By: Theodora Tsentas
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges
“What angle do you think I should take?” This, or a similarly phrased question, was what Chris Hedges asked ten minutes before he was scheduled to go on-stage and give a keynote address for the Media@McGill event, “Media, Politics and Protest Camps in the Occupy Social Movement” last Friday at the Grande Bibliothèque in Montreal.
His question would have made any event planner uneasy; but, assured that what the audience wanted to hear was his perspective – whether or not it was American-centric – Hedges went on to give a seamless one-hour talk, complete with citations, without a single piece of paper prompting him along.
Hedges could have easily captivated his audience by launching into his first-hand experience of Occupy – a movement he has staunchly supported to the point of facing arrest in New York City for joining a protest outside the headquarters of investment bank, Goldman Sachs. The angle he chose was not as personalized, but perhaps even more pertinent.
Drawing on his experience as a journalist, social critic, and activist, Hedges presented a broader view of the Occupy movement by relating it to America’s history of populist movements and their decimation at the hands of a forceful system of mass propaganda and an image-based culture.
“I spent 20 years outside the United States and, during that time, my country went through a coup d’état in slow motion,” he said, referring to his two decades spent as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Central America, Africa, and the Balkans. From a nation where radical and populist movements were something of a status quo at the beginning of the twentieth century – with strong unions like the Wobblies and socialist publications like Appeal to Reason amassing a great following – America witnessed a gradual decimation of structures that had been aimed at furthering the interests of ordinary people.
According to Hedges, the decline of social movements in the United States was a result of World War I and its creation of a modern system of mass propaganda so effective, it managed to seduce even hardened radicals and intellectuals into supporting the war movement: “For the first time in the history of mass propaganda, we had those who were disseminating information drawing on the understanding of crowd psychology and mass psychology as pioneered by [Gustave] Le Bon, [Wilfred] Trotter and Sigmund Freud. They understood that people were not moved by fact and reason, but by the manipulation of emotions”.
As such, the emotional state of permanent fear, combined with a continuous psychosis of war and the search for internal enemies, was used as a tool of indoctrination by those in power even in a post-war setting - much like Naomi Klein advocates in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007). It was through the successful implementation of this tactic that America came to see, as Hedges calls it, the “disemboweling of its democracy” and the suppression of popular resistance.
