Empire of desperation
Matt Kennard on exposing the rot of the powers that control our world, the corruption of the media, art's role in politics, and the extermination of Gaza
It’s not at all surprising why several people have compared investigative journalist Matt Kennard to the late John Pilger in their praise for Kennard’s book The Racket: A rogue reporter vs the American empire. Following in the footsteps of the grand Australian reporter and documentary film maker, Matt Kennard is a journalist with a rare integrity and purpose, which he’s continuously and courageously demonstrated — to uncover the egregious abuses of power that dominate our world and wreck the fates of regular people, and hold their perpetrators to account.
The Racket is a riveting and extremely important exposé of the harmonious but clandestine marriage between corporate greed and political malfeasance, which has employed all kinds of complex machinations to deceive the public and project a virtuous image of itself.
The book is a collection of Kennard’s on-the-ground investigations from five continents and more than a dozen countries, which he did during his time as a staff writer for the Financial Times (FT) between 2009 and 2012, but which would never have made it to its pages — from Haiti, Bolivia, and Honduras, to Palestine, Egypt, and Turkey; from the United States, Mexico and Colombia, to his native Great Britain.
Besides the American empire’s decades-long pillage and destruction of nations around the globe, Matt Kennard exposed the domestic war of its racketeers against their own people back home, reporting from Washington, DC and New York — the gradual but steady decline of the social safety net in the past 50 years: rampant homelessness and drug addiction, unaffordable education and cost of living, disregard for proper healthcare, violent expansion and privatisation of the prison system, the list goes on.
Importantly, Kennard also shed light on the true nature of multinational organisations, which continue to market themselves to us as the noble guardians of the wretched of the world but whose actual function is to look after the interests of the empire — the World Bank, the UN, NATO, the IMF. Whenever any of them steps out of line, as the UN tried to do with Gaza, there are mechanisms, inscribed into the system, to tame them down and curb their ambitions.
We in Bulgaria know all too well what our membership in racketeering instruments like NATO and the EU meant for our country — just last year, Bulgaria celebrated its 20-year anniversary of joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, which seems to have made us “more beautiful” by ripping apart our army and stripping us of any meaningful defence capacity, installing foreign military bases on our territory whose activity is cemented in divine secrecy.
One of the exploitative conditions before Bulgaria to join the EU back in 2007, was the shutting down of fully operational nuke reactors for “safety concerns”. Since then, our mobster politicians have made bold strides to further destroy our economy by welcoming in all sorts of “foreign investments” and reckless privatisation of the public sector, to help us reform our Soviet-era economic model and heal our Eastern mentality. With a bit of luck, we will soon subjugate ourselves completely by surrendering our last shred of financial independence and adopting the euro as our official currency.
Matt Kennard has all the receipts to prove the rot at the core of these institutions. And because of his uncomfortable questions and investigations, the British government has blacklisted him and unlawfully rejected some of his Freedom of Information requests.
More recently, as part of his work at Declassified UK, he’s made consequential revelations about British foreign policy and intelligence operations that have unmasked the United Kingdom as a willing participant in Israel’s sadistic annihilation of Gaza through diplomatic cover but also military and intelligence assistance out of the British RAF (Royal Air Force) bases in Cyprus.
Perhaps most striking of all, as Matt Kennard points out in The Racket, as well, his reporting is based on publicly available information for any journalist curious enough to look for and examine. This in itself is very telling of the servile media landscape in modern times whose main priority is to guard the racketeers from the working class.
The Racket is also the name of a recent project which Kennard started in collaboration with A/Political. It’s a fascinating continuation of his book that stresses further the urgency of his findings.
I’m very grateful to him for speaking at length about his work on The Racket, and sharing his views on the media and the journalistic profession, the place of arts in politics, and Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, in an interview we recorded recently. You can read it below.
Follow and support Matt’s work on X, and if you only read one book in your lifetime, let it be The Racket.
The interview was edited for clarity.
Matt, your book The Racket tells the story of a popular illusion, which a lot of countries have been told for decades, including my home country. And I think it makes sense to open with a quote from the book. I think it captures the essence of the message very well. So if you don't mind, I would like to read an excerpt from it. It goes like this:
“Unlike previous superpowers, the United States is a “moral” power, driven by principles and values, as opposed to domination and greed. America is “exceptional” we are told — not exceptionally violent, which is the truth, but exceptional to the extent that it has a “higher calling”; it is a “shining city upon a hill”. A brief foray into the world with eyes open teaches you quickly that this is the opposite of the truth. But keeping your eyes open will always be harder than seeking solace in your own divine moral superiority and the turpitude of your enemies. And so the myth takes hold. Repeat after me: when the US does it, Terror is Peace-seeking; Domination is Partnership; Fear is Stability. It's easy”.
Can you please explain who the racketeers are, what is the racket and how does it operate?
Matt Kennard: Essentially, the racket is an international system with lots of different players, mainly private concentrations of power in banking, in insurance, in mining, in all these different private sectors which are working at all times and have an infrastructure which is global to enforce their power and extract resources from the developing world. But they have to have a backup essentially, and that backup is the United States and also, the system I described whereby these private interests can go around the world making money, is a system which was essentially set up by the United States and allies after the Second World War. It existed before but it was British power before, which basically governed the global system.
So you have this system of extraction of wealth from the poor world to the rich, which is enforced through different organisations like the World Bank, IMF, which is headquartered in Washington, D.C. And if they need to, as a last resort, they can bring in the US military, which is the biggest military in human history. Its budget is over a trillion dollars, the Pentagon's budget. It has the same budget as the next 10 countries combined, and it has bases all over the world.
So it's an enforcement mechanism: if different countries or different movements get out of line and impinge on the ability of these private interests to continue making profit around the world. So it's a mafia system, essentially. And the title — The Racket, actually comes from a speech by General Smedley Butler, who died the most decorated Marine in US history. He signed up to the Marines in 1898 during the Spanish-American War, which interestingly, is when the American empire is seen as beginning in terms of its external empire. Some people argue that the United States has been an empire from the beginning because, obviously when the British colonists landed they started expanding westward and taking native American land close to immediately, and then spent hundreds of years doing that.
But in terms of it outside the national territory or what became the national territory, 1898 when they beat the Spanish, was when they took on a load of Spanish imperial possessions like Puerto Rico, Philippines and others. And so he signed up to the Marines during that and then fought in lots of wars in the early 20th century in places like Honduras, China even. And so he was like one of the major, major military figures of the era. But he had an awakening when he left and realised that all the myths that you mentioned at the beginning about what America stands for and also what the US military is for, which is we're told it's about national security and defense, you know it's called the Department of Defense — he realised it wasn't about defense, it’s about offense and it's about offense for the 1%. He actually compared what he was doing inside the U.S. military to what Al Capone was doing in New York. And he said: “Al Capone could operate in four districts. I operated on four continents. I was a high-class muscle man for big business and a racketeer”.
And that speech that the title comes from basically, backs up what I was saying at the start, you know, that the US military is about enforcing private interests, corporate interests around the world and was back then and it's still like that now. And as you mentioned, obviously, it's never, ever presented like this in the Western media. It's never represented as a racket, as a mafia system, the US military is never represented as an arm of corporate power. And instead, you get fed all these myths that you talked about, like freedom, democracy, national security, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it's endless. And in fact, interestingly, you can’t work in the mainstream media or most elite parts of academia as well, if you don’t believe these myths.
And it's quite interesting to me because you have all these people who talk about religion, and I'm an atheist, but I'm not like a Richard Dawkins-style atheist who thinks that religion is the major problem we have in the world. That's what he says. But he and others abide by this religion which is that America is a shining city on a hill. I think that American exceptionalism is like a secular religion, it’s a religion that is basically devoid, it has no evidence to support it. And in fact, not only doesn't it have evidence to support it, like religion has a lot of evidence which shows it's complete rubbish. It's all discarded and avoided.
And it's prevalent. What I'm saying to you is completely verboten in the mainstream media, and most of academia, as well. But it's not unique to American power. Every single empire in history has basically run along the same lines about extracting wealth and resources from the rest of the world and bringing them back home, and not actually to the people back home but bringing them back to a very narrow elite back home. They've all come up with nice theories to justify what they're doing. None of them said: “We're going X place because we want to ransack and take all their money and take all their resources”. They said: “We want to civilise them, we want to spread freedom, we want to spread Christianity”, whatever it was, they always had a noble mission. So the United States follows in that line.
And actually, it began even before the external empire, after the Spanish American War that I mentioned. When they were taking native American land, the same language, in fact, that phrase you mentioned — city upon a hill, came from a journalist earlier in the 19th century. And that was an excuse, basically, for massacring and exterminating and transferring the native population. American exceptionalism started much earlier, even than the external empire. So it's always had these religious-style justifications for what they do.
And I mentioned the mainstream media, but I actually think that these kind of mythologies are prevalent in wider society because the wider society consumes the mass media and the mass media constantly indoctrinates them with all this rubbish. So here in England, I don't know if it's the same in Bulgaria, but most people believe that the United States is this noble power that has higher values than previous empires or that it's not even an empire at all. It's just a neutral arbiter of a global system that is founded in rule of law and fairness, which is all complete rubbish.
So yeah, you have this whole imperial system, which is basically the governing dynamic of international affairs, which is unmentionable in the mainstream of any kind of intellectual industries, which for me is preposterous. And actually, I found this to be the case in the Financial Times. I didn't have too much of a different opinion of global affairs even before I went into the Financial Times, but I thought, well, it's an opportunity to have a look at how it works on the inside and also test the boundaries. And I found out pretty quick that, if you start testing those boundaries and putting in information that reveals the truth about America's role in the world and allies, because obviously the British is no different, European powers are no different, then you'll be out of a job.
There was no way I could stay at the Financial Times, even though I was a trainee and I was doing good stories, I was doing stories. There was no actual specific reason that I wasn't allowed to stay, although I didn't want to stay, anyway. But just interestingly, I was told I wasn't an FT journalist now; what that meant was, I hadn't imbibed and absorbed all the convenient mythologies, which you need to, to ascend the ladder of the corporate media.
So I was let go. It wasn't a verdict on my abilities as a journalist. In fact, the editor of the FT said to me: “You're a good journalist, but you're not an FT journalist”. So that's a quite telling thing. What does that mean? That means you're a good journalist, but you're not willing to become part of the system and become part of the institutionalised thinking. And that's an extremely explicit version of something that you assume exists on a much more implicit level across the media and does exist on an implicit level. But if you start pushing the boundaries, they have to become explicit about how it works.
You've mentioned before that the FT and outlets like the FT do factual journalism, they're very meticulous with the facts, but they do reporting by omission. I wanted to ask you to explain the term “resource nationalism”, and “foreign aid” and what mechanisms the racket uses to submit other countries.
Matt Kennard: Yes, it’s interesting. The main way that resources are extracted is through the mining industry, right? And oil industry. And they have to, because they're Western companies mainly, but there's also obviously Chinese companies and Russian companies doing it as well, but they have to have an excuse for why they're there. Because if you have loads of lithium in Bolivia, which they do — second highest proven reserves, a normal president who was representing his country would be like: “Okay, well, let's extract that and gain the wealth and build up industry within Bolivia to produce whatever products are being produced on that lithium”. And that's true.
That should be how it works. But the whole system, you need an excuse why they need a foreign company to come there. And that excuse is: "Well, they don't have the expertise. They don't have the potential for investment”, blah, blah, blah. There's loads of different justifications. But those justifications basically become this ideology that you have to attract foreign investment to be a successful economy.
And you have to allow the experts and the big companies to come and produce that for you. And what that means is, they come in, they take the lithium, they pay very little taxes because they've installed the government, which is basically working for the corporation rather than the people. They pay very little royalties, as well.
Even the taxes that they're meant to pay, they have very high-powered accountancy firms, which can do clever accounting and are huge companies that have thousands of people working for them, more than probably the country has in their own tax institutions. So there's a massive imbalance of power there. And then, they take those resources, basically paying very, very little royalties.
They say: “Okay, well, we're doing these nice corporate social responsibility things. We'll build a school”, which they sometimes do, or a hospital. And usually you find they're badly run and don't have much investment.
And also, it just means that you have these very, very localised versions of development. So there might be some development around a mine, but then the rest of the country is a wasteland because there's no money going to the central reserves of the actual government of the country. So there's nothing for the rest of the people.
And those resources go abroad. The lithium goes to Britain, Germany. And then what happens there? They build the batteries that the lithium produces in that country. So what does that mean? They build up industry within Britain and Germany. They create jobs. They create secondary industries from the other facets of building a battery. So you build up the industry, you get the resources. And then that's why there's been such uneven development across the world. And if any kind of leader tries to do something different, they say, well, they come up with the term called “resource nationalism”, which is one that I learned about when I was at the FT actually, which was quite funny because anyone I talked to in the mining industry, that was like a pejorative. It was something they'd say as kind of an attack on any government. They'd say resource nationalism is a bad thing. But what is resource nationalism? All that means is that the countries want to produce their own minerals and get their own minerals out of the ground and build up industry themselves.
And it's constantly poo-pooed by the international finance industry, the mining companies. And the other part of it is that most countries, you realise, have governments which are working for the corporations. And that is one of the major, major takeaways I had from, not writing The Racket actually, from the last book or the previous book called Silent Coup, which is about corporate power.
When I was going around the world and I was talking to peasants or workers or activists that were getting killed by paramilitaries hired by different companies who are unhappy with their dissent against a certain corporate project, I'd say to them: “Okay, I understand that the corporation is doing this bad stuff, but you have got a government. Why isn't the government supporting you”? And they all thought that was a ridiculous question. They would say, and I'm not just making this up.
They would say: “Don't be stupid. The government works for the corporation”. The government in most of the world is just a body which greases the entry of the corporation into that country and works for that corporation once the corporation is there. So you have not only, obviously the two power centres in a society — the state and the corporation, and the corporation is much more powerful in many places than the state, but even the actions that the state is taking itself, are often done in the interest of the corporation. So it's just a massive imbalance of power. And it's a hugely, hugely important thing because this is why we have a world which is so unequal.
Latin America is a good example. Since the Spanish arrived, nearly all the wealth for 500 years, all the wealth of that region was taken back to Europe, and then the United States. And you have such high levels of poverty in Latin America. I've been there quite a lot, in places like Brazil, which should be hugely rich. It's got huge resources. It should be one of the richest countries in the world. You just see that there's street kids everywhere who can't feed themselves. And that's not a mistake. That's a system running as it should. That's the system spending 500 years extracting that wealth, or corporations extracting that wealth, backed by their governments and building up industry at home. And resource nationalism is what you need. And Bolivia is actually a good example. So lithium — Evo Morales, who was elected president of Bolivia in 2005 — first indigenous president, democratic socialist. He nationalised a whole host of companies and renegotiated contracts, which is important, as well, because, as I mentioned, a lot of these contracts had hugely... the corporation got a much higher percentage of any profits than the government itself, which is preposterous.
And he changed all that. He started something that he called value-added. He said, we're not going to do what we did for example for 500 years, which is allow these materials to go out back to Europe to build up industry there. We're going to build the batteries in Bolivia. And they started doing it. And what happened in 2019? There was a CIA, UK/US-backed coup, which deposed him. And that's what happens.
This is what I said about the hidden fist. If you start stepping on the toes of corporate power and actually trying to use the resources of your country for your own people and to take a fair share of those resources for your own people, they'll take you out. And we see that again, and again, and again. So resource nationalism is a propaganda construct, basically. What it describes is a country taking control of its own resources and taking power away from corporations to ransack those countries. It's a very, very good thing. And I would advise anyone who is in the developing world to practise resource nationalism because these companies are not there for charity. They're there to exploit and to extract. And that's all they care about. Anything they do that they say is beneficial for the country, like bring jobs or build a school, is all just ways of them getting what they call a “social licence” because they know that they're unpopular because of what they're doing.
So they try all this corporate propaganda. But it's all rubbish. And I'll finish with this, that the whole system is undergirded by the main international financial institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, who promote the policies that I've described. And it's very, very hard when you come up against that whole ecosystem to go another way in development because you get all your credit lines pulled from the IMF if you're in a crisis. You get your credit lines pulled from the World Bank just in terms of your development projects. All the money is going towards people who just basically open up their economies to be ransacked.
And it's a tragedy really. But things are changing. Obviously, there's the BRICS bank, which is still young, but there's a move towards trying to build an alternative to what's called the Washington Consensus. But it's basically just a Washington and Europe consensus of the 1% that we can continue to ransack the world how we want.
Right, and in that sense, there is this asymmetry, I think, at least that's my impression, that as you mentioned, most people in Britain, let's say, they don't see the US as an empire. And I would argue that people in developing countries and countries like Bulgaria, they don't live under the illusion that America is here to save us or corporations are really good. I would argue that there is a specific social group which has a good income and they are actually benefiting from the system, and that's why they are conditioned to believe that it's not this insidious system that you are describing.
So your book was first published in 2015 and it was just republished last year, last summer. And it seems to me that the interest for the book took off more recently. I tried to find some reviews of it. I did find a review in The Guardian and a couple of other places. And I found it funny that the reviewers attacked your book in the sense that you wrote it from a very subjective leftist perspective and you provided a rather simplistic explanation of how the world is governed. And I found it funny because they conveniently omitted the fact that you based all your argumentation and conclusions on on-the-ground reporting in a couple of continents. And as you mentioned earlier, you spoke to local people, you interviewed local and international officials, government officials, business leaders.
And you are an investigative journalist, so you base your reporting on official documents, like FOIA documents and a great deal of it was based on the WikiLeaks revelations. So I wonder whether you have had anybody trying at least to provide a more substantive counter-argument towards your book and your reporting, other than the usual accusations of conspiratorial thinking?
Matt Kennard: Well, it's interesting that you mentioned that Guardian review, because, firstly, that's the only mainstream outlet that touched it. And I was quite shocked that they actually even reviewed it because a lot of people say that the best way to kind of suppress information is just to ignore it.
If you create, even if you do a hit piece like The Guardian did, it generates interest in itself. And actually at the time, there was quite a lot of pushback against The Guardian online, basically saying this is a hit job quite clearly. So firstly, that was a surprise.
Secondly, I wasn't that surprised by how they covered it because firstly, I don't think, and this isn't me being rude, but I don't think the guy really understands the issues at play from reading it. I don't think he really had, he wasn't a guy that had had any history in writing about international affairs or international politics. And secondly, it was quite clearly he went out with the goal to kind of just destroy the book.
And what I thought was the most telling way that he did that was related to what you mentioned, which is that he went through this whole line of it's a conspiracy theory, it's simplistic, but he didn't once mention in that review, that the book was based on reporting I've done at the Financial Times, which is how the whole book is framed. And that's because clearly, it wouldn't have made sense to people reading it if you said “This guy's a mad conspiracy theorist, but he did all this reporting at the Financial Times”, which is this respected institution.
So it was quite interesting. I mean, the review in itself is interesting as a kind of analysis of how the left liberal corporate media attack people to their left. That's what I think is interesting because The Guardian is, and actually this was in the afterword that I wrote. The Guardian, and it's not just The Guardian, the left liberal mainstream papers in most of Europe and America, their role is to kind of guard the left flank for the establishment and stop any kind of systematic analysis of the system, from being allowed into the mainstream. And that's what that is about.
And that's what all those phrases are meant to do. And it's quite successful in that sense. If you constantly call anyone who has a systematic analysis of power and actually tells truths about powers we're told are the good guys, it's very, very effective to call them conspiracy theorists because people don't want to be called conspiracy theorists. And to call them cranks or whatever, there's a whole list of different words you get called. And what it does is, it makes people who say these things outside of the kind of realm of respectability, you're not going to be seen as a serious journalist or as a serious thinker, if you say things like: “Well, the United States is a major, a rampant, violent empire”. And that's why you'll never read that in The Guardian.
But there has been some interesting reviews. There was one recently in Middle East Eye. But as I say, and it goes to what you mentioned in the question, as well, about propaganda by omission. The best way of propagandising the public is just to leave out information, and even if you, as I mentioned, even if you write a hit job, it's not leaving out information and it will peak people's interest. It introduces ideas into the mainstream, which, even if you're poo-pooing them, people might explore a bit further, people who haven't been exposed to those ideas.
So it's much, much more effective to just completely ignore them. And that's what happened apart from that Guardian review. And that's what I found with all my work. Silent Coup, the book we released in 2023, not a single word about that book has ever appeared in a mainstream publication in the English language anywhere. Which is amazing, really, because it did sell quite well and did create quite a buzz, but it was completely ignored. And that's a very effective way, and it was published by Bloomsbury. So you see that there's a massive blackout of these ideas that question the fundamentals of the system and the fundamentals of what interests are guiding and moving the system, because that's really what is the red line.
You can have interesting stories in the FT about certain corporations doing bad things or certain governments doing bad things or certain politicians in the West. That's fine. If you start saying it's not just a bad egg, it's not just a scandal about this one company, the whole system is a mafia racket, well, yeah there's no way you're gonna get a hearing. And in fact, it's been really exposed by Gaza, you know. I think the most brain-dead propaganda organ in Britain is the BBC and obviously I've never, well, I've been invited on the BBC once after my first book was published, which was about extremists and other groups in the US military and they invited me in. And I don't think they realised what the book was about or who I was. I think they probably just got an email and were like: “Okay, let's do it”. And then I did an hour-long interview where they talked to me about the book, I was talking about the neo-Nazis that had been recruited by the Pentagon to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And then I waited, and waited, and waited, and they never aired it. And that goes to the same thing as, they just thought: “Well, this guy's way out of the respectable realm of opinions”. Even though it was straight investigative journalism. It was all backed up by rafts of evidence. And they just completely excised it from the record. And that's how it works.
It's the same with Declassified, where I worked until recently. We did loads and loads of stories. This is not on the American empire, but on the British role. It's a bit of a conceptual mistake to think of them as two separate countries really. In terms of foreign policy, they're basically the same entity. And we did, I personally did a bunch of stories which caused huge diplomatic incidents in places like Bolivia, Venezuela, in Cyprus, and not a single word about any of it ever appeared in any UK newspaper.
I'll tell you what surprised me, is when I was doing the stories about the role of the UK bases in Cyprus in the genocide in Gaza, and it caused such a storm there, that there was protests there every week. And the president on both sides of the Cypriot border had to make a comment. They were asked about it at press conferences. And I was thinking, if presidents are talking about it, you would think that the newspapers would have to just mention it maybe, but still nothing happened. So there's a complete blackout and it's extremely effective because it's a sophisticated form of propaganda because it's not bludgeoning people over the head. It's not like the Soviet Union and Pravda where people go into work knowing they're writing the party line and people read it knowing they're receiving the party line.
This system has a whole illusion of freedom of thought and freedom of information. But actually, the best way to do that is to just leave out what people need to have an understanding and leave anything that isn't conducive to the state narrative or to the corporate narrative. It just doesn't exist effectively. That is the principle. And that's why what we did at Declassified was so easy in some ways, because a lot of the stuff we were doing was open source. And it was just that you could read a document from the UK government and write an article, and then look at the same article that had been written on that document by The Daily Telegraph, and there'd be literally two completely different articles because The Daily Telegraph journalist, not even consciously by the way, is reading that document and just taking all the information that fits with their understanding of the world, which they adopt from the state, whereas we were looking for information that told the truth about what was going on, and you can get two completely different readings of it.
There was quite an interesting case, actually, on the declassified files where my colleague Phil Miller did a story about Nelson Mandela and an oil company, and the BBC did an article on the same documents, and literally they were completely different. The BBC one just showed the image of Britain as this kind of benign power or even benevolent power, whereas Phil's article showed that Britain was working for oil interests against governments or movements that were trying to fight oil interests. So that's how it works.
And it's funny that it's not talked about as much as it should be. And I have to say, it really crystallised, this idea of propaganda by omission really crystallised for me working at Declassified when I was just seeing again, and again, and again that we were just being ignored. Firstly, we were being ignored. Secondly, I was reading the articles in the mainstream media and I was seeing that actually they weren't lying a lot of the time, interestingly. They just weren't putting in loads of information. And I was like: “Okay, well then that's a very clever way of doing it, people are gonna know if they're being lied to but it's much harder to know you're being propagandised if you're being told the truth but you're just not being told the whole truth”.
That's true and you've mentioned this in the book and in other interviews, that, what enables this system to work so well is the media, the corporate media. And you have a very interesting episode in the book where you recount this event when you apparently “disgraced” yourself while you were studying at Columbia Journalism School, and Henry Kissinger was visiting the university and you confronted him, asking him how he slept at night. And your fellow students and professors at the university started whining and complaining basically how you could ask such an esteemed figure such a question.
I was wondering how does this indoctrination manifest while you are a student, when you are at the university, and also, how it progresses and morphs into these perverse incentives when you move up in the profession?
Matt Kennard: Yeah, it's quite interesting. My trajectory is quite interesting because firstly, I didn't go to private school in the UK, which is like, nearly all journalists at the FT and most of the media would have gone to private school.
Secondly, I didn't get into university and got in through a system called “clearing” here, which is when there's empty spaces. And I didn't go to an elite university, I went to Leeds. And what I found was that there was much more vibrant debate and interesting ideas being passed around at school and at Leeds than there was when I got to Columbia University, which is apparently the most elite journalism school in the world. And that's not a coincidence because there's much more incentive for the system to get people thinking the right thing if they're training people who are going to enter the media elite or any part of the elite, especially the media elite though, because they have such a wide influence on opinions in society.
So I found at Columbia straight away, I was like wow, this is meant to be the top journalism school in the world and there's just a massive dearth of independent thinking, completely like, people were just interested in learning what they could to further their careers and that meant they didn't know pretty much anything about how the world worked outside of what they were being told by CNN or MSNBC. And Kissinger was a good example of that because I knew what he'd done, you know, this is one of the worst mass murderers of the 20th century.
And he was invited to Columbia University Journalism School by the dean, I don't even know who invited him, but some of the senior figures, every year to come and pontificate about global affairs.
And when he came, he was being asked all sorts of ridiculous questions about China's human rights record or, should they be allowed to host the Olympics was one of them, and stuff like this, and I was just like, I was actually more shy back then and I was just debating whether I should say something but I felt so sick listening to it. I was like I just need to smash the whole pretence that this is a respectable figure that should even be asked a normal question so I was just like: “I've got to say something, otherwise I'm not gonna forgive myself”. So I put my hand up and said: “How do you sleep at night”?, which some people, I kind of accept the criticism which is like: “You should have just asked him a serious question”, which I could have done, but I was just like: “Fuck it, I'm gonna do it”.
And so the dean got up who was sat next to him, and there was an audible like “uuuuhh” in the room, which I heard, and then he said something like: “You've been reading weird websites” or something like that and I was like: “No, I haven't”, and then he said: “Do you think you're morally superior to me”?, and I was like: “Fucking hell, I'm being asked by Henry Kissinger if I'm morally superior to him, I don't think I've killed hundreds of thousands of people, so I was like: “Yes, I do actually”. And then I did say something about the the coup in Chile, East Timor, couple of other things, and it kind of just went to a bit of back and forth.
But that was a window into the ideological training that people get that this guy was seen as a perfectly reasonable figure who, and also his past was, no one asked about anything to do which he had actually done in government which was like destroyed Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, East Timor, loads of it. I mean his record is, Chile — the coup there as well, I mean his record is awful. It's been written about a lot by different journalists like Christopher Hitchens wrote a book called The trial of Henry Kissinger, which is very good. But no one knew about any of that. And then, so it's interesting that the students, the top journalism students in the country and the world, basically had no idea about the crimes of one of the worst war criminals of the 20th century. Obviously, they know all about the crimes of the Russian and Chinese ones, whose crimes pale into insignificance comparatively but also interesting was the reaction of the faculty afterwards.
So most students thought it was rude and the faculty, one came up to and said: “I heard you disgraced yourself the other day”, and I was like: “Fucking hell, man”. And you have to be strong, this is what I'm saying about how systems work — you have to be fucking strong to resist all this pressure because it's lonely and isolating, and I felt that at the FT, too. You feel like you're by yourself and you are effectively by yourself, and unless you have a really, really strong idea of how the world works, number one, and also, you have to not really be in it for your career, if you don't have those two things, the pressure is so intense that you just become part of institutionalised thinking.
Luckily, I had a very clear idea of how I thought the world works which I still have, and also I didn't care about a career, I thought journalism was a good way of changing the world if you can do it in the right way but if I wasn't able to do that, and make a career out of it, I wasn't really bothered about it. And that's also what happened at the Financial Times. But my route is very, very unusual because most people don't get to inside someone like the Financial Times with my thinking, and that if they knew what I really thought, they wouldn't have let me in.
In fact, the day of my final interview with the editor, this is totally true, I've never mentioned this before but I was at one of the GA protests in London, there was a GA meeting and we were “kettled”, there's this thing that the police do here where, if there's a protest they basically, I don't know if they do it anymore but for a long time they did this thing where they basically surround the protest and they wouldn't let anyone out for hours, even to go to the toilet or something like that. And I remember, I was meant, I was on this protest and I had my final interview with the editor of the Financial Times. And I was locked in a “kettle”. And I was like: “Fuck, I'm going to miss the interview because I can't get out”. And then the crowd started pushing the police line.
And I was like: “Okay, this is my chance”. So I was pushing as hard as I could. And then the police line broke. And I ran through, ran down Nally and then ran to the Financial Times. So that's how unusual my route into the Financial Times was. But interestingly, I also started with someone who similarly didn't go to private school and was a really good reporter and still is a good reporter, but she carried on and she's still there. But she wouldn't ever do the journalism that she wants. If she'd come up in a different system, she might have been doing different journalism. There's no way you can't become part of the system. I mean you can do it but you bang your head against the wall for years which no one wants to do, number one, and also, the editors and the bosses won't let you stay because you're not useful to them and you're not doing what they want which is writing propaganda about the corporate system.
I agree with all that you're saying, but it's becoming increasingly more difficult to make a living if you are actually true to what journalism should be about. So I was wondering, what would you say to people who are very idealistic and don't want to sell themselves to the system?
Matt Kennard: Yeah, I get this question a lot and it's an important one. I have thought about it and my advice always is: just do the journalism you want to do and if that means you can't make money from it, get a job that's kind of similar to, or in the field of what you want to do. So the most obvious is the NGO world. Get a job in an NGO, covering I don't know, that covers the mining industry and then do the journalism on the side and there is a vibrant independent media you can publish that stuff on. Because I do feel like, as I mentioned, I've had an unusual route and I left after three years, so it wasn't like I was in there for very long but generally, it changes people. Some people say to me: “Well, I should do this and then, I can do something better afterwards but generally that doesn't happen, generally people stay in. I mean that the FT experience was great for me If you think you can do that and you're aware that they're gonna try and change you and you can resist it yeah, take the opportunities to work on the inside as long as you're not writing propaganda for arms companies or whatever it is.
But generally, I think that most people aren't that strong and then it kills your passion for journalism, as well, because no one who's passionate about journalism, wants to go into it to write propaganda for states or corporations. That's the opposite of what you get into it for. So if you start entering the industries and even if you're not aware of it on a conscious level, subconsciously you will be, then you just get disillusioned with the whole profession and you'll probably end up doing something else completely.
So I would say work out a way you can make a living by working in the NGO sector is the main one but there's probably others, as well where you can kind of cover, and also do journalism because NGOs a lot of them do journalism it's not like straight journalism but you do like reports on a certain mining project that's affected indigenous people in Colombia, for example and then, so you work on that and then you turn that report into a long-form article which you can publish on an alternative media website and you're getting paid by the NGO but you can produce the journalism you want, rather than working within an institution which is basically just gonna kill your soul.
Also, within the FT, I was quite unhappy there, although it was a great experience in hindsight, it wasn't easy for me you can imagine, I didn't think much different to how I think now, imagine having to go in every day and write market reports, I had to do market reports for six months which is basically just like this stock went up five percent because XYZ happened; this stock went down, literally 600 words of that every day for six months, it literally killed my soul, so it's not fun and and luckily, there are other ways to do it so my advice would be: find a medley of different institutions that can support you and don't compromise your principles unless you feel you're super strong and you can resist it all and you've got quite a clear idea that you're just going to be there for a couple of years and then see what happens but to be honest with you, I haven't seen that happen very much. In fact, I don't know if I've ever seen it happen apart from me, like someone who's gone in and then just taken the decision to leave.
Because the other thing is, even when I was going to leave, as I mentioned, the boss said, you're not an FT journalist, but I could have put up some resistance and probably said: “Look, why am I the only trainee that's not going to get a proper job?” But I didn't want to stay. And when I told people this, they were like: “Are you mad? You're at the top paper in the world. And you're like 26. Why the hell would you ever leave”? And that's a big pressure, as well. And I think most people would find it hard to resist that. Because essentially, you’re writing articles, I was writing articles that were read by president Obama, I was going into the White House when I was in Washington.
And then suddenly, you're on the outside, and I'm writing for alternative media sites that are read by about 20 people and no one cares what I'm doing. But to be honest, I think that you only live once. Like it doesn't matter, if you're doing something which compromises your principles and compromises what you believe in, even if you're getting read by the president, even if you're going to the White House, this all, doesn't mean anything because you can't write something that the president can read that is actually truthful or actually tells a story that you want to tell; you got to tell them what they want to hear. So yeah, it's all about what you're going into it for.
Most people, I think, when they're young have an idealistic conception of what journalism is and why they want to do it and in that case, it gets beaten out of them quite quickly when they enter the corporate media. But as I say, there is a very exciting alternative media ecosystem now, which didn't even exist when I was at the FT. It's mainly because of social media. It's given us the ability to give what we produce to the masses without having to go through these corporate media outlets.
Even though social media itself is owned by big corporations and there is censorship, thus far, it's been fine for me, for example, it was fine for Declassified. Declassified wouldn't exist without Twitter. So I find it really hopeful that the technological evolution which has given us a voice and given us the tools to project our voice around the corporate media.
Yeah, that's true. Alternative media has definitely been and still is challenging for corporate media, and there is much more space for alternative voices. I don't know if this is your experience, as well, but I've noticed that they are not immune to these perverse incentives, either. And I was wondering, how can people be truly sure that they're getting honest, truthful, fair reporting which isn't based on any hidden agenda, even in the alternative space I’m noticing that.
Matt Kennard: Well, that's a very important question and you're right. It goes to what I'm saying which is that power is being subverted by the technological evolution that we've witnessed and it's been subverted by the rise of alternative media.
So what does power do when it's under threat? It devises ways to take, to put that threat under control. So alternative media has been a big target of states and corporations. And how do you do that? How do you get them on your side? You fund them, right? So there's all these kind of like quasi-state or para-state organisations like the National Endowment for Democracy, the Center for Information Resilience, there's loads of them, which are funded by the UK Foreign Office, the US Congress, whatever it is, which give money to alternative media. And they say to alternative media: “This funding is hands off, you know, you take the money, you do what you want”. But what you see is that later down the line, nearly all of these institutions have the same tone and do the same stories which are basically focused on official enemies.
Because that funding has an impact on an implicit level over a long time and those organisations know it. It's not like they're doing it because they really want to promote free press or at least articles that are critical of them. Of course, they don't want to fund articles that are critical of them. So at Declassified, we knew all this and we said early on we won't take money from corporations or states or fronts for either of those, importantly, because a lot of those organisations, a lot of states and corporations know that it looks bad for places to take their money so they create fronts, so we didn't. And secondly, we said we won't work with the mainstream media as a principle, ever, which is another way that you're acclimatised to the system because you end up working with them.
Say you work with The Guardian, you say, which is actually a very easy way for a young alternative media outlet to get outreach because you instantly have access to hundreds of thousands of people. But it's a shortcut that does damage you because you end up changing and you become more like the mainstream media so we said both those things. A good example I think of this is The Intercept in the United States because they were founded by Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras, and they were pretty good early on, and then they became more and more just kind of like the New York Times. That was because they became more and more associated with the mainstream and that was mainly to do with the expansion.
If you look at their, I don't know what it is now because there's been changes recently there, but when it was at its height, I looked on their website and they had like 40 different reporters — they must have cost millions and millions, and when you start expanding like that, you get reporters who used to be at the New York Times or used to be at Politico, you instantly dilute that philosophy about alternative media, which is based on truth and actually adversarial journalism, which is based on exposing power, because those people who come in, bring the philosophy of the mainstream into The Intercept or whatever organisation it is. So I think another, maybe an important part of it is to stay small or at least until you have the ability to pay young journalists money early in their career that they don't need to go into the mainstream first because I think that would be a game-changer, you know.
But the whole system is set up to stop organisations like Declassified and there's other ones around the world. That's what you realise: all the funding, all the outreach, all the access, all the awards, every single incentive is pushing you towards doing stories about, I'll talk about the UK and US context, doing stories about Russian war crimes in Syria which are real, I'm not saying they're not real, or Chinese interference in US/UK. Everything is pushing you towards doing those stories — that's the ones you'll get the awards, that's the ones where you'll get the liberal foundation industry giving you money, and it works. If you look at most mainstream, even alternative media, the big ones like Bellingcat, for example, they're just doing what they're told even though they're not told it, you know. I mean that they just adopt the same priorities of the states that are funding them and the states that essentially that their personnel are associated with through various mechanisms.
In terms of the model, I think probably the purest model is to be funded by subscribers, which is possible now actually, you know like Double Down News here. Although they don't produce investigations and stuff, they do amazing videos that reach millions of people and they're completely subscriber-based and you see it in their content — they're really free, it's not just like lefty stuff, there is a diversity of opinion but it's free of control in terms of the narrative. And you see it in Declassified, as well again, you can tell on their content that they're free of the different power centres which are trying to control media. So it is possible.
The other funder of Declassified, and this is a way a lot of alternative media is funded now as well, is foundations, which is again imperfect. It's not a perfect way to do it, but I think if you can get the right ones that aren't affiliated to the Coca-Cola Foundation or something like that, you can get independent ones that are not affiliated to nefarious interests, then again, that's actually okay. And if they ever said anything about your content, you just say: “Well, we don't want your money anymore”.
But the funny thing is, even the foundations, if you're doing good journalism, which really undermines the system, or undermines the understanding of how the system works, you're basically locked out of the whole liberal foundation industry. We have three or four foundations that funded us, but they are run by sort of mavericks that had a proper conception of how journalism should be in terms of accessing the big money where you've got like Ford Foundation or I don't know, Open Society or whatever it is. They wouldn't even touch Declassified and they wouldn't touch what I do generally.
So it's a very, very clever disciplining mechanism because it's a disciplining mechanism which works with no one who's been disciplined by it. And even the discipliners themselves understanding that they're involved in a system, that isn’t disciplining anyone, it's a propaganda system which no one is aware is operating so it's great…for them. And it's great for the society at large who have been propagandised, well, it's not great, it’s awful, but it's a very sophisticated and beautiful system. It's a beautifully integrated system in that sense.
I wanted to ask you about art and politics. You have this chapter in the book, which is the last chapter where you speak about resistance and art as a form of resistance, and I imagine that this worldview comes essentially from your father, so can you speak about art and politics and if you think that the space for critical thought in arts has shrunk in recent decades?
Matt Kennard: Before politics, art was my main obsession, actually. When I was a kid, I'd go to galleries every weekend with my dad and I saw that he was never let into the art world, even though he was seen as one of the most important artists of his generation, he was never accepted in the mainstream art world because he was doing really critical art of the system and not in a kind of oblique way. It was very direct and that's how I think that the art world works. You're allowed to do things in kind of indirect, maybe even like shocking ways.
You can do certain shocking things but if you start actually being direct, I don't know, putting actual politicians like Tony Blair or George Bush in a picture, or actual corporations like the logo of BP. That's what they don't want. They want something that's very subtle or oblique. So I think that's again for a reason, because art is a very, very powerful way of subverting the ideologies which I've talked about in terms of journalism, because you can subvert the accepted image and rip it apart and actually join it with something else and make a new image to reveal the actual truth of how things are working.
And my dad's art, when he first started, was about photo montage, which is literally about putting two images together or three images to make another meaning and a truthful meaning. So I think it has a massive role to play and it's not just art, visual art as well, it's also like music and you see with music, it's another one that's basically zero cultural figures, well there's a few like Macklemore and there's a few, but there's barely anyone in the mainstream who's been vocal on Gaza, for example, which is like the biggest moral crisis of our time. And again, I think that's because the corporations run the whole industry and for them it's like anything which dampens the buying mood, they're not interested in or that they'll lock you out. Ai Wei Wei, the artist, he was completely cancelled after he spoke out on Gaza and this is one of the most famous artists in the world. So it doesn't matter that he had this high status. He was just ignored completely. So I think that it's very similar to journalism.
It's very similar to every sector which has an influence on society. They want to control it and they want to control what people are saying. But it doesn't work. There's a lot of subversion of the mainstream art world.
And in fact, the other way that it works is they allow you in. You know, like I said about journalism once you become part of an institution you slowly start changing. A good example of that is Banksy, you know, Banksy when he first started was doing really subversive stuff like he did that one of the the girl in Vietnam, the famous picture of the girl with napalm naked with Ronald McDonald and Mickey mouse holding each hand. He would never do that now. In fact, he just did a recent series in London, which was just like pictures of animals which had no political overtones at all. And that's what the system does to you. It blunts your sharper edges.
So I think again, it goes the same as like a journalist; artists need to work outside the system because they want to make money off you and speaking out on the great moral crisis of our time like Gaza is not good for them in terms of making money so they'll try and shut you up or they'll cancel you or you'll lose all your access to the mainstream institutions.
But again, it's the same thing, it's like why are you doing it. If you're doing it to make work for the man, then yeah, fine, do it. Continue to do that and make money, but if you're doing it because you believe in what you're doing and believe that art is important and should be free and independent, then it's not really a choice that you have to make. This isn't difficult stuff, really, if you have a moral compass. I've got little tolerance now after watching dead kids on my phone for a year, for people who say: “Well, I can't speak up because I'll lose XYZ”. It's like, my tolerance level has changed because you only live once.
So if you're going to ignore that because it's going to maybe hurt a little bit your bank balance or whatever, you're not living life right, are you, really? To be totally blunt with you. But we have reached a very clarifying moment with Gaza because I feel like I know where everyone stands now. Everyone who's just been silent, and there's been a lot of people that have been silent, even on the left, in academia, that have spent years talking about empire and post-colonial studies and all this bullshit, and they've just absolutely gone to ground when they're witnessing a live-stream genocide. There's no other way to interpret that than they never believed anything they were saying in the first place.
It was all just bullshit that they were saying to sell books or to get a nicer position in university because if you're silent now, you literally would have been silent during the Holocaust or whatever it was, all the awful crimes that have happened through history. So yeah, zero tolerance, but art has a very important role and also look there's a few examples like the one I mentioned in the book is the one you know when Colin Powell made that bullshit speech about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq which is now infamous because it's been revealed he knew it was lies. They got the Guernica by Picasso, the famous anti-war work — there's a mural of it up in the United Nations. And they got that covered with a felt blanket while he was making that speech because they felt it undermined the drive to war. So that's powerful, you know. That's powerful that art scared them enough that they covered it up. And what they care about is restricting our imagination and art stretches our imagination. I do think this is a very important point.
So much of the system rests on us thinking that nothing can be different. And it has to be like this, and there has to be homeless people and blah, blah, blah. There's so much of that but it's all rubbish essentially; but it's a very, very powerful way of making people accept shit that they have to accept is to make them think that it's impossible to do it any other way. Interestingly, there's a very clear case of this during Covid in the UK under Boris Johnson. During Covid, they did this policy where basically homelessness disappeared overnight because they said: “We can't have these people on the streets”, because there was a lockdown they said: “We're going to put every homeless person in a hotel”, so literally homelessness was ended overnight and you could do that.
It wouldn't even cost that much. It was probably like 1% of the Ministry of Defence budget you could do that, or less than. And when they needed to do it, they did it instantly. But yet we've been told for years, we don't have the money to do this, we don't have the money to do that. And actually that debate never appears when they're talking about war, which is much more expensive. When we talk about the war debated in our parliament literally no one says:”Can we afford it?” Never. But yet, if you're talking about homeless people or you're talking about disabled benefits or you're talking about unemployment benefits — all the things that actually normal people might use, the whole discussion is couched in: “Can we afford it?”, “Have we got enough money?”, and they've got more than they need to provide for everyone. But the point is it's unequally distributed, and it's put into expanding and enforcing our elite's control domestically and globally.
I wanted to ask you about Gaza and Israel. You've said this before, that Gaza has exposed the racket like never before, just because the whole world is witnessing what Israel is doing, it’s very visual. Do you think that the Israeli government overestimated their ability to maybe play with the Holocaust guilt, in the sense that they saw this opportunity to obviously realise the Greater Israel project and they went really, really wild in Gaza, so do you think that they miscalculated how the world is going to look at them?
Matt Kennard: Yeah it's interesting I don't know. I don't know, I don't know, they probably did think that they wouldn't get the pushback they have. Although, having said that, they've got zero pushback from the United States and Europe basically, very little, I mean there's been a few arm suspensions here and I think France actually did suspend arms. But in terms of actually denouncing it as a genocide and talking in those terms it's been very little governmental…but in terms of the popular pressure on them, yeah maybe they are surprised, maybe they are surprised but essentially it's not had any impact on them carrying out the genocide and receiving the backing of the West in terms of weapons and intelligence and the rest of it.
Another element is popular attitudes towards Israel and Zionism, as well, because Zionism has been a kind of protected ideology for a long time, partly because of European guilt about the Holocaust and partly because of the Israel lobby itself just like working overtime to capture the governments of the United States and Britain, and others.
But people are talking much more freely now about Zionism because they're seeing the endpoint of Zionism really, it's a colonial genocidal project, settler colonial project which is similar to what the Spanish did in Latin America and in the Americas and what the British did in the Americas, as well. It's not very different. And I think that the genocide in Gaza has really revealed that. And it's very, very hard now for these liberal Zionists who basically dress up this rancid ideology which is a supremacist ideology and racist ideology. It's very hard for them to do that now because the truth is out. And it's not just about Netanyahu, that's the other thing.
Liberal Zionists try and do this now. They say it's all about Netanyahu and Ben-Gavir. But, you know, this is a sick society, a sick and racist settler society, which doesn't see Palestinians as humans or worthy of things that most humans need to survive, like water, electricity and food, which they withdrew.
So I think in the long term that's going to have a huge impact. I think Zionism is in terminal decline now because the younger generations have been traumatised by watching this. And I think, as you mentioned, by extension, it has exposed the United States and Britain and others because Israel's a little country, it doesn't have that much weight without the United States, specifically.
And bloody hell man, I mean, anyone watching what's going on in Gaza, is traumatised, and yet they're watching the United States which they've been told since they were little kids is this great, fucking great city, shining city on the hill, this exceptional power. And they're watching Biden, this president who's got porridge for brains, going up on a podium every day, defending it all and saying he's going to send more weapons and repeating all the Israeli propaganda.
It's like, I think that people are shocked. There's been a massive kind of like meeting of the ideology and the reality in the destruction of Gaza with the United States. And hopefully, well, I think the left needs to push it, I push it all the time now, because I think this is an opening that might not come around again, because it's so clear what's going on. It's clear that the United States is a genocidal power, it's clear that most European governments are genocidal, and it's obviously clear that Israel is genocidal, so that's quite of revelation, you know. Even the war in Iraq — there was a lot of awakenings that were happening during that but that wasn't a genocidal war, although it could have been a million. They weren't bombing kids specifically. They weren't targeting children like they are in Gaza.
This is a straight genocide and everyone knows it. And yet the British, the Americans, Europeans, Germany, are all supporting it to the hill and arming it and contributing to it and participating. So I think that's going to have a big impact, not just on Zionism and Israel, but also on the ideological infrastructure which justifies Western power.
It's kind of in tatters. And I'll finish with this. Just yesterday, the House of Representatives passed the bill to sanction the ICC officials that were involved in the arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Galan. And it's like, bloody hell, that's very revealing, isn't it? That they've literally bullshitted us for so many years about this rule-based order and blah blah blah blah, it was fine and it was great and we could celebrate as this great rule of law when it was being used against opponents of us and the first time it's been used against us, they literally are saying we're going to sanction the officials that are doing it and…bananas, it's so obvious, so obvious. I don't think it's ever been this obvious, they've had to expose themselves to get this genocide done and we really, really need to take advantage of that because there's an opening. It's our responsibility to really locate American power as the great evil, I think, in our world.
What do you think will happen with Gaza after they're done? They've pretty much bombed the whole place to shreds so I'm not even sure how there's anything left to bomb.
Matt Kennard: Yeah, I agree. My sense is that they have to get a victory because the other thing is that they killed enormous amounts of people and maimed and mutilated huge amounts of children, but they haven't actually achieved much, they haven't got all the hostages back. They haven't really ended the resistance attacks on them, soldiers are still getting killed by the resistance, the resistance still exists. So, and they've got their asses whipped in South Lebanon, as well. So my sense is that in that context, what they're saying is we need a win to end this war. The win will be, we'll annex Northern Gaza from Jabalia camp upwards. And if you look at the extermination campaigns that have been happening in Northern Gaza, they want to clear it and they want to clear it so they can annex it.
I think there's even been people going into kind of prospect for settlements. So they'll annex Northern Gaza and then the rest of Gaza will just be this destroyed place that will probably be rebuilt with Gulf money, I guess, and will be put under the control of a Palestinian Authority-style institution, probably the Palestinian Authority itself.
And the Palestinian Authority works for Israel and was designed like that so it would just be under control, and there's a guy called Mohammed Dahlan who was involved in the attempted coup in 2006 in Gaza who's the CIA favourite that they wanted to install him then, I think they're probably trying to install him as the kind of president of, or at least some kind of leader in that rest of Gaza. Then the West Bank, who knows? There's apparently going to be an offensive now in the West Bank. Ideally, they'd like to move all the Palestinians out of the West Bank into Jordan, but I don't know how they'd do that without another genocidal campaign, which they might do, who knows? But yeah, I don't know. Who knows? Because then there's also Iran, they want to attack Iran. At the moment, they're in control. But these things, there's a lot of unintended consequences that they're not aware of. No one is. So they might lose control at some point.
Do you expect that the Trump administration will put any pressure on the Israeli government?
Matt Kennard: No. They'll be worse than the Biden administration in that sense. They'll just do whatever they're told, I think.
Matt, thank you so much for taking the time.
Matt Kennard: Thank you. It was nice to meet you.
Nice meeting you, too.
This is brilliant Jana. It's always enlightening to read your work and I have bought Matt Kennard's book The Racket (pdf). Let's catch up when I have finished the book.
Also: I love Lena Petrova's channel on YT: https://www.youtube.com/@lenapetrova
Speak soon!
Just discovered this thanks to Council Estate Media. Matt Kennard is great and we need many more like him to help get all this out there and understood. Thank you for this.