It is rare to hear a United States presidential candidate clearly and eloquently spell out the realities of the country — whether it’s the genocide in Gaza, rising economic inequality or the horrors of mass incarceration. Dr. Cornel West, renowned political activist, philosopher, public intellectual, author and now independent presidential candidate, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to give an update on his campaign and to highlight the critical issues that define his fight for justice and equality.
West argues that the duopoly in the U.S. today often represents two sides of the same coin. On one hand, Donald Trump and the Republicans are a much more blatant example of the push towards fascism while Kamala Harris provides the American people a friendly face who in reality will defend the interests of the country’s most powerful elites. These forces, West says, embody the core features of the American political class, which are “conformity, complacency and cowardliness and being well adjusted to injustice and well adapted to indifference, it wants people to only see your success and not the underside.”
While West’s campaign has tried to address the most pressing issues facing Americans, he explains the system is set up to disenfranchise movements like his. He states, “The lies are so thick, people are so gullible, and every empire we know undergoes, for the most part, implosion based on outreach, military outreach.”
West invites people to view themselves as part of this bigger picture of what America represents, both domestically and globally. When people view themselves as innocent or removed from the crimes of the American empire, West argues, they absolve themselves of the responsibility to confront and correct these injustices. The various forms of hatred that brew within the U.S. — racism, classism or any other type of discrimination — are, according to West, “ideological forms that hide and conceal the deeper crimes that are tied, in the end, to predatory capitalist processes that will do anything for short term profit.”
Host:
Chris Hedges
Producer:
Max Jones
Intro:
Diego Ramos
Crew:
Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges
Transcript:
Diego Ramos
Chris Hedges
Dr. Cornel West, who is running as an independent presidential candidate, is not only one of the country’s most important intellectuals, but one of the standard bearers for the black prophetic tradition, the most important intellectual and spiritual movement in our history. He follows in the footsteps of Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Ida B, Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, James Cohn, bell hooks and many others. His critiques of the American experiment are informed by the nation’s founding myths still prevalent, based on white supremacy, capitalist exploitation and the crimes of imperial expansion, including the genocide carried out against Native Americans. Joining me to discuss the state of America, the world, including the genocide in Gaza and his presidential campaign is Dr. Cornel West. So Cornel, let’s begin with where you are in the campaign and then we’ll get into your positions. And of course, as you know, I think both of us believe that the genocide in Gaza is central to how people should express their support during this presidential race, but just lay out for people who want to vote for you and people who who support you globally, where you are nationwide.
Cornel West
Indeed. Well I want to begin just by saluting you, my dear brother, you recall you gave me the first interview 17 months ago when I announced and so it’s a beautiful arc to come to the end now and be able to have this last major interview with you as well. And of course you know how much I love and respect you. Though you know today is Annahita’s birthday and she sends her best to you. And I said, Well, I got one interview on your birthday, though, baby. Oh, Chris Hedges? No problem. Anybody else? No. Oh no. Chris Hedges? No problem. But that’s the kind of love and support. And of course, I salute Eunice and your precious children and everything. But no brother, I think, you know, we’re living in, you know, one of the grimmest and dimmest moments in the history of the American empire, in terms of its levels of organized greed and weaponized hatred and institutionalized indifference toward the vulnerable, and yet, at the same time, from a global point of view, we know, in fact, that empires come and go. That human species as a whole is just so wretched. Most of its history is a history of organized greed and weaponized hatred, forms of domination, oppression, subjugation, and we have moments of interruption and disruption to try to create some possibilities for truth and for justice and for love and for compassion and for some institutionalized forms of respect for poor and working people. They tend not to last too long, and therefore increasing and escalating fascism, not just in the American Empire, but around the world, is the dominant tendency among political classes across continents. This is what makes this moment so dim and grim. And yet at the same time, you and I know that we still got to tell the truth. We still got to fight for justice against the grain in the world, but not of it with a style and smile, no self righteousness, but tremendous self confidence and being willing to sacrifice, pay whatever cost and bear whatever burden we have to in order to tell that truth. And those names that you mentioned, because you’re right, that’s where I come from, see. That I come out of a Black people who’ve been so hated for 400 years, but still talk the world so much about love. Been terrorized for 400 years, and talked the world so much about freedom. Been traumatized for 400 years, taught the world so much about healing, even when you’re wounded, you can still heal. When you’re bombarded with sorrow, you can still generate joy. And I won’t go into it, but for me, you know, the Black musical tradition is the greatest tradition of the modern world in terms of not just its artistic creativity and spiritual fortitude, but it’s courage to love truth, beauty, goodness. It’s courage to fight for freedom, not just on the chocolate side, but start there and spill over, press people all around the world to try to heal your own self, heal your own family, heal your own community, but try to heal everybody. And it could be in the music, it could be in how you relate. It could be a grin, it could be a smile, it could be a joke. And in the end, to try to generate some genuine joy. We’re not talking about that cheap joviality that you see in the Democratic Party. We’ll get into that. I’m talking about deep joy, the way Dostoevsky talked about a joy that emerges out of grief or joy that emerges out of pain of the great Frankie Beverly, we just lost him, [inaudible]. So that’s for me, what it is to situate oneself and try to be true to one’s calling, and one’s calling has everything to do with integrity, not purity, but integrity. Honesty, not monopoly on truth, but honesty and decency. No saintliness but decency. In these days, these decrepit days of unbelievable spiritual decay and more decadence, not just in the American Empire, but around the world, it’s hard to get a foothold. It’s very hard to get a foothold. Our campaign was one that tried to keep alive of legacy and continue. We going to the end, as you know, to hold the torch, to try to accept the mantle of the Sojourner Truth’s and Harriet Tubman’s and Martin Luther King’s and Malcolm X’s, A. Philip Randolph’s, but also the Curtis Mayfield’s and the Nina Simone’s, also the John Coltrane’s and Mary Lou Williams’. That’s who I am, and I’ve always tried to be true to that. And in the end, almost every major spokesperson or figure who have tried to be true to that has either been assassinated, incarcerated, thoroughly misunderstood and misconstrued, rebuked and scorned, even among your own folk, even among your own precious Black folk, or it could be precious white folk or precious Latinos or whatever, because you’re tied to something bigger than the lens that they too often view the world. And it also cuts across ideology too, though brother, one of the things I’ve discovered in this campaign is even among my leftist comrades, sometimes they think the truth is much more narrow than it really is. Herman Melville said to speak the truth uncompromisingly is to recognize it has ragged edges. Remember that last moment in Billy Budd, the greatest short story, in my view, in the history of American literature that Melville wrote at the end of his life, 1891 which is 40 years after Moby Dick. But truth then cuts across ideology and politics. So you can have leftist comrades who are dishonest, disrespectful, disingenuous. You can have leftist comrades that want to tell the truth about the American empire but can’t say a mumbling word about repression in Russia or Iran or China, and you say, no, you got the wrong Black brother if you’re dealing with me now. Because I’m going to tell the truth, ain’t no doubt about it, and it has a moral and spiritual dimension that’s not reducible to simply the strategic and the tactical, because it has something to do with the humanity of each and every one of us, and it has something to do with just how vicious the lies can be for the atrocious crimes that those lies often hide and conceal, and it has everything to do with straightening our backs up and willing to proceed individually, collectively, organizationally, politically, but also recognize that in the end, we’re tied to something bigger than ourselves. Get beyond the narcissism, get beyond the very careerism and opportunism. And that’s not just a matter of the corrupt duopoly, which is corporate dominated, money driven, greed laden, tied to their propagandistic corporate media that refuses to want to speak any serious, deep truths about the empire for the most part. So in that sense, you end up… I saw your wonderful show on brother, Fisk, it’s powerful man but you end up with, you know, the I.F. Stone’s who I was blessed to break bread with. You end up with the Ida B Wells Barnett’s. You end up with the the Amiri Baraka’s and others. None of them have a monopoly on truth, but always willing to cut radically against the grain. The Paul Robeson’s, you mentioned Du Bois and the others. I’m sorry to go on so long, but that’s the framework from which I entered this campaign, and it’s been a magnificent one. I mean, our volunteers, man, oh, Lord have mercy. They have been extraordinary. Thousands of them. Very hard to raise money, as you can imagine. But we’ve been able to do some magnificent things in terms of getting in on almost 20 ballots in the short amount of time, and another 25 write-ins. I’ve met some of the most magnificent human beings on the ground of all colors, but I just haven’t been able to campaign as much publicly with huge rallies, because you have to have big money for that. And it’s very difficult to gain access to any kind of cash flow. I think we’re able to raise about 1.3 or so million dollars in the process. And of course, you know, Democrats can raise $540 million in one month. And Republicans can raise over $450 [million] in one month. So, you know, no comparison in that regard. But we tried to tackle, I say, to hold the torch, you know, sister Jackson said the other day, she said, you know, brother West, you’re holding the historic position of a great Black people’s freedom movement, and that, for me, is the highest compliment that one can receive, because that position is one that’s not predicated on either a popularity, is not predicated on access to the establishment is not predicated on whether you’re successful in one election. You’re trying to win the hearts and minds of people rooted in the grand historic traditions of the greatness of Black people, not the worseness of Black people, not our Black cowards, of which you can see a whole lot of them these days right before your eyes, not the Black thugs, not the Black gangsters, but the Black love warriors, the Black freedom fighters. And I believe all of us have a certain gangster in us. I know I do. All of us have a certain thuggishness in us. I think Tupac is right about that. I know I do, you fight it every day. But when she said that, it really hit me, because that’s precisely what I was trying to do. That’s why I chose sister Melina Abdullah. Annahita talked to her on the phone and said, we just want somebody who put a smile on Fannie Lou Hamer’s face. That’s why I went to Mississippi and started this campaign, right in Fannie Lou Hamer’s town, right, with the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party, you see? With Brother Conrad and others, that it was a way of saying, look, this tradition, what you call, rightly, the Black prophetic tradition, will be alive in some form, with my voice, with every fiber of being in my body, and I find joy in doing that. No matter what the attacks and assaults are, I find a certain sense of fulfillment and trying to be true to that great tradition, because it lives and breathes through every vein of my body, and yet, at the same time, you know, I’ve got my own gangster proclivities. I got my own blindnesses. I’ve got my own shortcomings, and what have you.
Chris Hedges
I want to ask about that, because honesty is a political trait that, of course, most politicians who are seeking or subservient to power don’t have and those politicians that do have it, Eugene V. Debs, I think George McGovern, Ralph Nader, when he ran, they’re crucified for that honesty. I mean, you mentioned how we take our prophets, Martin, Malcolm and others and, of course, that’s because they threaten the power structure. The truth that they speak threatens the power structure. I mean, you are certainly one of the premier intellectuals in the United States without question, you must have known that going into the campaign, that by standing up and calling, for instance, the empire by its true name, this was, in many way, an anti-political act.
Cornel West
No, it’s true. And of course, you know, you and I talked about this many occasions. We were in the car on the way to see sister Manning, or be we in the car going with James Cone to see our dear brothers and the great Mumia Abu-Jamal. I do believe that one of the deep insights of being human, given the wretchedness of human beings, but also the wonderful potential of human beings, is the word made flesh, and the word made flesh means the flesh itself is crucified as a testament to the word. It is impossible to be a truth teller and a freedom fighter and a love warrior without recognizing that your life will be cruciform. You will be symbolically crucified. You will be metaphorically crucified. You will be intellectually crucified, and you might be physically crucified, and you accept that, because that’s precisely what the calling is. Now, of course, as a Christian, deny yourself, pick up your cross and follow me. We used to sing in my magnificent Shiloh Baptist Church, must Jesus better cross alone and all the world go free. No! There’s a cross for everyone, and there’s a cross for me. That’s Sly Stone, Stand! You’ve been sitting much too long as a permanent [inaudible] in your right and wrong stand as a cross for you to bear things that go through if you going any way. And Sly comes right out, of course, Black church in Vallejo, genius, giant, [inaudible]. And so you’re absolutely right. I’ve been at this now for 57 years. I started when I was 14 years old, when we shut down the high schools for Black studies in Sacramento, California.
Chris Hedges
Weren’t you expelled from high school if I remember?
Cornel West
Oh, no, I was expelled in third grade for refusing to salute the flag because my great, great uncle was…
Chris Hedges
So it’s longer than that, Cornel!
Cornel West
Well that’s true, I was seven years old. Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. No, my great, great uncle who came back from World War II with his uniform, and he was lynched, and they wrapped the flag around his body in Texas. And I said, No, that that flag means something different to me than it does for other people. People can have their own views and perceptions of it, you know. But I got my own, given my own experiences and what have you. So you’re right. If it’s 57 then that’s 64 years, good God, that’s a long time, but I’ve had a good time. I’ve had fun time, but I’ve been wounded and bruised and scarred all the way through. But most importantly, though, brother, it’s just a matter of trying to, as you say, be honest. How can we not call Biden and Harris and Austin and Blinken and all the others, war criminals? Of course they are war criminals. Of course they have enabled not just genocide, but the massive murder of nearly 20,000 precious Palestinian babies in a matter of months, less than a year. What are the historians going to say? What are they saying now? Many of them, but many more will tell the truth. But at the same time for me, you know mass incarceration regime as you and I taught in prisons together, right? That’s a crime against humanity too. Been teaching the prison for 51 years. One out of three black children in poverty, one out of five American child in poverty in the richest empire in the history of the world, that’s a form of violence, that’s a crime. And I could go on and on and on. And so the question becomes, well, when are we really honest about it, with a clear language and a succinct way of putting it, what then do we do? How then do we proceed? Well, it’s manifest in our teaching, in our writings and how we relate to people. It’s manifest and what organizations we’re affiliated with. And that doesn’t mean that the people who disagree with us are demons, are devils. Everybody looks at the world through their own lens, but you do try to point out to them they’re indifferent. Rabbi Heschel says indifference to evils is more insidious than evil itself, he’s right. And their blindness, Wall Street bailout, shattering of lives of homeowners, that’s a certain kind of violence. That’s a certain kind of moral crime, but it’s what is in our politics. It’s naturalized. Why? Because our politics are legalized bribery, normalized corruption, politicized larceny, and it proceeds as business as usual. And one of the saddest features is that these days, especially in the Democratic Party, because the Republican Party is just fascist. I mean just outright fascist now with with gangster Trump, there’s no doubt about that. But the Democratic Party, which presents its own lies and crimes in the face of Americans fascist lies and crimes, be it Gaza or be it mass incarceration, silences across the board on both. To our poverty, silences across the board on both issues of both parties, but the Democratic Party now has become so colorful with all these Black faces and brown faces and women faces and gay faces and so forth, but the same lies and the same crimes. And so the question becomes, how do you bear that kind of political witness in light of your moral and spiritual calling that will cut so radically against the grain that even those folk who claim to be tied to the legacy of Martin King. If we would ask sister Harris, she would say, I’m part of the legacy of Martin Luther King, too. I’m part of the legacy of Thurgood Marshall. I’m part of the legacy of Constance Motley and so forth. And there’s no doubt that she would not be where she is if it were not for those folk. There’s no doubt about that. But when, in fact, you look at her record, you know the prosecutor in California criminalizing the parents and keeping the brothers in jail because you needed cheap labor. All the various policies, the worst, she had some decent ones sometime, but the worst. That’s not the legacy of Martin at all. That’s a sign of what it means to be obsessed with success out of careerism, opportunism, and it reflects the distinctive and dominant features of the political and professional class in the American Empire, which is conformity, complacency and cowardliness and being well adjusted to injustice and well adapted to indifference, it wants people to only see your success and not the underside. And the precondition of that success, which is all of these lies and crimes, and it has nothing to do with moral and spiritual greatness. It has everything to do with narrow, whirly success based on opportunism and careerism. You see it in the Academy. You see it in journalism. You see it in Hollywood. You see it in the music industry. You see it in our politics. And that’s one of the reasons why the American Empire is on its way toward doom or implosion, if there’s not a significant counter movement. And you know and I know the American empire, 68th Empire out of the 70 days emerged from the caves of Africa. And American Empire is the only empire that has been fundamentally committed to innocence. And James Baldwin used to say the innocence itself is the crime, because the innocence helped facilitate the violence. And when you view yourself as innocent, you always view yourself as one who never has to take responsibility. Be it genocide of indigenous peoples in the United States. It could be the barbaric slavery of my own Black folk for over 244 years in this hemisphere. It could be working people crushed by greedy bosses. It could be women dealing with insecure male egos, dealing with forms of psychic and physical violence or discrimination to workplace. It could be gay brothers or lesbian sisters or trans. It could be Jews who have to deal with Jew hating and unbelievable anti-Jewish sentiment as part and parcel of every Christian civilization, we know, including the Christian USA. It could be our Arab and Muslim brothers and sisters who have to deal with anti-Islamic sensibility, Islamophobia and what have you. All of these are various forms of hatred. They’re ideological forms that hide and conceal the deeper crimes that are tied, in the end, to predatory capitalist processes that will do anything for short term profit. Fossil fuel industry, short term profit, let the whole planet go. We just want our profits. It could be the oil companies or the gas companies and so forth. We just want our profits Wall Street. We just want our profit, but we have to be able to keep track of all of these and part of our challenges, and this is what I’ve had to wrestle with in this campaign, is for me, I come out of this as but a footnote in the Black freedom struggle, and so I have no patience for even my leftist comrades who will downplay the vicious role of white supremacy. Even when they have critiques of capitalism, even when they have to talk about the deep state. If you can’t say anything about white supremacy, or if you reduce it just to narrow identity politics, then you’re missing the point. Bourgeois identity politics must be rejected. I’ve already characterized that. That’s the Black and brown faces in high places, but the Imperial and class hierarchies remain the same. But the vicious legacy of white supremacy is much deeper than that, and when you start talking about Black self respect, Black honor, Black self-esteem, the conception of oneself as a human being who does not believe the white supremacist lies that say that Black people are less beautiful and less moral and less intelligent, and all walk around scared and intimidated and laughing when it ain’t funny, and scratching when it don’t itch, and wearing the mask when you’re successful, you’re still on the plantation. And the plantation comes a lot of different forms. It could be the Republican Party plantation, fascist now, and you look at Tim Scott and the others up there. The Democratic Party plantation now, led by a multicultural militarist with fascist elements. That’s sister Harris, and you see all the Black folk on the plantation. But it also relates to some of our leftist organizations too, even independent media. You know, how independent is media if your media is still obsessed with the eyeballs, still obsessed with the market? You got certain progressive folk in media that think Tucker Carlson’s a hero. No, the man’s a fascist. I don’t care how successful he is. Think Trump somehow was a disruption. No, the man’s a fascist. It might help you with your eyeballs and help you with your career, but tell the truth. That’s what I’ve always loved about you, though, brother and we try to help each other long even though I’m sorry, we don’t spend as much time recently because you’ve been on the run. I know I’ve been praying for you when you went to the Middle East. And I know you, we talked about, I think you snuck away for a little while, even from your family. I said, Oh brother, Chris, I’m doubly praying for you now, brother, they love you too much. They don’t want you to get hurt, and I don’t either. But the important thing is you have to have community and friendships and brotherhoods and sisterhoods and sibling hoods to stay on that narrow track, because our left wing is so weak and feeble. The lies are so thick, people are so gullible, and every empire we know undergoes, for the most part, implosion based on outreach, military outreach. For us, 800 military units around the world, 130 Special Operations in over 100 countries based on corruption of elites across parties, based on the citizenry feeling impotent, powerless, frustrated, looking for straws, grabbing for straws. Here comes Trump, neo-fascist, posing is populist because he understands that the neoliberal order is corrupt. He’s right about that claim, but he’s wrong about the alternative. And so the culture becomes a culture of titillation, stimulation, distraction, distracted by distractions from distractions. That’s the T.S. Eliot insight. Even a right wing brother like T.S. Eliot’s got insights. He knows the shallowness and the hollowness of a culture that evolves around just money and status and spectacle, and then the left trying to provide some alternative, so weak, so feeble and then,unable to generate what it requires. I mean, I think in many ways, that a full throated fascism in America is on the way because that the only counter statement is a Democratic Party that is so militaristic, that is so spiritually empty, that yes, has positions on reproductive freedoms that I agree with. Yes, concerned about the peaceful transfer of power. Yes, is concerned about creating conditions under which there could be some grassroot organizing and so on. I understand that, and I don’t think people are demons if they disagree with me and vote for Harris, I just disagree with them, that that’s not a genuine anti-fascist position. It’s a stop gap. It’s simply a postponement. The fascism is there in the hearts and minds of the people, and it’s escalating. If you don’t speak to those hearts and minds provide, a genuine alternative, then the empire is, in fact, headed toward a full throated fascism. And any talk about democracy becomes so empty. And I must say, the various attacks on me trying to get on the ballot, I mean, the Democratic Party’s, anti-democratic attacks on me, does not manifest any kind of deep commitment to democracy, and that’s true for the third party members. It’s true for sister Jill. It’s true for sister Claudia. It’s true for brother Chase. It’s true for so many other third parties.
Chris Hedges
Well, the nemesis, Ralph Nader’s nemesis was the Democratic Party. They spent millions of dollars.
Cornel West
Well he told me on the phone the other day, they had like 21 legal suits against him simultaneously, and I’ve had a whole host of suits against me. And of course, it means you have no money for the most part. But not like Ralph. I mean, Ralph, to me, is one of the towering figures in terms of his willingness to jump into the electoral politics. That’s why I supported him early on in 2000 and he’s still at it. I mean, it’s amazing how he’s still at it. But you’re right about about Gaza, see Gaza is the fundamental litmus test.
Chris Hedges
Didn’t Baldwin say that white supremacists confuse ignorance with innocence?
Cornel West
Who is that?
Chris Hedges
[James] Baldwin. Didn’t he say that the white supremacist confused ignorance with innocence? That what they described by essentially positing themselves as innocent. It was based on a willful ignorance of what was actually taking place.
Cornel West
Right, but the ignorance and the willful ignorance went hand in hand with an extravagant, intense hatred. So if there’s a concrete dimension to it, which is just the sheer hatred of Black people, but at the same time, there was an ignorance about the situation that produced their hatred, which is not just hating Black bodies, but also exploiting Black bodies. That’s the economic dimension, that’s the role of the capitalist mode of production, which sits at the center of how white supremacy operates. That’s part of my critique of my dear brother [Ta-Nehisi] Coates years ago, remember? I love Coates’ hatred of white supremacy. But where is your critique in relation to white supremacy, to capitalism, in relation to imperialism, and then, of course, courageously, where’s your practice? Now I’m glad to see him having his critique of apartheid and genocide and ethnic cleansing now, because remember, at that time he attacked us intensely, man. You know these Black public intellectuals making statements about Israel don’t know what they talking about whatsoever. He’s writing for an apartheid magazine Atlantic, with brother Goldberg and the others facilitating his whole career. And say, Hey, wait, wait, wait, brother, we trying to keep alive a tradition. It’s not about you, not about me. We try to keep alive a tradition. And he held on to that for many, many, many, many years, but now he’s breaking and that’s beautiful. People undergo conversion in that regard, but most importantly here, it’s a matter of Baldwin’s connection of the hatred and the innocent, but you get this in Melville, you get this in Toni Morrison. You get this in [William] Faulkner, you get this in Flannery O’Connor, all of the great literary figures in the history of the American Empire who tried to come to terms with America growing powerful and growing wealthy, but never growing up because a sign of growing up as a child is to move from innocence to wrestling with experience to become wise. Or as Shakespeare put it, ripeness is all. That’s Edgar in King Lear, right? Ripeness is all. What is ripeness? Moving from childishness and child-likeness into experience with all of its forms of hurt and pain and suffering and domination and emerging on the other side, more compassionate, more courageous and still wise and still child-like, see, child-like’s not the same as childish. Oh, not at all. Louis Armstrong was child-like, and he was one of the greatest revolutionary artists in the history of the American empire as one of the creators of of jazz based on the blues. That goes back to Delta Mississippi, ground zero of Black cultural formations. South Carolina’s number two I’m going to be there next week. Meaning what? Meaning that their concepts of what it means to be human has always been the leaven in the American loaf. And of course, it became the leaven in the global loaf, because Black music, of course, is now recognized as one of the most profound conceptions of what it is to be human at its highest levels of genius and talent. And the rest of the world understands that, they catch on. They catch on. There are other great traditions too, coming from other countries, but I’m just talking about Black folk right now in the United States. And can you imagine man, we had a politician, one politician that had the courage of a John Coltrane and the love of a Mary Lou Williams. It’d be a different kind of leadership man, but our Black leadership is so mediocre and decrepit and willing to say and do anything for success, and say and do anything in order to be under the spectacle of the mainstream media. And yet, Black masses are still suffering. The Black children are suffering. It’s a sad situation. But that sadness always is a starting point, not a conclusion. You begin with that sadness, and you’ve had to deal with this all your life, brother. El Salvador, Bosnia and others, you see this human wretchedness, deep sadness, and yet you got to bounce back. You’ve got to have that energy and vitality and vibrancy that’s rooted in a deep love of the people who are being victimized. And that’s why, when you rightly started off saying that this genocide is a litmus test, it is the way apartheid in South Africa was a litmus test a number of years ago. The way the death squads in El Salvador and in Central America were litmus tests, not because people aren’t suffering in other places, Sudan and Haiti and Congo and Indonesia, Kashmir. We can go on and on and on. People are suffering so many different places. Argentina right now is run by right-wing gangster. But genocide, Gaza, US Empire at the center, Netanyahu, gangster capital G. Fascist to the core, believes that a Palestinian life has zero status, zero status. And how does one respond? That becomes a question, and it has to be one in which the moral and the spiritual dimensions are still there, so that the Palestinian baby has the same value as Israeli baby and vice versa. This is not some kind of anti-Jewish move, but it’s one that keeps the focus where the genocidal attacks have been taking place, and if we can’t meet that test, you can rest be assured that any leader, any elected official, is nothing but a strategist and a tactician. They don’t have a moral fiber in their backbone, and that’s the problem with our politicians in both major parties in the United States.
Chris Hedges
Well, so this genocide, the crime of crimes, like slavery. This is radical evil, and we’ve reached a moment when, within the political sphere, obviously within the moral sphere, radical evil must always be fought. But we’re now in radical evil, the endorsements, the sustenance of radical evil is being sustained by the US Empire. And as a moral philosopher, I want you to talk a little bit about the nature of radical evil, and why the indifference to it, and I would call voting for the Democratic Party at best, indifference to it, why it is so dangerous to us personally, and why it is so dangerous to us as a society. Why radical evil when it manifests itself, must be fought in every conceivable way, including, of course, in the voting booth.
Cornel West
That’s a wonderful question, brother. Last night, I was rereading Georg Lukács’s powerful essay on the correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, and part of his point was, you get these two towering artists, unbelievable artists. Schiller’s [The] Robbers and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s [Apprenticeship] and we haven’t got to Faust yet, you see. And part of his critique was, they could not comprehend the radical evil of their day, even given their artistic sophistication. They evaded the deeper… He called it contradictions, he’s the Hegelian Marxist, but the deep, deep suffering, they could not confront it adequately. They did touch on it, they did describe it, but they didn’t have a diagnosis of it. And so one of the problems is that even when we talk about genocide and it’s a moral and spiritual issue, there’s also a need for analytical tools to understand how it came to be. The British Empire creates the state that facilitates the space for Jew hating Europe with a gangster called Hitler who wants to kill every Jew that he knows and sees and has access to. And so they end up jumping out of these European buildings and landing on the backs of Arabs and Palestinians and act as if they’re not human beings. It’s like when Europeans came the United States and says, there’s no human beings. There’s just buffalos and Indians. No mother huckers, Indians are human beings. Well, Arabs are human beings too. Quit lying, that first wave of Zionists, quit lying. There were some brave Zionists [inaudible] and Judah Magnes and [Albert] Einstein and others who said, no, we got to coexist. Martin Buber played with the idea, we got to coexist. Know what [Ze’ev] Jabotinsky says? We will dominate and annihilate. Well we’re seeing Jabotinsky project enacted right now in the barbaric policies of Netanyahu. There’s no doubt about that. So when we think about radical evil, it’s just that a moralistic gesture that we then protest, but we didn’t try to understand it, given our moral motives, and, most importantly, given our deep love of our precious Palestinian brothers and sisters. And that would be true if we were Jews in Germany, for example. It’d be true if it was Muslims in China. It would be true if it were young women in Iran, or whoever it is. Anybody getting misused, mistreated, unjustly targeted, we have to raise our voices. And yet you can’t, you raise your voice and end up with an indictment of the American empire. And once that indictment is made, you begin to see, my God, look at it overthrowing coups in Latin America. My God, look at it, overthrowing coups in the Middle East and supporting gangsters in Indonesia. American empire as a whole, imperialist. American empire as a whole, facilitating crimes against humanity, and in this case now, genocide that the whole world can see on social media and acts as if we’re the ones out of touch because they want to be silent about it, or they want an act as if you got the nerve to tell us it’s not a violation of international law, please. We born at night, but not last night. Levels of that barbarity is not a violation of international law? But then there’s a white supremacist dimension to it. Oh, if those innocent men and women and babies were white babies and Black people and Africans and Muslims and Arabs were committing it. Oh, it would be a genocide, genocide. If the Palestinians were doing that against Jewish Israelis. What do you think the Jewish leadership would say in America? What do you think Biden’s response would be? What do you think Harris’s response would be? What do you think Trump’s response would be? The Hamas version of the Jews being subjugated and hated would be freedom fighters. That’s how warped the perceptions are and we simply want to say we morally consistent, spiritually constant, with an analysis system of how this genocide is tied to British Empire, initially, the American empire, capitalist concerns of oil, capitalist concerns with natural resources in the land and then the white supremacist dimension of it, where, if the script were flipped, they would be a qualitatively different response. That’s the depth of spiritual decay that we’re wrestling with. And it for me, I always connect it to what’s happening on the south side of Chicago, what’s happening in South Carolina and Mississippi, what’s happening in South Central Los Angeles, because when you look at it through Black lens in the belly of the American Imperial beast, you begin to see some of the deep connections, very deep connections and relations of what’s happening. We just have to preserve our own souls and not find ourselves being too conformist and too complacent and too cowardly when we talk about the various forms of greed and hatred that cut across all peoples, all colors, all classes, all genders and so all sexual orientations and yet still take our stand against American imperial policies or Soviet imperial policies or Chinese imperial policies, or anyone’s imperial policy. But right now, the major contradiction and issue has to do with this American imperial policies on steroids, facilitating these indescribable murders and killings taking place. It’s hard to even conceive of a world in which Palestinian brothers and sisters and Jewish brothers and sisters could live a life under a nation state in which they could flower and flourish, where there’s dignity, equality and security for both, that’s part of the dream we got to hold on to.
Chris Hedges
And yet, would you liken what’s happening in Israel to the last days of the apartheid regime in South Africa?
Cornel West
I think there’s similarities and there’s dissimilarities. That’s true for any historical contrast, of course, but yes, there really are. I think the difference is that the decadence and decay of the US Empire is much more acute now. That’s why you have a gangster like Trump that could easily facilitate a second civil war. That was not the case in the in the 80s, in the 90s, when we were going to jail, tied to the ANC struggle with [Nelson] Mandela and [Joe] Slovo and Billy Nair and [Walter] Sisulu and others. But the decadence these days, with the civil war possibilities, that level of gangsterization of the culture, the rawness of the culture, the rawness of the hatred internally, you see. And that’s what Trump is, just a sign and a symbol. He’s not the cause of it. He’s a sign and a symbol of that. That was not the case when we were struggling against the vicious forms of apartheid in South Africa. So the American Empire is at a very, very different moment, when the American empire emerges in ’45 almost alone on the historical stage alongside the Soviet empire. Soviet empire plays a very important role in terms of decolonization. It has its own forms of repression at home, and the United States becomes then the major empire after 1991, reaches peak and then begins… decline sets in. The greed sets in at home. The weaponization of hatred steps in, backlash against Black folk making certain kinds of progress against white supremacy, but the progress is primarily affecting the upper middle classes and the middle classes, the poor and working classes completely pushed aside, rendered invisible, with levels of unbelievable suffering and social misery, of which mass incarceration is one of the major manifestations. And so here we are in 2024 where you got the ecological crisis, and the fossil fuel companies are tied as much to the military, the US military, that has expenditures more than the next six countries combined. And then the corporations as well. Then you’ve got the political crisis where the liberal orders no longer have legitimacy and the major alternatives are right-wing, fascist ones. It’s true in Hungary, it’s true in the United States. It’s true in Argentina, it’s true in a whole host of other places. Then you’ve got a culture that is just so thin and shallow that it’s hard for there to be spiritual and moral awakenings of people to see what the suffering is because of the distractions and the titration and stimulation and the joyless quest for insatiable pleasure and the modes of evasion, money making, driven cultural activities that evade any kind of engagement. That’s part of what Lukács was talking about. But of course, he’s talking about levels of a genius with Schiller and Goethe, but he still says they did not get at the nature of radical evil, which was not only tied to the capitalism, but also to the imperialism that was escalating in Germany, trying to catch up and be the imperial power, just like Britain, just like France, and you end up with what? World War I, boom and De Bois’s great essay, “The African Roots of World War I.” In the 30 year war, here comes World War II. Levels of catastrophe, indescribable. [inaudible], give us a sense in your poetry. It’s hard for literary folk, hard for the musicians, to come to terms with it, but it’s there. And then, of course, the Global South, where the majority of the world resides, looking at these implosions of Europe and saying, My God, we are no longer on your plantation in potential. Their neo-colonial elites are, their collaborators are. But the people are saying, we’ve got to provide some alternative. We’ve yet to provide any genuine alternative for those Frantz Fanon called “The Wretched of the Earth,” and that’s part of the deep, deep, what’s the right word, I mean the impasse. You see, if we can’t provide a left alternative that’s workable, that’s accessible, not just people see something, people feel deep down, then the full throated fascism and the ecological catastrophe is going to hit us very soon. And I don’t want to be a doom and gloom, but I do want to tell the truth. I do want to tell the truth, and that does not in any way dampen my fire, because I intend to be faithful unto death. I intend to keep swinging and laughing and and writing and fighting and organizing until the worms get my body. But at the same time, I want the younger generation to know that there are alternatives from just selling out and caving in and giving up. And once young folk reach that point and it’s really over, thank God we’ve got the marvelous militancy of the younger generation of all colors and Palestinians and Jews and Black folk and Latinos and indigenous folk, especially around this issue of genocide. But they got to connect the issue of genocide to the mass incarceration regimes in the United States, to the class struggles in the United States, the issues of patriarchy in the United States, and somehow see whether we can create a better world, given the nightmare that we’re living right now.
Chris Hedges
Although these power structures have gone after these students in the same way they’ve gone after your campaign. And before we close, I want you to talk a little bit about the media and the coverage.
Cornel West
Yeah, but I mean, I’ve been fortunate in terms of as an individual, having some access to a lot of media. I’ve done over a thousand interviews, probably 95% of them outside of the corporate media. But even the corporate media had me on a few times, much more than my dear sister Claudia [De la Cruz], for example, who I have have a great respect for. And I think sister Jill [Stein] is getting a little bit more treatment of mainstream as as well. But you know, for me, the more I get a chance to interact with sister Claudia, she strikes me as much more the real deal as so many of the others. But my point is that even just an appearance is just spectacle sometimes. There hasn’t been one reporter that has been assigned to our campaign. You think about that, not one reporter of a major newspaper assigned to the campaign. Out of a thousand interviews, 300 different speeches and so forth. So it means what? Well, if you believe, as I do, that the Black prophetic tradition constitutes very much a part of the best of America, then it means America has no access to the best of itself. It’s like somebody want to play the piano, but they don’t allow any music by Art Tatum or Thelonious Monk or Fatha Hines or James Cleveland, who you going to play? Well, we got Liberace. Well, okay, Liberace, you know he’s alright, but he’s predicated on those musicians too. So this is how an empire begins to implode when it doesn’t have access to the best of itself. It’s like you’re going to be a philosopher. Don’twant to say a word about Plato in the West. Well, sorry, you going to miss out on a lot. He doesn’t have the answers, but you going to miss out. Where you going to be a poet but don’t want to say nothing about Shakespeare and [John] Keats. And don’t want to say, Mama, what about Gwendolyn Brooks? You going to miss out on a lot. Sorry. Oh, you’re in musical theater, and want nothing about Sondheim. Sorry. We see you got a whole country where the media and the journalists and journalism is damn near dead. Let’s just be honest about it. Don’t even provide access to one of the greatest traditions. It’s not about me. It’s about what comes through me as a footnote, as a vessel, as a conduit. That’s the legacy of Martin King, that’s the legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer, Edward Zaid, Dorothy Day, Rabbi Heschel. We can go on and on and on. That’s why I talk about every speech. So what happens? Well, you end up just reproducing the same little, narrow, parochial, provincial perspectives, and then wonder why things begin to collapse.
Chris Hedges
Yeah, the elites create echo chambers that ensure their own demise.
Cornel West
That’s exactly right. And the anthem for Black folk is lift every voice, not lift every echo. When you find your voice that’s different than an echo.
Chris Hedges
That’s right. That’s Joe Turner, come and gone.
Cornel West
Ooh, Lord, you got little August Wilson there? That’s it. That’s it. He’s a blues man too, with his pen. Pittsburgh, he from Pittsburgh.
Chris Hedges
So it’s 17 months you’ve been at it. The election’s soon, now that you begin to look back, what do you want to have accomplished? What do you hope that you have done by running this campaign?
Cornel West
Well, I started with the conception of winning. You know, the wonderful essay by the great Tennessee Williams called a “Catastrophe of Success.” This is what he wrote after Glass Menagerie hit Broadway. All his life, he wanted to be successful in that narrow sense, and then when he got it, he saw how empty it was, because he wanted something deeper. And I, from the very beginning, I told my team, I told the volunteers and so forth, that one, we want to win the election, but we want to win the election because we’re nothing but a moment and a movement, and we’re here to ensure that the abolition of poverty, the abolition of homelessness, the nationalization, the democratization of some of the major corporations, putting working people at the center, putting poor people at the center, that’s what it means to proceed with an integrity. So we want to win the election. If we don’t do that, we want to win the hearts and minds of as many people as we can, to give them a different lens through which they look at the world, so that they’re not tied to nearing narrow, narrow success, and they have access to what moral and spiritual greatness could be in terms of the movements of the Eugene Debs’ and the Norman Thomas’s and the Martin King’s and A Philip Randolph’s and Ella Baker’s and others. But then also, there’s a personal dimension to this, which is, what kind of life am I going to live from live from womb to tomb? No brother. How am I going to hold on to my sense of truth telling and justice seeking and joy sharing? How do I want to hold on the integrity, honesty, decency? So when they put me in my grave, they can say this particular brother tried to be true to his calling. That’s not the crucial one, because that’s individual. This is not about individualism, but as a human being, you want to be able to be accountable to the best of you and who I am has to do with what was poured into me by Irene West and Clifton West and Reverend Cook, the Shiloh Baptist Church and the Black Panther Party leaders and the James Combs’ and the Stanley Aronowitz’s and the Williams Spanos’ and Paul Bové’s and Jeff Stouts’, they pour into me. How do I be true to them? So you got three levels trying to win the election, trying to win the hearts and minds, trying to be true to yourself in light of who you are and who you are is because somebody loved you, and those who loved you poured into you the way you pour into the brothers in Rahway, man. In your classes, I’ve seen it. When you come to my classes, I come to your classes, we try to pour and the brothers pour into us, right? You wrote a whole book on this! What was it called? Class… Our Class. Powerful book. We put on the play and so forth. But that’s also a beautiful way to live, man. You know, you and I get in the car after leaving the prison and we don’t feel like we deep do gooders. We just in a good mood, man, we like, yeah, God Almighty, this world is so cold and cruel, but we got a warmth right now. We got a glow right now. We got a fire. And you always want to keep that fire, you know, and so for me, as a campaign, we said we’re about truth, justice, love. The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. Justice is what love looks like in public. Tenderness is what love feels like in private. And we want to leave with a deep joy, not that little cheap joviality about oh, we got a Democratic Party campaign full of joy because everybody’s laughing and giggling. No, no, no, no, our joy is rooted in the depths of a grief and a hurt and a pain and a sadness and a sorrow that works through those in order to generate that smile and a style and a way of being in the world, and it’s open to every human being, but there’s no doubt in my mind that Black folk in America have made a major contribution in ensuring that transformation of sadness into joy is a genuine thing. A soulfulness is the way Marcellus would put his soul ain’t nothing but the sharing of a soothing sweetness. And I would add, against the backdrop of grim catastrophe, you see it in the eyes of the Palestinian brothers and sisters when they walk off of [inaudible] victory, [inaudible]. Unbelievable grace and dignity in the face of genocide, and they speaking for any human being who has any sensitivity to human suffering, so that that suffering will never have the last word. And that’s, at the deepest level, what it’s about in terms of the height of our humanity and the depths of our sense of possibility.
Chris Hedges
Our Class. Great, that was the great Dr. Cornel West, who, on election day, has offered all of us the chance to stand up against genocide and radical evil. So when you get in the voting booth, do the right thing. I want to thank Christian, Sofia [Menemenlis], Thomas [Hedges] and Max [Jones], who produced the show. Say happy birthday to Annahita. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.
Cornel West
Love you. Brother, love you.
