Pulitzer prize winning journalist chris hedges talks about his book wages of rebellion next. He discusses the causes of revolution and resistance by looking at stories of rebels throughout history and examines what it takes to be a rebel in modern times. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] hi there. Hi there. Can you guys hear me . Can you hear me in the back . Great. Im one of the owners here. Its great to see all of youd a labyrinth tonight. Welcome. Just a few practical things and then well get going. First, please turn off your cell phones if you havent done that already. Also our event season is islanding down but were planning great events for the fall so if you dont already get our email invite and would like to just leave us your email address on the back counter theres a signup sheet for that. In terms of the event tonight the logistics are i will do a very breath introduction, chris will speak and then there will be time for q a. I would just like to ask you we have cspan booktv here tonight. And id like to ask you to give me a moment to come to you with the mic so that you the whole event can be heard as well as seen. And i also want to ask you to try to formulate really a question rather than a statement in fairness to everyone else. Okay . It miss great pleasure to introduce to you and to welcome back to labyrinth a friend and neighbor chris hedges, white house new book, becames of rebellion. Were honoring and discussing tonight. Chris spent nearly two decade as a Foreign Correspondent in central america, the middle east africa, and the baskan balkans. He has report emfrom more than 50 conditioned working for major news outlets from are 15 areas he was foreign account for the new york times, where he was part of the team of reporters that was awarded the pull litter price in 2002 for the papers coverage of global terrorism. He is the author of more than a dozen chit acclaimed books which continue to influence and inspire those looking for ways to understand and resist structural inequality and injustice. Chris is a senior fellow at the nation institute. He has taught at Columbia University nyu princeton and in addition to publishing what seems to be about a become a year chris writes a weekly column and teaches inmates in new jersey prisons. With wages of rebellion chris continues his work as chronicler of globalized Corporate Power. Over the suffering and harm it inflicts on humans and on the environment. But while reminding the reader always of how high the stakes of inaction are this book is dedicated mostly to understanding what it means and what it takes to take action. In particular to take nonviolent action. While its never in doubt the rebel wes immediate in the book are men and women of great moral and physical courage that courage is in this telling almost a secondary effect. Primary is the notion of sublime madness. This curious mick tours, chris explains, of gloom and hope, defiance and resignation of absurdity and meaning is born of the enormity of forces that must be defeated and the remote chaps for success in every chapter he drew us on the history of political thought and the biographies of rebels through the centuries and the world over but crucially also on a large canyon of literary tasks. Our culture patri moany is a source from which to draw strength for a struggle that is not necessary lay struggle against all odds. A rae blind over the experience of the natural word is offered as another source of strength. While chris new book is a book of history reporting and analysis and therefore for the most part is written in the third, not the first person, given the fact that social justice is the cause to which chris has dedicated his own life wages of rebellion is an intensely permanent book. The last sentence at the end of a tribute to his wife and their children is fire i have never done enough. The work of those who resist injustice, it would seem, requires not only some form of sublime madness but also a forever restless conscience. Please join me in giving chris a welcome. [applause] thank you. And thank you. One of the great joys being in princeton is having labyrinth one of the great book stores in the United States, and it would be hard to imagine living here without labyrinth and Firestone Library across the street. The three books i wrote before becames of rebellion, death of the liberal class empire of illusion literacy, and the triumph of spectacle this the dives destruction days of due instructiondoor destruction out of camden, urge, the poorest per capita city in the United States and when we were working there to the most dangerous attempted to portray a political and Economic System that no locker served the interests of the citizen but the exclusive demands of Corporate Power. In all of those books i argued that investing our hope and our energy in the formal mechanisms of power was a waste of time; that we had undergone what john ralston calls a corporate coup detat in slow motion, that its over. Theyve won. That we live, rather, in what the political philosopher sheldon woolen calls a system of inverted totalitarianism, and that is not classical totalitarianism, doesnt find its expression through a demagogue or a charismatic leader but through the anonymity of the corporate state. Making it difference from communism and different from fascism but no less as effective a totalitarian force. So we have the facade of electoral politics, of the constitution of the traditional branches of government, but internally corporations have now seized all of the levers of power to render the citizen impotent. Those were all of those arguments that the liberal class chronicled the destruction of liberal institutions, which once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible. Labor, the academy the arts, largely commercialized, and of course as noam chomsky has written, those liberal institutions were a kind of safety valve to amale yourate the grievances and injustices of the citizenry and right the kind of capitali democracy. Roost said his greatest achievement was that the saved capitalism and thats correct can but the destruction of that mechanism by which you could address a crisis within capitalism and of course the new deal addressing the breakdown of capitalism itself is gone. We are barreling towards a frightening global neofeudallism. We have empowered a rapicious ollie backerric elite. We indeed live in an oligarch can i. We have detroit the exalt of our working clays to make a sustainable income and the assault on the middle class is far underway, and at the same time the state the corporate state, is squeezing more and more and more and rendering the government less and less effective in terms of meeting the demands of citizens and that is borne out now with the secret trade agreements, the tpp and cafta and others, where essentially the power of the state intervene in terms of corporate exploitation is removed from them. Now, all of this creates a very frightening kind of political paralysis, an inability of the state respond to the vast majority of the citizens. We see that in the name of austerity, we see that in the way that the state in order to fund its activities, exploits in greater and greater measure the poor and the most vulnerable. One of the engines to the revolt in ferguson, baltimore and other places this fact that poor what malcolm x called our internal colonies, derived up to 30 honor of their income from fining the poor. For absurdities, not mowing their lawn, standing for five seconds or walking they make the rules up thats go along. Nip who worked in the major alcommunity understand the omni omni otent policing, and at the same time the legal system has been utterly inverted. To strip the citizen of its most his or her most cherished constitutional rights. We can start with the right to privacy, the section 10201 on the detective i sued barack obama in the southern ticketer court of new york and it was appealed and overturned which permits the military to carry out domestic policing in essence form some extraordinary rendition on American City streetsseize american citizens who are deemed to be terrorists and hold them without due process indefinitely in military facilities. The inability on the courts to deal with wholesale surveillance all of news this room have all of our information we mow this because of the courage of Edward Snowden all of our information is captured, downloaded and stored in perpetuity in government computers. Once you have a state and i covered the collapse of the state in east germany once you have the state that has the capacity to monitor a citizen 24 hours a day you can no longer use the word liberty. That is the relationship of the master and a slave. The ability of the executive branch to call for the assassination of american citizens the misuse of the espionage act to shut down whistleblowers, drake, snowden and others, Chelsea Manning all of this is combining to create a very frightening dystopia. And unfettered, unregulated capitalism as karl marx understood is a revolution ther in post, stripped of external limits it exploits until exhaustion or collapse. So that even when you get a figure like Bernie Sanders on many of the issues agree with bernie although not on his position with israel as soon as he signs on to the project of the Democratic Party, and i think as ralph nader told us for some time the democratic part is as captive to Corporate Power as the republican party. There is no way within the american political system to vote against the interests of exxonmobil or raytheon or goldman samples. Its inpock and the decision by sanders to work within that party and not call it out for what it is, essentially allows him to act as a kind of sheepdog for Hillary Clinton who and clintons assault against the working class was perhaps even more draconian that that carried out by ronald reagan. And a half tacoma the omnibus crime bill in 1994, which exploded the prison population this deregulation of the fcc 77 of the children oregon the assistant act for families were stripped of their ability to receive government benefits. Glass stiegel. All of this essentially has propelled us forward to a situation where,s a things unravel, we know longer have the legal mechanisms or the protection by which we can resist and this is by design. The nsa has run numerous scenarios of the effects of climate change, and we just saw in march 400 parts per million the first time that the levels of Carbon Emissions has been that high for an entire month in roared history. These are the death throes of the planet, and corporate forces exploit until theres nothing left. And in theological terms in many ways they are forces of death. Quite literally when we talk about the fort visavis climate change. That the amendment can he face, the political environment alreality were up against. The capacity of the state to control the citizen to monitor the citizen to use lethal force against unarmed citizens, and all of the marches by black lives matter, all of the coverage all of the videos, that show us the murder by militarized police forces, of unarmed citizens, do nothing. The numbers of citizens keep being killed every 28 hours usually a young man or woman of color is murdered, unarmed in this country. And so how do we react . How do we resist what does it take . And what will the state do . That is what i tried to look at in the book wages of rebellion omoral imperative of revolt. And i spend time in the book talking with those who have stood up with magnificent courage to defy the system. People like abu jamal julian assange, and the embassy the great civil rights attorney, lynn stewart herself sent to prison, Jeremy Hammond the hacker. I attended with cornell west the trials of Chelsea Manning and wed leave princeton at 3 00 in the morning to drive down to be at fort mead and each lesson was each car ride cornell would drive was a lesson the classic soul. He knows everything about everything including cassic soul so re left side go booty collins wrote that sock for james brown when he was 19. And i got a letter from Chelsea Manning after she was sentenced and imprisoned. She was not allowed to turn around and look at who was seated in the courtroom to support her and i got a letter saying that she had looked out of the corner of her eye and seen cornel, myself and she just wanted to send a thank you note. I think the greatest existential cries of our time is accepting the reality that is before us with all its bleakness and yet finding the capacity to resist. And liberalism itself in the face of a crisis of this magnitude, is an ineffectual force. Its too intellectual, its too passionless, its too lacking in that quality that he called sublime madness that capacity to rise up in the face of overwhelming repression and respond as a moral imperative. The ability of rebels to react to massive systems of oppression is driven and baldwin writes about this by a vision, a vision that takes possession of them. Hannah errant writes about this where in the face of she actually says when she leave this university of heidelberg, that she had to unlearn everything that she had been taught of course she studied with hiderger in the university to become a moral human being, and she says that the those who are most effect enough terms of resisting are not those who ask or say this should not be done, or we oughtnt do this but who say i cant. Its that inability on the part of the rebel to accept because of who they are complicity with systems of injustice. And that is what neber called sublime madness, james koehn in his great book, from the lynching tree, which i suggest you read, plays with the fundamental quality in those who he talks about the africanamerican experience, who endure the horrific forms of racism economic and legal oppression that are not unfamiliar in marginal communities, and yet have that spiritual resource to resist in the face of overwhelming odds. What is coming, and we see it as the climate unravels at a faster pace than climate scientists predicted, we just saw we have seen the norwegian study in the arctic where theyre saying all of the measurements in terms of the arctic ice has been wrong because that layer of old ice is gone, all the old its in fact new ice. The severe drought in california and what happens as that society as our society constricts politically economically and environmentally, is that the forces of corporate control tighten, the levers or the mechanisms of power. The fact that the corporatized media, as one example will talk about the drought in california and not talk about the Animal Agriculture industry which is fundamental to that drought. And in fact the Animal Agriculture industry is arguably the primary industry behind Global Warming and yet the power of those corporations are such that they have shut out any kind of a discussion. Even this critique of Corporate Power, one that figures like nateer or noam chomsky will give is shutout. Those of us who offer this critique are not offered a platform on National Media noam, ralph and i all find im about to leave for canada on friday expats one cbc show after another, and last time i was in canada the cbc filmed the show we want to thank cspan for being here they filmed the show and devoted a onehour program to it. That is impossible within the United States. I used to wonder whether huxley was right or orwell was right. It terms out they were both right. What we first got was huxley and as we were fleeced as we now reach a state where we cant get credit where all of those cheap manufactured Consumer Products are no longer easily accessible or available and shelledon woolen in this great book called that those the access to cheap credit and consumerism one of the two primary forms of political control. Once those are removed we increasingly get the iron boot, the iron fist, that orwell predicted. So turns out that orwell and huxley were both right and we are seeing now that transformation. As you get a huge underclass pushing 50 of this country in terms of poor and near poor, enable to sustain a living unable to sustain a living, chronic underemployment or unemployment which of course the statistics mask once you stop looking for work, youre no longer counted as unemployed or if you have a parttime job at william, 28 hours a week most workers a walmart thats the average they work your still put below the poverty line so your given applications for toad stamps and you qualify. We subsidize the Walton Family make 11,000 a year. I think that ultimately for me i come out of seminary i come oust of theological background that resistance is finally not determined by what empirically is around us, and that gets to what father Daniel Bergen who baptized our youngest daughter, when he defines faith help says that faith is the call to do the good or at least the good insofar as as you can determine it and then you let it go. Faith this belief that enif awe up of the evidence around you says otherwise the good goes somewhere. And i think that for the rebel like the religious mystic, it is this faith that finally defines our capacity to resist. Because the forces that we are facing are deadly and immense and unlike any to at that totalitarian force that human societies have faced in the past. Why is there wholesale surveillance and we can look at past totalitarian regimes to understand it is because you gather all of the information on the citizenry so that the moment that you need it, you can use it. Its not about justice. Its not about innocence. Its not about who committed a crime or who didnt. Its about that moment that they decide to criminalize an entire segment of the population and have whatever it is on your file that they can reach out and twist and use against you. That is why all of our electron ic correspondence, our medical records extraordinarily everything about its which by the way is a big business. Corporations sell all this stuff and they have everything on you. But thats why its there. And its that again that fought of both corporate and political power which is indistinguishable of our 16 intelligence agencies this is why snowden was working for a private contra