by Chris Hedges
Preachers and lay people may say, “In a church, through rituals and traditions, black-robed priests proclaim the revelations of God, helping us learn the beliefs and wisdom that can lead to our salvation.” Scientists and many lay people say, “In a laboratory, under controlled conditions, following the rituals of the scientific method, white-robed scientists proclaim the new theories and discoveries of Science, helping us to gain the understanding and the knowledge that can lead us both toward a good life, and Progress.”
During the twentieth century, the churches lost even more of their fundamental contributions. Psychologists took over the role of hearing confessions and forgiving sins—for both the laity and the ministers. Books, movies, radio, and television took over the role of providing the most persuasive fictions. Virtually all our best movies are about good and evil, because we created them, and we wonder about good and evil. A long list of literary fictions and film plotlines have allowed people to enter easily into their fantasies, to try on different roles for themselves: Star Trek, Star Wars—“The Force be with you”—Rocky, Rambo, Clint Eastwood’s tough characters, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Superman, Batman, Iron Man, etc. With the giant leap forward of the movie Avatar, our best professional storytellers can blur the line between fantasy and reality, making it even easier for people to enter the stories.
An important part of this, I think, is that people know all these stories are fictions. If they were told that all these things were factually true, they’d reject them. This also makes it easier to recognize that biblical stories are also fictions—but not as attractive as the best movies. In graduate school, the Catholic theologian David Tracy made some little waves when he wrote that our religious/theological stories are “useful fictions,” or even “necessary fictions.” If so, they have a long way to go to be as attractive as all the other fictions we have today.
Christianity certainly has—through Jesus and the best of the Hebrew prophets—some profound wisdom, without any doubt. But once you claim to exalt the Wisdom Tradition—as the Jesus Seminar also did—then there’s no reason to stop with Christianity. All wisdom (and alleged wisdom) is on the table. Then it’s easy to see and say things that are almost impossible to say from within Christianity. “Jesus was so young. It’s a pity he didn’t live to 70-80, as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Buddha, Lao Tzu and Confucius had, and grow into a less idealistic and more realistic vision.” Questions like this, I think, take the discussion outside of Christianity (or any single religion) and into a field that might be called the best sort of humanism (à la Shakespeare and Montaigne). But it’s hard for professors and preachers paid to be Christians to make that move, for lots of reasons.
Ministers know that if they’re going to preach on a story from the Bible, they have to tell the people the story first, since most of them have never read it. I remember Borges writing that we die twice, once when the body gives out, and then the second and final death, “when there is no one left to tell our story.” I think this is the state of most Christian churches today.
I. F. Stone, perhaps more than any journalist in the twentieth century, lived a life dedicated to the values Day and Macdonald held out as the only hope for real transformation. Stone, born and raised by Russian immigrants in Philadelphia, was one of the most famous reporters in the nation by the end of World War II. He was a regular on television news programs and had easy access to those in power. He traveled with underground Jewish survivors of the Nazi Holocaust on leaky transports to British-occupied Palestine and wrote a series of reports that dramatically boosted the circulation of the New York newspaper PM. He covered the war for Israeli independence. And he was a confidant of many in the administration of Franklin Roosevelt.
And then, challenging President Harry Truman’s loyalty program and the establishment of NATO, Stone disappeared from public view and was swallowed up in the hysteria over communism. He became a nonperson. He began an address to a rally against the hydrogen bomb in February 1950 with the words “FBI agents and fellow subversives”15 He was soon under daily FBI surveillance. His passport was not renewed. And he was blacklisted as a reporter. Even the Nation, the centerpiece of the liberal intelligentsia, would not give him a job. He was forty-four and wrote that such actions made him “feel for the moment like a ghost.”16
Stone gathered up a few stalwarts from his old magazine and newspaper audience—although not enough to cover expenses—and launched a newsletter in 1953 called I. F. Stone’s Weekly. Stone did what the muckrakers did before the war, but rather than write for huge mass weeklies, he self-published his work in his basement. Stone’s work exposed the damage done to journalism by mass culture. The stories that Stone broke were ignored by most organizations. It was Stone who punctured the Johnson administration’s assertion that U.S. ships had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin. He pointed out that “one bullet embedded in one destroyer hull is the only proof we have been able to muster that the . . . attacks took place.”17 In an appendix of a State Department white paper meant to justify an expansion of the war, he found that in the months between June 1962 and January 1964 only 179 of approximately 7,500 weapons captured from the Vietcong had come from the Soviet bloc. The remainder, ninety-five percent, came from U.S. arms provided to the South Vietnamese.
He did this reporting while shut out of the big news conferences and confidential background briefings given to well-placed Washington reporters. The establishment reporters, he conceded, knew things he did not, but “a lot of what they know isn’t true.”18 What those journalists called objectivity “usually is seeing things the way everybody else sees them,”19 Stone said. By the time he closed the weekly nearly two decades later, it had seventy thousand subscribers, and he had become a journalistic icon.
Stone was that curious hybrid of intellectual and journalist. He was as conversant in theater, art, literature, poetry, and the classics—he knew Latin and mastered Greek at the end of his life to write a book on the trial of Socrates—as he was in the intricacies of the New Deal, the permanent war economy, and the labor movement. His fierce independence and razor-sharp intellect, like George Orwell’s, often made him a scourge to the liberal class as well as the right. He detested orthodoxy. He consistently stood on the side of those who would have remained unheard without him. He may have been a supporter of Israel, but he had the courage to write in 1949 that Deir Yassin, an Arab village attacked in 1948 by Zionist paramilitary, who killed more than one hundred residents, was a village “whose Arabs were massacred by Irgunists with biblical ferocity, a shameful page in the history of the Jewish war of liberation.”20 American Jewish organizations offered to promote his book on the war for Israeli independence if he deleted one sentence calling for a binational Arab-Jewish state made up of Palestine and Trans-Jordan. He refused. The book languished in obscurity.
Stone would not sell out. He never forgot, as he famously quipped, that “every government is run by liars.”21 He was expelled from the National Press Club after he and a black former federal judge were refused luncheon service. He promptly joined the black newspapermen’s club. He declared Malcolm X “savagely uncompromising” after his assassination, seeing perhaps a bit of himself in the brilliant leader who read Paradise Lost and Herodotus in prison. Malcolm X, Stone stated, “drove home the real truth about the Negro’s position in America. It may not be pleasant, but it must be faced . . . No man has better expressed his people’s trapped anguish.”22 Yet as the New Left became anarchic and its fringes began to embrace violence in the 1960s, he was as withering in his critique of the 1960s radicals as he was of the government it defied. “Lifelong dissent has more than acclimated me cheerfully to defeat,” Stone wrote:
It has made me suspicious of victory. I feel uneasy at the very idea of a Movement. I see every insight degenerating into dogma, and fresh thoughts freezing into lifeless party lines. Those who set out nobly to be their brother’s keeper sometimes end up by becoming his jailer. Every emancipation has in it the seeds
of a new slavery, and every truth easily becomes a lie.”23
It is only when radicals such as Stone exist that the commercial media wake from their slumber. Figures like Stone, in essence, shame the press into good journalism. The news media reached their peak in the 1960s and 1970s with the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the coverage of Watergate, and the reporting of the Vietnam War. This reporting took place against a backdrop of social unrest, including the civil-rights movement and the antiwar movement, and a discrediting of established centers of power. The commercial media reported on the realities of the Vietnam War and the excesses committed by the CIA and the FBI only when public sentiment began turning against the war. Mass movements acquired, if not formal political power, at least enough power to demand a voice. The acceptable debate between the two wings of the power elite broke down. The alternative press, including magazines such as Ramparts, exposed egregious assaults on civil liberties directed at those outside the circles of established power and ignored by the liberal class. The pressure was an example of how important radical movements are for the vitality of the liberal class.
Government harassment of the underground press, especially after Richard Nixon took office in 1969, was ignored by commercial media. The FBI pressured record companies to cancel advertisements in alternative publications. Papers such as the Rat in New York City and the NOLA Express in New Orleans were under constant FBI surveillance. During 1969 and 1970 the editor of Miami’s Daily Planet was arrested twenty-nine times and acquitted twenty-eight times, posting a total of $93,000 in bond money. FBI harassment included phony letter-writing campaigns and three phony underground newspapers, along with three phony news services. Army intelligence burglarized the Free Press in Washington.24
But once Richard Nixon began to use illegal tactics against the liberal establishment, the commercial press fought back. The Watergate scandal, mythologized as an example of a vigorous free press, in fact illustrates the deference the liberal class pays to privilege and power, as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in their book Manufacturing Consent. Nixon had long engaged in similar illegalities against antiwar groups and dissidents such as Daniel Ellsberg, as well as against alternative publications, such as Ramparts, with little or no reaction from the liberal class. Nixon’s fatal mistake was to use these illegal tactics on the liberal class itself. Once the Democratic Party and the liberal class became the targets of Nixon’s illegalities, the media were empowered to expose abuses they had previously ignored.
“History has been kind enough to contrive for us a ‘controlled experiment’ to determine just what was at stake during the Watergate period, when the confrontational stance of the media reached its peak,” Herman and Chomsky wrote:
The answer is clear and precise: powerful groups are capable of defending themselves, not surprisingly; and by media standards, it is a scandal when their position and rights are threatened. By contrast, as long as illegalities and violations of democratic substance are confined to marginal groups or dissident victims of U.S. military attack, or result in a diffused cost imposed on the general population, media opposition is muted and absent altogether. This is why Nixon could go so far, lulled into a false sense of security precisely because the watchdog only barked when he began to threaten the privileged.25
Howard Zinn in the People’s History of the United States examined history through the eyes of Native Americans, immigrants, slaves, women, union leaders, persecuted socialists, anarchists and communists, abolitionists, antiwar activists, civil rights leaders, and the poor. Zinn’s work has been castigated by many academic historians, largely because he broke with the mold of writing about the great and the powerful. Zinn related history as it was experienced by people and he imploded numerous national foundation myths from the hijacking of the American Revolution by the wealthy, slave owning elite to the treachery exhibited by European settlers towards Native Americans. Zinn also exposed the clay feet of the founding fathers, including George Washington, who was the richest man in the nation after the revolution, and national idols such as Abraham Lincoln, whose opposition to slavery was never emphatic or even principled. Zinn’s honesty perhaps explains why the FBI, which released its 423-page file on Zinn in July 2010, saw him as a threat.
Zinn, who died in January 2010 at the age of eighty-seven, did not advocate violence or support the overthrow of the government, something he told FBI interrogators on several occasions. He was rather an example of how independent intellectual thought deeply disturbs the myths perpetuated by the power elite. Zinn’s work was based on a fierce moral autonomy and personal courage and was, for this reason, branded as “political.” Zinn was a threat not because he was a violent revolutionary or a communist but because he was fearless and told the truth.
The cold, dead pages of the FBI file stretch from 1948 to 1974. At one point, five agents are assigned to follow Zinn. Agents make repeated phone calls to employers, colleagues and landlords seeking information. The FBI, although Zinn is never suspected of carrying out a crime, eventually labels Zinn a high security risk. J. Edgar Hoover, who took a personal interest in Zinn’s activities, on January 10, 1964, drew up a memo to include Zinn “in Reserve Index, Section A,” a classification that permitted agents to immediately arrest and detain Zinn if there was a national emergency. Muslim activists, from Dr. Sami Al-Arian to Fahad Hasmi, can tell you that nothing has changed.
The Zinn file exposes the absurdity, waste and pettiness of our national security state. And it seems to indicate that our security agencies prefer to hire those with mediocre or stunted intelligence, dubious morality, and little common sense. Take for example this gem of a letter, complete with misspellings, mailed by an informant to then FBI Director Hoover about something Zinn wrote.
“While I was visiting my dentist in Michigan City, Indiana,” the informant wrote, “this pamphlet was left in my car, and I am mailing it to you, I know is a DOVE call, and not a HOCK call. We have had a number of ethnic groups move into our area in the last few years. We are in a war! And it doesn’t look like this pamphlet will help our Government objectives.”
Or how about the meeting between an agent and someone identified as Doris Zinn. Doris Zinn, who the agent says is Zinn’s sister, is interviewed “under a suitable pretext.” She admits that her brother is “employed at the American Labor Party Headquarters in Brooklyn.” That is all the useful information that is reported. The fact that Zinn did not have a sister gives a window into the quality of the investigations and the caliber of the agents who carried them out.
FBI agents in November 1953 wrote up an account of a clumsy attempt to recruit Zinn as an informant, an attempt in which they admitted that Zinn “would not volunteer information” and that “additional interviews with Zinn would not turn him from his current attitude.” A year later, after another interrogation, an agent wrote that Zinn “concluded the interview by stating he would not under any circumstances testify or furnish information concerning the political opinions of others.”
The FBI spent years following Zinn, and carefully cutting out newspaper articles about their suspect, to amass the inane and the banal. One of Zinn’s neighbors, Mrs. Matthew Grell, on February 22, 1952, told agents that she considered Zinn and another neighbor, Mrs. Julius Scheiman, “to be either communists or communist sympathizers” because, the agents wrote, Grell “had observed copies of the Daily Workers in Mrs. Scheiman’s apartment and noted that Mrs. Scheiman was a good friend of Howard Zinn.”
The FBI, which describes Zinn as a former member of the Communist Party, something Zinn repeatedly denied, appears to have picked up its surveillance when Zinn, who was teaching at Spelman, a historically black women’s college, became involved in the civil rights movement. Zinn served on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He took his students out of the classroom to march for civil rights. Spelman’s president was not pleased.
“I was fired for insubordination,” Zinn recalled. “Which happened to be true.”
“America has been a police state for a long time,” Zinn went on. “I believe that policemen should not have guns. I believe they should be disarmed. Policemen with guns are a danger to the community and themselves.”
Agents muse in the file about how to help their unnamed university source mount a campaign to have Zinn fired from his job as a professor of history at Boston University.
