of the major tools that the FBI used against Martin Luther King Jr. and others in an attempt to shut down their activism. In the case of King, it was adultery. Nobody’s clean; everybody’s got something. And the state wants to know what it is so they can build a case against anyone.
You can go back and look at the purges that Stalin carried out in 1937 and 1938. They would build cases from wholesale surveillance to criminalize behavior that wasn’t criminal at all. But totalitarian states don’t collect evidence because they’re searching for crimes. They collect evidence so that when they need to criminalize a group or shut down an individual they have it. It’s dangerous.
Mass surveillance also destroys any possibility of serious investigative reporting because your sources always know they’re being tracked. Under those conditions, no one can reach out independently to a reporter to shine a light on the inner workings of power. The Obama administration’s assault on civil liberties has been far more egregious than the Bush administrations. We’ve seen Obama use the Espionage Act eight times against whistleblowers. That’s not why the Espionage Act was written. It was the equivalent of our Foreign Secrets Act to prosecute people who gave sensitive state information to those who were deemed the enemy. But it has been misused and has essentially killed investigative journalism into government activity.
The misuse of the Espionage Act coupled with wholesale surveillance essentially means that power is no longer accountable. The consequences of it are terrifying. You can’t organize. We see this in the wake of the Occupy movements; because all of the Occupy activists communicated electronically the government has gone back and traced all of those communications and determined who were central to those movements and hauled them into court on bogus charges. They’ve been threatened with jail time if they don’t plea to a felony conviction, they’ve got five years probation and if they get picked up for anything then they’ve got to serve their full sentence. They’ve effectively neutralized activists across the country. And it was done through wholesale surveillance because the government could figure out who had been the engines of particular movements and they targeted them.
Julian Assange regards the Internet as primarily a tool for mass surveillance. Digital tools like GPS, the Internet, and computers were originally designed for military use. On the other hand, some activists involved in Occupy and the Arab Spring uprising praise the power of such technologies for organizing civil resistance. What do you think?
These are valuable tools, in terms of logistics, for passing information and getting people mobilized quickly. But these tools also destroy anonymity so if those movements are not successful quickly, then the state has a road map by which to persecute people at the heart of those resistance movements. And that’s precisely what they’ve done both here and abroad. So, it’s a double-edged sword. Yes, it’s very effective, but not in terms of transmitting ideas; that’s a myth. Digital technology doesn’t transmit ideas. But it does help in terms of logistics.
You’ve written about the importance of journalism to make social change, highlighting George Orwell and James Baldwin among others. Dorothy Day was another great journalist and activist who was grounded in Christian Anarchism. In your book Empire of Illusion, you write, “We’re in an age when we desperately need moral guidance,” and “All religions produce those who challenge the oppressor and fight for the oppressed.”
All religions have produced those who rise up on behalf of the oppressed to fight the oppressor. But many people outside of religious traditions rise up on behalf of the oppressed to fight the oppressor. As H. Richard Niebuhr once said, “Religion is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people.” There are many ways to come to what I would define as the moral life. Religion can be one of them, but it’s hardly exclusive. Certainly no religion has a monopoly on morality. I speak as someone who spent seven years in the Middle East.
Understanding resistance is a moral imperative. It’s important not to be trapped in the emotional highs and lows that characterize popular culture, but to understand that, in the words of Father Daniel Berrigan, “We’re called to do the good, or at least the good so far as we can determine it, and then to let it go.” Faith is the belief that our actions go somewhere. The Buddhists call it karma. Even if empirically everything around you indicates that things are getting worse, it’s important to take action. I think that’s right. We have to begin, especially in an age of corporate totalitarianism, to stop asking ourselves whether resistance is going to work but to understand that we have a moral responsibility to resist what Emmanuel Kant and Hannah Arendt would call “radical evil.” To paraphrase Sartre, “I don’t fight fascists because I’m going to win. I fight fascists because they’re fascists.”
You’ve written about your experiences in war zones. In Empire of Illusion you write about the violence and tyranny of war, but also about being witness to a great deal of compassion and love. What are your impressions from living in war zones?
I remember those people who affirm the humanity of the enemy at great risk to themselves; those who denounce the violence of their own state and society at great risk to themselves. A lot of these people get killed. The culture of war is its own peculiar culture. I’ve spent a lot of time in war and a lot of time writing about it in War is A Force. Often in those circumstances, retaining your humanity is the only victory possible. I saw this and it is a powerful force because to stand up for the right of the other to exist is almost suicidal. Often it is suicidal.
I spoke at a church in a wealthy white suburb of New Jersey a few weeks ago and it was peacemaking Sunday. I stated what is an unequivocal fact; U.S. drones and attack aircraft and missiles have beheaded far more people, including children, then ISIS has ever beheaded. At that point people started to get up and walk out. The demonization of the other is always part of the rhetoric of war and it is poison. People do stand up and challenge that poison during war, but it’s a lonely and difficult stance. They are very powerful figures and their moral force is undeniable. Yet they are often persecuted because of the truth they speak.
During the height of the Occupy Movement, some activists advocated using what they called “diversity of tactics.” This seems often to refer to property destruction. You were very critical of the Black Bloc and this diversity of tactics in your February, 2012 article titled “The Cancer in Occupy.” You also wrote, “I am not a pacifist.”
When the Black Bloc talks about “diversity of tactics” it really just means one tactic, which means “our tactic.” My anger at the Black Bloc was that they would hijack nonviolent peaceful movements. Most of them are kids and most are white males. There would be people in a crowd or protestors who are undocumented for whom arrest means deportation and separation from their families. You have people who are elderly and mothers pushing strollers. When the Black Bloc provokes the police, they run and the other people are left behind without any consultation or choice.
I don’t have any problem with the Black Bloc doing what the Black Bloc does. But I don’t understand why they go into cities like Oakland and smash windows; if they want to drive to La Jolla where Romney lives and smash Romney’s windows, I’m not going to say anything. But it struck me as juvenile. This idea of their rebellion being spontaneous and the fact that they would group in a mass; it’s a crowd phenomena and they would glory in their violence.
I come out of the Dorothy Day, Christian Anarchism tradition and have deep admiration for all of the great anarchists—Kropotkin, Proudhon, and others—but I don’t see any similarities with the Black Bloc. So, I took them on (in the article) and was very unpopular because of it. In retrospect I might not have used the word cancer. The state tends to use terms like that. But everything else was dead on.
The fact is that our only hope is to build a mass movement that is a mainstream movement. I think that is what Occupy was. That was it’s power and that’s why the state was frightened of it and why the state shut it down.
Ultimately revolutions are nonviolent affairs when you look closely at history. Whether it’s the French Revolution or any other. Nonviolence works because you get the forces of control, those on the side of authority, to defect. That’s what happened in Russia with the Petrograd Red Riots. They sent the Cossacks out to shut down the uprising and the Cossacks wouldn’t shut them down and started fraternizing with the crowd and the Czar was rushed back from the front on a railway carriage and he never made it. He abdicated on a railway siding.
I saw the same thing in East Germany when I was there, with the demonstrations in Leipzig. Eric Honecker, who’d been in power for almost two decades, sent down an elite paratroop division to fire on the crowd and the paratroopers wouldn’t do it. Honecker was out of power within a week. When you have decayed structures—and we certainly have decayed corporate structures—you ultimately succeed by neutralizing those who are tasked with using coercion to defend and discredit an elite.
The Black Bloc was kind of a gift to the surveillance state because it alienated the mainstream. Because they covered their faces, the cops could easily infiltrate them. One activist has a picture that was circulated in Zuccotti Park of the back of a police van a few blocks from the park and three guys are getting out of the back of the van with backpacks on, totally dressed in black, going off to join the Black Bloc anarchists. They were never much of a force in New York; they were more of a force in Oakland. Their reaction to my criticism kind of validated what I wrote because I received a lot of death threats.
In terms of pacifism, there are moments when there are forces bent on your annihilation. When I lived in Sarajevo during the war, that was one of them. We knew that if the Serbs broke through the trench system a third of the city would be slaughtered and the rest would be driven into refugee or displacement camps. That wasn’t conjecture; it’s what happened in the Drina Valley and Vukovar. Violence is always a poison. Even in a supposedly just cause it doesn’t save you from that poison but it’s a completely understandable response when you are faced with annihilation as we were in Sarajevo. When I was in Sarajevo there were 2000 shells a day and no one was having theoretical discussions about pacifism.
November 9, 2014 was the 25th anniversary of the Berlin wall coming down. You worked as a journalist from the East side of that wall. What were you reflecting on during the anniversary?
The afternoon before the wall came down—on November 9, 1989—I was in Leipzig with leaders of the opposition movement and they were saying, “Maybe within a year we’ll have free passage back and forth across the wall.” By that very evening the wall, as an impediment to human traffic, did not exist. That was a very important lesson for me; I understood that even the purported leaders of social movements don’t understand, once those movements erupt, what their dynamics are and where they’re going.
The Stasi state was the most efficient security and surveillance state until our own. And yet it was broken. At one point you had one informant for every 63 citizens. We’ve now outdone anything the Stasi even dreamed of. Our only hope is to build mass sustained movements of civil disobedience to discredit the power elite and to do so nonviolently. We need to neutralize the police and other forces that are as aware of the corruption within the tiny oligarchic, corporate cabal of predators as we are.
Tell me about the importance of anarchism in your life and work.
Anarchism is about perpetual alienation from power. Anarchism is an understanding that power is the problem no matter who holds it. We have to build movements that threaten centers of power if we’re going to keep those centers in check. Strong labor and mass movements are key to a healthy, open society. Unfortunately our mass movements, including our labor movements, have been destroyed.
In “The Open Society and It’s Enemies” Karl Popper writes that the question is not how do you get good people to rule? Popper says that’s the wrong question. He says that most people attracted to power are at best mediocre—which is probably Obama—or venal—which is Bush. The real question is; how do you make the power elite frightened of us? I think that is the question. I think you do so by building mass movements that keep the circles of the power elites under control.
That’s why the last liberal president we had was Richard Nixon. Not because he was a liberal, but because he was frightened of movements. There’s a scene in Kissinger’s memoirs where there’s a gigantic anti-war demonstration surrounding the White House and Nixon has placed empty city buses end to end as a kind of barricade all around the White House and he’s looking out the window ringing his hands saying, “Henry, Henry—they’re going to break through the barricades and get us.” That’s just where you want people in power to be. That’s what we have to rebuild. In that sense that’s anarchism. We who care about the open society and populism forgot that it’s not our job to take power. It’s our job to hold fast to moral imperatives around resistance movements so that power doesn’t become abusive.
Tell me about your newest book , Wages of Rebellion.
It’s about the fact that we’ve got to stop asking if we’re going to succeed. That doesn’t matter anymore. Rebellion in the face of what’s happening to the ecosystem and the rise of neo-feudalism and corporate totalitarianism is a way to affirm life and not to be complicit in what, in theological terms, can be called the forces of death.
Hannah Arendt writes about this. She says she looked back on her time in Nazi Germany and reflects, “Thank God I wasn’t innocent.” She almost died. Arendt was picked up by the Gestapo and they almost killed her. You don’t want to be innocent in a state like this—you want to defy criminal forces. And criminal is the right word. These are criminal forces that have seized control and strangled any kind of legitimate democratic participation. It goes back to that issue of faith; even if everything around us empirically points to the fact that things are worse, that doesn’t invalidate resistance.
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