ANNOTATED
Chris Hedges on Christopher Hitchens (radio interview)
Christopher Hitchens is remembered here by Chris Hedges (above), who faced off against Hitchens in his writing and public debate about U.S. foreign policy and Hitchens’ brand of atheism. Chris Hedges is the author of books including “The World As It Is”, “Death of The Liberal Class”, “Empire of Illusion”, and “I Don’t Believe In Atheists.” (Intro courtesy by CBC).
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Commentary by Patrice Greanville
Although barely six minutes long, I found the above interview by Hedges with CBC unwittingly revealing about Chris Hedges, and especially about the self-imposed cognitive boundaries that well-educated liberals like him apparently use to stave off the danger of Marxist tools “infecting” their ruminations. It is well known that Hedges was trained at Harvard in divinity studies, and that he takes religion seriously. His extremely eloquent fulminations against the [capitalist] status quo, however, fall short of the mark because Hedges seems to want to have it both ways: he works to get rid of the ills of capitalism but refuses to endorse unequivocally a true socialist future (as opposed to a class collaborationist social democratic one), let alone one based on “communism”.
The contradiction is interesting because in 2008 Chris —in my view a left-liberal or social democrat—declared himself “a socialist” yet this has not eliminated his contempt and frequent attacks on the supposedly “totalitarian twins”, fascism and communism, always a false equation, and in the case of communism, a shopworn liberal slander.
Without indulging in long-winded polemics about what really constitutes capitalism, fascism, communism, socialism, or, of equal significance, what some have called, “real existing communism”, it’s worth noting that those who equate communism with fascism do so in bad faith, by disregarding the historical record or denying the way large social forces and unpredictable events shape historical outcomes. In fact, to deny that the historical record has something to say about the good or bad of a given system is to deny that history itself matters.
That means we must weigh both the historical record and the inherent political DNA of a given system before coming up with such equations. And when we do that it is soon clear that it’s logically impossible to equate socialism & communism with fascism. It’s just a matter of intellectual honesty, supported by a fair grasp of the basic facts underscoring such comparisons.
Today’s political antipodes
The great unresolved conflict of our time is not between what liberals like to call the “totalitarian tyrannies” (i.e., fascism, communism) and “capitalist democracies”. It’s actually between capitalism/fascism on one side, and socialism (and its higher phase, communism), on the other. The facts are straightforward, and in passing illuminate why socialism has been so ferociously resisted wherever it arose, while capitalism had a relatively easy time replacing feudalism as the dominant social paradigm.
Feudalism and capitalism have much more in common than the latter cares to admit. After a process that lasted centuries, an emergent capitalist class replaced the old, literally rotten and obsolete regime with the new class, but both retained their respect for and allegiance to class divisions. Put another way, one class (capitalist) displaced another (feudal), but social parasitism lived on, actually strengthened and amplified by the vigor of the younger system. In the case of socialism, there can be no point of convergence or reconciliation. Socialism and communism do not just aim to replace the capitalists with another class; they aim to finish social parasitism off once and for all. No wonder, then, that they meet with such fierce opposition.
The totalitarian equation revisited
So, recapitulating: Are socialism and fascism totalitarian twins to be shunned and resisted at all costs? We won’t waste time here wondering why so many liberals, including a man as gifted as Chris Hedges, embrace such half-truths. We’ll leave that for another article. Suffice it to say that many, perhaps most, have simply absorbed and regurgitate without realizing the fuller implications, the crude, Cold War invidious cartoon images of the Soviet Union (or China, Cuba, etc.), a fervid cottage industry among intellectuals in the United States and “the West” now for almost a century. Still, while, as some say, we’re all entitled to our opinions, we’re certainly not entitled to our facts. The record is clear in this regard.
Despite elaborate attempts at concealment, and while paying plenty of lip service to the higher virtues, capitalism and fascism (its brutal bastard child), are inherently antisocial, and most definitely the wrong road toward a social peace based on social justice. Just consider a few of this hypocritical duo’s “non-negotiable, defining” traits:
- Both worship on the altar of blatant inequality (and the deepening thereof); hence all forms of egalitarianism or “levelling” are seen as anathema or criminal by the state;
- Both see nothing wrong with the most extreme forms of exploitation of humans and nature on the basis of simple “superiority” (the latter defined unilaterally and of course self-servingly), “property rights”, and other constructs;
- Both welcome frequent or even constant war as a means of conquest and dominion and to maintain control over the masses;
- Governance rests on the Big Lie, repeated endlessly by [in effect] a totalitarian system of propaganda;
- In their praxis, both tolerate pervasive racism (fascism makes it a core governing value);
- Both cynically exploit the most rabid forms of jingoism;
- Profoundly hierarchical and classist, both are fundamentally antithetical to authentic democracy;
- Capitalism worships and depends on constant economic expansion, a belief that threatens all planetary life.
That such experiments may have foundered, largely as a result of all-out capitalist hostility, including overt and covert war, unremitting destabilization efforts, etc., does not erase this central truth.
So what is Chris Hedges? A liberal? A socdem? A real socialist? As long as he continues to excoriate Marxian socialism as a form of “secular fundamentalism” (and this not to deny that dogmatists do exist in Marxist groups as they exist in all types of political formations), a leftist creed riddled with rigidities and—the capital sin—a “lack of nuance” in the contemplation of human events, he will remain a prisoner of his own prejudices and no more than a self-satisfied fire-breathing anticommunist liberal. Which is regrettable, as Hedges, obviously a man of principle, has done enormous service to the antiwar cause, anticorporatism in general, remains a lucid and acerbic critic of mainstream liberals, and is currently an eager participant in the OWS movement. Speaking in religious terms, as far as Chris Hedges is concerned, I hope for an early epiphany.
PATRICE GREANVILLE is Editor in Chief of The Greanville Post.
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