Chris Hedges: Putin’s Useful Idiot-- A Guest Post By Dorothy Reik

-by Dorothy Reik

I had heard Hedges speak several times before but this time I was on a mission. I wanted to get him to support Bernie Sanders. I even paid extra to get into the reception after his talk. But no go. He sneered. He called Bernie a sellout, said Bernie would endorse Clinton. “ The Democratic Party is a full partner in the corporate state. Yet Sanders, while critical of Hillary Clinton’s exorbitant speaking fees from firms such as Goldman Sachs, refuses to call out the party and-- as Robert Scheer pointed out in a column in October-- the Clintons for their role as handmaidens of Wall Street. For Sanders, it is a lie of omission, which is still a lie. And it is a lie that makes the Vermont senator complicit in the con game being played on the American electorate by the Democratic Party establishment.” He repeated his mantra that both parties were the same.

He rages weekly on truthdig, blaming the "elites" as though, as an Ivy Leaguer he is not one of them. Years of being a war correspondent have left him with, I believe, more than a touch of PTSD but being a war correspondent is addictive as many of their profession admit-- the adrenalin, the hypervigilance-- they are like those they cover. Holding a dying baby, as Hedges claims he did, can sear an image in your brain that will never go away. And thus he holds his audience in his hands and with the practiced cadences of a divinity student, which he was, brings them along in his frenzied journey.

He sang Jill Stein’s praises-- remember her? It seems a lifetime ago!

"The imperative of revolt dramatically reduces the importance of elections. Elections, managed by the elites, mean nothing if radical movements are not powerful enough to disrupt and dismantle corporate power." So he turns to Jill Stein because "she, unlike Bernie Sanders, knows that this movement will never be realized within the Democratic Party."

Marsha Gessen’s rules came too late for Hedges. He thought Clinton and Trump were two sides of the same coin but they were not. He should have believed Trump’s promises but he was too busy listening to himself. Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. Hedges now channels Gessen who suggested this as Clinton’s concession speech: “Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.”

So thanks to Jill Stein, Putin’s other useful idiot, now we have Trump, and Hedges, like the rest of us, is terrified. Maybe now he knows that elections do, in fact, matter. He cries out: "Reality is under assault. Verbal confusion reigns. Truth and illusion have merged. Mental chaos makes it hard to fathom what is happening. We feel trapped in a hall of mirrors. Exposed lies are answered with other lies. The rational is countered with the irrational. Cognitive dissonance prevails. We endure a disquieting shame and even guilt. Tens of millions of Americans, especially women, undocumented workers, Muslims and African-Americans, suffer the acute anxiety of being pursued by a predator. All this is by design. Demagogues always infect the governed with their own psychosis."

Yes they do, Chris. And you have infected many with yours. But no worries. You have a nice home now on RT along with a good salary and interesting people to interview. You probably even have good health insurance! On Putin’s RT you are calm but when you write for truthdig you scream in pain: "The crawl toward despotism within a failed democracy is always incremental. No regime planning to utterly extinguish civil liberties advertises its intentions in advance. It pays lip service to liberty and justice while obliterating the institutions and laws that make them possible. Its opponents, including those within the establishment, make sporadic attempts to resist, but week by week, month by month, the despot and his reactionary allies methodically consolidate power. Those inside the machinery of government and the courts who assert the rule of law are purged. Critics, including the press, are attacked, ridiculed and silenced. The state is reconfigured until the edifice of tyranny is unassailable."

Would you feel the same way with Hillary or Bernie in the White House? We will never know. Putin keeps his useful idiots close so they won’t bite the hand that feeds them. He might need them again. Rail as you will on truthdig-- on RT Putin has tamed you.