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.
War-time Propaganda Poster by the Committee on Public Information circa 1917
At the end of World War I, those skilled in disseminating propaganda for the war movement within the multimedia government agency known as the Committee on Public Information transferred to the private sector and became the foundation for America’s colossal public relations industry. “We talk about American culture, but I think that is a misnomer; because the rise of the PR industry effectively inculcated new values: the hedonism, the consumerism, the cult of the self. All of this stuff was implanted,” said Hedges.
The significance of the then burgeoning PR industry, Hedges claims, is that it allowed corporations to instill consumerism as an inner compulsion in American society, which resulted in the annihilation of the liberal class by stripping away the mechanisms that prompted it to react to social injustice and grievances.
New liberal figures in the 1990s, such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, helped further empower this consumerist culture through the passing of legislation favorable to the expansion and unfettered control of the corporate enterprise. As an example, Hedges referred to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, brought about by then President Clinton, which deregulated the Federal Communications Commission and “allowed a consolidation of the media industry into roughly six corporate hands: Viacom, General Electric, Disney, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corps”.
Along with the domination of the majority of news and information fed to Americans, media corporations also played a role in shifting society from a more cognitive and active print-based culture to a submissive image-based culture bent on promoting the values of celebrity decadence and narcissism.
What makes this battle with corporate forces a fight for human survival, according to Hedges, is that, unlike American and European colonialism, there is not much left to exploit either in terms of a new untouched territory or pestilent indigenous people. Society’s awakening to this realization is emblematic of the Occupy movement and its supporters’ reactions to the injustices and grievances faced by their generation.
“People find the courage – they wake up, they understand. That is the Occupy movement. And it’s not going away; because the only response of the state is to physically eradicate it. This, for me, exposes how calcified, frightened and dead the system is,” said Hedges, who views the value of resistance not in its size, but in its ability to keep alive a narrative that opposes the status quo.
Turning his attention to the members of Occupy Montreal in the audience, he added: “What you’re doing is not small; it’s huge. It’s not going to be pleasant, it’s not going to be easy, but, in theological terms, we have to vanquish what are, in essence, the systems of death”.