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The Chris Hedges Report
A Rogue Reporter vs. The American Empire (w/ Matt Kennard) | The Chris Hedges Report
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- [00:10]
Chris Hedges
Matt Kinnard, a former investigative journalist for the Financial Times, in his book the Racket, details the nefarious tools the United States employs to shape and manipulate power abroad to serve its quest for global hegemony. His reporting, done over four years in more than a dozen countries, including Bolivia, Mexico, Haiti, Palestine, Tunisia and Egypt, shatters any idea that the US is concerned with fostering democracy or protecting human rights. In case after case, he illustrates how US military and economic power serve as the enforcer for global corporations in the service of exploitation. The US instigates coups, uses natural disasters such as the 2010 earthquake in Haiti to sell off the country to foreign corporations, breaks labor unions, removes from office those such as Jeremy Corbyn, who pose a threat to its interests in Haiti. In one example in the book, the US establishes a publicly funded but privately run educational system. This privatization of the educational system saw $700 million of Haiti's tax revenue turned over to corporations, while more than half of the country's school children lost access to schooling at sweatshops in Honduras, half of which are owned by US multinational corporations. He found that managers were administering birth control pills to female employees each morning to ensure they can continue to work, and there were notices stipulating the hours during which workers were allowed to use the toilet. He writes of US backed assassination attempts in countries such as Bolivia. The consequences of US intervention abroad are impoverishment for workers and the installation of puppet governments that are enemies to national sovereignty. The reality of US imperial power, he wryly notes, is not covered in domestic media, which continues to pump out the fictitious narratives of the US as a light among nations and a beacon of human rights and democracy. But the ugly face of American power, especially with his complicity in the genocide in Gaza, has turned the country into a hated global pariah. Joining me to discuss his book the Rogue Reporter versus the American Empire, is Matt Kennard, who is head of investigations at the investigative journalism website Declassified uk, which he co founded with author and historian Mark Curtis. I think the power of the book is that by the time you're done, you have delineating most of the patterns of control, most of the methods or tools the US uses, and not just in the Global south, but even within the uk. And we can talk about that, but let's begin with some of the examples I alluded to in the introduction. Bolivia. I mean, maybe we can start with Bolivia and then talk about Honduras and Mexico, but let's start with Bolivia.
- [03:18]
Matt Kennard
Yeah, Bolivia is a very interesting case and should be much more widely talked about amongst progressive forces around the world because in my opinion it might be the most successful sustained experiment in democratic socialism in history. Eva Morales won the election in 2005 and took power in 2006. And he was the first indigenous president of Bolivia. This is a country which had effectively been under the control of a white skinned elite since the Spanish came. And the indigenous people have been brutally repressed in all sorts of ways for centuries. And he came up in a democratic revolution and really straight away transformed the society. So within the first hundred days had a program of nationalization of different industries, investment in education, health care, all the stuff we're told that the World bank and others are concerned with, but actually promote policies which do the opposite. But anyway, he was a huge success and I was quite inspired by watching this democratic revolution from the UK at the time. And then I went to the States and continued to follow it. And then I was actually. And then in 2008 began. Well, there was, straight away there was attempts at subversion. In fact, there's a quote in a book from an American I interviewed when I was in Bolivia who was an activist, but he went on this trip in Bolivia and there happened to be some US Embassy, US aid officials on it as well. And he, he, he's quoted in a book talking about, they, he overheard them talking about how we've got to get rid of Morales quite explicitly. But the US subversion started right away. But it picked up in 2008 when the Eastern provinces threatened to cede from Bolivia, which has been one of their goals ever ever since, that they didn't control central government. They basically went to break up the country. In fact, that was only kind of reversed because Hugo Chavez was in Venezuela at the time and he threatened to invade if they were, if they overthrew democracy or at least illegally ceded. Anyway, I went there when I was at the Financial Times and it was a real window into how the US empire operates because essentially all the institutions you'll talk about, the patterns that I call it a empire of acronyms. You know, when you go to these countries you see Ned, usaid, dea, CIA, if you look hard enough. And what all these institutions have is huge amounts of ideologies bolted onto them to justify them as benevolent organizations which take great things to the developing world. So the Drug Enforcement Administration, we're told is about stopping drug production and cracking down on narcos. National Endowment for Democracy is about promoting democracy. USAID is about aid and bringing wonderful benefits to poor people. And that kind of works okay in that Ideology and that propaganda works okay when things are running as they should, which is you have some client ruler who basically just does whatever he's told by Washington and by corporations which want to ransack the country for resources. But obviously that, that, that wasn't the case in the, in Morales's case. And so all the different pressure points were exposed and all those organizations became exposed as well. So I started looking into the National Endowment for not looking into, okay, what are their programs in, in Bolivia. And you realize actually it was nothing to do with promoting democracy. What was it? They were funding groups which were opposed to Morales and trying to bring him down. You USAID is the same thing. And I got internal reports when I was in, I was in the Financial Times in Washington and said Freedom of Information act requests and had tons of data and then also read every single cable when the WikiLeaks cables came out from 2005 to 2010, which is when they were up to. And it just shows that there was a wide ranging effort to destroy this really promising development not just for Bolivia, not just for Latin America, but for the whole world. Because we're constantly told oh socialism doesn't work. You can't run an economy based on the needs of the people. You ha. You need foreign corporations to come in and develop resources. That's like the strongest ideology they promote and obviously they promote it for a reason because it enriches corporations and the 1%. But he re and they say well if you have socialism what you do is you get dictators and they end up basically just exploiting their people for the regime rather than corporations. He showed actually this is a movement based democratic society. And the point is that is what happened. That occurs naturally a lot of time and huge amounts of resources are put in by the US to try and smash that hope when it arises. They nearly did it under Morales and in fact There was a CIA backed coup in 2019 which involved other organizations as well based in Washington, the oasis and again not talked about enough on the left. But that was a majorly historic moment because he was taken out in a U S backed coup in 2019 but returned and democracy was restored the following year. And I don't know of any other case where a CIA coup like that has been reversed that quickly and democracy has been restored and his party which had won the election in 2019 won the following elections the following year. So it really opened my eyes to the nefarious nature of the US Empire. The fact that we as a is the biggest enemy of human Progress, I believe, around the world, because it smashes anywhere any leader, any movement that wants to do things differently. And the key point is, wants to use the resources of their country for the people rather than the global market and global corporations. And yeah, and obviously the key point of all this is that this is the opposite of the propaganda we're fed from the moment we're born effectively in the US and the UK as well, which is that the United States is unlike all previous empires which were that which did operate on exploitative terms. But the US is different. It operates on noble principles like freedom, democracy, development, whatever these words are. And it's pervasive. Everyone. You have to believe that to work in the mainstream media effectively for the Financial Times, you can't believe what I've just said about US power. So it works in a filtering mechanism. And I realized as well when I was at the Financial Times, I couldn't write about US subversion of Bolivia, which I was seeing, which if you actually had a free media, you'd be free to write stuff about that. If I was, if I was published, if I wanted to publish stories about Chinese or Russian interference in a country I was visiting, they'd welcome it and promote it and pay me to do it. But when it was US aversion, it was. I was getting no's from all editors about specific stories. So what I've realized quite early on being in the Financial Times was I'm not going to stay here because I can't do the journalism I want to do. So what I want to do is collect as much information as I can from the coal face to try and then expose how the system works when I leave, which is what the racket is. And effectively what the racket does is use a lot of the information I gathered at the Financial Times and obviously you have access, which is amazing. Like when I went to Bolivia, I could interview the charged affairs. There wasn't an ambassador because it had been kicked out. But I interviewed, I went to the US Embassy and interviewed the charge affairs. I interviewed USAID and, and, and then, and then cross reference that with the WikiLeaks cables, because the WikiLeaks cables are the best window we've got into how US empire really works and how US foreign policy really works. Because they're talking, they think privately and they're much more honest, obviously. And there isn't the space for the ideologies which I've talked about, so you can get the real information. And what you see is that they just admit in private that all the stuff they're saying in public is rubbish. And actually the cables showed in the case of Bolivia that they were actively working with the opposition to take down Morales. So I think that Bolivia is actually the longest chapter in the book because I feel like it's such an important case study because as you say, it's also patterns. What I've described in Bolivia has happened in countless other countries. Anytime a democratic left leader who wants to use their resources comes along, the NED are mobilized, the USAID mobilized, DEA is mobilized. And it's very, very hard to move in that ecosystem. And that's why they want it. It's a straitjacket. And actually Evan Morales realized that quite early on and he kicked out USAID and he kicked out the dea, which I think is a prerequisite for actually any leader in the global south wanting to run their country as a sovereign country. You need to get rid of these agencies because these agencies aren't there to help you. They're there to enforce U.S. power and enforce U.S. corporate power.
- [12:17]
Chris Hedges
Well, they also that they work in tandem with a banking system to strangle the economy. That's certainly what they did with Syriza in Greece. So there are the internal organizations. You have a line in the book that the NED just does publicly what the CIA used to do in private, but they have the ability to essentially shut the country down. I just, before we go on, I want to talk about the WikiLeaks cables. But that pattern has been rep. I lived in Latin. I actually studied Spanish and Bolivia and Cochabamba but and lived in Latin America for six years. That pattern has been repeated for decades. Whether it's Allende in Chile, whether it's Arbenz in Guatemala, anytime there was movement, a popular movement that sought to reclaim sovereignty, you know, control over in of course in Bolivia, a lot of it is tin, the famous tin mines that the US Intervened on behalf of corporations. And I think a lot of people, you and I do, but a lot of people don't realize how important the WikiLeaks cables were. Not just for the debacles and war crimes in Iraq, but for shining a light on U.S. complicity. I mean, Haiti being one of the most. You write about Haiti as well. But the WikiLeaks cables exposed that the US government was on behalf of US corporations which ran sweatshops in Haiti. You were also right about this in Honduras, but was working to essentially suppress a movement to raise the minimum wage to I mean something insane. What were they trying to get $2 an hour. I don't remember how much, but talk a little bit about the importance, because in independent media in the Global south, the WikiLeaks cables, which was also true in Tunisia, were huge, a huge revelation.
- [14:18]
Matt Kennard
Yeah, I mean, I think it's the best repository for historians and journalists there's ever been for understanding the global system. Because the US is this kind of government. US power is the governing dynamic in world affairs. If you look from what's going on in Gaza to regime change in Venezuela, Venezuela, Syria, wherever you look, American power is the overriding factor. And we were given a decades of them speaking privately, what they thought was privately about how they operate. And actually its significance is why that is completely ignored by the mainstream media in the US and the uk. Because their role is not to reveal truth. They say it is, and we're told it is. In civics class and journalism school, we're a check on power. But what you realize when you work on the inside, and I'm so sure you saw this at the New York Times as well, is that actually, if you start doing proper journalism like Julian Assange did, and really revealing truth, as we're told we should, then you get attacked by the journalists that operate at the top of society. And one of the awakenings I had when I was at the FT was I was there in Washington, this was under the Obama administration, when the WikiLeaks cables first started coming out. And I remember being really enthused and excited about this. I was thinking, this is a treasure trove for journalists. And I remember the first editorial meeting at the FT's Washington bureau and it was just everyone was attacking Assange and basically dismissing the cables. And I was just thinking, wow, if that is their reaction to the revelations that might give us some clue about how the system really works, then they don't see their role as really exposing power. What they see their role is, and I still believe this, is that they project an image of that through covering Frost stories, scandals like Small Fry, and then, but never ever do stories which impact on our understanding of how the system works at a much deeper level. That's the red line for these journalists because effectively, and this goes, in fact, the liberal class may be even worse than the right wing. In fact, I think they are because they essentially believe in the system and they have to believe in the system to get where they are. So I think the WikiLeaks cables are hugely significant and they just appear all throughout the book. In fact, the book's dedicated to Chelsea Manning because she well, she changed, she changed history by what she did and it was completely heroic, you know. And again, wasn't supported by the media in the way that she should have been. Wasn't supported by the Guardian in the way she. They should be. Julian Assange wasn't supported by the Guardian. Look at, not to go off track too much, but this is very linked to the US Empire because this was a historic moment in exposing the US empire, what Julian Assange and she, Chelsea Manning, managed to do. But the Guardian was the, the paper that published most of those early leaks and then they later on became the biggest vehicle for the information war which was being fought against him by the CIA, the British state and other elements. Outrageous. They even. He was in Belmarsh prison for five years, maximum security prison, never without a conviction for anything. The Council of Europe just voted, which is the highest human rights body in Europe, of which the UK is a signatory. They vote, their parliamentary institution just voted that he. To, to declare him a political prisoner for, for the five years he was in. It's quite incredible that not one UK newspaper has written a single word about it. You would think that the highest human rights body in Europe ruling that we held a journalist as a political prisoner for five years in our, in our highest security prison would interest journalists and at least should be on the front page of every paper if we had a genuinely free press. Nothing. And that's because Assange is the enemy, because he took journalism too seriously. And he did, he exposed them, he exposed the American empire, but he also exposed journalism because he, he set the standard for actually how you really do what we're told you're meant to do, which is, which is help our understanding of how our society works. And, and in the case of Haiti, it was very, very. I used the cables throughout because, as you say, I think that Haiti is maybe the emblematic example of how this system operates, an emblematic example of how the US empire destroys countries. Because I was sent there the year after the earthquake in 2010, which was an unbelievable disaster. You know, 300,000 people died instantly. I remember getting there and I just couldn't believe my eyes. It was apocalypse, you know, the Presidential palace had collapsed. All the government ministries, the whole of Port au Prince, which was where I was, was, was, was living intense, the whole of it, and just incredible. And I started looking into the history and at that time I was working for the ft, so I got all the, I got the, the, the tour that you get as a, as a corporate reporter for a elite paper. And that is how it works. You know, you stay in the five star hotel, you get taken around in a air conditioned 4x4 by the world bank to the nice projects that they're funding and they're telling you all these wonderful things that they're investing in and restarting the economy and blah, blah, blah. And it's very seductive. And in fact if you don't come in to journalism with a, a very, very defined idea of how the world works or at least you, you some kind of backbone to resist that ideology and that seductive system, no, you don't go against it. And not many people do go against it. And they were taking me to these special economic zones which were being opened, funded by US aid. One of them was in the north. We flew to the north and they took me and I remember we went to another special economic zone which had been set up previously by a company from Dominican Republic but with aid money. And I was taken in and interviewed the CEO and he was, they had a union. So I was talking to him about the union and he was saying, well, we had some teething difficulties but now we have the best running union in the country. And I remember I looked at the WikiLeaks cables afterwards and firstly I found that, that SEZ had been built on peasants, land that didn't want to move and had been actually removed by corporate and state forces. And then I found out that the union had been talked about by U.S. officials because the union had taken its role too seriously and was demanding better rights for the workers and then was disbanded and then replaced by this, what's called a yellow union which basically just works for the corporation. So, so you saw there's these two worlds, there's the fantasy world, the hyper reality world which is created for you. If you're a corporate journalist and you go to Haiti and it's very easy to accept because what's your interest in not accepting it? And then there's the real world which is evidence based and really exposes the dynamics which govern the decision making of the US and sat traps in Haiti and other places and they're completely at odds and they never can meet. And that's why there was a brief opening when WikiLeaks cables started coming out. You know, we did have some real evidence of how the world works. This hyper reality was smashed. But actually I've been thinking recently about that because it was an amazing moment. But the powerful forces who create the discourse in, in the US and the uk, they have all the resources and they managed to even though we had amazing revelations like the Collateral Murder video and others which showed that the US just gunned down journalists and kids and others, it didn't dent this what we talk about, this overarching ideology of the benevolent and benign American power. It didn't dent it in the long term. And that's because they have all the resources to kind of just squash the evidence that come up and that if it was sustained it would be. But the whole point is it's not sustained. It's this little brief blink and then you get put Assange in prison and it all goes back to how it was before. So I think us in alternative media that's why I think what's going on in alternative media and, and the power the Internet gives us the circumvent the mainstream media is so important and obviously does worry the powers that be because the empire operates on propaganda. That is one. That is why they took Assange so seriously because one of their biggest priorities is that they can't. The truth about how the world works and in whose interest is being run is central to them being able to project power. If you damage that and people understand how the world works and what we're involved in and for example in Gaza then there will be pressure to change. And in fact I do believe that's what makes a journalist complicit in what's going on in Gaza now because we at declassified have been doing a stream of stories about the use of the UK base in Cyprus. This is a bit off topic but is related to the U.S. but because the U.S. has been flying flights from there and that's caused an absolute scene in Greece. I mean sorry, in Cyprus, in Greek Cyprus there's been demonstrations at the UK base. It's both presents on both sides of the border have had to talk about it. Never a word has been written about in the UK media. But if, if the resources of the BBC and the Guardian were used to really expose the US empire and it's and its little poodles like the UK then I think that it would really make the system running as it does much harder and may have they would have to change it. They might get more sophisticated way to propagandize and but, but, but that pressure is not there at all. And this is not a left right issue Guardian which is held up as like, as, as the, the kind of like liberal left. You can get an anti imperialist perspective. They're signed up to the American imperial project and all the propaganda that goes with it. So it's, it's not about a left right, the whole of the, the left center right in the establishment, all regurgitated stuff and believe that stuff. And you have to believe that stuff to get into the media and get a column or get, become a news reporter.
- [24:19]
Chris Hedges
Well, Noam Chomsky told us several decades ago, I just, on Cyprus, I think it was declassified uk, which you run, broke this story that armed shipments were being flown from Cyprus to Israel to fuel the war in the genocide in Gaza. That's correct, yes.
- [24:48]
Matt Kennard
And this is actually really relevant to what we're talking about, which is US Empire because obviously Britain is part of the American empire. We are a junior partner, we're an adjunct to the whole system. But one of the major ways we remained relevant to the United States after the Second World War, which is the time when we're told the empire died, which never happened, it just got repackaged in different ways. But one of the ways we remained relevant was we basically opened up our bases, which we have all around the world, from Falklands to Cyprus to Bahrain to Nepal. We made them also US bases. And Diego Garcia being an emblematic example, that's actually called a joint base, but unofficially all the others are joint bases. And I went to Cyprus. So a bit of background on this base as well, about which shows how the empire never died, as the British Empire never died. So Cyprus was a British colony until 1960 when it got independence under Archbishop Makarios, who was the liberation leader, the first democratically elected leader of independent Cyprus. But in that treaty that we signed, the British signed, they retained 3% of Cyprus, which we still own. And not many people, no one knows about this even in Britain. But so it's these huge swathes of land which aren't just military bases. There's military bases on them, but you're talking about 3% of the island. So they're big. And I went there and did a series of stories. One of them was about revealed for the first time the, the real presence of the US Air Force there. Because the British and Americans had said for 50 years the Americans have a presence there. But they wouldn't say the size and they wouldn't say the, the, the complexion, what, what units were there. But I found that 129 US airmen were permanently stationed at RAF Equerry, which is the main base there. And, but, but as I say, one of the services we provide is not only use but the all UK sites around the world. And this is very important people notice. And no one knows this and I only know this because I've been trying to. But they operate as black sites for the Americans. You cannot get a single bit of information about US activities on UK basis from the UK side. I've tried. They. And they come up with a blanket statement which is we don't comment on allies movements on our activities on our own basis. And there's. So it's more secret effectively than our intelligence agencies and our Special Forces, what US do. And they've got huge presence within the. Within Britain as well. There's 12,000, over 12,000 US troops permanently stationed in the UK, most of them at two sites just outside London called RAF Mildenhall and RAF Lakenheath. Lakenheath they're talking about which rumored and it seems likely that they're redeploying nuclear weapons. The US is to. To that plus you have the intelligence occupation of Britain. You know, Edward Snowden's leaks showed that GCHQ viewed now GCHQ is the UK's largest intelligence agency. It was exposed extensively by Snowden's leaks. And it has a site in Cornwall which is in the west of England by the beach and it's called GCHQ Butte. And all the transatlantic cables go there. And he. His leak showed that the nsa, the National Security Agency, pay for half the maintenance of GCHQ Butte. So it's effectively a US site. You can't get any information about how many US personnel are there or anything because there's just a blanket statement saying we don't comment on intelligence matters. But then you have RAF Crowdon, which is another base within the UK itself, north of. In the Midlands, where they. That they say that there's a thousand CIA officers based there. It's 25 of all communications which come from Europe back to America go through RAF crowd. And that's also the site where the. The alleged CIA officer Ansa Cooles killed Harry Dunn, that child. Which was a case which got very big here. I don't know if it was big in the States, but what you see when you start looking into it and.
- [28:42]
Chris Hedges
This and let me just interrupt Mat she was then spirited out of Britain and all the requests to extradite her were met with this false claim that she had diplomatic immunity.
- [28:59]
Matt Kennard
Exactly, yeah. And they first denied that she was working for the CIA because it's not official. None of this stuff is official. They've never acknowledged that RAF Crow is a huge CIA station. So it was all very embarrassing for them. But effectively the. The UK just takes its orders from Washington there's no and that. And the, the quid pro quo is that the US keeps us, I guess, gives us the. We can have. The pretense that we're with is still this powerful force. And the British Establishment really care about that just on a personal level. There's an arrogance in the British Establishment which has been festered and pickled over centuries of ruling the world, which. And they don't want to let go of it. So they're willing to do anything for Washington if they can stay part of the US Empire. But we have. So we have this huge occupation which means that we're not a sovereign country. And I know it's a cliche to say Britain's the 51st state, but it really is. We cannot go against the US and actually the preface to the book is all about this. And we re that again, this was really exposed during Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party because that was a historic moment in British history. You know, he was elected labor leader in 2015. He was the first, well, the second, non Atlanticist labor leader ever to be elected post the Second World War. The other one being Michael Foot in 1980-83. But he was destroyed again. But Corbyn really showed that the power that the US still has here. And actually when I started looking into all the agencies that you mentioned, you know, like the Ned and stuff, through the whole of my career, I'd always looked at those in the Global south who were operating in weak states and basically running the show. And I kind of assumed that even before I was going there, because in a country like Haiti, the state's so weak that even one of those institutions is more powerful than government. My hunch was, okay, well, this doesn't operate the same way in Britain, where we've got a longer history, we've got these strong institutions. But I realized pretty quick when I started looking into what these agencies were doing in Britain that the same patterns were occurring and in fact even more resources were going in because obviously as an imperial center, financial capital, it was the top priority to keep the US to keep the UK pro Atlanticist. So Jeremy Corbyn was a massive, massive nightmare for the US and in fact it was, it became really explicit. You know, Mike Pompeo, when he was Secretary of State, who was previously director of the CIA, came to the UK in the summer of 2019. This was before the six months before the election of 2019, which Jeremy Corbyn lost to Boris Johnson. But he was recorded privately saying to a group of people. We will do our quote level best to stop Jeremy Corbyn becoming Prime Minister of Britain. And he said it's too hard to do it once he's Prime Minister so we'll do it now. Like this was. And it was reported for a day in the papers but then it just disappeared. And you're sort of thinking this should be a huge, huge scandal. This is a senior official coming to the UK and basically saying we won't allow it. And there was no investigations of what he meant by that. And obviously he was referring to certain programs they had. And, and, and I think those programs are like the ned. So the NED fund. I did a story about the NED in the UK and it, their investments in the UK in media organizations picked up massively after Corbyn became leader. And they included groups like Index on censorship, Bellingcat, Article 19, Open Democracy, all had received money over since 2015 and it was in the millions of pounds. Plus there's, I'll finish with this because there's a very, very interesting organization which again is the dynamics of it and the setup of it and how it works is very, very much part of this pattern of how the US exercises power sort of covertly. But it, as I mentioned, the, the only other leader of the labour party post 1945 who was non atlanticist was Michael Foot. And he was in, he, he was elected leader in 1980, he lost the election in 1983 and left. But he, the election in 1983 was, he was really radical, well, comparatively like if you read that manifesto from 1983, he called for the UK to withdraw from NATO for example, example and really showed that he wanted to move Britain away, not to the, not towards the Soviet Union but away from the United States. He wanted Britain to be a kind of non aligned country. And he lost the election badly. But, and it was called the longest suicide note in history. But declassified USCIA files have shown that they were massively worried about Michael Foot's leadership and what had brought him to power, which was a real sort of anti imperial movement within the Labour Party. And they and the US Embassy at that point started this organization which is called the British American Project. And it was quite explicitly about kind of cultivating the progressive left end of the British political spectrum into a pro American position. And it developed massively during the 80s and it still exists today. And it was mobilized massively during Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of labor. And many, many senior figures in that organization were, became the biggest critics of Corbyn. And, and you saw they had to come out the shadows. They wouldn't because how it's presented is it's a nice membership organization where journalists, politicians, intelligence officials as well, by the way, UK military as well get together and have, they have dinners and events and they have a conference every year in the US and the uk, alternate years. But what it is actually is about trying to cultivate and bring the left of the political spectrum away from any anti imperialist position. It's been very successful. And I actually interviewed an MP or a former MP called Emma Dent Code. She won the election. She won her seat in Kensington for the first time for the Labour Party in 2017, served till 2019. And she told me that she was recruit. What they tried to recruit her to the British American project in the 80s when she was a journalist. And she said that they said come to this conference, it's just about helping develop relations between Britain and America and, and helping poor kids and stuff like that. And she said something smelt fishy. And this was a senior official in CND by the way, which was which Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament which, which were. Which called for the US to, I mean for the UK to unilaterally decommission its nuclear weapons. But she found out subsequently, she told me this, and this is not a fringe figure or a conspiracy theory. She's quite a prominent figure here in the us in the uk. She said her friend, the, the boyfriend, who was no longer the boyfriend of, of this woman that tried to recruit her told her actually I found out that she works for the CIA and she was working for the CIA at the time. And that's Emmerdent Code said that and that we put that in the article obviously didn't get any pickup in the mainstream media, but you see time and time again that the CIA, its main focus in the UK has been to try and stop the anti imperialist left getting anywhere in the Labour Party and they really had to come out of the shadows during the Corbyn years because that was. He is a genuine anti imperialist and he has a long history of opposing US wars and UK wars and he was kind of the biggest nightmare for the United States and they successfully did it. You know, they, they want. Like Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 was within 2,000 votes of becoming Prime Minister spread across different constituencies. If he hadn't been fighting a guerrilla war against these different elements for two years, he would have won that election and British history would have been different. But, but the whole point about the British political system is. It's never been allowed to. We've never been given a real choice, and we're not allowed to have a real choice, partly because we're controlled by the US in all these different ways. Military, NGOs, intelligence, and you can't talk about it. It's an interference that literally you can't talk about. So we get endless stories, most of them rubbish, about Russian influence every day, but literally nothing about the fact that we can't move because we're controlled by the US. And that figure I mentioned, about over 12,000 US troops permanently stationed, has never appeared in a UK paper. So just omitted from the record. No one. So no one will know that we have this occupation. So it's. It's a. It's a silent empire. And again, as we. As we mentioned that as. As you know, this. Is this how it operates across the world? They. There's so much propaganda put into presenting the US powers benign and malevolent. But there's also a whole other side of this which is propaganda by omission, where all the nefarious things that the US does around the world are just omitted by the oligarchical media. So no one knows about it. So. So we need to change that.
- [37:58]
Chris Hedges
Yeah. I'm. The first story I ever wrote. I was in college, was a company called Gulf and Western, which owned many corporations, including Paramount Pictures. And I went to the Dominican Republic. They were assassinating labor leaders. I wrote it up and it was set to be printed in the Outlook section of the Washington Post. I was a freelancer and Paramount Pictures told the Washington Post that they would withdraw their advertising, millions of dollars of advertising, and the story was never printed. It was eventually printed in the Christian Science Monitor in a reduced form only because the Christian Science Monitor at the time did not take advertising. So I mean that. And of course, you and I both come out of the mainstream media, we understand exactly how that pressure works. And journalists, most of the people of the FT or the New York Times are good careerists. You don't need to write rules on the walls. They get it. They don't want to become a management headache and end up like you and me. I want to talk about Zionism because there were two forces that brought down Corbyn. One was this neoliberal American imperial force. But also the way they discredited him was as an anti Semite. They got him to purge his own party. You also had the Blairite faction within the Labour Party that was working against him. And part of your book is written from Palestine. So let's, let's talk about, about that, that force of Zionism and what you wrote about in Palestine.
- [39:38]
Matt Kennard
Yeah, well, I mean to link it to what I was just saying, I think that Gaza, the horror that we've seen over the past year has, has kind of stress tested the propaganda system and the propaganda system has failed. You know, we have, you've had like a year of people, millions of people and actually the general population seeing on their phones some of the most awful things they've ever seen in their life. Just straight terrorism by the Israelis and yet they've seen Joe Biden who's a Democrat and they've been told their whole life is the good guy against the boogeyman. Trump getting up and defending it all and ventriloquizing Israeli propaganda, sending billions more weapons. And I think that contradiction is really having an impact on a societal wide level. I've talked to people who are just, they're like my worldview has completely changed over the past year because they're not like us in the sense of that they haven't worked in it and they don't have this kind of understanding because they're not working within the system or at least trying to do journalism about this stuff. And so if you've been fed that propaganda and you're seeing this, that contradiction is, has never been as extreme because obviously US and UK imperial crimes throughout history have been. There has been awful stuff happening similar to Gaza. You know, like what the British did after the Indian Mutiny in 1857. People should look into that. It was. The savagery was out off the charts and then obviously.
- [41:08]
Chris Hedges
Or the Mount or the Mao. Mao, exactly.
- [41:11]
Matt Kennard
And then you have the Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, but we didn't have social media then. Like this is the thing that I think got why Gaza's is changing the consciousness of humanity because everyone is seeing it and the mainstream media, you won't see it or you won't see the real stuff, but there's a way we can circumvent it. So I think that, that, that that's changed the world for the better and the cost has been way too high obviously because it's, it's, it makes you speechless often looking at what's going on. But I, but another part of it is to go to what you talk about Zionism as well because previously in the uk, in the Corbyn period we couldn't ever talk about Zionism. Even like people around Corbyn and stuff, we couldn't talk about the Israel Lobby we did on the fringes, but we were called cranks and dismissed us. But, but it was that people were so scared to touch those two things. And that has also changed. You know, we can talk openly about what is Zionism. It's a settler colonial ideology which, which is predicated on the supremacy of Jews over the indigenous people. And its intellectual godfather is Japotinsky, who was a fascist and admire of Mussolini and kind of his philosophy is one out. The kudniks adhere to all that. And the way that the Zionist lobby in the UK and I think around the world, its central goal has always been to present Zionism as a progressive force. They try and link it always with the history of persecution of Jewish people. When it's. Zionism and Judaism are two totally different things. But there's this real, real attempt to do that. And in fact, within the Labour Party, it was those organizations that really went for Corbyn, you know, because, because of his pro Palestine position, nothing else. He's never said anything anti Semitic. In fact, they picked on the, the most storied anti racist of his generation in Parliament by far, Jeremy Corbyn. He's been a longtime supporter of the Muslim community, the Jewish community, every minority, he's famous for it. So it was kind of like, you know, that Swift Boats Veterans for Truth thing with John Kerry where, right. Carl Rowe said we've got to go for his, his strength. That's what they did anyway. But they don't. Some of those groups call themselves like Israel, have Israel in the title, like the Labor Friends of Israel. But others like the Jewish Labor Movement say then what they said they're nothing to do with Israel, but in fact of run effectively as proxies for the Israeli embassy. And they did. I mean very. There's a very good journalist we got in the UK called Asa Winstanley, who I think you've had on the show before. But he, he wrote a book recently and he, but he was literally the only journalist really doing this at the time. There's more stuff coming out now, but it was, but it was completely suppressed and in fact I, I don't think the Corbyn administration dealt with it at all. They didn't really realize what they were up against because I think they were quite naive. You know, they kind of got catapulted into this position. No one thought Jeremy Corbyn was going to win in 2015. There was not many personnel around that he could. But they basically they did. They never pushed back against the, the smears, which is what they should, they said, they kept saying we're sorry, we, we don't. Any anti Semitism is wrong which everyone agrees with obviously, but, but they never said actually this is a witch hunt which has been instigated by the Israel lobby actually and other forces as well who is useful to, to destroy the one bit of hope we've had in the UK for many generations, which is what they should have said. And, but again I think all this has changed now because I think if, if, if we're looking at what's going on and we're not brave enough to speak in clear eyed terms about what Zionism is and what the Israel Lobby is because we're scared we're going to get smeared as anti Semites or, or, or bigots or whatever it is, then yeah, you, you've lost your humanity because we, it's too serious, you know, and I think that's. A lot of people have had that realization and are speaking out in a, in a clear throated way and hopefully it will continue. I mean I don't, I don't know whether it ends, I don't know what you think, but it seems to me that Zionism is dying in terms of the narrative. I think that I could talk to the UK side because we've got actually a lot of amazing activism in the UK against Israel and pro Palestine activism. All the biggest marches actually about Gaza have been in London and we have this group called Palestine Action which is actually making actual strides to shut down Israel, Israeli weapons factories, elbit factories in the uk. But there's a massive backlash from the state because, and there's polls that have come out recently. There was a poll that said 71. It was that the favorability for Israel was minus 71 in the UK and that was the lowest ever in recorded history. And so the population is, and wants an arms embargo on Israel. They want a ceasefire. But you've got this massive breach now between the ruling class Labour Party, Conservatives and pretty much the rest of them and the whole population and that's not sustainable for that long I don't believe. And what the state is doing in response is to try to discipline the population through legal means. So they, so they're using these laws that have been, that were passed to prescribe Hamas and Hezbollah which were actually done at the behest of the Israel Lobby by the way. Hezbollah was banned in the UK in 2019. But what the Terrorism act says in section 12 is that you cannot voice support for prescribed groups. Now Hamas and Hezbollah are prescribed, but they're now using that. They're wielding that legislation against pro Palestine activists. So Sarah Wilkinson, who's an independent journalist, had her house raided by 13 police. This is a woman who runs a Twitter account just giving updates and got it. She was bundled into a van. They threw the urna with her mom's ashes against the wall. She was held in a police station and interrogated. You had the week before, Richard Medhurst, another independent journalist who was detained for 23 hours in solitary confinement in, at Heathrow Airport, again under section 12 of the Terrorism Acts and charged under it. Richard Barnard, I was just at court the other day in London. He's been charged under section 12 of the Terrorism act for a speech he gave. So they are, they know they're losing and they know Zionism is losing because we're talking about it. People are seeing the real basis of it, which is, it's a settler colonial ideology which, which has no place in the 21st century. We, we left, we should have left all that behind. But the, but, but the repression is getting worse here and we don't have the culture of free speech that you have in the, in the U.S. but like whatever you think of Hamus and Hezbollah, you should, it's a massive attack on free speech that you can't speak freely about resistance groups around the world. It's, it's kind of tantamount to say to the US outlawing, saying you support the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. It's, it's, it's, it's a, it's an attack on free speech and it's an attack on the basics of freedom. But it's been done at the behest of the Israel lobby and they are clamping down massively now. But I don't think it will work because they can't put millions of us in prison. Well, maybe they can try, but, but, but the awakening that has happened here is incredible. And I see it in the United States as well. You know, like, look what happened with the student demonstrations. I was a student at UCLA and Columbia at different points in my 20s. And I remember I was a columnist on the UCLA student paper called the Daily Brune. And you couldn't say anything about Israel back then. Anything like you would get, Editors would tell you, don't say if you wrote anything mildly, you'd get attacked. And then you saw the ucla, all these students coming out doing an encampment. It was the same at Colombia. So things are changing and I think they know that. But what People are saying, and I think it's quite accurate, is that democracy is being, and free speech is being eroded in the US and the UK to defend the fascistic genocidal regime of Benjamin Netanyahu, which is an absolutely insane scenario. These are victories for freedom that have been won by centuries of popular struggles and they're all being dismantled to support this genocidal state, which is smaller than Wales.
- [49:50]
Chris Hedges
Yeah, well, they've come down very hard on the universities. The universities and colleges spent all summer with security firms, many linked to Israel, to impose all sorts of new rules. You can't have encampments, you can't have tables with leaflets, etc. Etc. So, yes, the response especially targeted at the student activists who perhaps the only people in the United States with a conscience, along with Jewish Voices for Peace and a few others, they've targeted them with very draconian means. I want to talk a little bit before we go about the transfer of manufacturing overseas. This is. You raise this issue in particular in your chapter in Honduras and the role of the US in essentially as the, as the protector of sweatshop labor. So you, after nafta, are able to move large industries, the auto industry, etcetera, over the border into Monterrey, Mexico. Workers who were once making 25, $30 an hour with union, union members with benefits, a pension plan, they could buy a house. They didn't need to work 70 hours a week, they could send their kids to college. That vanished, evaporated. And our work in China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, you know, it all becomes the sweatshop labor. But an important point in the enforcer of this sweatshop labor is the U.S. empire. And that's something that you write about in the book.
- [51:28]
Matt Kennard
Yeah, well, I mean, there's a whole section in the book, one of the four sections is about the empire at home and how the imperial elite in Washington and other places there, when, when they do have to defend this system, they'll, they will say, oh, well, we get lots of benefits from being engaged in the world. You know, for the people. These resources are coming back and, and America's prosperous because of it, but it's, it's all a lie. And you realize that when you start looking at the sorry state of the United States society, you know, like the huge levels of inequality, the poverty, the people without health, health care. It's outrageous when you've got the richest country in, in history and, and you have a situation like that, but that's by design. You know, all that wealth comes back and it's not distributed in society, in fact, the poor subsidize the rich because the military, their taxes go towards the military, which enforces the system, which then benefits the 1%. So it's a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich globally and domestically within the United States. And one of the main ways they do that is by offshoring production because it takes jobs away from Americans and gives them to the poor world, but not good jobs to the poor world. So they go there because they can undercut the wages and they can. In fact, often these sweatshops are built on special economic zones as well. And one of the facets of special economic zones and one of the incentives for corporations in the US Is that special economic zones have even less regulations than the national state on what, how you can treat labor and taxes and customs. So you send, so you open these sweatshops on a special economic zone, you pay the workers pittance, and you get all the resources out without having to pay customs or tax. So the state in Mexico or Haiti or wherever it is where they're offshoring this production doesn't benefit at all either. And that's by design, you know, so you just see that the coffers of the state are always the ones that never get increased. And it's, and it's the corporations that do that benefit and that operates domestically. And there, I mean, there was quite a lot of opposition to NAFTA within the United States and also within Mexico because there's a chapter on the, in the Book of Mexico, which is a kind of section on resistance and successful resistance. And obviously the Zapatistas rose up in, on the New year's day in 1994, on the first day of NAFTA because they want, they were rejecting the neoliberal model, the sweatshop model for Mexico. And they, it was a, it was a unarmed, well, nearly all unarmed uprising. They, they took control of San Cristobal de la Casas in where they were based, with like, guns carved out of wood, just symbolically. And, but, but they, they fought a battle and won. You know, there was 1996, the San Andreas Accords, gave them, well, not gave them. They won 13 autonomous zones within Chiapas. And so the book, I went to one called oventik and it's, it's amazing. And again, a story not many people know and it should, but it shows what can happen when this system is resisted. Because, and I, I do believe, and I think this is also the case with the previous book I did with corporate power like that these institutions project power so forcefully partly because they project this omnipotence and this idea that they can't be forced back. But you see time and time again that they often are paper tigers, that if there is a resistance, they don't know what to do and they can't handle it. And the Zapatistas, as I say, a ragtag army of unarmed, mostly peasants won these autonomous zones where the military still can't go in. And, but just to go back to the sweatshop point, the US Empire and this sweatshop model and the international development organizations, they're all intertwined, they're all part of the same system and they're all effectively the U.S. empire. You know, the U.S. empire is a system which runs for the benefit of corporate power. And in fact the book is the title of it is the Racket. And that comes from a speech by Smedley Butler, who signed up to the Marines in 1898 during the Spanish American War when he was 16. Spanish American War, by the way, is when historians say the overseas American empire actually began when they took on the possessions, when they won the war from Spain, like Philippines and Guam and Puerto Rico. But anyway, he, he, you'll know this story, but not a lot of people do in the UK I don't know if it's well known in the US but Smedy Butler was like, died the most decorated marine in U. S history. He was very, very senior. He fought in Haiti, Honduras, China during the Boxer Rebellion. But, but then later in life had this awakening about what he had been doing all those years. Because obviously you're told in the military and you're told in society at large, well, the military is about defending the national interests of America or Britain or wherever it is. And when he left, he realized actually, no, I wasn't defending American people, I wasn't defending their security. I was defending American corporate interests and enforcing corporate rule. And that the speech he gave, which became very famous, he says, I wasn't in Honduras or wherever it was for national security reasons. I was there for Brown Brothers bank in New York. And then he says, I was a high class muscle man for big business. Al Capone could operate in four districts, I operated on four continents. And he, and he said, he said war is a racket. So. And I think he's right. That's why I opened the book with that quote, because that's what I saw at the financial times. The US Empire, there's two elements. Obviously it does want geopolitical control as well. But the primary role of the US Empire is to make a global economy run in the interests of American corporate power. It's called an open door empire nowadays because it's not like old empires where you have formal garrisons of troops and formal colonies. But effectively they are formal colonies because you can't go against American corporate rule. And if you elect a leader who does, like Eva Morales will take you out, whether it be through intelligence agencies doing it through subversion. If that fails, we'll send in the military as a last resort. And you see it, as you said time and time again, throughout Latin America, Africa, Asia. And we need to, as the left or progressive forces or anyone interested in truth and progress, understand that the US is the major impediment to human progress. And like that William Bloom book called Killing Hope, I think that's a great title for a book because that's what it is, is wherever hope arises, that maybe things can be a bit different. Maybe humans can live at peace with each other. Maybe humans can actually benefit from the resources they're living on top of. All these things that we're told that are basic things that I think are very, very possible, they get smashed by the US State, by the US Military, by the CIA in infancy. And we need to fight back against the idea that there's anything benevolent or anything benign about the US Empire because that is a prevalent ideology which is just the opposite of the truth. In fact, it's Orwellian that anyone actually believes that.
- [58:50]
Chris Hedges
Great. That was Matt Kennard on his book the Racket. A Rogue Reporter Versus the American Empire. I wrote the introduction. It's a great book. I want to thank Christian and Sophia, Thomas, Diego and Max who produced the show. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.