The military-industrial-complex has grown into a monster so powerful that even its earliest critics likely never foresaw its evolution. In the age of Big Tech's rising power, can anything stop it?
Wars will never end as long as the monetary system remains unchanged. Humanity doomed itself when it created “artificial wealth” and the ability to amass it by a few. And war making is one of the biggest ways to accumulate such “artificial wealth” if not the biggest way. The only true wealth is a healthy ecosystem and empathy for others.
I'm sure most people are aware that the need to increase our technology infrastructure to compete with China is bogus. But, what the govt does not say is that around 50% of Palantir revenue comes from China.
So grateful for this interview--thank you! Can't think of a better New Year's gift. As one of the seven people left in the middle class, I will read this book and do what I can to make change happen. Mr. Hartung and Mr. Hedges have done a bang up job with this interview. Good health and safe travels to them and everyone here.
And not on Amazon! I mean, the book is there, but I'll probably buy it at Warwicks (local, but they never tell me when the book arrives if they need to order it) or Powells in Portland, which I adore.
William Hartung is the first writer to mention what I have long suspected: that we got here after forty years of films and video games starring 'lone heroes' who often fight against authority, amplified by declining educational standards and a 'me first' attitude combined with worship of technology for technology's sake.
What a writer I first encountered in Grad School and have recently rediscovered in our gool local bookstore.......Donna Haraway, calls 'the prick story'.
She's revived an essay I taught my high school students by Ursala le Guin, called "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction"........and is arguing that we need to tell new stories....
Stories of the earth, and of the people trying to repair the damage created by these Prick Stories......of the isolated hero who saves us all from the invaders....action plots that are seldom believable or possible in the actual terrain we all live in.
The free floating fear such Action Flicks produce is a sideline I think........but it keeps the Weapons of Mass destruction being produced.
In Amerika and in Israel as it turns out.............not Iraq as that original 'coalition of the willing' had us so easily believing in 25 short years ago.
Countries capitals offices back rooms and board rooms
The characters caught up in this web of deceit are captured by their well documented inspections and revealed for what they are
The notes on each chapter are a library in and of themselves providing a great opportunity for further research
If you want your country back... get this book to understand how the War Machine was manufactured...it’s a good manual for how our collective efforts can begin to dismantle the pieces and sell them for scrap ...creating a way forward that respects life
My love & gratitude goes out to William Hartung and Ben Freeman ✌🏼❤️🙏🕉
What a valuable conversation. Thank you. It put me in mind of what the two alluded to in their brief discussion of whistleblowers. Ernie Fitzgerald was a U.S. Air Force official who, against the advice of his colleagues, testified before Congress about cost overruns and tech failures in the “defense” industries, including the failure of Lockheed Martin’s C-5A transport plane. For his trouble, he was fired by Nixon. Fitzgerald’s suit for retaliation resulted in the 1982 Supreme Court decision, Nixon v. Fitzgerald, in which the Court held that sitting presidents have absolute immunity from civil suits. Our whistleblowers have not fared well, from Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning to John Kiriakou (who was imprisoned for blowing the whistle on torture) to lesser known individuals.
I will get Mr. Hartung’s book. Am currently reading “Gilded Rage,” by Jacob Silverman, about the tech industry and many of its players, which discusses, among other things, their increasing dominion over the military industrial complex. It’s hard for ordinary citizens, even collectively, to combat this level of wealth and control. Thanks to Mr. Hartung for encouraging us to try.
I am wishing a better New Year for us all, and thank you Chris and The Chris Hedges Report community.
Yes..........and given there are few new markets left on overshoot earth.........Capitalism is busy doing what Marx warned us it would do: Cannibalizing itself.
PS: That's you and me eventually....once they finish destroying the people's in the 2nd and 3rd worlds.
@ingamarie: may i humbly suggest '2nd' and '3rd' worlds be put in quotation marks? there is only one world, i.e. one planet earth, which the insatiably greedy are busy destroying, not least by trying to CON_vince us that: "peace does not pay!"
While that may be the ultimate reality........only one planet, everywhere beleaguered, it is not the way the majority see it. If it were, the charade going on in Israel would have been shut down by now.
Instead, a bogus Cease Fire got the Zionists their dead back, and now Israel is banning all aid groups with 'trumped up' claims that they employ Hamas operatives............and moving into the final stage of disappearing 'a third world people'.
IF WE WERE LIVING ON ONE PLANET, PART OF ONE WORLD........THE CITIZENS OF SAID WORLD WOULD BE IN THE STREETS IN THEIR MILLIONS......demanding that the pychopaths who divide and conquer us into empires and colonies do something of face the consequences.
Changing our 'language' is one thing. Changing our passivity, indifference, and cowardice, quite another.
i agree. and in one truly ideal world nobody would be mega-rich while we'd DARE to share fairly what's there bc we CARE. no one would have to take to the streets to demand more than just the bare minimum. ["free your mind, and the rest will follow!" sang en vogue in 1992.]
i meet many people who shrug their shoulders saying: "things have always been the way they are. we can't change the course of events, anyway." those who divide and lull us into indifferent passivity do thorough jobs.
mean_while, people die by the [tens of] thousands, not just in gaza and the west bank. the further out of our sight and the darker they are, the less they concern or move us, alas. while even civil disobedience gets criminalized, i take courage from william hartung's & chris hedges' determination to "fight the good fight" ...
We've been first worlders forever......most of us watching what a feminist theorist by the name of Donna Haraway calls 'the prick story'....action violence and the fantasy hero.....over and over again.......
While the actual alpha males gobble up most of the world's wealth....and blame poverty on the kids who are the real victims of their 'wealth creation' schemes......
I find it very difficult to maneuver my way through a world where I have friends that I have attended peace protests with that now take it as an article of faith that we should be engaged in war Ukraine (so long as we don't send our sons and daughters) and are slowly coming to be uneasy about the Gaza genocide. But Hartung's book likely lays out how being at war is the just part of the ocean we swim in, the air we breathe. This war addiction is our national sickness a multi system failure syndrome that has generous dollops of greed, racism, Nationalism and Christian Nationalism. And I do not see a country that can fix itself from within since what remained of our functioning government is being aggressively degraded in the 2025, the year we just ended. We're not even one year into Trump's presidency but don't mistake me for saying that a President Harris would have been vastly better. This is an acceleration of what has already been happening.
Listening to American tV as I do now........the scariest part is how left of centre commentators think they are........as they debate whether the second strike on one boat might be a war crime.............while easily calling Maduro a 'thug' and pretending that everyone of those boats shot out of the water weren't acts of gangster murder.
American regime change operations have been going on since the end of WWII. Most Americans continue to be blase about it......if they're even aware of the death machine your country has become. Speaking from Canada...most of us have our elbows up, but our brains in neutral.......we're unaware of the extent of the carnage as well.
Being smarter than we think we are being an easy game to play, at the heart of empire.
We live in a corrupt country. It makes me nauseous and sick! Add to that we are now a country that regularly breaks domestic and international laws and illegally overthrows governments, such as in Venezuela, which destabilizes countries and the world. We are heading in a catastrophic direction.
the "entire culture shift!" we need can't come soon enough! instead of "dividing and ruling!" we should DARE to share fairly what's there, if we really CARE - even while arms makers CON_tinue to make us believe that "peace does not pay!" it does. war is not a must. peace is.
THANK YOU so much, william hartung and chris hedges, for calling the many spades spades, for spelling out all the challenges we face, and for showing us, again, that we're not alone, working to effect the required changes. may the platforms available to you up to now continue to be available in the future so you can encourage & convince [tens of] thousands of people to jump off the fences they're sitting on and join the struggle to make life more than just bearable for the many, rather than for the insatiably indifferent, the greedy and destructive few!
mr hartung's mentioning "a lot of the hawks have never fought, have not seen war" reminds me that, much to my dismay!, my country's chancellor wants to make my country the "biggest military power" in europe. neither he, nor any of his fear-/war-mongering ministers ever experienced the pains, traumas, losses battlefields bring.
There was a reference to Seymour Melman. Go to Billmoyers.com, do a search for "Seymour Melman," see the "World of Ideas" episode with him (takes about a minute to start). Nearly 36 years ago the nearly exact same discussion was taking place then, 'cept now we're ever so much deeper in the hole, with so much less resolve to get us out of it. We're done for.
As with pretty much the overall situation in this country, I think that two points raised about are the war machine are most salient.
At the conclusion, there was talk of the need for mass, united movements in order to deal with the threats posed here. This followed the point made earlier, the aspect that on which this is contingent, but also not imminent, at least as things look at this point: something like a cultural change is needed.
The shift in American society and culture to what we now live has occurred over decades.
The question is how the cultural, and subsequent political shift away from what we have might occur.
Society seems a lot like an amoeba, changing direction in response to internal and external conditions. There is no central guiding intelligence. The nucleus just directs functions to maintain and reproduce it's life. It can be influenced to some degree, but the amoeba goes where it will, and there is something like an unfortunate inertia countered by a blind reactiveness to it's motion.
I do think that the continuance of voices like those in the Chris Hedges Report are crucial in keeping this possibility alive.
Our one advantage over the amoeba is that some of the protoplasmic residents of the human society do have a degree of conscious intention, and if enough them move in a certain direction, it can form a pseudopod that moves the whole thing.
But they seem of about equal intelligence overall.
Wars will never end as long as the monetary system remains unchanged. Humanity doomed itself when it created “artificial wealth” and the ability to amass it by a few. And war making is one of the biggest ways to accumulate such “artificial wealth” if not the biggest way. The only true wealth is a healthy ecosystem and empathy for others.
As long as The State remains unchallenged
Mr. Hedges, Mr. Hartung, THANK YOU! Happy new year, y'all. Love you guys.
I'm sure most people are aware that the need to increase our technology infrastructure to compete with China is bogus. But, what the govt does not say is that around 50% of Palantir revenue comes from China.
I thought that too when i thought that the state is not a threat to society
like what was entity who had A-bombs and N- bombs ?
So grateful for this interview--thank you! Can't think of a better New Year's gift. As one of the seven people left in the middle class, I will read this book and do what I can to make change happen. Mr. Hartung and Mr. Hedges have done a bang up job with this interview. Good health and safe travels to them and everyone here.
Marcia. I too will (try) to get Mr. Hartung’s book. There’s no way I could remember the
immense information talked
about.
And not on Amazon! I mean, the book is there, but I'll probably buy it at Warwicks (local, but they never tell me when the book arrives if they need to order it) or Powells in Portland, which I adore.
William Hartung is the first writer to mention what I have long suspected: that we got here after forty years of films and video games starring 'lone heroes' who often fight against authority, amplified by declining educational standards and a 'me first' attitude combined with worship of technology for technology's sake.
What a writer I first encountered in Grad School and have recently rediscovered in our gool local bookstore.......Donna Haraway, calls 'the prick story'.
She's revived an essay I taught my high school students by Ursala le Guin, called "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction"........and is arguing that we need to tell new stories....
Stories of the earth, and of the people trying to repair the damage created by these Prick Stories......of the isolated hero who saves us all from the invaders....action plots that are seldom believable or possible in the actual terrain we all live in.
The free floating fear such Action Flicks produce is a sideline I think........but it keeps the Weapons of Mass destruction being produced.
In Amerika and in Israel as it turns out.............not Iraq as that original 'coalition of the willing' had us so easily believing in 25 short years ago.
Oh the web they’ve weaved...
William and Ben the authors of TDWM
Put together a remarkable effort
Following every strand of the spider’s silk
Spun through the communities townships states
Countries capitals offices back rooms and board rooms
The characters caught up in this web of deceit are captured by their well documented inspections and revealed for what they are
The notes on each chapter are a library in and of themselves providing a great opportunity for further research
If you want your country back... get this book to understand how the War Machine was manufactured...it’s a good manual for how our collective efforts can begin to dismantle the pieces and sell them for scrap ...creating a way forward that respects life
My love & gratitude goes out to William Hartung and Ben Freeman ✌🏼❤️🙏🕉
What a valuable conversation. Thank you. It put me in mind of what the two alluded to in their brief discussion of whistleblowers. Ernie Fitzgerald was a U.S. Air Force official who, against the advice of his colleagues, testified before Congress about cost overruns and tech failures in the “defense” industries, including the failure of Lockheed Martin’s C-5A transport plane. For his trouble, he was fired by Nixon. Fitzgerald’s suit for retaliation resulted in the 1982 Supreme Court decision, Nixon v. Fitzgerald, in which the Court held that sitting presidents have absolute immunity from civil suits. Our whistleblowers have not fared well, from Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning to John Kiriakou (who was imprisoned for blowing the whistle on torture) to lesser known individuals.
I will get Mr. Hartung’s book. Am currently reading “Gilded Rage,” by Jacob Silverman, about the tech industry and many of its players, which discusses, among other things, their increasing dominion over the military industrial complex. It’s hard for ordinary citizens, even collectively, to combat this level of wealth and control. Thanks to Mr. Hartung for encouraging us to try.
I am wishing a better New Year for us all, and thank you Chris and The Chris Hedges Report community.
GLOBAL CRONY
CORPORATE
CAPITALISM
IS CANCER
Yes..........and given there are few new markets left on overshoot earth.........Capitalism is busy doing what Marx warned us it would do: Cannibalizing itself.
PS: That's you and me eventually....once they finish destroying the people's in the 2nd and 3rd worlds.
@ingamarie: may i humbly suggest '2nd' and '3rd' worlds be put in quotation marks? there is only one world, i.e. one planet earth, which the insatiably greedy are busy destroying, not least by trying to CON_vince us that: "peace does not pay!"
While that may be the ultimate reality........only one planet, everywhere beleaguered, it is not the way the majority see it. If it were, the charade going on in Israel would have been shut down by now.
Instead, a bogus Cease Fire got the Zionists their dead back, and now Israel is banning all aid groups with 'trumped up' claims that they employ Hamas operatives............and moving into the final stage of disappearing 'a third world people'.
IF WE WERE LIVING ON ONE PLANET, PART OF ONE WORLD........THE CITIZENS OF SAID WORLD WOULD BE IN THE STREETS IN THEIR MILLIONS......demanding that the pychopaths who divide and conquer us into empires and colonies do something of face the consequences.
Changing our 'language' is one thing. Changing our passivity, indifference, and cowardice, quite another.
i agree. and in one truly ideal world nobody would be mega-rich while we'd DARE to share fairly what's there bc we CARE. no one would have to take to the streets to demand more than just the bare minimum. ["free your mind, and the rest will follow!" sang en vogue in 1992.]
i meet many people who shrug their shoulders saying: "things have always been the way they are. we can't change the course of events, anyway." those who divide and lull us into indifferent passivity do thorough jobs.
mean_while, people die by the [tens of] thousands, not just in gaza and the west bank. the further out of our sight and the darker they are, the less they concern or move us, alas. while even civil disobedience gets criminalized, i take courage from william hartung's & chris hedges' determination to "fight the good fight" ...
We've been first worlders forever......most of us watching what a feminist theorist by the name of Donna Haraway calls 'the prick story'....action violence and the fantasy hero.....over and over again.......
While the actual alpha males gobble up most of the world's wealth....and blame poverty on the kids who are the real victims of their 'wealth creation' schemes......
BOLL SHIT
I'm sure you're widely known for your rhetoric...lol.
I find it very difficult to maneuver my way through a world where I have friends that I have attended peace protests with that now take it as an article of faith that we should be engaged in war Ukraine (so long as we don't send our sons and daughters) and are slowly coming to be uneasy about the Gaza genocide. But Hartung's book likely lays out how being at war is the just part of the ocean we swim in, the air we breathe. This war addiction is our national sickness a multi system failure syndrome that has generous dollops of greed, racism, Nationalism and Christian Nationalism. And I do not see a country that can fix itself from within since what remained of our functioning government is being aggressively degraded in the 2025, the year we just ended. We're not even one year into Trump's presidency but don't mistake me for saying that a President Harris would have been vastly better. This is an acceleration of what has already been happening.
Unfortunately, I agree with you.
Listening to American tV as I do now........the scariest part is how left of centre commentators think they are........as they debate whether the second strike on one boat might be a war crime.............while easily calling Maduro a 'thug' and pretending that everyone of those boats shot out of the water weren't acts of gangster murder.
American regime change operations have been going on since the end of WWII. Most Americans continue to be blase about it......if they're even aware of the death machine your country has become. Speaking from Canada...most of us have our elbows up, but our brains in neutral.......we're unaware of the extent of the carnage as well.
Being smarter than we think we are being an easy game to play, at the heart of empire.
War is the Health of the State.
A truer explanation has never been made.
Nibbling around edges of D's and Rs and never even been seriously challenged.
Health of The STATE
and NOT of SOCIETY (socialism ?)
We live in a corrupt country. It makes me nauseous and sick! Add to that we are now a country that regularly breaks domestic and international laws and illegally overthrows governments, such as in Venezuela, which destabilizes countries and the world. We are heading in a catastrophic direction.
MAMDAMY LOOKS PROMOSING!
YOU BEAT ME CHRIS,
BTW, HAVE YOU READ ‘BLUE BOOK TO A TRUMP’ BY NORMAN SOLOMAN —- WHICH I AM QUITE LEARY ABOUT, EH ?
the "entire culture shift!" we need can't come soon enough! instead of "dividing and ruling!" we should DARE to share fairly what's there, if we really CARE - even while arms makers CON_tinue to make us believe that "peace does not pay!" it does. war is not a must. peace is.
THANK YOU so much, william hartung and chris hedges, for calling the many spades spades, for spelling out all the challenges we face, and for showing us, again, that we're not alone, working to effect the required changes. may the platforms available to you up to now continue to be available in the future so you can encourage & convince [tens of] thousands of people to jump off the fences they're sitting on and join the struggle to make life more than just bearable for the many, rather than for the insatiably indifferent, the greedy and destructive few!
mr hartung's mentioning "a lot of the hawks have never fought, have not seen war" reminds me that, much to my dismay!, my country's chancellor wants to make my country the "biggest military power" in europe. neither he, nor any of his fear-/war-mongering ministers ever experienced the pains, traumas, losses battlefields bring.
There was a reference to Seymour Melman. Go to Billmoyers.com, do a search for "Seymour Melman," see the "World of Ideas" episode with him (takes about a minute to start). Nearly 36 years ago the nearly exact same discussion was taking place then, 'cept now we're ever so much deeper in the hole, with so much less resolve to get us out of it. We're done for.
Thank you, Chris Hedges and William Hartung.
As with pretty much the overall situation in this country, I think that two points raised about are the war machine are most salient.
At the conclusion, there was talk of the need for mass, united movements in order to deal with the threats posed here. This followed the point made earlier, the aspect that on which this is contingent, but also not imminent, at least as things look at this point: something like a cultural change is needed.
The shift in American society and culture to what we now live has occurred over decades.
The question is how the cultural, and subsequent political shift away from what we have might occur.
Society seems a lot like an amoeba, changing direction in response to internal and external conditions. There is no central guiding intelligence. The nucleus just directs functions to maintain and reproduce it's life. It can be influenced to some degree, but the amoeba goes where it will, and there is something like an unfortunate inertia countered by a blind reactiveness to it's motion.
I do think that the continuance of voices like those in the Chris Hedges Report are crucial in keeping this possibility alive.
Our one advantage over the amoeba is that some of the protoplasmic residents of the human society do have a degree of conscious intention, and if enough them move in a certain direction, it can form a pseudopod that moves the whole thing.
But they seem of about equal intelligence overall.
One just has more advanced technology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pR7TNzJ_pA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cnchea6LHN0&t=3s