Remember Andre Vltchek (1963-2020)

Patrick Henningsen
21st Century Wire

On September 22, 2020, author, investigative journalist, filmmaker, playwright, philosopher and revolutionary, Andre Vltchek, died at the age 57.

He passed way in his sleep following a long car journey with his wife Rossie from Samsun to Istanbul. While some initial reports suggested that the Turkish authorities were investigating ‘suspicious circumstances,’ it was later stated in reports that he suffered from multiple chronic health challenges and that the cause of death was a pulmonary embolism.

Andre was born in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), Russia, and would later become a naturalized U.S. citizen after his defection from the Soviet Union. His work has spanned some four decades and is best known for him in-depth reportage from numerous conflict zones including Bosnia, Rwanda, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Syria, to name only a few. He is also the author over of 20 nonfiction books, novels and plays, and worked on a number of documentary films. His journalist work has appeared in numerous international publications including Der Spiegel, The Guardian, France 24, RT International, Press TV, China Daily, New Eastern Outlook and Counterpunch.

In addition to this stunning body of work, since 2019 Andre was also a featured contributor at 21st Century Wire. I can only say how deeply saddened we were by this news, and I speak for many others I’m sure, when I say that Andre left open a massive void in the world of journalism and political commentary – at a time when experience and integrity are in increasingly short supply. Over the course of the last year in which we worked together, I learned a lot Andre Vltchek, but also through his eyes, I learned a lot more about this world we inhabit. I learned that if you want to know what’s happening in the world, you can follow the news, but if you really want to know what’s happening on the global street, you followed Andre. He risked life and limb to bring people the truth. It’s hard to believe he’s left the stage so soon.

The last 18 months had been a typical whirlwind for Andre. We began working more closely together in the latter part of 2019, while he was reporting on the political upheaval in Hong Kong, as well as half a dozen locations. By then, the political brush fires of discontent and discord were spreading rapidly through Europe, the Middle East and South America. What a time to be a journalist, especially an intrepid one, and Andre wasn’t about to let this explosive epoch pass without giving a fair crack. Incredibly, he was able to embed himself in all of these simmering spots, as well document a number of other tertiary situations too.

Over the past few years, he had been based in Beirut and so when protests broke out there last fall, he was well-placed to report on it. As ever, Lebanon’s street demonstrations were a deeply complex political and sectarian affair, but unlike most western journalists keen to identify and harp on partisan political fault lines, he wasn’t so ensconced in nuance of Lebanon’s local sectarian and confessional rivalries as much as trying to search for the fingerprints of a familiar gang of usual suspects, namely western NGOs and other US State Department-backed front groups, by now infamous grey actors in Washington’s ‘democracy’ roadshow. He remarked on the suspicious Otpor! symbolism of the clenched fist in the air, as well as the marked segregation among demonstrators between the NGO-friendly pro-American class and Lebanon massive underclass. Less interested was Andre in the myriad of political parties as he was in widening gap between the haves and the have-nots – the working poor and the jet-setting elites, and amongst it all the hope of a more equitable, socialist future and the Neoliberal savage capitalist status quo. In the end, he couldn’t contain his frustration with Lebanon.

After falling out of love with Beirut, in the late autumn he said good bye for good, and headed for what was arguable the most exciting and perilous continent on the planet at that time, South America, with no less than five major uprisings taking place at once, in Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, as well as resonant political toggling taking place in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Nicaragua, and of course Venezuela too. It was the place to be if you wanted to have your finger on the pulse of the Latin street, and so it goes without saying that he would be deep in the mix. Over the course of some thirty years in international journalism and politics, he had developed an unparalleled network of contacts which enabled him to quickly take the pulse of the internationalist movement where ever we went, but also to compare and contrast the progress of different socialist movements in different locations. This brought a level of richness and depth to Andre’s work, and it’s one of the things which I found to extremely authentic and engaging because it was showing another side to global politics which was more or less invisible to mainstream media and punditry. How can you cover or know pretend to know what’s happening on the ground without this perspective? The answer is you cannot, and for this reason I really believed his perspective provided an important balance to our coverage of global affairs at 21st Century Wire.

In between the Andes and the Levant, Andre managed to do another Herculian loop through Asia, filing eye-watering reports from locations like Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia. In Borneo, is was literally eye-watering because Andre has contracted a near deadly parasite infection in his eye which required medical treatment which he was not able to get locally, but eventually got treated after he left the country. But it hardly slowed him down. Off to the next war, uprising or jungle.

Following his last Asian sweep, he returned to a thoroughly depressing and dark environment which was the brutal lockdown imposed by Chile’s neoliberal government led by Sebastián Piñera. Our radio interviews from South America in March 2020, ‘Panic, Lockdown, Backlash’ and later in June, ‘Chile’s brutal ‘Corona Coup’ were among the best segments we’ve ever aired. In one of our first full-length radio interviews recorded in October 2019, Andre covered other popular uprisings in Hong Kong, Ecuador, Lebanon, Catalonia and others. He would later witness firsthand in Bolivia the immediate aftermath of the US-sponsored, fascist beer hall putsch and flight of deposed President Evo Morales, and told the important story of a marginalised indigenous population based in Altiplano. If there was a hot spot anywhere in the world, it wouldn’t be long before you’d see him there. It was Andre’s raw emotion anchored by a special documentarian eye for detail which really made his segments so captivating.

All in all, we commissioned nine exclusive features from Andre, nine on-location radio segments, and also worked together on a series of short video reports from Europe, the Middle East and South America.

Though we shared many of the same anti-imperialist perspectives and knowledge of western soft power and ‘smart power‘ subterfuge, Andre and I did not always see eye to eye politically and so we had our share of heated political discussions. His ardor was undeniable though, and so you could never contain him in within the tidy frame of journalist, reporter or filmmaker. His scope was far wider than that. By his own admission, Andre was committed internationalist, in the Cuban sense. He strongly believed that if one is to cultivate real political awareness, then it should start with having an international perspective, because imperialism, as a de facto continuation of colonialism, is the fundamental source of pain and suffering in the developing world. He would memorably refer to this as endemic “savage capitalism.” He believed strongly that internationalist states like Cuba held true to the spirit of cooperation, and are fundamentally a force for good in the world. Regardless of one’s political preference, it’s difficult to deny how many times Cuba (a country under US embargo for over 60 years and with relatively few resources) has led the way in providing international aid or medical assistance to locations in crisis which were routinely eschewed by sanctimonious western governments. Indeed, similar missions have been undertaken by socialist and communist governments like China, Venezuela and North Korea. Western critics of those efforts claim they are not truly humanitarian, but rather, they’re mere state propaganda exercises designed to curry favor with a global audience. In truth, there is no state actor on the international state that is not engaged in some sort soft power operations overseas. Actors like the US, UK and France are not only engaged in such efforts, but do so with bottomless tranches of funding and resources exceeding all of the other countries combined. All of which makes the relatively small but hugely symbolic efforts of countries like Cuba all the more impressive in comparison – winning hearts and minds the old fashioned way, through hard work, organisation and dedication to their mission. Andre had the same mission: running towards trouble and strife, offering nothing but himself, along with his pen and camera lens, with a deep conviction that by doing so he could make the world a better place. But he was no naive revolutionary. He knew the flaws and shortcomings of conventional politics, and offered some of the most brutal critiques of western leftism and the ascendancy of the neoliberal radical centrists.

It’s hard to conceive of just how prolific he was, and how much we learned from his work. Andre was on the ground in Hong Kong throughout most of the umbrella protests, and revealed time and time again how violent ‘pro-democracy’ mobs being marshaled by Joshua Wong had the full backing of the US State Department. His report, ‘Hong Kong’s Hooligans: Western Shock Troops‘, contains some absolutely stunning images. He also knew how, since 2012 the US and its allies have been using the radical jihadi fighters from China’s Uyghur community in Xinjiang as proxy fighters in Syria since 2012. He was also on the ground in the Philippines in 2017, and knew that ISIS fighters, arms and money were being injected into Marawi in order to destabilise a government who was not obeying the diktats of Washington.

As a denizen of the world, Andre was always monitoring the trajectory of leftwing political movements, but also taking the cultural temperature too, keenly aware of the art scene, local music, underground cafe culture, poetry and literature, and the independent cinema, and the quality and potency of the local graffiti too – all important barometers of political vibrancy, and potential. To less observant documentarians, such particulars would dissolve in passing – taken for granted as mere background noise, but Andre always paid attention to them. Perhaps that’s what drew me to Andre’s style of reporting to begin with, as I tend to follow the same interpretivist methodology when I travel or report on location. It’s why I really appreciated Andre’s razor-edged, gonzo-style of journalism.

I admit, we had some brutal arguments over editorial issues. I had to wear my editor’s hat, something I so loath to do, in truth I’d much rather be in Andre’s boots, swashbuckling and intrepid, fighting for my convictions – making my case to the editor to publish all of it, and be damned. Andre knew the score, and he knew that the nature of relations between writer and editor were always bound to be inherently attenuate. Even so, his hard-headed nature meant he would never readily accept the often uncanny bureaucratic alchemy of the editorial room. But it’s that stubbornness which made him such an exceptional reporter, raconteur and witness extraordinaire.

In a world dominated by desktop journalists and plastic pundits, he was the genuine article. Shades of Hemmingway and Steinbeck, with a bit of Harper Lee thrown in for good measure. Andre would knowingly insert himself and situations and push things to the limit in a way that so many great writers and artists do – knowing they have the power to reform the discourse, and thus change the way people see their world. I recall during our conversations how often Andre would so lament the disappearance of the dissident intellectuals – the poets, the composers, the artists… the dreamers, all of whom have always kept the flame of hope alive in societies through the ages. It’s so simple and so fundamental, and yet we all know such individuals are fast becoming an endangered species in an increasingly homogenized and globalised 21st century political economy. There’s no doubt whatsoever that Andre was, and will remain, a keeper of this flame.

Andre always reminded me as that rare breed of warrior known in great lore, who preferred to die with honour on the battlefield, rather than to be showered with medals and parades post factum. He certainly wasn’t a careerist in search of corporate mainstream acceptance and accolades from the liberal establishment, no desire for the champagne socialist circuit; the ingratiating Guardian and Frontline Club panel discussions and usual human rights NGO junkets. He wasn’t even remotely interested in that world, which was why he was shut-out by the ‘great and the good’ dutifully manning the gates of corporate mainstream media.

In all of my years working in media and journalism, I have never known anyone who was as passionate and as driven as Andre Vltchek. During his years as a writer and journalist, he visited some 140 countries, authored some 18 books, including a collaborative work with Noam Chomsky entitled On Western Terrorism, produced and directed documentaries films, wrote stage plays, as well as penned several hundred feature articles for a variety of publications worldwide. He exuded the youthful exuberance and spirit of adventure which you’d be hard-pressed to find in any journalist half his age. Beyond his sheer talent as a report, he wasn’t only a witness of events and people – he was intimately involved in his research subjects and absolutely believed that his being there, on site, on location, could somehow help to steer events in a positive outcome by virtue of his telling the story which wasn’t being told.

The hard part is, no one likes to see a colleague, friend or comrade die in battle. It reminds us of what a relatively brief ball of fire our lives really are. We’re overcome with grief and regret knowing that the fallen will not be there for the next battle, or even to see the victory in their lifetime. But sometimes victory never comes, and all there is, is the fight. In life, and in death, it’s that which defines us. Not whether we ‘won’ or lost, but where and how we fought. Such is the fate of a warrior.

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Author Andre Vltchek has worked for 25 years as an international reporter, photojournalist and documentary filmmaker, and has authored 18 books including the best-selling title, Exposing the Lies of Empire. His portfolio covers a vast array of subjects covering culture, wars, political science, and world history. Four of his latest book titles include China and Ecological Civilization with award-winning academic John B. Cobb Jr., Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism, the revolutionary novel, “Aurora”, and his film & dialogue with renowned US academic Noam Chomsky, entitled, “On Western Terrorism.” Andre’s work has taken him to every corner of the globe, including ground-breaking journalistic work in locations in Southeast Asia, Middle East and South America.

See more of Andre Vltchek’s work at his own independent publishing company here..

Also, see a list of available book titles on Amazon here.

SEE ANDRE VLTCHEK’S 21WIRE ARCHIVE HERE

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