This is the Rockford College graduation speech Chris Hedges tried to give on May 17, 2003, before being drowned out by shouts and boos and fog horns. A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, he is author of the highly recommended War Is the Force That Gives Us Meaning.
War and Empire: The Truth That Rockford Couldn’t Bear to Hear
I saw this video months ago, but recently came across the text on Antiwar.com while searching for something else. He calls Putin a dictator, but Russia was fighting U.S.-backed terrorists in Chechnya at the time (see after the cut). The reason why the speech interested me is that Rockford isn’t far from where I grew up.
Related:
The West, far from assisting the Russians in their fight against Osama bin Laden’s co-thinkers in the Caucasus, is aiding and abetting the Chechen “separatists”: The same Western governments that strained to create phony “links” between Iraq and al-Qaeda are weirdly oblivious to the numerous Chechen/al-Qaeda links. One would think that Washington, at pains to detect any sign of Muslim support in the war on terrorism, would have taken full advantage of the near-universal condemnation that greeted the Beslan outrage from Tangier to Tehran. But no: instead, the British have granted political asylum to Akhmed Zakayev, a top Chechen military commander accused of murder, kidnapping, and other crimes, who is now feted in London by the likes of Vanessa Redgrave.
Imagine if Moscow agreed to shelter Abu Musab al-Zarqawi – because that’s what this amounts to.
The almost unbelievable hypocrisy and outright treachery of the Western response to Beslan might baffle the more naïve among my readers, in Russia as well as the West, who wonder how and why Bush, Blair, and the EU-weenies are pursuing such a course. But Putin, a proud Russian patriot, knows perfectly well what he’s up against, and why. Because it isn’t only a few stray Chechen bandits who enjoy the sympathetic hospitality of the West. Boris Berezovsky, the Russian “oligarch” who made his fortune from political connections that enabled him to scarf up newly-“privatized” Soviet state assets, fled Russia to evade charges of massive fraud and other crimes, and found a natural home in Tony Blair’s Britain, which received him with open arms. The campaign against the oligarchs – former Commies who cashed in on their connections to steal billions from the decomposing Soviet state – particularly enraged Richard Perle, the neocon Achilles, who mourned the arrest of Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky as bitterly as the Greek hero mourned Patroclus, bitterly demanding that Russia be thrown out of the G-8 group of nations.
The Chechen “liberation” struggle is being taken up by a very odd crowd, as John Laughland notes in the Guardian:
“This harshness towards Putin is perhaps explained by the fact that, in the US, the leading group which pleads the Chechen cause is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). The list of the self-styled ‘distinguished Americans’ who are its members is a rollcall of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusiastically support the ‘war on terror.’”
Laughlin lists the ACPC’s supporters, including
• Richard “Conflict of Interest” Perle
• Elliott “Iran-Contra” Abrams
• Kenneth “Cakewalk” Adelman
• Midge “Rummy’s a Stud Muffin” Decter
• Frank “Military-Industrial Complex” Gaffney
• Bruce “Lockheed-Martin Marietta” Jackson
• Michael “Creative Destruction” Ledeen
• R. James “World War” Woolsey.
The neocons, who supposedly abhor “appeasing” terrorists, are demanding, through the ACPC, that Putin negotiate with the murderers of children. Their website is filled with “peace proposals” and articles blaming the Russians themselves for the wave of violence being visited upon them, and extolling the Chechens as “oppressed” victims of Great Russian expansionism.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 