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Chris Hedges: Malcolm X Was Right About America

Malcolm X, unlike Martin Luther King Jr., did not believe America had a conscience. For him there was no great tension between the lofty ideals of the nation—which he said were a sham—and the failure to deliver justice to blacks. He, perhaps better than King, understood the inner workings of empire. He had no hope that those who managed empire would ever get in touch with their better selves to build a country free of exploitation and injustice. He argued that from the arrival of the first slave ship to the appearance of our vast archipelago of prisons and our squalid, urban internal colonies where the poor are trapped and abused, the American empire was unrelentingly hostile to those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.” This, Malcolm knew, would not change until the empire was destroyed. ...

King was able to achieve a legal victory through the civil rights movement, portrayed in the new film “Selma.” But he failed to bring about economic justice and thwart the rapacious appetite of the war machine that he was acutely aware was responsible for empire’s abuse of the oppressed at home and abroad. And 50 years after Malcolm X was assassinated in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem by hit men from the Nation of Islam, it is clear that he, not King, was right. We are the nation Malcolm knew us to be. Human beings can be redeemed. Empires cannot. Our refusal to face the truth about empire, our refusal to defy the multitudinous crimes and atrocities of empire, has brought about the nightmare Malcolm predicted. And as the Digital Age and our post-literate society implant a terrifying historical amnesia, these crimes are erased as swiftly as they are committed. ...

The integration of elites of color, including Barack Obama, into the upper echelons of institutional and political structures has done nothing to blunt the predatory nature of empire. Identity and gender politics—we are about to be sold a woman president in the form of Hillary Clinton—have fostered, as Malcolm understood, fraud and theft by Wall Street, the evisceration of our civil liberties, the misery of an underclass in which half of all public school children live in poverty, the expansion of our imperial wars and the deep and perhaps fatal exploitation of the ecosystem. And until we heed Malcolm X, until we grapple with the truth about the self-destruction that lies at the heart of empire, the victims, at home and abroad, will mount. Malcolm, like James Baldwin, understood that only by facing the truth about who we are as members of an imperial power can people of color, along with whites, be liberated. This truth is bitter and painful. It requires an acknowledgment of our capacity for evil, injustice and exploitation, and it demands repentance. But we cling like giddy children to the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. We refuse to grow up. And because of these lies, perpetrated across the cultural and political spectrum, liberation has not taken place. Empire devours us all.

How Guantánamo Diary Escaped the Black Hole and Got Past the Censors (Mostly)

The first word of Guantánamo Diary is a black bar.

The book, in which Guantanamo detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi tells of his odyssey through overseas prisons and his torture and abuse by the US and its counterterrorism allies, is pockmarked with redactions left by military censors.

The diary was finally published last week, more than nine years after Slahi wrote it, and it jumped onto bestseller lists. But the details of how his lawyers fought for its release are still under seal – highlighting the secrecy that still surrounds everything to do with the U.S. military prison and the 122 men who remain there.

“The starting point is that everything that Mohamedou says, like anything that any Guantanamo detainee says, is considered classified and has to be cleared by the government,” said Hina Shamsi, the director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, who was involved in the negotiations for the manuscript’s release. ...

Slahi began to write his memoir in the summer of 2005, soon after he first met with attorneys. But, consistent with its policy of censoring communications from detainees, the government refused to approve it for release: Instead, the manuscript sat in a facility near Washington D.C., off-limits to anyone without the right security clearance. His attorneys, Shamsi said, fought to get it declassified, but that litigation remains under seal. Once they obtained an unclassified version, it could still only be read by Slahi’s legal team. It took further negotiations to get the government to approve it for public release. ...

For Larry Siems [editor of the book], censorship is at the core of Slahi’s story, and while the redactions sometimes impede his narrative, they serve a literary function as well.

“Secrecy was imposed in order for abuse to happen, and then more secrecy was imposed in order to cover it up,” said Siems. “The redactions are like the fingerprints of that longstanding censorship regime.”

March to Folly in Ukraine

The United States has just made an exceptionally dangerous, even reckless decision over Ukraine. Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader who ended the Cold War, warns it may lead to a nuclear confrontation with Russia.

Rule number one of geopolitics: nuclear-armed powers must never, ever fight.

Yet Washington just announced that by spring, it will deploy unspecified numbers of military “trainers” to Ukraine to help build Kiev’s ramshackle national guard. Also being sent are significant numbers of US special heavy, mine resistant armored vehicles that have been widely used in Afghanistan and Iraq. The US and Poland are currently covertly supplying Ukraine with some weapons.

The US soldiers will just be for training, and the number of GI’s will be modest, claim US military sources. Of course. Just like those small numbers of American “advisors” and “trainers” in Vietnam that eventually grew to 550,000. Just as there are now US special forces in over 100 countries. We call it “mission creep.”

The war-craving neocons in Washington and their allies in Congress and the Pentagon have long wanted to pick a fight with Russia and put it in its place for daring to oppose US policies against Iran, Syria and Palestine. What neocons really care about is the Mideast.

Some neocon fantasies call for breaking up the Russian Federation into small, impotent parts. Many Russians believe this is indeed Washington’s grand strategy, mixing military pressure on one hand and social media subversion on the other, aided by Ukrainian oligarchs and rightists. A massive propaganda campaign is underway, vilifying Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin as “the new Hitler.”

Back to eastern Ukraine. You don’t have to be a second Napoleon to see how a big war could erupt.

Greece, the US and the Neo-Liberal Coup

In Argentina in the early 2000s there was little confusion as to whose interests the I.M.F. served. The ‘public’ debt the I.M.F. was working to get repaid was formerly private debts that were socialized, bank and corporate liabilities converted to obligations of the Argentine people, not unlike the trillions in bank ‘assets’ dumped by the (George W) Bush and Obama administrations into Federal government agencies to save Wall Street in 2008. This conflation of private with public debt is a primary component of neo-liberal extraction. And the ‘privatization’ of Greek ‘assets’ now being repudiated by Syriza was used to loot Argentina by this international kleptocracy as a core I.M.F. policy. This is to suggest that the Troika’s austerity programs for Greece have little to do with theoretical economics and everything to do with Western imperial ambitions. The policies may have ‘logic’ as economic theory, but the logic emerged from several centuries of imperial practice.

Another way to see the issues is to ask where the U.S. Central Bank, the Federal Reserve, found the $4 trillion to buy financial assets through its QE (Quantitative Easing) programs? The money was conjured ‘out of thin air,’ by making digital entries against the assets being purchased. The E.C.B. similarly has fiat currency; it can conjure money at will. If an asset is needed to be booked to balance the Central Bank’s books, a nominal asset like the trillion dollar coin being proposed a while back in the U.S. would work just fine. The point is that the E.C.B. could technically, if not politically, resolve Greece’s public debt with a few keystroke entries. The debt is being used as a political and economic lever by the Troika, much as was the case in Argentina in the early 2000s and is currently the case in the U.S. The budget ‘deficit’ being used to sell austerity in the U.S. is a contrived fiction. It isn’t that the accounting isn’t ‘real,’ it is that it misrepresents for political purposes how government spending is really financed.

The point in uniting the victims of an engineered Great Depression in Greece with the plight of Argentinians in the early 2000s to that of the growing poor underclass in the U.S. is that the problems are social— class warfare, not a function of material limitations. Each of these circumstances represents a struggle for social resources; the differences are over economic distribution, not ‘natural’ limitations. ... The economic policies forced on Greece are being imposed by degree across the West. School systems in major U.S. cities like Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit are being systematically looted by neo-liberal ideologues and self-serving ‘managers’ for their own benefit. ... Public and private pensions are being cut under claims of material scarcity when the taxes and pay that were intended to fund them have been cut to benefit the wealthy. ...

The economic policies forced on Greece are more draconian than in the U.S. and European core, but be degree, not by type. Wall Street, which includes major German and French banks, has used manufactured crises to affect ‘soft’ coups around the globe for decades. Debt is used as a weapon. The Greek people have a very difficult battle to fight. But the neo-liberal coup is international. Americans and Northern Europeans who think they are on the ‘winning’ side just haven’t had their jobs and life savings stolen yet. To one degree or another, we are all Greeks now.