– SFU
Noted academic and journalist Chris Hedges spoke to a sold-out audience and numerous webcast viewers on Feb. 19 as part of SFU’s spring 2015 “President’s Dream Colloquium on Obedience and Disobedience.”
Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, known for covering wars and conflict in the Middle East as well as in the Balkans during his career as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He has written numerous books on war, imperialism, religion, and society.
He sat down with The Peak before his lecture to touch on topics frequently discussed in his works.
The Peak: With reference to the idea of the “Rules of Revolt,” how should citizens, especially students, go about revolting against institutions? Does tying yourself to trees or bulldozers work anymore, or do people need to go higher up and try new things?
Hedges: Well, I mean this is the dilemma. [. . .] The bottom line is that those [problems] won’t stop unless you blow them up. But if you blow them up, you’ll spend the rest of your life in prison. And that is the dilemma, and you have it with the tar sands.
[Seeing] the corporate coup d’état which has taken in place in Canada as it has in the United States, they could care less what citizens want. They do what the corporate exploiters want.
And that creates a real problem for those of us who want to resist because appealing to the centres of power no longer works. Acts of mass civil disobedience [are] all we have left.
P: Regarding radical groups like ISIS, what should religious communities in places like Canada and the US, especially Muslim communities, do to counteract radicalization within their communities and bigotry from the outside?
H: Well it’s the bigotry that creates the radicalization. [When] you render a people voiceless and when you dehumanize them — which has happened I think towards Muslims, certainly in the United States — then they are going to be driven in the arms of groups like that.
I saw that in the former Yugoslavia. People were driven in the arms of ethnic nationalists because of abuse by the dominant Serb majority, [or] the dominant Croat majority. If you can’t get justice within a particular system of power then you are inevitably going to be drawn to those groups that are fighting back against the dominant power. I think that is the danger of ISIS.
P: So to follow up on that, how should governments and institutions approach relations with Muslim communities, or do they even have an interest to stop radicalization?
H: ISIS is kind of a gift to the American war machine. [. . .] Extremism always plays off of extremism. And as western societies become more extremist, they need extremists who are really the mirror image of themselves. And what happens is that the same middle or majority [. . .] is silenced, marginalized, and finally shut out of the debate.
And that’s where we’re headed. So I’m very worried because when we suffer another catastrophic terrorist attack, the ideological, cultural, and social ground has already been set — [that] Muslims are inhuman, basically — for violence against Muslims. I’m very worried about it.
P: I think we’ve seen a lot of discussion around free speech lately. I’ve read that you’ve been disinvited to speak at the University of Pennsylvania. I’m wondering in your experience as a journalist how have you seen free speech undermined in various ways, by the media and institutions?
H: The parametres now of acceptable debate [are] so narrow. It is ridiculous. [. . .] I mean like, the debate over ISIS is should we just bomb ISIS, or should we bomb ISIS and send troops? That’s a debate.
[The media] lock people who offer a radical critique out, or at best they put on for three or four minutes and that is to make you speak in clichés. [. . .] So it’s effectively made actual debate impossible. It’s a kind of ‘faux debate.’
And so that has become a very good mechanism for perpetuating corporate global imperial power, because it is never questioned by either side of the supposed two sides of a debate. [. . .] It’s kind of frightening what’s happened.
