In this rare opportunity, The Uniter had the chance to speak with one of the last dissidents of the American Left, Chris Hedges. Author of nearly a dozen books, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a weekly columnist at Truthdig.com, Hedges has earned a reputation as an ally of progressive politics and social movements such as Occupy, and situated himself as a champion of social welfare and peace.

In this extended conversation, senior editor Harrison Samphir asks Hedges about recent developments in the Middle East, his most recent work with Joe Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, and the state of journalism today.

Beginning with the civil war in Syria – is this perhaps the most pivotal moment for the Middle East in the twenty-first century? We’ve seen many half-realized and deferred revolutions elsewhere (Libya, Egypt) but the Syrian conflict seems to be engulfing many of the great powers. How do you assess it?

I don’t think this is the most pivotal moment, no. The most pivotal moment in the Middle East is still the first Gulf War, because after that the United States began its military occupation of the region, establishing bases in Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Doha, etc. It culminated in the invasion of Iraq which reconfigured the power arrangements, upsetting the balance between Iraq and Iran. So this is just part of a continuation of a swath of destruction and violence which is exacerbating tensions between the United States and the Middle East and of course destabilizing the region as a whole. The fundamental issue is occupation. Until the United States withdraws its bases and troops from the region, the irritant of that occupation will trigger insurgencies and armed resistance and what the United States calls terrorism. What makes Syria problematic is its relationship with Iran and Hezbollah.

Coverage of the Syrian Civil War in North America, as with many before it, has often been misleading or obfuscated by the mainstream media, especially in the case of the recently alleged chemical weapons attacks. The topic of the corporate press is one you approach in many of your writings. To what extent are alternative news outlets galvanizing and informing people and have they been successful? Do you see a greater push against corporate media in the future, led in part by a concerted journalistic Third Wave?

First of all the American public isn’t buying it, 59% oppose the war. And I think there is a sort of war weariness after twelve years of war. There’s also a great deal of skepticism because the American public has been so lied to so often. And we see with the revelations about the NSA leaked by Snowden that they lie to us every week, including Obama. Claiming that are no breaches or violations when there are, claiming that there isn’t wholesale surveillance when there is. The mood in the United States is changing, and the response to the call to invade Syria is evidence of that change.

What is the role of social media and alternative media? Well, it’s role is what it always has been: to often shame the commercial or traditional media into doing their job. There’s been a physical as well as moral collapse of the traditional press, especially on the airwaves, and so the alternative voice of the alternative media has become more powerful when juxtaposed against this sort of craven obsequiousness to power, as well as the trivial celebrity gossip that dominates commercial networks. They’re seen as complicit as pushing the agenda of the power elite.

Can you comment on the state of journalism today, specifically how the future may look for young writers who speak in the language of class struggle, support social movements and engage in subversive intellectual thought?

The problem is that the monopoly that newsprint once had, connecting sellers with buyers, is now broken which will make it very hard for journalists to make a middle class income which they were able to make during that kind of heyday of newsprint. That means that journalists are going to be pushed back into the working class, and they’re going to struggle in the same way classical musicians and theatre actors struggle. Good journalism will exist but it will be pushed to the margins of society and the plight of those who practice journalism will be financial precariousness.

The youthful movements of Occupy and the Quebec student demonstrations are two prominent examples in North America. Are they just the beginning? What nonviolent methods might be pursued to take them a step further and achieve reforms for the majority that demand them?

The corporate state in Canada is beholden to global corporatism as much as the United States and it knows only one word and that’s “more”, it has no self-imposed limits. It’s always the ruling class that determines the configurations of resistance or revolt. The failure on the part of the state to respond rationally to the demands that pushed people into the Occupy encampments – and a rational response would mean a massive jobs program targeted at people under the age of 25, universal health care for all, a moratorium on foreclosures and bank repossessions, a forgiveness of student debt, that would be rational – but the state has not responded rationally and there’s no pressure internally or externally to make it respond, so things are getting worse and worse and worse. Slashing school budgets, cutting Head Start, a refusal to extend unemployment benefits means something will happen, eventually. Will it be called Occupy? Will it look like Occupy? Probably not. I think we have to look at the Occupy movement as a tactic, in the same way that Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the bus was a tactic, and then the Freedom Riders came a few years later. But that something is coming I have absolutely no doubt, because unregulated and unfettered capitalism, as Karl Marx understood it, is a revolutionary force.

The only hope we have is building a mass movement, the kind of movements we saw in Eastern Europe that pulled in half a million people. That’s it. That’s the only hope we have. The state wants us to speak in the language of violence because that they can dominate. All of our electronic communications are monitored, many of these groups are heavily infiltrated. I think we need to go back to Václav Havel’s 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless.” I’m not naive enough to tell you it’s going to work, but by adopting the tactics of the black bloc we’re playing into the hands of the state. They want people to be frightened by the protest movements, they want it to be severed from the mainstream, and they want an excuse to use overwhelming force to crush it.

What can you tell me about your most recent work, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt?

I think the title of the book was always Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, but when Joe Sacco and I began it, the revolt was just conjecture. Two years later, as we’re finishing the book, the Occupy movement emerges. We knew something was coming, but we didn’t know what – we didn’t anticipate the Occupy movement – but it gave us the opportunity to give a kind of a physical, concrete expression of the revolt we anticipated. It was kind of serendipity, it was fortuitous, but it gave us an arc that made the book far more complete and gave people a sense of the roots of the corporate devastation that drove people into these protest encampment and into the streets.

In Death of the Liberal Class, you discuss the separation of art from politics and the demobilization of independent thought through hyper-individualized consumerism. I believe you call it the “cultural embrace of simplification.” Are these forces ones we can successfully counteract within a capitalist society, or are drastic reforms necessary?

Again, they can be counteracted but people aren’t remunerated for it. At a certain point, you know, you have to pay your mortgage or your rent, and that’s the problem. Canada still has, if Harper hasn’t cut it, funding for the arts. He’s slashing and burning on behalf of his corporate overlords. But it’s really important because art gives a kind of expression to voices and dilemmas, and creates realities or gives us other lenses into our own reality that makes transformation possible. That’s what art is, it’s not simply about entertainment.

Anything that has to do with these fundamental issues of beauty or truth, whether it’s art or journalism or critical thinking, the corporate state is working overtime to snuff out. So the arts are one of the expressions of a society that the corporate state seeks to either co-opt or marginalize and crush.

Postmodern thought, pluralism and relativism are quite common within the Academy today, but have they infiltrated journalism too heavily?

Relativist thought has been destructive within journalism and the academy. I am an enemy of that movement. Tolerance was a word Martin Luther King never used and the problem with the Occupy movement is that it didn’t understand there are certain things you should not tolerate, not everything is acceptable. When you’re building a movement you need to make moral distinctions and moral decisions as well as strategic and tactical decisions, which I think is part of my criticism of the Black Bloc. Many times activists are very naive in terms of underestimating the resources that the corporate state has put in to destroy what we’re doing. Both in terms of infiltration and in terms of finding the weak points within the movement. For instance, you had the NYPD in New York, dropping off released prisoners from Rikers, homeless people in the park. And they knew how to short circuit or overload the park so that it would implode. And activists, by the end, were staying up all night long in de-escalation teams. We have to be smart too, because the resources of the state are working overtime to find out how to break these movements, and that means we have to recapture the kind of discipline of old radical movements, even the militancy of old radical movements where certain things aren’t acceptable. After we lost Zuccotti, there was a big push to get an area owned by Trinity Church down near Duarte Square, and one of the reasons that the Occupy activists wanted it is because it had cyclone fencing with entrances and exits, so they could actually control the inflow and outflow. They realized this sort of open encampment would not be replicated again. But, yeah, this whole relativism has been very destructive to those of trying to build movements, but it’s also contaminated the academy itself where nobody seems to stand for anything.

I placed myself physically in El Salvador, in Sarajevo, in Gaza, where people were being horrifically repressed, and used my status as a reporter at the New York Times to give a voice to those people – it’s often very dangerous work. But I didn’t want to go to Washington, I didn’t want to follow around ambassadors, I didn’t want to report on the power elite.

An abbreviated version of this interview ran in the September 19 print edition. View that article here.