Remains of Sandy Irvine believed found on Everest after 100 years

Grayson Schaffer
Fri, October 11, 2024 


Photographer and filmmaker Jimmy Chin was leading a National Geographic team below the north face of Mount Everest in September when they discovered a boot and sock embroidered with “A.C. Irvine,” believed to belong to the lost mountaineer Andrew Comyn Irvine. Photograph by National Geographic/Erich Roepke

When they spotted it, there was no mistaking what they were looking at: a boot melting out of the ice. As they drew closer, they could tell the cracked leather was old and worn, and the sole was studded and bracketed with the diamond-patterned steel hobnails of a bygone era of climbing.

In September, on the broad expanse of the Central Rongbuk Glacier, below the north face of Mount Everest, a National Geographic documentary team that included the photographer and director Jimmy Chin, along with filmmakers and climbers Erich Roepke and Mark Fisher, examined the boot more closely. Inside, they discovered a foot, remains that they instantly recognized as belonging to Andrew Comyn Irvine, or Sandy, as he was known, who vanished 100 years ago with the famed climber George Mallory.

“I lifted up the sock,” Chin says, describing the moment, “and there’s a red label that has A.C. IRVINE stitched into it.” Chin says he and his companions recognized the significance of the moment in unison. “We were all literally running in circles dropping F-bombs.”

Irvine and Mallory were last seen on June 8, 1924, while attempting to become the first people to reach the top of the world’s highest peak. The question of whether they had summited has endured as the greatest climbing mystery of all time. If Irvine and Mallory succeeded, their feat would have come some 29 years before Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary finally reached the top of Everest.

Mallory’s remains were located in 1999, while the whereabouts of Irvine’s were unknown. “It's the first real evidence of where Sandy ended up,” says Chin of the discovery. “A lot of theories have been put out there.” He hopes the discovery helps explain what happened on the mountain in 1924, and brings some closure to Irvine’s relatives who revere him still. “When someone disappears and there’s no evidence of what happened to them, it can be really challenging for families. And just having some definitive information of where Sandy might’ve ended up is certainly [helpful], and also a big clue for the climbing community as to what happened.”

Chin said he suspects the boot had been trapped in the glacier until just prior to the team spotting it. “I think it literally melted out a week before we found it,” he said. Photograph by Jimmy Chin


The sock, with Irvine’s name, was found along with a boot and a foot, emerging from the ice of the Central Rongbuk Glacier. Photograph by Jimmy Chin

One of Chin’s first calls to share the news was to Irvine’s great-niece Julie Summers, 64, who wrote a 2001 biography of Irvine and has championed his contributions to mountaineering for years. She was grateful for the news. “It’s an object that belonged to him and has a bit of him in it,” she says of the boot. “It tells the whole story about what probably happened.” Summers suspects that the remains were swept down the mountain by avalanches and crushed by the moving glacier. “I'm regarding it as something close to closure.” Members of the family have volunteered to share DNA samples to compare with the remains in order to confirm their identity.

(This team climbed Everest to search for a camera that could rewrite history)

Summers said the discovery brought back memories of when news broke in 1999 that Mallory’s body had been found by the alpinist Conrad Anker, as part of the Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition, which sought to settle the question of whether the pair had indeed reached the summit. An examination of his remains revealed the sort of deep rope marks that might indicate a fall that was caught by a rope wrapped around his waist—evidence that suggested to Anker that Mallory and Irvine were roped together in their final moments. “I knew at once that he’d been tied to his partner, and that he’d taken a long fall,” Anker wrote in The Lost Explorer, which he co-authored with David Roberts. Mallory’s right leg was badly broken and his uninjured left leg was laid delicately over the break, hinting that he didn’t die immediately in the fall. His dark snow goggles were in his pocket, which led to speculation that the fall could have occurred in the evening as the two had been descending. The photograph of his wife that Mallory had planned to leave on the summit wasn’t with him.

Finding Mallory’s remains answered several questions about the fate of the two men, but it left two big questions unanswered. Where was Irvine? And had the pair reached the summit? Climbers and historians long thought that answering the first question might offer clues about the second. After all, it had been Irvine who had carried the Kodak Vest Pocket Camera lent by expedition member Howard Somervell. The undeveloped film inside, it was thought, might contain the only conclusive evidence of their success. And so, the quest to find Irvine’s body acquired more interest—on par, in some circles, with the search for Amelia Earhart or Michael Rockefeller.

In the last photo taken of the mountaineers, George Mallory (left) and Sandy Irvine prepare to leave the North Col of Everest in June 1924. Photograph by Noel E. Odell/Royal Geographical Society via Getty Images

In September, several days before they came upon the boot, Chin says, the team was descending the Central Rongbuk Glacier when they found a different artifact that aroused their curiosity. “We discovered an oxygen bottle marked with a date on it that said 1933,” he says. Nine years after Mallory and Irvine had gone missing, the 1933 British Everest expedition was the fourth attempt to climb the mountain. It also ended in failure, but members of the 1933 expedition did find an ice ax that belonged to Sandy Irvine high on the northeast ridge, though well below where Mallory was found.

(Here's why Mount Everest keeps changing its height)

The discovery of the 1933 oxygen cylinder got Chin and his teammates thinking. “If Sandy had fallen down the north face, his remains or his body could be somewhere near here,” says Chin. They started to speculate that if an oxygen canister had fallen off the mountain, “it probably fell down quite a bit farther than a body—more like a missile.”

Chin suspected that Irvine’s remains could be close. “Sandy could potentially be a few hundred yards up the glacier from here toward the mountain,” he told Erich Roepke. In the days that followed, Chin and his team began taking a circuitous route across the folds and crevasses of the glacier. “It was actually Erich who spotted something and was like, ‘Hey, what's that?’,” says Chin. It was the boot, emerging from the ice. “I think it literally melted out a week before we found it.”

In her book about her great-uncle, Julie Summers describes Irvine as “a beautiful young man who died in the flush of youth.” Indeed, at 22 Irvine had been the youngest member of the 1924 expedition—a mission that followed two previous British climbs, one in 1921 to reconnoiter possible climbing routes, and a second in 1922 that marked the first serious attempt at summiting. In those days, simply reaching Everest required a month or more. The ropes were natural fiber, the outerwear consisted of wool and gaberdine, and the boots were leather—purchased for five pounds three shillings from James J. Carter, a London boot maker.


Andrew “Sandy” Irvine was 22 years old when he vanished with Mallory. The Oxford student was the youngest member of the expedition. Photograph by Mount Everest Foundation/Royal Geographical Society via Getty Images

Irvine came from an upper middle-class family in Cheshire, England; he was handsome and athletic, a star rower at Oxford. Still, Irvine has often been the subject of criticism for lacking technical mountaineering experience prior to finding himself on the mountain in 1924. Reportedly, he likely suffered from a learning disability like dyslexia that hampered him as a reader, but he was mechanically gifted and excelled at math and engineering. When he joined the expedition, he was immediately appointed to serve as the oxygen officer, and he helped to improve the design of the team’s oxygen cylinders. He earned his spot on the summit team by dint of his will and athletic prowess. “Irvine,” wrote expedition leader E.F. Norton in The Fight For Everest, “was big and powerful—with fine shoulders and comparatively light legs.” Summers says that Mallory likely valued Irvine’s deference to the older climber. Irvine was absolutely loyal to Mallory, she says.

Early on the morning of June 8, 1924, the two men set off for the summit under conditions that Mallory is said to have described as ''perfect weather for the job.'' That afternoon, they were last spotted by teammate Noel Odell, who reported briefly noticing two tiny figures near the Second Step during a brief parting of the clouds. Then they were gone.

(Inside the Everest expedition that built the world’s highest weather station)

Over the years, several theories have emerged to explain why Irvine was never found. One notion proposed by Mark Synnott, a writer, climber, and National Geographic contributor in his book The Third Pole: Mystery, Obsession, and Death on Mount Everest suggests that Chinese climbers might have found the body and the camera long ago, and kept it quiet. Summers thinks the discovery of the boot refutes that idea. “I think Jimmy's find has absolutely answered that question,” she says.

An earlier theory suggests that a Chinese climber in 1975 had encountered a body outfitted in vintage clothing, just below the Northeast Ridge. That sighting became the basis for the target area of the 1999 Mallory Irvine Research Expedition. Members of that team, including Anker, expected that if they found a body it would be Irvine’s—which might then lead them to Mallory’s (the expedition’s leader Eric Simonson collected a DNA sample from one of Irvine’s relatives to aid in the identification). After Anker discovered Mallory’s remains— the team performed a burial on the mountain—he spoke with Summers. “Conrad Anker said to me, he was looking for the treasure map and ended up finding the treasure,” remembers Summers.

Several days after Chin and his team found the boot, they noticed ravens disturbing it. At that point, he says, he asked the China-Tibet Mountaineering Association (CTMA), the governmental authority that oversees the north side of Everest, whether the team could move the remains off the mountain. Chin carried the boot and foot off Everest in a cooler and turned it over to the CTMA. His team also took a DNA sample that they are working with the British Consulate on for further identification. “But I mean, dude,” says Chin. “There's a label on it.”

Chin is declining to elaborate on where exactly the remains were found—he says he wants to discourage trophy hunters. But he’s confident that more artifacts and maybe even the camera are nearby: “It certainly reduces the search area.”

Everest’s great mystery solved? Sandy Irvine’s remains found 100 years after tweed-clad climber vanished

Alex Croft
Fri, October 11, 2024 

(PA/Getty)


The enduring mystery of Mallory and Irvine, the tweed-clad heroes of Everest last seen vanishing into a cloud as mist swept over the Himalayan summit, may finally have been solved 100 years on from the tragedy that so nearly ended in triumph.

Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, the youngest member of the 1924 Mount Everest expedition, disappeared on the upper slopes alongside George Mallory on 8 June that year while attempting to become the first people to climb the world’s highest peak.

With efforts on the coveted summit taking place in the few short years following the First World War, and with Britain having lost the race to the North and South Poles in desperate circumstances, the assault on Everest represented efforts to restore the reputation of British exploration – and indeed preserve the prestige of a declining empire.

The mystery of whether the duo reached the top before their death has been debated by climbers and historians for many decades. If they succeeded, they would have accomplished the feat 29 years before Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary, who made the summit in 1953.

Now, what appears to be the partial remains of Irvine have finally been uncovered in the biggest breakthrough in the great Everest mystery since Mallory’s frozen corpse was found 25 years ago.

In the latest development, a sock embroidered with “A.C. Irvine” and a boot were discovered on the Central Rongbuk Glacier, below the north face of Everest, by a team of mountaineers filming a documentary.

The 1924 Everest expedition. Back, from left: Sandy Irvine, George Mallory, Edward Norton, Noel Odell and John Macdonald. Front, from left: Edward Shebbeare, Geoffrey Bruce, Howard Somervell and Bentley Beetham (Royal Geographical Society via Getty Images)

A sock embroidered with "A.C. Irvine", along with a boot, has been discovered on the Central Rongbuk Glacier (Jimmy Chin)

The finding offers the first meaningful insight into the young man’s death since the ill-fated expedition to the 8,849m peak – with the Irvine family having volunteered to compare DNA test results with the remains to confirm his identity.

Notably, the sock and boot were found at a lower altitude than Mallory’s remains, which were located by climber Conrad Anker in 1999 and are now in the possession of the China Tibet Mountaineering Association, which is responsible for climbing permits on Everest’s northern side.

When the team made the find they began “running in circles” and shouting expletives, the National Geographic director and photographer Jimmy Chin said.

“Sometimes in life, the greatest discoveries occur when you aren’t even looking. This was a monumental and emotional moment for us and our entire team on the ground, and we just hope this can finally bring peace of mind to his relatives and the climbing world at large.

“It’s the first real evidence of where Sandy ended up. A lot of theories have been put out there.

“When someone disappears and there’s no evidence of what happened to them, it can be really challenging for families. And just having some definitive information of where Sandy might’ve ended up is certainly [helpful], and also a big clue for the climbing community as to what happened,” he said.


Sandy Irvine was only 22 when he died on Mount Everest (Royal Geographical Society via Getty Images)

Back row: John MacDonald, Noel Odell, George Mallory, Edward Norton and Andrew Irvine. Front row (left to right): Bentley Beetham, Howard Somervell, Geoffrey Bruce and Edward Shebbeare. Mount Everest Expedition 1924 (Royal Geographical Society via G)
Britain’s gleaming hope

In 1924, Britain was an empire in decline. The emergence of the US and Japan offered a glimpse into the world’s shifting tectonic plates and how global politics would be reconfigured over the coming decades.

Britain’s pride was also damaged after it lost out to both the North and South Poles, to the US and Norway respectively, losing its status as the trailblazer of global exploration.

Mount Everest was seen as the third pole, and the hopes of a nation rested on the shoulders of Mallory and Irvine.

Britain had made several efforts on the summit before. Set up by the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club, the ascents had been led by Mallory, whose athleticism and reading of the mountain marked him as a special climber among battle-hardened mountaineers.

The former schoolmaster, who had the good fortune of being sent home from the Somme due to the recurrence of an old climbing injury and then missing Passchendaele thanks to a motorbike accident, was involved in each of Britain’s three attempts to reach the summit, in 1921, 1922 and 1924.

Remarkably, the 1921 outing surveyed the Himalayas on an unprecedented scale, with 12,000 square miles of unexplored territory being mapped on a quarter-inch scale – laying the foundations for future expeditions for decades to come.

“That work is still being used, revised, updated, so it provides a baseline for understanding the region to this day,” Jamie Owen, of the Royal Geographical Society, told The Guardian. “It was a tremendous legacy.”

For the last of his three attempts, Mallory was joined by Irvine, a young engineer and keen rower who, according to a letter from Mallory to his wife, “could be relied on for anything except perhaps conversation”.

Andrew ‘Sandy’ Irvine, George Mallory, Edward Felix Norton (Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
The final ascent

Although the expedition was poorly planned and marred by illness, Mallory and Irvine prepared for their final ascent on June 8. “It is 50 to 1 against us but we’ll have a whack yet & do ourselves proud,” Mallory wrote in his final letter to his wife, Ruth, unaware of the tragedy ahead.

Mallory and Irvine were last seen by Noel Odell, a fellow climber who saw two black dots moving across the ridge from thousands of feet below. It would be the last time Mallory would be seen for 75 years.

Irvine would disappear for a century.

Announcing their tragic end, the Mount Everest Committee received the cablegram from expedition member Colonel Norton, despatched from Phari Dzong, 19 June, at 4.50pm: “Mallory and Irvine killed on last attempt. Rest of party arrived at base camp all well.”

Britain was left a nation in mourning, with a memorial service for the pair at St Paul’s Cathedral attended by King George V.

Wade Davis, author of Into The Silence, in an account of the 1924 expedition, said it is the only time that mountaineers have been so honoured in British history.

The last image ever taken of Mallory (left) and Irvine (right) as they leave North Col for the final climb (Noel E. Odell/Royal Geographical Society via Getty Images)
The great Everest mystery, reignited

In news that stunned the world, Mallory’s body was discovered at a height of 26,800ft (8,165m) just over 2,200ft (670m) from the peak along with some of his climbing equipment, a wristwatch and altimeter in 1999.

It reignited one of the great unanswered questions in world exploration. Did Irvine and Mallory die during a victorious descent having summited the world’s highest peak, or did they fall agonisingly short before perishing on the slopes?

Mallory’s camera, which may have held proof of whether they reached the summit of Everest, was lost. Also missing was a photo of Ruth – which he had previously said he would leave on Everest’s peak.

This raises the possibility of their success in conquering Everest. The climbing community generally says it is possible, but not probable, that Irvine and Mallory reached the top.

For now, that secret remains between the two men and Everest herself, but Irvine’s remains could shed new light on the events.


The sock embroidered with “A.C. Irvine” was found, alongside a boot (Jimmy Chin)
Following in Irvine’s footsteps

In September, several days before they came upon the boot, Chin revealed the team was descending the Central Rongbuk Glacier when they found an artefact that piqued their curiosity. “We discovered an oxygen bottle marked with a date on it that said 1933,” he said.

The bottle was marked nine years after Mallory and Irvine had gone missing. The 1933 British Everest expedition was the fourth attempt to climb the mountain and also ended in failure, but members of the 1933 expedition did find an ice axe that belonged to Irvine high on the northeast ridge, although well below where Mallory was found.

The discovery of the 1933 oxygen cylinder made Chin wonder. “If Sandy had fallen down the North Face, his remains or his body could be somewhere near here.”

Chin suspected that Irvine’s remains could be close. “Sandy could potentially be a few hundred yards up the glacier from here toward the mountain,” he told National Geographic.

In the days that followed, Chin and his crew began taking a circuitous route across the folds and crevasses of the glacier.

“It was actually Erich Roepke [filmmaker] who spotted something and was like, ‘Hey, what’s that?’,” said Chin. It was the boot, emerging from the ice. “I think it literally melted out a week before we found it.”

Andrew ‘Sandy’ Irvine (Alamy Stock Photo)
Irvine’s legacy

Julie Summers, Irvine’s great niece and biographer, said it is “remarkable” to see the discovery made almost exactly 100 years after their deaths. She was “moved to tears” when she heard that her blood relative’s boot had been found.

“I have lived with this story since I was a seven-year-old when my father told us about the mystery of Uncle Sandy on Everest. The story became more real when climbers found the body of George Mallory in 1999, and I wondered if Sandy’s body would be discovered next.

“When Jimmy told me that he saw the name A.C. Irvine on the label on the sock inside the boot, I found myself moved to tears. It was and will remain an extraordinary and poignant moment.”


Jimmy Chin led the small team which made the breakthrough discovery (National Geographic/Erich Roepke)
‘We weren’t even looking’ – Jimmy Chin

“Any expedition to Everest follows in the shadow of Irvine and Mallory,” Chin said. “Sometimes in life the greatest discoveries occur when you aren’t even looking.

“This was a monumental and emotional moment for us and our entire team on the ground, and we just hope this can finally bring peace of mind to his relatives and the climbing world at large,” he added.

Chin has declined to reveal the precise location of the find in order to deter trophy hunters.

Can Washington  hack and burn its way out of a future of megafires?

Sep. 29, 2024 


Tom Frantz, a manager with the state Department of Natural Resources, controls a Green Climber slope mower June 26 near Nile, Yakima County. (Nick Wagner / The Seattle Times)

By Amanda Zhou
Seattle Times staff reporter

Climate Lab is a Seattle Times initiative that explores the effects of climate change in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. The project is funded in part by The Bullitt Foundation, Jim and Birte Falconer, Mike and Becky Hughes, University of Washington and Walker Family Foundation, and its fiscal sponsor is the Seattle Foundation.

OKANOGAN-WENATCHEE NATIONAL FOREST — The teeth of the mower chewed through a stand of small trees and shrubs 30 miles from Mount Rainier and belched out a brown cloud of dirt and wood chips.

Tom Frantz, a manager with the state Department of Natural Resources, used a joystick to control this tool remotely. DNR hopes it can help thin Washington’s overcrowded forests that are primed for wildfire.

The work is part of DNR’s 20-year plan to improve forest health in Central and Eastern Washington and includes not only mechanical treatments like the mower but also prescribed burns. It also marks a different approach to managing forestland and wildland firefighting in the West.

This is a mammoth undertaking with hundreds of thousands of acres needing help. The Legislature in 2021 budgeted $500 million over eight years to get things started and help communities prepare for wildfire. So far, groups including DNR, the U.S. Forest Service, tribes, commercial and private landowners, and other state agencies have completed nearly 800,000 acres of treatment, of its goal of 1.25 million acres by 2037.

The stakes are high in a state that has seen record wildfires in recent years. Washington had its second- and third-worst fire seasons in 2021 and 2022, respectively. Wildfires in the Pacific Northwest have also destroyed hundreds of homes and structures, devalued timber sales, closed highways and foiled carbon sequestration plans.

After over a century of policies that prioritized fire suppression, unhealthy and overgrown forests are widespread across Eastern Washington. When a wildfire sweeps through these forests, which historically would experience periodic fires, they burn to a crisp because of decades of accumulated leaves, pine needles, shrubs and younger trees in the understory.

Nevertheless, barriers and questions remain. Prescribed fire, an essential step in making forests more resilient to wildfire, has been thwarted by workforce shortages and regulatory roadblocks. Hundreds of thousands to millions of acres still need some kind of intervention to be restored to health. Conservationists have also questioned to what degree the plan has changed operations at the massive agency and how much of DNR’s own resilience work is its standard forest harvests repackaged under a new name.

Wildfire season in the Pacific Northwest is expected to become longer and more intense as summers are anticipated to become hotter and drier. Forest resiliency scientists argue the treatments — if done at scale — have the potential to fundamentally change fire behavior in the state.

What does a healthy forest look like?

An hour drive outside Mount Rainier National Park, the forest road tunnels through a blanket of dense, decades-old pine and fir trees. You can barely see through the understory, and tree trunks brush up against the needles of younger Douglas firs, only a few feet tall.

This view might seem natural to the hikers, campers and motorcyclists who visit the area each summer, but to those who have studied these landscapes, their composition is the result of decades of Western forest management.

Forest fires emerged as a natural enemy in the early days of settlement, when timber made up as much as 90% of the country’s energy needs for things like heating, cooking, construction and toolmaking, said Lincoln Bramwell, the U.S. Forest Service’s chief historian. Prevailing scientific understanding on forests came from countries like France or Germany, which don’t experience the same type of forest fires. Settlers considered wildfire something that needed to be eliminated.

Yet Indigenous people understood the necessity of wildfire for a healthy forest ecology, often lighting fires of their own to cleanse the land.

When settlers moved west, they fought wildfires directly, killed Indigenous people en masse and outlawed cultural burning practices, said Sean Parks, research ecologist with the Forest Service. The number of annual wildfires had dropped sharply by 1880 and the formation of the Forest Service in 1905 created a formal agency tasked with ridding forests of wildfire, he said.

By the 1950s, wildfires that used to burn around 30 million acres each year now burned close to 3 million a year, said Timothy Ingalsbee, a wildfire ecologist and the executive director of the nonprofit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. During these decades, forests across the American West were accumulating a fire deficit. Grasses, shrubs and trees that historically burned away collected and piled up.

In Eastern Washington, around half of the forests have historically experienced low-intensity wildfires every five to 25 years, which would open up spaces for animals like deer to travel through and recycle nutrients in the soil. These forests would be dominated by fire-resistant species like Douglas fir and ponderosa pine, which rely on fires to open their cones and distribute their seeds.

“For the most part in Eastern Washington, fire was just part of the system that maintained and shaped it,” said Derek Churchill, a DNR forest health scientist.

Many forests across Eastern Washington now lack forests with large and medium trees where less than 40% of the sky is covered by tree canopies.

“We’ve done such an amazing job, even on the federal lands, of removing those large, old trees that we’re in a deep deficit. We don’t have anywhere near the number that we would have historically,” said Dave Werntz, a science and conservation director at Conservation Northwest.

How forests can better survive wildfire

In Eastern Washington, fire has long been a natural part of the landscape. However, policies that have prioritized fire suppression have led to overgrown forests that are not able to survive wildfire when it does come through. Forest health experts say a combination of reducing the tree density with thinning and prescribed fire can help boost survival rates for the largest and oldest trees, which may already be fire-tolerant species.


Source: “Tamm review: A meta-analysis of thinning, prescribed fire, and wildfire effects on subsequent wildfire severity in conifer dominated forests of the Western US,” Forest Ecology and Management, Volume 561, June 1, 2024, 121885; sciencedirect.com (Illustrations by Eric Sloniker, graphic by Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times)

According to scientific research on Pacific Northwest forests, around 3 million acres of the 10 million acres of forested lands in Eastern Washington are unhealthy and need prescribed fire, thinning, time or a combination to restore the landscape to a resilient condition. However, not all of that land is accessible to humans.

So far in higher-priority lands, DNR has estimated that at least 900,000 to 1.3 million acres in Eastern Washington need thinning or fire. The need will always surpass what resources are available, especially after taking into account that treated lands require maintenance, Churchill said.


During the 2021 Schneider Spring’s fire, the area on the right, which had previous had been thinned and prescriptively burned, survived better than the area on the left, which was... (Courtesy Washington Department of Natural Resources)More

Since 2017, various agencies in Washington have completed 790,790 acres of treatment like thinning and pruning, though after accounting for the fact that those treatments often happen on the same pieces of land, the actual footprint of the treatments total around 381,000 acres.

As proof of the efficacy of forest treatments, the DNR likes to point out one area in the massive 2021 Schneider Springs fire near Mount Rainier National Park. On one side of a road, the U.S. Forest Service cut down trees in 2008, created slash piles a year later and did a prescribed burn in 2013. The forest on the other side of the road was untreated


After the fire, the difference between the two sides of the road was stark.

On the untreated side, the trees look like spiky black toothpicks. On the treated side, the trees survived and still have green canopies, despite some scorching near their base. With less dead vegetation on the ground, fewer understory trees and more room between trees, the fire burned less intensely and wasn’t able to travel up the existing trees. Naturally fire-resistant ponderosa pines have thick bark and don’t have branches low to the ground that can help a fire climb to the canopy.

Barriers around fire and questions from conservationists

The lack of prescribed fire threatens to be the biggest bottleneck of all in Washington’s forest resiliency plans.

Only around 23% of all treatments and 12% of DNR’s treatments since 2017 were prescribed fires, according to data collected by DNR. Most of those treatments were when piles of branches, shrubs and “slash” were burned and only around 0.5% of all the treatments were “broadcast burns,” or when an entire section of a forest floor was cleared of vegetation. DNR ignited its first prescribed burn of that kind in two decades in 2022. Other agencies, like the Forest Service and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, have been conducting prescribed burns for longer.

Earlier this year, Public Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz wrote that the amount of prescribed fire called for by the state’s scientific work is at least five times what is currently done.

The lack of prescribed burning can be blamed on workforce shortages and regulatory hurdles, said DNR assistant division manager Kate Williams. She said the state has a narrow burn window in the spring and fall, and if firefighters are already out on wildfires, there may not be personnel available to perform prescribed burns.

Washington’s air-quality standards are also more strict than federal requirements and do not have the flexibility needed, she said.

Experts have also argued that because the scale of the issue is so large, there needs to be more “managed fire,” or wildfires that are allowed to burn in a larger area without harming nearby communities.

While this can happen on federal land, Williams said, state laws still require immediate suppression of wildfire and DNR still aims to keep fires small to protect timber.

It’s unclear so far whether the current rate of treatment is fast enough to make a difference in some communities, said Katie Fields, Conservation Action’s Forest and Communities program manager, but generally thinning and prescribed fire “needs to happen on a much more rapid scale.”

“If they meet the goal [of 1.25 million acres of treatment] and they’re not really getting prescribed fire back in the landscape, it feels questionable whether those stands will be at the level of forest health that we’re seeking,” Fields said.

Conservationists have also expressed concern over certain DNR timber harvests that are counted as forest health work. DNR reports the highest amount of these harvests counting as treatments.

While there are cases when a clear-cut can help restore a landscape, Werntz, with Conservation Northwest, said he is skeptical that the amount DNR is doing is actually what the science calls for. Rachel Baker, the forest program director with Washington Conservation Action, agreed and said she would like more details about these treatments from DNR.

Churchill acknowledged that these treatments are done to make money for DNR and its beneficiaries but said they “often” include forest-health benefits, like shifting the area to more resilient fire-resistant species or creating open habitat. DNR spokesperson Will Rubin added that these tree harvests are different from standard timber harvests in Western Washington, and in all of DNR’s cuttings, a certain number of trees are left standing.

“We know people have economic objectives. Can people meet those objectives and still meet these other broader forest-health goals? I think we can. The devil is in the details in particular landscapes,” Churchill said.

Regardless, DNR has been hoping to expand more of its treatments to Western Washington. While fire has been historically less frequent here, research suggests these areas could see at least twice as much fire activity in the 30 years after 2035.

But the job will never be over when you consider that trees and other plants just keep on growing, said Chuck Hersey, DNR forest health environmental planner.

“You gotta run faster than the treadmill and keep running faster than the treadmill or else you’re gonna fall off. That’s our challenge,” he said.

Seattle Times climate reporter Conrad Swanson contributed reporting.

Amanda Zhou: 206-464-2508 or azhou@seattletimes.com; Amanda Zhou covers climate change and the environment for The Seattle Times.

Vietnam Then, Gaza Now: Bill Ayers & Juan González on 1968 and 2024 Antiwar Protests at Chicago DNC

DEMOCRACY NOW!

August 19, 2024

GuestsJuan González
co-host of Democracy Now!

Bill Ayers
longtime Chicago activist, author and founding member of the Weather Underground.

Links"When Freedom Is the Question, Abolition Is the Answer"

The 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, taking place against the backdrop of an unpopular war opposed by a growing number of voters, carries echoes of the 1968 DNC in the same city, when police violently attacked protesters calling for an end to the war in Vietnam. Much of the police riot unfolded on live national television, showing police, members of the National Guard and U.S. Army soldiers brutally assaulting and arresting protesters, many of them students. After four days and nights, more than 650 people were arrested and more than 1,100 injured. We look back on the infamous 1968 DNC with Bill Ayers, longtime Chicago activist, author and founding member of the Weather Underground, and Democracy Now! co-host Juan González. Both of them were in Chicago to take part in the protests. “It was really an eye-opening period for all of us who attended, who were out in the streets,” says González. “Chicago showed us what the crisis in the country was, the crisis of racism and white supremacy, the crisis of empire and war,” adds Ayers.

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.


AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” We’re “Breaking with Convention,” broadcasting from the studios of CAN TV here in Chicago. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, as protesters prepare to march on the Democratic National Convention today, we look back to the 1968 DNC here in Chicago, when police violently attacked protesters calling for an end to the war in Vietnam. Much of the police riot unfolded on live national television.

The 1968 Democratic National Convention came in the middle of a year of mass protests against the Vietnam War. Those protests had also erupted in April when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Then, on June 5th, Robert Kennedy was killed as he sought the Democratic Party nomination for president.

Democrats had to select a nominee after Lyndon Johnson, President Johnson, announced he would not seek another term and amid fallout over Vietnam. His vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was ultimately nominated for president without competing in the primaries, after party bosses arranged for his support from most delegates.

AMY GOODMAN: Despite months of organizing that brought tens of thousands of people to Chicago during the DNC, Chicago refused to issue permits for almost any of the demonstrations. Instead, protesters were met by an estimated 24,000 police officers, Illinois national guardsmen who patrolled the streets with fixed bayonets, and 5,000 regular Army soldiers.

This is a clip from the documentary by Newsreel that captures the tension of the protests and how police escalated the situation on August 28th after someone lowered an American flag in Grant Park. The police, under apparent orders of then-Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, responded by tear-gassing and clubbing their way through a crowd of about 10,000 protesters.


UNIDENTIFIED: This rally is extraordinary. It began for us when one of our brothers, quite rightly, lowered an American flag to half-mast. No one since then has mentioned the rightness of his act. It followed with an unprovoked charge of the pigs into our space.


TOM HAYDEN: They’re not going to let us out of this park in any organized way. So, for the purposes of survival, you should move out. You should float out in small groups and do whatever you’re going to do outside of the park around the city. Don’t get trapped in some kind of large organized march, which can be surrounded. I’ll see you in the street.


UNIDENTIFIED: How long would it mean leaving these people alone?


POLICE OFFICER: We are not aware of the conversation that you’ve been holding here with Captain Green.


DAVID DELLINGER: This is a nonviolent march, that so far we are only on the sidewalk. We are not even on the street yet, although it is certainly our intention to march to the amphitheater in the street, because we think that the street is necessary to accommodate this many people. We’re stubborn bastards. We may be nonviolent, but we’re stubborn. And so, we are appealing publicly, through the press, through Deputy Commander Riordan —


POLICE OFFICER: There will be no march today.


DAVID DELLINGER: We’ve made very clear that you have no conflict with you.


POLICE OFFICER: The order is, sir, that there will be no march today.


UNIDENTIFIED: Be able to march on the sidewalk.


POLICE OFFICER: There will be no march today.


DAVID DELLINGER: Well, we’d like to have the reason so that it could be communicated to the world.


POLICE OFFICER: We will let you know at the proper time. But right now there will be no march.


UNIDENTIFIED: This is a legal walk.


POLICE OFFICER: There will be no march today!

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: On August 28th, the day Hubert Humphrey got the nomination for president at the DNC, police again brutally attacked protesters who had marched to the convention headquarters at the Conrad Hilton Hotel.


PROTESTERS: [bleep] you, LBJ! [bleep] you, LBJ! [bleep] you, LBJ!


UNIDENTIFIED: I take one look at the troops in Vietnam, I know what American foreign policy is about. America now, that’s America of the Democratic Party. Most of us here didn’t come to support McCarthy. Troops are out!


UNIDENTIFIED: The troops are out.


UNIDENTIFIED: Hey, don’t panic! Keep talking!


UNIDENTIFIED: Cool it! Cool it!


UNIDENTIFIED: Keep talking! Keep talking!

AMY GOODMAN: Those video clips come from Newsreel, which was in the streets of Chicago. After four days of protests outside the Democratic convention here in Chicago, more than 650 people were arrested, more than 1,100 were injured. Despite the police attacks, thousands headed back to their communities as reenergized and radicalized activists. This is the legendary activist, the late Tom Hayden, who helped organize the 1968 protests.


TOM HAYDEN: What we are battling for is not simply for an end to the war in Vietnam or to move these racist dogs out of the Black community. We are beginning to fight for our own survival. We came here. We fought. We did not run from the tear gas. We did not run from the bayonets. We stayed in the streets. And we did survive. And if we can survive here, we can survive in any local community in this country.

AMY GOODMAN: We are joined now by two people who were in the streets of Chicago in 1968: our own Juan González and Bill Ayers, longtime Chicago activist, retired education professor at University of Illinois at Chicago, author of many books. His book When Freedom Is the Question, Abolition Is the Answer is coming out in September. In 1968, Bill was arrested in Chicago during the DNC in front of the Hilton Hotel and held at Cook County Jail. At the time, he was a member of Students for a Democratic Society. He later helped form the Weather Underground and spent years living underground with his wife Bernardine Dohrn.

We welcome you, Bill, to Democracy Now! And, Juan, it is great to be with you here for the first time in years together, as we co-host every week, but to be together with you in your now town of Chicago. This was amazing, what took place in 1968. Why don’t you lay out for us how you got involved?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, well, actually, you played the clip of Tom Hayden. It was Tom who convinced me to come to Chicago, because I didn’t think that the Democratic Party convention was worth the activists going to, because both parties, we felt back in those days, were capitalist parties that would not produce any progress for the American people. But I met Tom at a student convention again, because we had been at Columbia during the Columbia student strike there. And he told me, “Juan, we’ve got to go to Chicago. We have got to. The American people have to let the rest of the country, the leaders of the country know that the Vietnam War must end.” So I said, “OK, Tom, I’m not sure this is going to work, but I’ll go ahead.” And so, he was the one, actually, who recruited me to go, because I was not planning to at the time.

And I think it was really an eye-opening period for all of us who attended, who were out in the streets. And Bill can tell you, the number of different organizations and groups that participated in that protest was amazing. It was not only supported by the Panther Party and “Cha Cha” Jiménez and the Young Lords, but there were the Yippies, there were the McCarthy people, there were those of us in SDS. And maybe, Bill, you could talk about this strange coalition of folks that came together.

BILL AYERS: Yeah, when you say “the McCarthy people,” it’s the Eugene McCarthy people —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Eugene McCarthy.

BILL AYERS: — the peace, the “Clean for Gene” kids, who were there supporting a peace candidate who had run in the primaries, which Humphrey had not, and they came in support. And, of course, it’s interesting — Tom Hayden also organized us to come, because I was a regional traveler for SDS. I had been arrested, starting in 1965, maybe a dozen times by 1968. And we had organized. We had demonstrated. We had been activists in the street. And now was a time when Tom felt and others felt that we could make a coalition that would really show the whole world. And that’s why the slogan was “The whole world is watching,” because we wanted to project to the whole world that not only were there Americans who were against this; we wanted to educate Americans to the horror of the war and the reality of the political class having to meet behind police barricades.

AMY GOODMAN: And look at what you had just come out of. I mean, April 4th, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King is assassinated in Memphis. Just two months later, you have Robert Kennedy, who defeats McCarthy in California, as he heads off the stage announcing they are moving on, what, to Chicago —

BILL AYERS: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — he is also gunned down. He was assassinated.

BILL AYERS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: This is what you came out of.

BILL AYERS: Well, and for all those months, starting in January, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which proved that the Americans could not win the land war in Vietnam, and then Lyndon Johnson saying, “I won’t run for president,” the last day of March 1968. And we were ecstatic. We felt like three years of organizing and activism had worked, and we had now driven a president from office.

We weren’t happy long, because, as you say, five days later, Martin Luther King was assassinated, a couple months later Bobby Kennedy, and a few months after that, Henry Kissinger emerges from the swamp he was living in — I think it was Harvard — and he has a plan to extend the war. So, that was the reality we were facing. Every week the war went on, 6,000 Vietnamese were killed — every week, with no end in sight. So, the question was: What do you do? It was a crisis for democracy. It was a crisis for the antiwar movement. And we felt that we had escalate and bring the war home.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about what Mayor Daley did. Let’s talk about the inside of the convention and the outside. What was taking place in both places? Start with Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Daley was, one, leading the Illinois delegation on the floor of the convention, while at the same time he was instituting a police state. Even many of the delegates at the convention said, “We’re in a” — the reporters, Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, all of these people were saying, “This is a police state that we’re operating in here.” And so, he was playing both roles, as a political leader of the party, but more as the mayor of Chicago, creating a situation where — in essence, not goading, but leading the police in their attacks on the protesters.

BILL AYERS: And a year later, the Kerner Report — Governor Otto Kerner issued a report, mandated by the federal government, and they called it a police riot. And that’s indeed what it was. We had hoped to have a million people in the streets of Chicago. We failed miserably. And part of our failure was that Mayor Daley had made it very clear: If you come to Chicago, you will be hurt, you will be arrested. And it dampened the enthusiasm for the demonstration.

Interestingly, the impact was so great, I’ve never met anyone my age who wasn’t there. Now, that couldn’t possibly be true, but it felt true, because we were all there in spirit. And I think that that’s — the symbolic importance of it cannot be, you know, overestimated. It was huge.

AMY GOODMAN: Very interesting that the mayor today, that now you have protests that, well, didn’t look like they were going to be permitted, and people were talking about: Are there going to be parallels to 1968? You have a president who decides not to continue to run for reelection — Biden now, Johnson then. But at the very end, they have permitted these protests that are going to be taking place this week, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes. And according to the media reports, the mayor personally called some of the protest organizers and said that toward the end, when the police were refusing to give the permits, he said, “I’m going to get it done.” And so, he did use his office at least to allow the protests. Now we have to see how the police function, because, you know, political leaders don’t often control their police. I’ve learned that the hard way over many years of covering urban politics.

BILL AYERS: It’s true. They don’t.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You don’t always control the Army. And we have to see what happens now between the mayor and the police department in terms of how they handle these protests.

BILL AYERS: But it’s a significant difference to have a mayor who’s a labor organizer, who comes out of the movement, to honor and to name the moment, I think, correctly. But I also think it depends so much on what comes next. And we will see, but I’m confident that the expression of solidarity with the Palestinian people against this preannounced genocide will be heard loud and clear, inside and outside.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Bill, I’m wondering also what you think, because back then we had a problem even within SDS, that after the convention, many people were saying, “This election is not worth voting in,” and the result was, what we got was Richard Nixon and the law and order era that he ushered in. And I know that many of the protesters today are facing the same issue. After this convention, what do they do when the presidential election comes?

BILL AYERS: Well, I think that we overestimate sometimes the presidential election. Our job is to build an irresistible social movement. But it is also true that voting is not a Valentine. It’s a practical, tactical move. It’s not a moral question; it’s a practical question. And two things can be true at the same time. The lesser of two evils can be evil, and the lesser of two evils can be lesser. And so, recognizing all the contradictions in voting, it takes 15 minutes. You can be an activist for 365 days a year and vote for 15 minutes, and that is probably worth doing.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Bill, I want to go to Black Panther leader Bobby Seale. We have two clips. We’re going to talk about the trial in a second. But right now this is Bobby Seale speaking in Chicago during the ’68 DNC protests.


BOBBY SEALE: We go forth as human beings to remove these pigs, these hogs in the power structure, murdering and brutalizing people not only here in the confines of racist, decadent America, but murdering, brutalizing and oppressing people around the world. And when we go forth to deal with them, the devil always send out their racist, dirty, rotten pigs to occupy the people, to occupy the community, such as the way they have this park here occupied. Now, just a second. There’s a lesson that Minister of Defense Huey P. Newton teaches, that whenever the people disagree with the political decisions that have been made upon their heads, that whenever the people disagree with those political decisions, the racist power structure sends in guns and force to see that the people accept those political decisions. But we are here as revolutionaries to let them know that we refuse to accept those political decisions that maintain the oppression of our Black people and other people in the world.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Black Panther leader Bobby Seale in 1968, later arrested for inciting a riot. In 2018, he appeared on Democracy Now! and talked about being gagged during the historic Chicago 8 trial.


BOBBY SEALE: So I argued in the courtroom every time. Every time my name was mentioned, I would jump up and interrupt the whole thing. “I object! My lawyer’s not here. He’s mentioning my name.” “Sit down, Mr. Seale!” the judge would say. And I would say, “No,” and I would argue. And then, I remember the judge one time says — he talked to the court recorder and asked her, “Did she get that?” [She] says, “Yes.” I said, “Did you get mine’s, too, ma’am?” She says, “Yes.” I says, “Thank you very much,” and then turn right back around and told the judge, “You’re a racist, a fascist and a bigot.” You know, so, that was the argument with me. And I run that all the way through. Ultimately, those contempt charges and everything was totally thrown out. In fact, everybody who was convicted — they even convicted the lawyers of contempt, etc., of us. But when it got to the higher circuit courts, higher circuit courts threw all that crap out. Judge Julius Hoffman violated all our rights.


And then the last day of gagging, I was bound up, my head. The only thing you could see is my eyes and my nose. I was bound up with ACE bandages. You know, the ACE bandage, you put them around the knees when you’re playing basketball and stuff, to tighten up the — that’s what I was — and then, right around here, all the arteries that’s going down. And they brought me in the courtroom. My arms are strapped down to the chair. My legs are strapped to the legs of the big heavy wooden chair, the last day of gagging. And when I got in, I mean, I was losing blood pressure, circulation. And it caused a big commotion in the room. And then the judge says, “Well, take him out.” And they tried to pick me up in this heavy chair, three guards. And the big guard started beating me in the head. Jerry Rubin jumped up out of his chair. Abbie jumped up out of their chair, trying to help me. Guards slammed them back in their chair. I’m trying to turn my hand over, my right hand over, to get my — to get my fingers up to the top of the gag. And then the other guard would turn my hand down and then hit me and knock me back, you know, and stuff like that. They really brutalized me.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s former Black Panther leader Bobby Seale speaking on Democracy Now! in 2018 with Juan and me, talking about the Chicago 8 trial. As we begin to wrap up this segment, Bill, the significance of this trial?

BILL AYERS: Well, I think the significance of the events in ’68, the trial later, really show us what — Chicago showed us what the crisis in the country was, the crisis of racism and white supremacy, the crisis of empire and war. And it was just demonstrated. It was laid out, and it was so perfectly kind of on display that no one could avoid it. And so, for Bobby Seale to be gagged and dragged off, with his seven white comrades sitting there, and with people like Dave Dellinger with the courage to stand up and fight that, I think it was a remarkable —

AMY GOODMAN: Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin.

BILL AYERS: All of them.

AMY GOODMAN: The judge, Julius Hoffman, you said, no relation to Abbie Hoffman.

BILL AYERS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did Abbie Hoffman say? No one ever feared there anyone —

BILL AYERS: Yeah, exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: No one ever thought there was any relation.

BILL AYERS: Exactly. But it was an important statement to the country and to the world that we had these contradictions. And as you pointed out, it’s not that history repeats itself, but the contradictions have not gone away. White supremacy abides. War and empire and genocide abide. And we have to stand up against them. Our task today is very similar. We have to end this system of oppression. And that was a great moment of showing the world what it looks like.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about what happened afterwards. What happened with the trial, Bobby Seale gagged to a chair, tied up?

BILL AYERS: And eventually, they were — you know, the trial was seen as an atrocity, and Judge Hoffman was seen as some troglodyte from a former era who was trying to suppress justice, not serve justice.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Bill Ayers, we want to thank you for being with us, in your hometown of Chicago. Your new book, coming out in September, When Freedom Is the Question, Abolition Is the Answer. Bill Ayers, a longtime Chicago activist, retired education professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. I want to thank you for being with us.

BILL AYERS: Thank you very much.

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THE IMPENDING COLLAPSE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

The world as we know it is run by an exclusive class of American racketeers who operate with virtually unlimited weapons and money, Matt Kennard’s book reveals.

CHRIS HEDGES
18 JUNE 2024

Donald Trump and Joe Biden at a US presidential debate in 2020. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch via Alamy)

The public perception of the American empire, at least to those within the United States who have never seen the empire dominate and exploit the “wretched of the earth,” is radically different from reality. 

These manufactured illusions, ones Joseph Conrad wrote so presciently about, posit that the empire is a force for good. The empire, we are told, fosters democracy and liberty. It spreads the benefits of ‘western civilization’. 

These are deceptions repeated ad nauseam by a compliant media and mouthed by politicians, academics and the powerful. But they are lies, as all of us who have spent years reporting overseas understand.

Matt Kennard in his book The Racket – where he reports from Haiti, Bolivia, Turkey, Palestine, Egypt, Tunisia, Mexico, Colombia, and many other countries – rips back the veil. He exposes the hidden machinery of empire. He details its brutality, mendacity, cruelty and its dangerous self-delusions. 

In the late stage of empire, the image sold to a gullible public begins to entrance the mandarins of empire. They make decisions based not on reality, but on their distorted visions of reality, one coloured by their own propaganda. 

Matt refers to this as ‘the racket’. Blinded by hubris and power they come to believe their deceptions, propelling the empire towards collective suicide. They retreat into a fantasy where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. 

They replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with unilateral threats and the blunt instrument of war. They become the purblind architects of their own destruction.

“In the late stage of empire, the image sold to a gullible public begins to entrance the mandarins of empire.”

Matt writes: “A couple of years after my initiation at the Financial Times a few things started to become clearer. I came to realise a difference between myself and the rest of the people staffing the racket – the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) workers, the economists in the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and so on.” 

He continues, “While I was coming to understand how the racket really worked, I started to see them as willing dupes. There was no doubt they seemed to believe in the virtue of the mission; they imbibed all the theories that were meant to dress up global exploitation in the language of ‘development’ and ‘progress’. I saw this with American ambassadors in Bolivia and Haiti, and with countless other functionaries I interviewed.”

“They genuinely believe the myths,” he concludes, “and of course are paid handsomely to do so. To help these agents of the racket get up in the morning there also exists, throughout the West, a well-stocked army of intellectuals whose sole purpose is to make theft and brutality acceptable to the general population of the US and its racketeering allies.”

“The U.S. carried out one of the greatest strategic blunders in its history, one that sounded the death knell of the empire, when it invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.”

The United States carried out one of the greatest strategic blunders in its history, one that sounded the death knell of the empire, when it invaded and occupied for two decades Afghanistan and Iraq. 

The architects of the war in the George W. Bush White House, and the array of useful idiots in the press and academia who were cheerleaders for it, knew very little about the countries being invaded. They believed their technological superiority made them invincible. 

They were blindsided by the ferocious blowback and armed resistance that led to their defeat. This was something those of us who knew the Middle East – I was the Middle East Bureau Chief for the New York Times, speak Arabic and reported from the region for seven years – predicted. 

But those intent on war preferred a comforting fantasy. They stated, and probably believed, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, although they had no valid evidence to support this claim. 

They insisted that democracy would be implanted in Baghdad and spread across the Middle East. They assured the public that U.S. troops would be greeted by grateful Iraqis and Afghans as liberators. They promised that oil revenues would cover the cost of reconstruction. 

They insisted that the bold and quick military strike—“shock and awe”—would restore American hegemony in the region and dominance in the world. It did the opposite. As Zbigniew Brzeziński noted, this “unilateral war of choice against Iraq precipitated a widespread delegitimation of U.S. foreign policy.”

The war state

America since the end of World War II has become a stratocracy – government dominated by the military. There is a constant preparation for war. The war machine’s massive budgets are sacrosanct. Its billions of dollars in waste and fraud are ignored. 

Its military fiascos in Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East disappear into the vast black hole of historical amnesia. This amnesia, which means there is never accountability, licences the war machine to leap from military debacle to debacle while it economically disembowels the country. 

The militarists win every election. They cannot lose. It is impossible to vote against them. The war state is a Götterdämmerung, as Dwight Macdonald writes, “without the gods.”

Since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. 

Military systems are sold before they are produced with guarantees that huge cost overruns will be covered.

“The US public funds the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buys these same weapons systems on behalf of foreign governments.”

Foreign aid is contingent on buying US weapons. Egypt. which receives some $1.3 billion in foreign military financing, is required to devote it to buying and maintaining U.S. weapons systems. 

Israel, meanwhile, has received $158 billion in bilateral assistance from the US since 1949, almost all of it since 1971 in the form of military aid, with most of it going towards arms purchases from American weapons manufacturers.

The US public funds the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buys these same weapons systems on behalf of foreign governments. It is a circular system of corporate welfare. 

In the year to September 2022, the US spent $877 billion on the military. This was more than the next 10 countries – including China, Russia, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom –  combined. 

These huge military expenditures, along with the rising costs of a for-profit healthcare system, have driven the US national debt to over $31 trillion, nearly $5 trillion more than the US’s entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

This imbalance is not sustainable, especially once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency. As of January 2023, the US spent a record $213 billion servicing the interest on its national debt.

The empire at home

The military machine, by diverting funds and resources to endless war, disembowels and impoverishes the nation at home, as Matt’s reporting from Washington, Baltimore and New York illustrates.

The cost to the public – socially, economically, politically and culturally – is catastrophic. Workers are reduced to subsistence level and preyed upon by corporations that have privatised every facet of society from health care and education to the prison-industrial complex. 

Militarists divert funds from social and infrastructure programs. They pour money into research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable energy technologies. Bridges, roads, electrical grids and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Our public transportation system is a shambles. 

Militarised police gun down mostly unarmed, poor people of colour and fill a system of penitentiaries and jails that hold a staggering 25 percent of the world’s prisoners although Americans represent only 5 percent of the global population. 

Cities, deindustrialized, are in ruins. Opioid addiction, suicide, mass shootings, depression and morbid obesity plague a population that has fallen into profound despair.  

Militarised societies are fertile ground for demagogues. Militarists, like demagogues, see other nations and cultures in their own image — threatening and aggressive. They seek only domination. They peddle illusions of a return to a mythical golden age of total power and unlimited prosperity. 

The deep disillusionment and anger that led to Donald Trump’s election—a reaction to the corporate coup d’état and the poverty afflicting at least half of the country—have destroyed the myth of a functioning democracy.

“The military machine, by diverting funds and resources to endless war, disembowels and impoverishes the nation at home.”

As Matt notes: “The American elite that has grown fat from looting abroad is also fighting a war at home. From the 1970s onwards, the same white-collar mobsters have been winning a war against the people of the US, in the form of a massive, underhand con. They have slowly but surely managed to sell off much of what the American people used to own under the guise of various fraudulent ideologies such as the ‘free market’. This is the ‘American way’, a giant swindle, a grand hustle.”

He continues, “In this sense, the victims of the racket are not just in Port-au-Prince and Baghdad; they are also in Chicago and New York City. The same people that devise the myths about what we do abroad have also built up a similar ideological system that legitimises theft at home; theft from the poorest, by the richest. The poor and working people of Harlem have more in common with the poor and working people of Haiti than they do with their elites, but this has to be obscured for the racket to work.” 

“Many actions taken by the US government, in fact, habitually harm the poorest and most destitute of its citizens,” he concludes. “The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is a good example. It came into force in January 1994 and was a fantastic opportunity for US business interests, because markets were opened up for an investment and export bonanza. Simultaneously, thousands of US workers lost their jobs to workers in Mexico where their wages could be beaten down by even poorer people.”  

Self-immolation

The public, bombarded with war propaganda, cheers on their self-immolation. It revels in the despicable beauty of U.S. military prowess. It speaks in the thought-terminating clichés spewed out by mass culture and mass media. It imbibes the illusion of omnipotence and wallows in self-adulation. 

The mantra of the militarised state is national security. If every discussion begins with a question of national security, every answer includes force or the threat of force. The preoccupation with internal and external threats divides the world into friend and foe, good and evil.

Those such as Julian Assange who expose the crimes and suicidal folly of empire are ruthlessly persecuted. The truth, a truth Matt uncovers, is bitter and hard.

“Those such as Julian Assange who expose the crimes and suicidal folly of empire are ruthlessly persecuted.”

“While rising empires are often judicious, even rational in their application of armed force for conquest and control of overseas dominions, fading empires are inclined to ill-considered displays of power, dreaming of bold military masterstrokes that would somehow recoup lost prestige and power,” the historian Alfred McCoy writes. “Often irrational even from an imperial point of view, these micro military operations can yield haemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the process already under way.”

It is vital we see what lies before us. If we continue to be entranced by the images on the walls of Plato’s cave, images that bombard us on screens day and night, if we fail to understand how empire works and its self-destructiveness we will all, especially with the looming climate crisis, descend into a Hobbesian nightmare where the tools of repression, so familiar on the outer reaches of empire, cement into place terrifying corporate totalitarian states.

---

The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire is out now and available from Bloomsbury here.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Hedges worked for nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, National Public Radio and other news organisations in Latin America, the Middle East and the Balkans.

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