[Peace-discuss] Paul Jay, Chris Hedges on theAnalysis.news, RT, and my take

Tue Apr 19 04:58:48 UTC 2022

A just-published Paul Jay (who now runs theAnalysis.news) interview with Chris
Hedges -- https://youtube.com/watch?v=EuGzAb-YNlM -- stands out from other
Hedges interviews I've seen & read because so much of it has remarkable wisdom
(overwhelmingly from Hedges, not Jay) but starts with some points that should
have been made more clear:

   Paul Jay: [...] Thanks for joining me, Chris.

   Chris Hedges: Sure, Paul.

   Jay: So, before we kind of get into the substance of some of your recent writing
   about [Hedges' column] "The Pimps of War", I want to talk just a little bit
   about your last days at RT and a quote from something Matt Taibbi wrote as an
   introduction to an interview he did with you in his column[1] called The
   Censored. Here's what Matt wrote:

> Hedges denounced Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a “criminal act of
> aggression”[2] after it began, and believes that if RT had been allowed to
> stay on YouTube, he — along with similarly critical former RT contributors
> like Jesse Ventura — wouldn’t have been permitted by the Kremlin to stay on
> air.

   So is that a correct quote and just talk a bit about that.

   Hedges: Yeah, I mean, so I very publicly denounced the invasion of Ukraine and
   RT went dark 6 days later. They didn't say anything, certainly well aware of it.
   They didn't censor my show. But I have a hard time believing given the very
   harsh censorship that has been imposed on Russian press domestically by Putin
   that they would have tolerated having someone like myself or Jesse Ventura
   denouncing the war in the Ukraine. And we should be clear that Jesse and I both
   were essentially blacklisted for denouncing the war in Iraq. I was pushed out of
   the New York Times, he had just signed a contract with MSNBC which was in the
   process of getting rid of Phil Donahue because he was giving a voice to antiwar
   figures over the Iraq war and they never launched Ventura's show. They'd have to
   pay him, so I think he walked away with 3 million dollars or something and
   neither of us were gonna stand by and remain silent when Russia carried out a
   preemptive war, which under post-Nuremberg laws is a criminal war of aggression,
   that would just be the height of hypocrisy.

   [1] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-chris-hedges
   [2]
   https://scheerpost.com/2022/03/14/hedges-waltzing-toward-armageddon-with-the-merchants-of-death/

Following this he talks about his former RT show, "On Contact with Chris Hedges"
where he interviewed people one rarely or never gets to hear from in
establishment media.

Some facts of this get a bit muddled across both the Taibbi piece and this
interview:

* RT "went dark" 6 days after he denounced the Russian invasion of Ukraine but I
know of no evidence to show that his denunciation caused the end of RT America.
One event merely followed the other in time, as far as I have evidence to show.

* Hedges said, "They [RT] didn't say anything [about his denunciation but were],
certainly well aware of it. They didn't censor my show. But I have a hard time
believing given the very harsh censorship that has been imposed on Russian press
domestically by Putin that they would have tolerated having someone like myself
or Jesse Ventura denouncing the war in the Ukraine.". Despite the "very harsh
censorship that has been imposed on Russian press domestically by Putin" nothing
happened to old episodes of Hedges' show. You can find them at
https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/ available for viewing or downloading,
including transcripts. That availability directly contradicts Hedges' apparently
baseless speculation.

* I understand that (as Hedges told Taibbi):

> The RT On Contact website is still up[1], but everything on YouTube is gone,
> and people watched it on YouTube. Some of that stuff had hundreds of thousands
> of views.

[1] https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/

but unpublishing episodes from YouTube is merely unfortunate. Unpublishing from
YouTube is nowhere near the same as being gone altogether. People who knew about
his show will likely read Hedges' Taibbi interview and go somewhere else to see
extant "On Contact" episodes. The main problem should have been that no new
episodes of the show are being produced and that, I believe, comes down to
Biden/Harris' anti-Russian sanctions. People with an audience, like Hedges,
should spend some time teaching others about other video sharing sites like
Rumble and Odysee.

* RT America, as far as I can tell, went off the air and off of YouTube because
of American anti-Russian sanctions. Since Hedges' show was running on RT America
(as opposed to some other RT channel), all RT America shows ended and all RT-
related channels were unpublished from YouTube. If "On Contact" could be
produced by RT (the main English-speaking RT network) instead, new episodes
would likely show up on https://rt.com, https://rumble.com/c/RTNews , and
https://odysee.com/@RT:fd where RT hosts its segments and live feed today.

A side note relevant to the above: Odysee has been asked to remove RT from their
service[1] and apparently they still carry RT channels (English, Spanish, RT
documentaries, and RT shows). It will be interesting to see how this develops
and if Odysee is hauled before a US/UK virtue signaling political theater like
Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter reps have been.

[1] https://twitter.com/OdyseeTeam/status/1498353815736573952 from 2022-02-28
which reads:

> We’ve been asked to remove RT from Odysee.
> 
> We don't care about politics, and being a platform means we have to be a
> platform.
> 
> Whether it's CNN , Fox 🦊, RT, etc. It all has its place on Odysee.

It's not clear who asked Odysee to remove RT from their service despite multiple
Twitter posters asking Odysee to disclose this information.

Getting back to the Paul Jay interview, Any context setting for this war is
almost exclusively left up to Hedges to bring up and he had quite a lot of work
to do there given Jay's stated ignorance of what the major players in this war
want in the end. Jay later says he "can't figure out what the hell Putin's
endgame is", but it seems to me that Russia would like a neutral Ukraine which
conforms to the Minsk agreement and for Ukraine to not be run by people who
continue attacking the Donbas (no matter how few people are killed). Jay also
says he has similar difficulty understanding the American position on this war.
I don't see how one could have lived through the US/UK-led invasion & occupation
of Iraq and seen the Afghan Papers and not understand that the US acts on behalf
of big business interests. I can only hope that Jay's claims of ignorance are a
clumsy lead-in to an interview question instead of actually finding it hard to
parse who benefits from more war, but I have only Jay's own words to cite.

On the upside, perhaps Jay is coming around to realizing that Russiagate was far
more significant than he ever gave Russiagate credit for being when Aaron Maté
worked with Jay at The Real News (if I recall correctly, Maté has said that this
disagreement is one of the reasons he left The Real News). The Real News went on
to hire a Russiagator and I generally lost interest in The Real News as I can
get that coverage from any establishment outlet.