The Chris Hedges Report

• The Shared Mythological History of Israel and the US (w/ Joan Scott) | The Chris Hedges Report

  The narratives surrounding Israel and their genocidal campaign against the Palestinians took decades to create and embed into the West’s psyche. The Holocaust, decades after its end, became a central part of the Jewish and Israeli identity. Enemies of the Israeli state were conflated with Nazis. The physical location of Israel became essential to Christian evangelicals who believe the second coming of Jesus Christ was to take place there.   The late Amy Kaplan, in her book, Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance, explored how these narratives developed through popular culture and the media’s reporting on the Israeli government’s actions throughout the 20th century, particularly in the United States. Professor Joan Scott, professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and adjunct professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss Kaplan’s book and how prevalent it is in the face of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.   “Part of the invincible victim story is that Jews have to always be alert about defending themselves against any sign that the Holocaust is about to reappear and then attribute it to Palestinians, the possibility that they will bring another Holocaust,” Scott says. “So the whole defense industry of Israel, the whole occupation of Gaza and the West Bank become a way of arguing against the possibility of another Holocaust.”   When it comes to Christian Zionism, Scott explains that cynicism in the Israeli government tolerates the antisemites within these groups “because they're bringing a large sector of the American population, a powerfully politically influential sector of the American population, certainly now with Trump, to support the activities that Israel is engaging in.”

  --------  

  51:19
• Facing the Climate Crisis and Human Mortality (w/ Eiren Caffall) | The Chris Hedges Report

  In a world gripped by daily catastrophes, there is one that affects all but lacks the attention it deserves. The climate crisis — pervaded by ecological collapse, war, endless resource accumulation fueled by capitalism — is the issue of our time. The warning signs are there but as author Eiren Caffall tells host Chris Hedges, people are not able to handle the facts regarding the “fragility of our ecosystem, and [they] just don't really have a great way of managing the emotional impact of that.”   Caffall joins Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss her novel, All the Water in the World, and her memoir, The Mourner’s Bestiary. She explains that climate talk is often a tough pill to swallow because it deals with ideas of impermanence: “I think we are struggling to talk about our climate grief, our experience with the eco-collapse as a collective, as a planet who are all confronted with the evidence of our mortality.”   As someone who has dealt with loss and trauma her whole life as a result of inheriting polycystic kidney disease, a genetic illness that has plagued her family for over 150 years, Caffall employs a unique perspective when it comes to preserving her family’s stories and art.   “That sense of it is vital to protect whatever stories we can in the face of great loss is kind of baked into my background, my childhood, my understanding of my role as an adult to tell the stories of the dead, to hold on to the culture of those folks, to make sure that there's a continuance,” she tells Hedges.   Caffall understands the need for stories like hers to create the empathy that is lacking in a world that continually sees violence as an answer to problems. “I just think actually it's that vulnerability and that presence that's the real tool that we need to be able to move carefully through the world that we're being confronted with at this moment and in a possible bleaker future.”

  --------  

  46:52
• The Dark Money Game (w/ Alex Gibney) | The Chris Hedges Report

  On this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Chris Hedges speaks with filmmaker Alex Gibney about Gibney’s documentary series The Dark Money Game, which examines the “labyrinth of mirrors” that facilitates untraceable corruption through the American political system. Although both the Democratic and Republican parties have served the interests of the billionaire class since well before the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission Supreme Court ruling in 2010, the removal of restrictions on political spending created a system by which corporations could route millions of dollars in bribes through an intricate, opaque network of nonprofit organizations and super PACs.    FirstEnergy, a failing Ohio nuclear power operator, exploited this network to pay $60 million to former Ohio State Representative Larry Householder, in exchange for his support of a “Clean Energy” bill that would award FirstEnergy $1.3 billion in benefits. Ohio Confidential, the first documentary in Gibney’s series, follows the affair, which was subject to an FBI investigation, and which offers a view into mechanisms of illegitimate influence which are rarely visible to the public. Nonetheless, Hedges notes, the FirstEnergy story is likely a “microcosm of the whole system.”    The second film in the series, Wealth of the Wicked, portrays the contradictory but effective partnership between the anti-abortion Christian right and the billionaire class, which has used a variety of sordid tactics to sway the Supreme Court towards conservative and pro-corporate decisions. For example, Gibney describes how wealthy donors would “engage in a kind of romance” with justices, offering expensive gifts and pursuing “friendships that ultimately would have the effect of turning their perspectives...”   The faster the dark money flows through the American political system, the greater the power of the billionaire class to oppose regulations and steal wealth. “It's a series of interlocking favors,” Gibney observes, “but all these interlocking favors, which—let's face it—are traditional tools of the political system… are made possible and made far more corrupt by the application of tens of millions of dollars, which to the public is completely invisible.”

  --------  

  48:33
• The West Serves as Israel's Police (w/ Richard Medhurst) | The Chris Hedges Report

  Richard Barnard, Sarah Wilkinson, Asa Winstanley and Richard Medhurst. These are some of the canaries in the coal mine for what is to come in the West as the region’s elite quickly becomes Israel’s international police. Medhurst joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to talk about his own experiences in the United Kingdom and Austria, where federal agents and police arrested him and searched his home under draconian counterterrorism laws. “I was just trying to tell the truth as best as I could with the facts that we had at that time and that's it. And I think they're trying to make an example out of me, definitely,” Medhurst tells Hedges. Medhurst points to Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 in the UK as one of the broad laws being used to silence people like him. “If they really want to, they can charge you for just saying a simple fact just because the fact is uncomfortable to the government or perhaps they can twist it into saying you're glorifying a group but it's not true,” he explains. For Medhurst, the UK pinned Schedule 12(1A) on him, which he explains “has never been used before, and escalated it straight to an arrest.” They then took his “fingerprints, [his] DNA, [and] they put [him] in jail for 24 hours.” Despite his accurate reporting, Medhurst says that the validity of what one says does not matter when it conflicts with the establishment line. “You're not glorifying anyone. You're just stating a fact, but they can still charge you. That's what's so dangerous about this law,” he said. Austrian security service agents still possess most of Medhurst’s journalistic tools. There is still no clear time table as to when he will get his tools back. As Medhurst explained: “It wasn't just my phone and my laptop, which I also use for work, which are my work tools, but …you know, hard drive adapters, things that don't even have data on them, analog microphones. Why would you do that to someone unless you're trying to make a point that you don't want them to continue their work?”

  --------  

  42:21
• Israel’s Eradication of Gaza’s Healthcare System (w/ Dr. Feroze Sidhwa) | The Chris Hedges Report

  If anyone can witness the genocide in Gaza with utmost clarity, it would be medical professionals working there. Their accounts continue to be as harrowing as those of journalists and Gazans themselves, stripped of rhetoric and left with only raw truth. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a general, trauma and critical care surgeon in California, has been to Gaza twice and he joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report. “There is no serious health system in Gaza anymore,” Sidhwa tells Hedges. Instead, what’s left of hospitals are mere buildings filled with medical professionals stripped of the equipment vital to saving lives, refugees seeking anything more than tents and endless streams of people barely surviving the constant onslaught of bombs. Sidhwa explains the gut wrenching details of treating people mangled by bombs, children shot in the head and the inability to save people because of the lack of basic equipment. While describing the treatment of a six-year-old boy with severe shrapnel injuries, Sidhwa explains, “In the flagship hospital of any third world country, this kid could have survived. But at Nasser [Medical Complex], we don't have the right types of pressures, the right types of critical care medications and even just simple things like a pediatric ventilator, which just wasn't available. So he died 12 hours later.” The situation in Gaza, as Sidhwa details, is morbidly bleak: “I don't know how women who need C-sections will get them. I don't know how people who even just have regular role general surgery problems will be able to get them. I don't know how a kid that has asthma will be able to get albuterol. I don't know how somebody with heart disease will be able to get their medications. Just leaving aside the trauma. And then on top of that…the whole population is being starved. Literally no food has gone into Gaza for six weeks.”

  --------  

  1:04:58

More Arts podcasts

Trending Arts podcasts

About The Chris Hedges Report