Greenwald & Hedges Debate Over Doge-Ukraine-Trump & Elon!

Editor's Note: Brilliant as his critiques of the US empire are, I find it grating that Chris Hedges rarely fails to mention the Soviet Union, or the other Western propaganda bogeyman, Stalin, or more recently, East Germany's Stasi, as examples of brutal totalitarianism, lack of "free press," mass persecutions, etc. to be avoided at all cost. Curiously, he rarely mentions in this context the really huge examples of such barbarism, as exemplified first by the 1930s fascist dictatorships of Hitler and Mussolini, or later, in the postwar period, during "Pax Americana".  the many slaughterhouses created by the US around the globe, in Indonesia, Argentina, Chile, Central America, and so on. (I wonder if he ever read Michael Parenti's debunking of all this claptrap.) I've come to believe that Hedges is, despite his radical rhetoric, and enormous first-hand experience of various political systems, still a bourgeois anti-communist observer of reality, and this usually mars his testimony and defeats his own supposedly revolutionary personal quest.  Maybe his lifetime aversion to "communist dictatorships" has kept him away from studying some Marxism, which, applied with an open mind, would have easily rectified his thinking, making him more sensitive to the frequently submerged subtleties of history. It is indeed a bourgeois conceit that all one needs to properly understand history and political questions is a fair dose of decency, impartiality, a solid education, and a first-class mind. Well, Eric Blair (Orwell) had all those in significant measure, and yet he missed his target with 1984, modeling his vision on the Soviet Union and not Western imperialism. Not only that, but for a man who saw colonialism firsthand in India, and later fought in the Spanish Civil War, albeit as an anarchist (anti-Stalinist) sympathiser, and took a bullet for it that almost killed him, he didn't get that fight right either, finally crowning his career as an anti-communist informer for the Anglo establishment.
Even the usually heavily redacted Wikipedia has this to say about this sordid matter:

In 1949, shortly before he died, the English author George Orwell prepared a list of notable writers and other people he considered to be unsuitable as possible writers for the anti-communist propaganda activities of the Information Research Department, a secret propaganda organisation of the British state under the Foreign Office. A copy of the list was published in The Guardian in 2003 and the original was released by the Foreign Office soon after.^[

The Information Research Department (IRD) was a secret propaganda wing of the UK Foreign Office, dedicated to disinformation warfare, anti-communism, and pro-colonial propaganda. The IRD was created in 1948 by Clement Attlee's Labour government, and became both the largest wing of the Foreign Office and the longest running covert government propaganda department in British history.

There are many other cases, some far worse, Arthur Koestler being one, of high-caliber intellectual turncoats who did study Marxism and history and later sold their talents to the capitalist West via the CIA, MI6 or other suitable channels.  Given his value in the pantheon of US public intellectuals, I hope Chris Hedges will eventually rethink and correct this aspect of his public education ministry.—PG